As a Christian who desires to know God personally, one of my daily disciplines is to study the Scriptures. I have not been formally trained in theology through a seminary program, but I am very fortunate to live in a time where there are numerous resources available to learn the culture, history, language, and theology of manuscripts that were written two thousand years ago.

One of the theological resources that I have been using recently is Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,” a collection of philosophical fragments, notes, and essays in which he explores the contradictions of human nature in phycological, social, metaphysical and theological terms” (Pensées, Introduction).

In English, we use the word thought to convey an idea or opinion produced by thinking; something that occurs suddenly in the mind.

I love Blaise Pascal’s definition of thought, however, or la pensée, which has the meaning of a concept, view, or insight. In Pensées, Pascal gives us a collection of his conclusions on life, God, nature, Scripture, and much more, from many occasions of deep thought and reflection.

Pascal was first recognized as a brilliant mathematician and scientist. On can see that many of the concepts he used in mathematics are carried through his concepts of religion. For example, just as lines, squares, and cubes cannot be added together as being of different orders, so in the realm of human knowledge that the body (senses), mind (reason), and heart are of different orders and must be carefully distinguished.

  • Body: For Pascal, a physical phenomenon must be properly examined by the physical means. The mind, just as presented by Descartes, bases faith on the authority of great men rather than reason.
  • Mind: Reason formulates hypotheses to test the senses,
  • Heart: The heart is the seat of and recipient of charity. Carnality and materialism are the enemies of charity and cause the heart to look downwards instead of upwards to God (xxiii).

After his conversion to faith in 1654, his purpose in life changed. Intellectual achievement became a distraction from his search to know God. Pensées was published posthumously eight years after his death.

Pascal first gained attention with Provincial Letters (1656-7) which showed readers with no special knowledge or qualifications in theology could have scriptures and theology explained to them. He was truly ahead of his time and Letters would assure him as an outstanding writer of French prose.

In addition to his purpose of explaining dense theology to laity, I admire his working methods in which I can relate! Pascal would write his thoughts on large sheets of paper with alterations, transpositions, in poetry, table of contents, and headings. He used classification in Pensées and each fragment, or Pensée (thought), had up to nine entries. He would then thread a string through the corner of the fragments (similar to how index cards have holes punched in the corners in order to bind with rings) to secure each  liasse, or bundle of thoughts. The Miracles section of dossiers contain Biblical texts and translations, and the last section contains Pascal’s conversion experience, the “Mystery of Jesus”, and a paper on “Self-Love”.

In addition, Pascal did not compose his writings in a linear logical style, but by noyaux, or nuclei centres in the order of heart rather than mind. I love this! Pascal wanted to communicate to others what had been “vouchsafed” to him (xxi).

The pattern of all Pascal’s religious writing

 “is the stark contrast between man in his state of fallen nature and in a state of grace. In this, human nature is seen as having been so corrupted by the Fall that only the direct intervention of God’s grace, mediated by the redeeming power of Christ, could enable an to do good and be saved. This grace could never be earned, and man could never put God under an obligation to save him, but man could try to remove some of the chief obstacles to grace and thus create in himself a disposition more favourable to its reception” (xxi).

The appeal Pascal has had for so many readers over four centuries who find themselves responding at a very personal level to his portrayal of the human situation is incomparable. I am in this company! I incorporate the texts of Pascal’s religious writing into the French language equivalency courses I teach for seminary PhD students because of their readability, ease in translation, clarity of style and, most importantly, the embodiment of his personal theological and religious struggles in his writings.

Here are some of my favorite Pensées [English translation]:

  • Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical. If we look at our work immediately after completing it, are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again (good observation for writers!) (5,6)
  • In painting the rules of perspective decide it, but how will it be decided when it comes to truth and morality?(6)
  • We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too raped flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does (8).
  • It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one needs (15).
  • Pride. Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it, and for the sheer pleasure of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others (21).
  • Philosophers. All very well to cry out to a man who does not know himself that he should make his own way to God! And all very well to say that to a man who does know himself (43).
  • God alone is man’s true good, and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, animals, insects, fever, plague, war famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction, although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason and to nature(46).
  • Self: What about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
  • And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body, nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person’s soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore, we never love anyone, but only qualities (218).

Work Cited

Blaise Pascal. Pensées.  Pierre Zoberman, Translator.  Catholic University of America Press. 2023