Pensées

Based on Wikipedia: Pensées

The Unfinished Masterpiece That Changed Western Thought

When Blaise Pascal died in 1662 at the age of thirty-nine, his friends found something unexpected among his belongings: hundreds of paper fragments, some no larger than a playing card, many of them literally cut and pasted together, all representing the scattered pieces of a book he would never complete. These scraps of paper became the Pensées—which simply means "Thoughts" in French—and they would go on to influence philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, shape existentialist thinking for centuries, and introduce one of the most famous arguments in the history of philosophy.

The irony is thick. Pascal, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his era and a genuine polymath, left behind not a polished treatise but a collection of fragments. And yet these fragments have proven more enduring than most finished books.

The Man Behind the Fragments

Pascal was not always a religious thinker. He was, first and foremost, a scientist and mathematician. By the age of sixteen, he had written a significant treatise on geometry. He invented one of the first mechanical calculators. He made fundamental contributions to probability theory—work that, not coincidentally, would later inform his famous "wager" about the existence of God.

Then came what Pascal called his "night of fire."

On November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced a profound religious conversion. For roughly two hours, he felt what he described as absolute certainty of God's presence. He wrote a brief account of this experience on a piece of parchment, which he then sewed into the lining of his coat and carried with him for the rest of his life. After this night, Pascal largely abandoned mathematics and science, turning instead to religious contemplation and ascetic practice.

The Pensées emerged from this transformed man. Pascal set out to write a comprehensive defense of Christianity—what scholars call an "apology," using the word in its older sense of a reasoned justification, not an expression of regret. He never finished it. What we have instead are the notes, drafts, and fragments he was organizing when death interrupted him.

A Book That Almost Wasn't

Here is where the story becomes complicated. Pascal died leaving behind bundles of paper scraps, some organized, most not. The people who inherited his effects—well-meaning but not fully understanding what they had—handed these materials over to editors who published them in 1670, eight years after his death.

But in what order should these fragments be read?

Pascal had clearly begun organizing his notes. Evidence suggests he was cutting and pasting drafts into a coherent structure. But he died before completing this work, and so the fundamental question facing every subsequent editor has been: what arrangement did Pascal intend?

Different editors have given radically different answers. Léon Brunschvicg organized the fragments by theme. Louis Lafuma tried to reconstruct Pascal's original bundles. Philippe Sellier proposed yet another arrangement. The scholar Jean Mesnard spent nearly thirty years on a monumental edition of Pascal's complete works that attempted to date and contextualize each fragment individually.

This is not merely an academic puzzle. The order in which you read the Pensées genuinely changes its meaning. It's as if Pascal left behind the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box, and scholars have been arguing ever since about what image those pieces were meant to form.

The Style of Scattered Brilliance

The philosopher Peter Kreeft described the Pensées as more like a collection of "sayings" than a book, and this is apt. Some fragments are a single sentence. Others run for several pages. Many feel like the beginning of an argument that Pascal meant to develop further. Others seem complete in themselves, little diamonds of insight polished to perfection.

This aphoristic quality is part of what makes the Pensées so quotable. Pascal has a gift for the memorable phrase:

"Man infinitely surpasses man."

This line, which Pope Paul VI quoted in his 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, captures something essential about Pascal's view of human nature. We are, in his vision, creatures who transcend our own limitations—but only by recognizing that we cannot save ourselves.

The Hidden God

Pascal takes an unusual approach to defending Christianity. He is skeptical—genuinely skeptical—of the traditional philosophical proofs for God's existence. The cosmological arguments, which try to reason from the existence of the universe to the existence of a creator, strike Pascal as weak. When believers present such arguments, he writes, they give atheists "ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak."

This is a remarkable statement coming from a Christian apologist. Pascal is essentially conceding that the standard philosophical arguments for God fail to convince.

But Pascal argues that this is actually the point. Christianity, he insists, has never claimed that God is obvious. On the contrary, Scripture describes God as hidden, deliberately concealed from casual observation. "Men are in darkness and estranged from God," Pascal writes. God "has hidden Himself from their knowledge."

This leads to one of Pascal's most striking arguments. Atheists, he suggests, attack a straw man. They criticize Christianity for not providing clear proof of God, but Christianity never promised such proof. The faith claims that God reveals himself only to those who genuinely seek him "with all their heart." Since atheists, by definition, are not engaged in this kind of wholehearted seeking, their arguments miss the point entirely.

It's a clever rhetorical move. Pascal essentially argues that the absence of obvious evidence for God is itself evidence for the Christian understanding of God—because the Christian God is supposed to be hidden.

The Heart Has Its Reasons

Pascal is often associated with skepticism, and with good reason. "Scepticism is true," he writes bluntly. Before Jesus Christ, he argues, human beings "did not know where they were, nor whether they were great or small." Philosophers throughout history claimed to have answers, but "those who have said the one or the other, knew nothing about it, and guessed without reason and by chance."

But Pascal is not a simple skeptic. His skepticism leads him not to despair but to a different source of knowledge.

"We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart," he writes. First principles—the basic foundations of knowledge—cannot be demonstrated through reason alone. They are known through what Pascal calls the heart, a faculty that reason "tries in vain to impugn."

This distinction between the heart and reason became enormously influential. Pascal is not arguing for mere emotion or sentiment. He is suggesting that there are forms of knowledge—including the most fundamental knowledge of all—that cannot be reduced to logical proof. Skeptics who rely solely on reason "labour to no purpose" because they are using the wrong tool for the job.

Pascal's Wager

The Pensées contains what is probably the most famous argument in the philosophy of religion: Pascal's wager.

The argument draws on Pascal's expertise in probability theory. Imagine, Pascal suggests, that you are facing a bet. Either God exists or he doesn't. You must wager one way or the other—there is no sitting this bet out, because how you live your life constitutes your wager whether you intend it to or not.

If you bet that God exists and live accordingly, and you turn out to be right, you gain everything—eternal salvation. If you're wrong, you lose relatively little—some worldly pleasures foregone, perhaps. On the other hand, if you bet against God's existence and you're wrong, you lose everything. The expected value calculation, Pascal argues, overwhelmingly favors betting on God.

This argument has been debated endlessly since Pascal first formulated it. Critics point out that it doesn't tell you which God to believe in. They argue that you can't simply choose to believe something through an act of will. They question whether a God worth worshiping would accept belief based on such calculating logic.

Defenders respond that Pascal wasn't trying to prove God exists—he was trying to show that skeptics have practical reasons to take faith seriously. The wager is meant to get you in the door; genuine belief, Pascal assumed, would follow from the practice of faith.

Whatever you think of its logical merits, Pascal's wager represents a genuinely novel approach to religious thought. It treats the question of God's existence not as a matter of abstract proof but as a practical decision under uncertainty—the kind of decision Pascal, with his work on probability theory, was uniquely qualified to analyze.

Banned by the Church He Defended

In a twist that Pascal might have appreciated, the Pensées was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Catholic Church's official list of forbidden books. The same work that set out to defend Christianity was banned by Christianity's largest institution.

The reasons were complicated. Pascal was closely associated with Jansenism, a Catholic theological movement that emphasized predestination and divine grace in ways that the Church hierarchy found troubling. His earlier work, the Provincial Letters, had savagely attacked the Jesuits. The Pensées, despite its apologetic intent, contained ideas that Church authorities found inconsistent with orthodox teaching.

This ban has long since been lifted, and the Catholic Church now celebrates Pascal. In June 2023, Pope Francis published an apostolic letter on the four hundredth anniversary of Pascal's birth, praising the Pensées as "monumental" and admiring its "philosophical depth and literary charm."

The Long Shadow

The influence of the Pensées extends far beyond religious circles.

Martin Heidegger, one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, kept a photograph of Pascal's death mask in his study during the 1920s. Pascal appears in the introduction to Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time. Scholars have traced numerous parallels between Heidegger's existentialist philosophy and Pascal's thought.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher most associated with existentialism, read the Pensées as a young man, and his own writings show its influence. The existentialist emphasis on human finitude, the anxiety of existence, and the necessity of choice all find precedents in Pascal.

Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship with Pascal was more complicated. Nietzsche was a fierce critic of Christianity, and much of the Pensées is devoted to defending Christianity. Yet Nietzsche called Pascal "the most instructive victim of Christianity" and expressed his "love" for him. Pascal, Nietzsche wrote, "has enlightened me infinitely." He praised him as "the only logical Christian"—meaning, perhaps, that Pascal alone was willing to follow Christian premises to their honest conclusions, however dark.

Nietzsche's ambivalence points to something important. You don't have to accept Pascal's conclusions to find value in his observations. His psychological insights into human nature, his analysis of self-deception and rationalization, his understanding of how people use diversion to avoid facing uncomfortable truths—all of this remains compelling even to readers who reject his religious framework.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu titled one of his major works Pascalian Meditations. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser drew on Pascal in his influential essay on ideology. Max Scheler, the phenomenologist, was deeply influenced by Pascal's value theory.

Reading Pascal Today

What is it about these fragments that continues to speak to readers more than three hundred fifty years after Pascal's death?

Part of the answer is that Pascal refuses to offer easy comfort. He takes the case against Christianity seriously. He acknowledges that God is not obvious, that the evidence is ambiguous, that reasonable people can look at the same world and reach opposite conclusions. He doesn't pretend that faith is simple or that doubt is foolish.

But he also refuses to accept that skepticism has the final word. Against the pure rationalists, he insists that the heart has its own knowledge. Against the pure skeptics, he insists that we cannot avoid betting, that life forces us to live as if certain things were true.

The fragmentary nature of the Pensées somehow adds to its power. Pascal's thoughts come to us incomplete, still in process, still wrestling with problems that admit no easy solution. Reading the Pensées feels less like being lectured and more like thinking alongside someone—someone brilliant, tormented, and honest enough to show us his doubt as well as his faith.

The book's unfinished state also means that readers across centuries have been able to find their own order in the fragments, their own meaning in the chaos. In a sense, every reader of the Pensées becomes a collaborator with Pascal, completing in their own imagination the work he could not complete in life.

Pascal believed that we are caught between greatness and wretchedness, capable of transcendence yet mired in limitation. His Pensées embodies this condition. It is a great work that remains incomplete, a defense of faith written by a man who understood doubt intimately, a collection of fragments that somehow adds up to more than any finished book could have been.

Man infinitely surpasses man. And sometimes, a pile of paper scraps surpasses the most polished philosophical treatise.