Christ’s Agony and Faith’s Wakefulness—Reflections on a Remark of Pascal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reflects upon a remark of Blaise Pascal. His gloss upon the story of Christ in Gethsemane is punctuated with the arresting comment that “Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world: during that time, we must not sleep” — “Jésus sera en agonie jusqu’à las fin du monde: Il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là”. In close conversation with the work of Lev Shestov, I explore the unsettling suggestion that for Christian faith the time before the eschaton is fundamentally “gethesemanean” in quality, i.e., is marked by Christ’s own saving agon and so also by faith’s proper struggle to awaken to it and keep vigil with it. For Shestov, Pascal’s disquieting vision demands that the Christian life “seeks with lamentation” to resist the false consolation of trading the travail of discipleship for the confidence of clear understanding. To the agony of Christ there corresponds the agon of faith: it is the labour of discipleship to shake off the sleep of reason in the time that remains.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".