We are aware of the imperfections and injustices that exist in society—in our own: municipality, region, country, and world. These shortcomings come to the forefront when political parties launch their campaigns to gain access to established power. Faced with these social ills, reformist or revolutionary proposals are put forward to change the social order and improve it with measures of moderate or disruptive impact. In this regard, Pierre Manent’s interpretation of the thought of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) in his book  *Pascal and the Christian Proposal*  (Rialp, 2025, Kindle edition) is relevant for gaining some clarity in the endeavor to improve society.

Pascal distinguishes three orders in society. The order of the flesh is driven by greed and the pursuit of sensual pleasures. Its actions consist of  acquiring : riches, power, prestige, glory, and praise. The order of charity, on the other hand, uproots this attitude of acquiring and is based on a pure and humble heart, attentive to the will of God. Between these two orders lies the order of the mind, which is not based on the will, neither one’s own nor God’s, but on the understanding. This order leads to respect for the reality of established facts, to honoring proven propositions, and to the indemonstrable principles characteristic of the spirit of geometry (cf. pp. 94-98). As can be seen, without charity, power crushes service.

Having made these distinctions, Pascal points out that this human order, “however imperfect it may be, however inseparable it may be from the rule of force or the reign of concupiscence, is the condition and framework of human life and the countless goods it entails. Besides being the locus of injustice, it is also the condition and, so to speak, the subject of justice as it is accessible to humanity. It is impossible for man to clearly separate the wheat from the chaff in this field where they grow inconspicuously together.” In this line of thought, the Christian knows that “the wheat and the tares grow together and that it is imprudent, to put it mildly, and certainly impious, to give man the social mandate to carry out that discrimination which is reserved to divine justice (p. 156).”

This Pascalian vision of social improvement does not lead to setting the prairie ablaze to achieve the radical changes that society requires. It is not a political messiah—an enlightened figure convinced he possesses the effective solution for social change—that society needs. Rather, it needs social gardeners who sow, fertilize, and tend to the fragility of the field. The political messiah despises the social and political order. He is willing to disregard all rules; he lacks the patience of the gardener who must wait for nature to do its work. This messiah lacks refinement of spirit, one component of which is patience, that is, the fortitude to wait—without despairing—for the slow process that reforms undergo in their proper season. It is a grave matter to ignore “the fact that grace and sin are inseparable in the human order, and that special respect is due to this mixture, a condition of human life and drama.”

Pascalian anthropology recognizes the twofold movement that resides in the human heart: love of self and love of being. These are the loves characteristic of the Christian perspective, open not only to survival in the city of man, but also to divinization in the city of God.