The problem with treating a book like Pascal's Pensees as an apologetic is that images and analogies like the dethroned king thereby lose much of their force. As a description of the human condition, considered without reference to the question of why it is true, its power grows the more we hold it up to our experience, until it comes to represent something profoundly relevant and contextualized within our own life. But our tendency, as Christians, is to immediately categorize the dethroned king as a defense of our doctrine of sin. Maybe that was its purpose.
[...] I want to take the epigram about the dethroned king, and several related passages, and simply dwell on them without reference to the assumed grid of assumptions and sources that can rob such analogies of their power. So the first question we must ask in dwelling on this epigram, is what does Pascal mean by “these forms of wretchedness”? In another place, he performs a thought experiment that admirably encapsulates what he means by the wretchedness of man: Is the dignity of royalty not enough in itself for anyone who possesses it to be made happy at the very prospect of what it is? [...]
[...] Maybe Pascal would answer me like this: even to imagine such a state as the ones you describe, the little girls and little boys and religious people would have had to know about pop stars and swash-buckling adventurers and purity of heart. Perhaps it is not their memory of these things that forms their imaginings—but it is the memory of some member of the human race. In other words—the fact that these things can be imagined means they must have been experienced at some point, by someone. [...]
[...] So I resolutely hold my mind as empty as I can—and often a strange sensation will suddenly engulf me. I will picture myself in scale. My inner eye will soar out to immense distances and turn around to imagine me clinging to the globe like a gnat in a hurricane. When that happens, sleep ceases to be my goal and I reach eagerly for any careening thought to make that feeling of insignificance go away. For a while after such an experience I can feel the immensity of undesired space just waiting to impinge on my consciousness. [...]
[...] He suggests that because the wretchedness of an exiled king or a prodigal pig- herder results from a previously better state, we may argue from these small examples to the cosmic principle that because men in general are wretched in their present state they must have come, in some sense, from a better state. But it seems to me that this explanation of human dissatisfaction is not obvious” that no other conclusion can be drawn. For example, I imagine a pig-herder who has always been a pig-herder, but still wishes that he were a king. [...]
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