“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” This famous line from Pascal’s Pensées draws a wise distinction between religious faith and intellectual inquiry. The two have different motivations and pertain to different domains of experience. They are like oil and water, things that do not mix and should not be confused. Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, and he did not allow his Catholic beliefs to interfere with his scholarly investigations. He regarded the authority of the church to be meaningless in such matters. He argued that “all the powers in the world can by their authority no more persuade people of a point of fact than they can change it.” That is to say, facts are facts, and faith has no business dealing in the world of facts. Faith resides in the heart and in one’s way of living in the world.
Which would be a lovely opening if that were at all Pascal's view. In Pascal's view faith does reside in the heart, but Pascal, in drawing the line between the heart and the reason, is not drawing a line "between faith and intellectual inquiry"; that would make half his comments on the subject incomprehensible, because Pascal puts mathematics partly on the heart side of the division. The heart is that whereby we have the intuitive understanding essential for (among other things) actual life; all intellectual inquiry on Pascal's view has to be shot through with it, because all intellectual inquiry presupposes principles recognized by the heart. His quotation of Pascal on authority is even worse. Hendel hasn't bothered to go back to the original; his footnote here is from a secondhand source. It's from the Provincial Letters (letter 18). And it's in a defense of Jansenius. Now, if you know anything about the history of Jansenism, you'll know that the Pope had at the instigation of the Jesuits condemned several propositions of Jansenius. The Jansenists, wanting to be good Catholics but not willing to concede defeat, argued that the propositions were indeed wrong in the sense the Pope had condemned them, but that they were not as a matter of fact to be found in the text of Jansenius in that sense. When Pascal makes his claim about authority failing to persuade of fact, he is arguing that the only thing that can actually persuade someone of a fact is the senses -- unlike faith and reason. And it's clear from elsewhere (the preface to the fragmentary Treatise on the Vacuum, for instance) that Pascal would place almost Hendel's entire discipline outside the realm of sensible experience. History of any kind, on Pascal's view, doesn't deal with facts; it deals with authorities of various kinds. The only fields that properly deal with facts are those in which you can see, here and now, what you are talking about; history may draw on some of these, but once you make a historical conclusion you are in the realm of human authority, not fact. Where the testimony of the senses is uniform, we must interpret our authorities, even Scripture, accordingly; but, as Scripture is divine authority, we should accept it as exceeding any human authority. The Pascalian point really doesn't cut in quite the same direction as Hendel is suggesting.
This is why, incidentally, philosophers like myself have difficulty taking so-called "biblical scholars" entirely seriously. The whole point of the article is repudiation of the SBL for the sole reason that the SBL has given up critical investigation of the texts, but even in the article himself Hendel can't even be bothered to make use of the basic principles of critical investigation, merely appealing to authority rather than actually seeing what the text says. Instead of taking the trouble to understand Pascal critically, which isn't that difficult given that Pascal has been translated many jillion times and is easily accessible (especially in this internet age), he maneuvers him clumsily on a rhetorical chessboard to a pre-ordained conclusion. It's difficult not to wash one's hands of Hendel and his ilk, who make a great fuss over critical inquiry and reason but repeatedly seem to show that this is just all a rhetorical facade; who place themselves on the side of reason and critical investigation in the very same breath by which they blatantly violate both. It's not that Hendel's opponents are particularly better; it's just one sign, one of many, that the whole field is shot through with what looks like the grossest rational incompetence. Now some of this may just be appearance; perhaps Hendel is just having a bad day in which he can't think straight, and perhaps there are lots and lots of people in Biblical Studies who do a competent job quietly enough that they just don't ever come to notice. One expects kooks in every field, so one ignores them; it is people like Hendel, however, who make it difficult not to write off the entire area as just intellectually bankrupt. And, yes, it is not wholly fair to write off a field so thoroughly, so I try not to do so. People in the field don't give those of us outside the field that much to work with, though.
