I’m happy to begin the New Year with this blogpost: I noted earlier my excitement on hearing about a new biography of Blaise Pascal, and I successfully solicited it as a Christmas gift. This blogsite is, after all, named for works by Pascal and my other great Christian hero, C.S. Lewis.
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The book did not disappoint. Before discussing why, here is some nitty gritty: It is 388 pages of text, along with a bibliography, endnotes, a chronology of “Pascal’s Life and Times,” and an index. The book is dedicated by the author to his six grandchildren, “in the hope that they will all ask the questions that Pascal asked and grow in their knowledge of the God that he knew and came to love” (8). There are generous blurbs by Tom Holland and Alister McGrath (who by the way wrote, among other things, a biography of C.S. Lewis). The author (quoting his Wikipedia entry) “is a British theologian, author and former Church of England bishop. Since 2022, he has led the Centre for Cultural Witness …. From 2007 until 2015, he was dean then principal of St. Mellitus College and is now its president.” The entry adds that he “completed a PhD in theology at the University of Exeter on St. Paul, Martin Luther and Blaise Pascal” and that he “belongs to the charismatic evangelical tradition of the Church of England.”
In his introduction, the author outlines the book in the following paragraph (6-7, footnote omitted):
Some biographies simply follow their protagonist’s story in strictly chronological order. There are biographies of Pascal that do exactly that. I have chosen to take a different approach. The chapters do follow a roughly chronological pattern from the beginning to the end of his life, but each one focuses on a particular theme in his life and thought. Chapter 1 sketches the main features of the century in which Pascal lived; chapters 2 and 3 focus upon his scientific work; chapter 4 looks at his engagement with the sophisticated skeptics of his day; chapter 5 explores his tangled relationship with the religious Jansenist movement that so influenced his family and was based in the community at Port-Royal; chapter 6 describes his dramatic life-changing experience of God in 1654; chapter 7 explains his relationship to the twin tendencies of dogmatism and skepticism, embodied in a vital conversation that took place soon after that experience; chapter 8 tells the story of his writing of the Provincial Letters; chapter 9 investigates the key theme of the hiddenness of God [this chapter includes a discussion of “The Miracle of the Holy Thorn,” the miraculous healing of the eye of Pascal’s niece, of which I was unaware]; chapter 10 looks at his view of politics; chapter 11 examines the theme of the human capacity for distraction; chapter 12 looks in detail at the Pensees; chapter 13 inspects his theories of how belief happens; chapter 14 works through the famous argument of the Wager; chapter 15 takes on his startling language of self-hatred; and chapter 16 describes his death and subsequent reputation. This way of proceeding means that from time to time, our story will double back to aspects of the chronology that have already been touched on, but for those who want an orderly timeline of Pascal’s life and times, a chronology is included for reference. The advantage of this method is that it enables us to go a little deeper into some of the key themes of Pascal’s life and work and to bring out their significance, not just historically but also for today.
Here are the first and last paragraphs of of the final section of the final chapter (387-88, “The Last Word”):
Whether we agree with Pascal or his critics, it is hard not to marvel at his extraordinarily creative mind, his inventiveness, his profound perception of the human condition and the impact he made on those who knew him, and those who knew his writings only from afar, during his brief life.
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Pascal is an enigma, who recognized the enigmatic nature of this life that we have to live and the motivations that swirl around our minds and hearts. Like his great hero St. Augustine, he knew himself, and so he knew us, even us moderns, sometimes better than we know ourselves. Which is why, whether we follow his Christian faith or not, he remains an insightful, if sometimes uncomfortable companion along the journey, illuminating our path with a strange light from another world, a world he yearned for and on which he wagered his life.
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While reading the book, at one point for fun I asked AI, “Who was the smartest Frenchman ever?,” and I was given, without any of the equivocation one might have expected, the simple answer, “Blaise Pascal.” It is a seller’s stretch to say Pascal is “The Man Who Made the Modern World,” but it is only a stretch and not a lie: Pascal did, after all, build one of the first math calculators, do brilliant work as a geometrician, begin probability theory, lay important groundwork for calculus, prove that nature does in fact not abhor a vacuum, pioneer the science of fluid pressure and hydraulics, design the first modern transportation system, and showed himself also to be a “genius at comedy” by writing one of the “greatest works of satirical literature in European history” (176) regarding, of all things, an internecine theological dispute with the Jesuits — plus, of course, give us one of the most important Christian apologetic works of all time. And he died at the age of 39.
The biography covers all this, as well as Pascal’s family and personal life, including his constant ill health. I will not attempt to summarize Pascal’s secular achievements, except to say that his brilliance ought itself to be of some apologetic relevance, and to say that the way Pascal lived his life is instructive to Christians: He was brave, facing both physical pain and personal/professional threats, and kept earthly concerns in perspective, eschewing any lavish lifestyle, championing his immediate family and, especially more and more as he grew older, keeping Christ at his life’s center.
To me, and perhaps to most of my readers on this blogsite, while all of his secular achievement is important, it is not as immediately interesting as what Pascal had to say in his Pensees — perhaps especially, though by no means exclusively, his famous wager. A chapter (14, “A Spinning Coin at the Edge of the Universe”) is devoted to the author’s take on the wager, which is very good — the author argues that Pascal is using the wager to show that the God-deniers are the ones motivated by emotion rather than reason — and he also does an admirable job of explaining why the rest of Pascal’s book is also of exceptional importance. On the specific matter of how one cultivates one’s faith, see especially 332-33, 340-42; see also 147-49 from an earlier chapter (“cultivate,” “nurtured”); note as well 96 (discussion concluding, “Uncertainty does not therefore mean we have to suspend all judgment”).
Once in a while I would quibble with the author, and I don’t entirely understand his comma philosophy, but I loved the book.
A few odds and ends:
- C.S. Lewis is mentioned a couple of times (139-40, 361).
- There is a lot in the book on Pascal’s engagement/issues with the works of Descartes and Montaigne.
- Pascal’s ties to Christian existentialism like Soren Kierkegaard’s — and, I would add, Walker Percy’s (and see 287, “malaise”) — is discussed (214, 219-20, 300; see also 327, a comparison to Camus and Sartre — “meaning resides in action — we have no choice but to act”).
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As I said at the outset, this new biography did not disappoint. Happy New Year!