Here are the last two paragraphs from an article by Alexander Riley in the latest (November/December 2024) issue of Touchstone magazine (page 17):
Nietzsche admired Pascal greatly, though he also criticized him, and considered him perhaps the most tragic victim of Christianity. Like Nietzsche, Pascal gazed at the infinity of indifferent time and space. Unlike him, the Frenchman found the solution to that cold nothingness in God’s existence. Like many another confident young man of his time and since, Nietzsche believed he could brave this emptiness alone. It was a test of his strength, the kind of test young men tend to gravitate toward and toward which they frequently demonstrate unjustified confidence. Would he, perhaps, have eventually understood the fruitlessness of this approach had he but lived long enough as a sane man?
The author of The Anti-Christ is buried outside the little church in Röcken where his father was pastor. Given another two decades of healthy life, it is perhaps not too much to imagine that he might have returned to his father’s faith and become one of modernity’s most formidable Christian thinkers.