Blaise Pascal, in one of his excellent Pensées (194 on The Project Gutenberg) writes that there are two kinds of people; those who care about their role in the cosmos and what eternity has in store for them and those who do not. The 17th-century philosopher and mathematician concludes this not just from revelation but entirely from reason and self-interest. If it is even possible that there is something awaiting us after death, shouldn’t any self-interested person make it their top priority to figure out what could possibly be awaiting us? Instead many slough off perennial questions and still divert content themselves with worrying about the most petty and fleeting things. Pascal writes:
Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature. With everything else they are quite different. ; they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honour is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell, a supernatural torpor that points to an omnipotent power as its cause.
Even when I wasn’t Christian, I was concerned with “what it all means.” I don’t know if this is a result of my temperament or that I was encouraged to investigate things by my parents but I have always, even when I claimed agnosticism, thought it was worthy trying to figure out my role in the cosmos. As I went on in my life I met more and more people who simply did not think it worth investigating.
Like Pascal, I’m baffled by this position. Even when I didn’t believe in Hell (which for Pascal is a great motivation of why you should care about eternity) I thought deep down that what I did with my life had to somehow fit or correspond to something greater than myself. To just shirk that off and content myself with the things around me horrified. If there is no bigger picture or no commensurability between humans and it, how can the smaller picture matter? I’ve met people who seem to think simply that if they care about something strongly, that is sufficient. But they never ask SHOULD they care about it. And in light of the fact that we’re all going to die, why care?
That we are going to die is sometimes thrown around as a reason why we should stop worrying about “cosmic” stuff and just “embrace the moment.” This just leaves me entirely cold to the point of thinking this is what divides Christians from those who aren’t. Either you care about how you fit into the big picture and that that is what gives meaning to the little things in life, or you reject the big picture entirely and chase after the little things inordinately.
How do we incite the longing for meaning in those who see no point in it? Without this longing, without recognizing the “forever empty” of Louis C.K. or that we are “restless until we rest in You” as St. Augustine says, how can we begin to evangelize our culture?