the knot of our condition

what a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty! what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

what will unravel this tangle? nature confutes the sceptics, and reason confutes the dogmatists. what, then, will you become, o men! who try to find out by your natural reason what is your true condition? you cannot avoid one of these sects, nor adhere to one of them.

know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. hear God...

it is, however, an astonishing thing that the mystery furthest removed from our knowledge, namely, that of the transmission of sin, should be a fact without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. for it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. this transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. for what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? certainly nothing offends us more readily than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. the knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.

-blaise pascal pensees 434