Pensees

Author:

Blaise Pascal

Edition:

A.J. Krailsheimer, Penguin Classics; Reissue edition (December 1, 1995)

Summary:

Blaise Pascal’s Pensees, although fragmentary and incomplete, is a penetrating, original, and stylish defense of the Christian faith and one of the supreme Christian writings of all time.

Pensees, however, is not a book to be read through like other books; it is better approached as a series of reflections to be pondered at their own pace. And certain background considerations are needed for the best understanding of the book.  Pascal employs an argument in the Pensees that is not linear but cumulative; and, although profoundly rational, it depends on more than reason alone. Eschewing a rational “proof” for God’s existence, Pascal uses an approach that is at once more profound, more popular, more concrete, and more effective. He appeals to human misery in awakening self-knowledge, raising the riddle of human existence, and spurring a search that can lead to only one possible answer–Jesus Christ. Because the whole person must be saved, the whole person must be moved in spiritual pilgrimage.

Pascal strategically argues from false alternatives. Somehow fated always to be caught in the middle– between the priests and the free-thinkers, between the philosophies of the skeptic Montaigne and the stoic Epictetus and between the worlds of the convert and the gambling saloon–he uses dualisms to argue for the higher truth of the Christian faith.

– Os Guinness, Blaise Pascal: Pensees. In Louise Cowan & Os Guinness (Eds.), Invitation to the Classics.