Deus ex Machina. Appunti sul problema della «macchina» in Pascal

This paper examines the notion of the «machine» in Pascal’s thought through selected fragments of the Pensées, highlighting its anthropological, theological, and apologetic significance. Against the Cartesian project of “composing the machine” of the world – judged vain and useless – Pascal exposes the structural impotence of reason and mechanistic knowledge in relation to salvific truth. Yet within his apology of Christianity, he paradoxically reappropriates the logic of the machine as an extrinsic argument: human beings are both intellect and automaton, and only through habit and automatism can one externally dispose oneself toward faith, which nonetheless remains an unpredictable and gratuitous gift of grace. The machine thus names both the impersonal functioning of nature and society and the set of rational proofs themselves, which are incapable of converting the heart. What emerges is an apocalyptic dialectic between machine and event, automatism and Spirit, offering a critical interpretation of modern rationality, technology, and political order as dispositifs of repetition and alienation, always exceeded by the unassurable alterity of the hidden God.