Philosopher · Early modern
Blaise Pascal
1623–1662 · Augustinian apologetics (Port-Royal)
Died with the sacraments, in communion; the Provincial Letters were placed on the Index (1657). Pope Francis (Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis, 2023) honored him while noting his Jansenist milieu.
Mathematician, physicist and inventor, Pascal experienced on the “night of fire” (1654) the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, “not of the philosophers,” and joined the circle of Port-Royal. His Provincial Letters attacked Jesuit casuistry with devastating wit; his unfinished Pensées argue from the greatness and misery of man, the hiddenness of God, the Wager and the prophecies, that the Christian religion alone explains the human condition.
Why he matters: He is the greatest Catholic apologist to the modern unbeliever: his “reasons of the heart,” his anatomy of diversion and his sense of the infinite spaces speak to the age of science from inside it.
Where to be careful
His Jansenist sympathies on grace and his rigorism on the sacraments and casuistry are outside Catholic latitude, and the Provincial Letters caricature probabilism; his fideist-sounding texts must be read with Dei Filius in mind. Pope Francis judged that he died a Catholic and never embraced Jansenist heresy as such.
Reading
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PenséesBlaise Pascal (trans. A. J. Krailsheimer) · Read in the Lafuma order; start with the fragments on diversion and the Wager.
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The Provincial LettersBlaise Pascal · Brilliant and unfair; read with a good account of probabilism.
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Sublimitas et Miseria HominisPope Francis, 2023 · The apostolic letter for his fourth centenary.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each question the test asks.