Playing the Fool: The Subversive Literary Apologetics of John Bunyan and Blaise Pascal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Bunyan and Blaise Pascal seem unlikely bedfellows – a fiercely Protestant English artisan with only vernacular literacy and a devoutly Catholic French polymath. Yet there are striking affinities between the two in their theologies, spiritual experience, and apologetic methodologies. Both believe that conversion requires divine intervention, yet both quote St Paul’s words Fides ex auditu / “Faith cometh by hearing” (Romans 10:17), thus involving human persuasion in conversion. Though both sometimes employ rational propositional arguments, both see rational argument as insufficient to change a person’s affections and will. Both Bunyan and Pascal adopt literary strategies of persuasion to faith that seek to bypass and subvert their readers’ cognitive defences. Pascal’s famous “wager” (pari) is often criticised for seeking to compel an impossible belief in something of which one is not persuaded. However, this criticism misconstrues the literary context. In this section of the Pensées, Pascal is speaking “selon les lumières naturelles” (“according to natural lights”), adopting St Paul’s rhetorical strategy of “speak[ing] as a fool” (2 Corinthians 11:23) by inhabiting and subverting the thought categories of his pragmatically self-interested worldly readers. His initial goal here is not to compel belief but to persuade readers to participate in a sacramental environment in which they can more readily be habituated into faith. Bunyan’s literary apologetic likewise draws on the model of St Paul and Bunyan’s imaginative fiction is a form of playing the fool which, like Pascal’s apologetic literary strategy, appropriates and reinscribes the thought categories of readers towards a vital faith.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".