Blaise Pascal

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Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious writer of the seventeenth century whose work runs along a fault line that defines him: a first rank scientific intellect that came to insist on the limits of reason in the one matter he thought mattered most. Born in Clermont in 1623, he had by his early twenties built a working mechanical calculator, established the existence of the vacuum against the physics of his day, and laid foundations of the mathematics of probability. He died at thirty-nine, leaving a defense of the Christian faith unfinished.

The turn came on the night of 23 November 1654. Pascal recorded what happened on a small sheet of parchment, which he sewed into the lining of his coat and carried, recopied, until his death; a servant found it after he died. The note is mostly broken phrases — the word Fire, the hour marked, and the line that fixes its meaning: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.” Whatever the experience was, Pascal took it as a direct encounter with the living God of scripture rather than the abstract first cause of metaphysics, and dated his decisive commitment from it. He never published it, and never, so far as is known, spoke of it.

In the aftermath he drew close to Port-Royal, the center of Jansenism — an austere, Augustinian movement within French Catholicism that stressed human corruption and the absolute priority of divine grace, and that Rome and the Jesuits would condemn. Defending it, Pascal wrote the Lettres provinciales (1656–57), a sequence of polemical letters whose wit and clarity made them a landmark of French prose. The larger project, the apology for Christianity, he left in thousands of fragments; gathered and printed after his death as the Pensées, they became his most read book.

Two of its arguments traveled furthest. One is the wager: since reason cannot settle whether God exists, the question must be decided as a bet, and Pascal argues that the stakes — an eternity against a finite life — make belief the rational gamble. The other is the deus absconditus, the hidden God, a deity who neither plainly reveals himself nor wholly withdraws, leaving evidence enough for those willing and obscurity enough for those not. Behind both stands his claim that “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know” — that the deepest assent is not a conclusion but a kind of perception.

Pascal is often read against René Descartes, his near contemporary: where Descartes sought to ground certainty in reason, Pascal mapped reason’s edges and located faith past them. Whether to call him a mystic is contested. The Memorial is plainly a record of religious experience, intense and first-hand; yet Pascal remained a defender of ordinary Catholic orthodoxy, suspicious of private illumination as a path, and his lasting influence is as much on philosophy and literature as on devotion. What is not in doubt is that a mind capable of the exact sciences staked everything on a God it judged the sciences could not reach.

→ Related: Rene Descartes · Nicolas Malebranche · John Calvin