Blaise Pascal

1623-1662 · French · Apologetics, Philosophy of Religion, Mathematics, Physics

Between us and hell or heaven there is only life, the most fragile thing in the world.

At nineteen Blaise Pascal built a calculating machine; by his mid-twenties his vacuum experiments had overturned the ancient idea that nature abhors a void. Then on November 23, 1654, a religious experience permanently redirected him. He recorded it on a parchment sewn into his coat: Fire. God of Abraham, not of philosophers. He died at thirty-nine, leaving the unfinished notes gathered as the Pensées.

Topics Blaise Pascal addresses

• the Wager
• the heart and its reasons
• divertissement
• human misery and greatness
• the three orders
• the Hidden God
• efficacious grace
• the thinking reed
• original sin and the Fall
• esprit de finesse and esprit géométrique
• faith above, not against, reason
• concupiscence and corruption of the will
• self-love
• the self is hateful
• infinite stakes and expected-value reasoning
• the automaton and habit in faith
• death as the one certainty
• the eternal silence of infinite spaces
• the two infinities
• christocentrism
• critique of natural theology
• miracles and prophecy as historical proofs
• the Mystery of Jesus
• Jesuit casuistry critique

Converse with Blaise Pascal on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Blaise Pascal's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.