The three orders: does the ontological discontinuity between bodies, minds, and charity make Christianity permanently inaccessible to the unregenerate, or is it what the apology is designed to navigate?

Blaise Pascal, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Bodies, minds, and charity are of entirely different orders — so different that the greatest magnitude of any lower order produces nothing of the higher: "from all bodies together one could not produce one little thought; this is impossible, this is of another order.¹² From all bodies and minds together one could not produce one stirring of true charity; this is impossible, this is of another, supernatural order" (fr. 308).

Natural virtues do not lead to faith; philosophical arguments do not produce charity; there are no intermediary steps from the order of bodies to the order of charity. The greatness of intellectual achievement — mathematics, science, philosophy — is infinitely remote from the greatness of charity, as the visible creation is infinitely remote from mind. The passage between orders is vertical: God's act, not the philosopher's ascent.

Sources

1. The greatness of clever men is invisible to kings, to the rich, to chiefs, and to all the worldly great. The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if not of God, is invisible to the carnal-minded and to the clever. These are three orders differing in kind.

   Pensées

2. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their products, are not equal to the least feeling of charity. This is of an order infinitely more exalted. From all bodies together, we cannot obtain one little thought; this is impossible, and of another order. From all bodies and minds, we cannot produce a feeling of true charity; this is impossible, and of another and supernatural order.

   Pensées

Where the argument is made

• Pensées fr. 308 (the three orders — bodies, minds, charity)
• fr. 189 ('we do not know God except through Jesus Christ')
• fr. 192 ('to know God without knowing our own misery produces pride')
• fr. 199 ('man in infinity'). De l'esprit géométrique on the orders of knowledge

How the argument was received

The Thomist objection — that the three orders doctrine destroys the legitimate natural route to God through reason — identifies a genuine tension. Aquinas's world is one of comfortable coexistence: natural reason establishes much of what faith also teaches, and grace perfects nature rather than annihilating it. Pascal's world is one of ontological rupture: there is no comfortable coexistence, and the pretense of one — the Jesuit project of making Christianity easy, the rationalist project of making it rational — is what the Provincial Letters and the Pensées are jointly written against. The unintelligibility to the unregenerate is not a defect of the doctrine but its point: the discontinuity is what the apology navigates, not what it overcomes by argument.