The right of conquest, which establishes its own laws, relates back to the arbitrary nature of language. Legitimate sovereignty relates back to the lingua adamica, to the sound that reveals the secret name of things. Now, the grammar of the Adamic language has never been reconstructed. And grammar is the action of language. The primacy of the praxis sought to wipe out even the memory of the Adamic language. But memory lasts longer than action.

Treacherous Trifles

It was certainly not reason, manipulated by unbelievers, that frightened Pascal. He could run it through with a few sword thrusts. What worried him, instead, was the credulity of the unbelievers: the inclination to abandon themselves to precariousness, being well aware of how precarious it was—faith kept whole in fleeting simulacra. An earlier believer, of that species to which Pascal could not and would not belong, wouldn’t have felt so exasperated: he would have pointed to the world and the stars, would have invited us to heed the signs of a divine scheme that reverberated there.

Pascal shared with unbelievers the perception of the divine absence from the visible world. For him, the world could serve only as a theological catapult to project us into something that spurned contact with the world. But proof through absence is most difficult. Watching men rapt in their divertissement—their horrifying seriousness in stalking their prey as they hunted; or in trying out a dance step; or feeling a piece of cloth—he recognized in them the scorned image of ancient devotion, when the world’s signs were enough to fill the soul with reverence.

Fénelon, in his implacable mildness, saw clearly the enemy of his spiritual counsels: “Within, you have to overcome your taste for a delicate life, your proud and scornful nature, along with your long tendency to dissipation,” he wrote to the Comtesse de Grammont. That new form of evil might seem bland, and yet such an idiosyncratic vortex acted “like a torrent that sweeps everything away in spite of the best intentions.”⁸² Noble whim, hierarchical distance, now removed from all contact with the land, from all reciprocal feudal responsibilities, from all immediate function, but abandoned solely to the cruel game of favors at Court, now reemerged, and flared up again, to the point of a tacit fanaticism—in the development of taste, in the pursuit of sensitivity, in the gradual discovery of a uniqueness in style. And pride now came to govern all of this, as in the quarrel over a footstool, or for a place in a carriage. In each of those sudden, passionate exasperations of sensibility Fénelon recognized “the breaches that the world has opened up.”⁸³ And so the pleasures of conversation could become lethal—and virtually the most concrete and lasting image of ultimate Evil: “It will never be possible for you to abstain too sternly from the pleasures of social conversation.”⁸⁴

Pascal’s Pensées, which are now read as a breviary of inner restlessness, were intended by the author as an arsenal of sharp, deadly weapons, to be unleashed upon the world. The vibrant urgency of the entries is not supposed to make the writing resemble the palpitations of the soul (how futile that would be!): it is the impatience of someone who wants to strike his blow an instant before that of his enemy.