Pensées Blaise Pascal – From the notes for Pascal’s contemplated ‘Apology for the Christian Religion’ the Port-Royalists compiled and edited the book known as his ‘Pensées’ or ‘Thoughts.’ The early texts were much tampered with, and the material has been frequently rearranged; but now at last it is possible to read these fragmentary jottings as they came from the hand of their author. In spite of their incompleteness and frequent incoherence, the ‘Thoughts’ have long held a high place among the great religious classics. Much of the theological argument implied in these utterances has little appeal to the modern mind, but the acuteness of the observation of human life, the subtlety of the reasoning, the combination of precision and fervid imagination in the expression, make this a book to which the discerning mind can return again and again for insight and inspiration.
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French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was a contemporary of René Descartes and was ten when Galileo Galilei was forced to recant his belief that the earth circled the sun. He and Thomas Hobbes lived in Paris at the same time (1640) including the year Hobbes published his famous Leviathan (1651). Together with Pierre de Fermat, Pascal created the calculus of probabilities.
A near-fatal carriage accident in November 1654 — less than eight years before his death — persuaded him to turn his intellect finally toward religion. The story goes that on the proverbial dark and stormy night, while Pascal was riding in a carriage across a bridge in a Paris suburb, a fright caused the horses to bolt, sending them over the edge. The carriage bearing Pascal survived. Pascal took the incident as a sign and devoted himself to theology. It was at this point that he began writing a series against the Jesuits in 1657 called the Provincial Letters.
Pascal is perhaps most famous for his Wager (‘Pascal’s Wager’), which is not as clear in his language as in this summary: ‘If Jesus does not exist, the non Christian loses little by believing in him and gains little by not believing. If Jesus does exist, the non Christian gains eternal life by believing and loses an infinite good by not believing.’
Sick throughout his life, Pascal died in Paris, probably from a combination of tuberculosis and stomach cancer at age 39. At the last he was a Jansenist Catholic. No one knows if Pascal won his Wager.
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