Abstract
The book is a sustained reflection on Blaise Pascal’s ‘Pensées’. It does not try to deal with all Pascal’s work, and is devoted to considering the theological points that this specific work by Pascal raised, and their relevance to contemporary thought.
Pascal is an important seventeenth-century Catholic writer, as well as being a mathematician and physicist. He is perhaps best known for some of his aphorisms, such as ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’, for his visionary experience of God as ‘fire’ (Pascal’s ‘Memorial’), and for Pascal’s Wager – that belief in God is a better bet than atheism, considering the possible consequences.
Williams deals in detail with these topics, as well as explaining them within the general context of the Pensées. He notes that Pascal was a man of his time, who accepted a literal interpretation of the Bible, young earth creation, the existence of Adam and Eve, and the reality of original sin and guilt. Pascal thought that humans were paradoxical, even contradictory, combinations of wretchedness and greatness. In a prefiguring of Karl Barth’s theology, he saw humanity as totally condemned by God, yet also some humans at least are elected by God for greatness and glory. He was burdened by a great fear of death and of divine judgement, yet rejoiced in Christ’s work of eternal salvation.
Williams is aware that these are doctrines hard to bear in the modern world, and he attempts to show that Pascal nevertheless can provide important insights for modernity. He argues that Pascal is not a fideist, someone who discounts reason in matters of religion. The ‘heart’, after all, has reasons, and people must see that Christianity is reasonable. But the ‘heart’ stands for those pre-rational intuitions or instincts that are not established by reason, but form primitive axioms or inclinations which are presupposed by truly rational thought. They are what might be called the presuppositions of human existence, and reason must have some presuppositions.
Pascal’s Wager is considered at length, and Williams is careful to note the many objections that may be made to it – that there are many more options than just damnation or life with God, and that not all would desire life with God, for instance. But he argues that there is in human nature a sense of failure and dissatisfaction and a longing for a humanly unattainable love that underlie the wager and give it an enduring, if logically uncompelling, force. There is in the human soul an intimation that a God of love is the sole ultimate good, and that without God human life is miserable and pointless.
Stephen Williams has written a book that makes a good case for the spiritual relevance of Pascal for today, and, while not ignoring the problems of some of Pascal’s thoughts, uncovers some of the deep existential truths that Pascal discerned.