August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Pascal, despite his shortened life, is renowned for his pioneering work in geometry, physics and probability theory. His most powerful legacy, however, lies in the way he engaged with life’s biggest questions.
Pascal’s intellect attracted attention from a young age. At 16, he completed an essay on the geometry of cones so impressive that René Descartes initially refused believing that it could possibly be attributed to a “sixteen year old child”. Later, Advanced Pascal the study of voids in the face of the dominant (and misplaced) belief that nature is entirely filled with matter and therefore “horrors a vacuum”.
In 1654, his work on probabilities took a new turn when a friend sent him a puzzle. Apply mathematics to problem, Pascal arranged rows of numbers in a triangular formation, a formation which now bears his name. As author John F. Ross described:
This was the whole idea of probability: establishing the numerical probabilities of a future event with mathematical precision. Remarkably, no one else had solved the probability puzzle before, although the Greeks and Romans had come close.
In 1646, Blaise Pascal encountered the kindness of two Jansenist Christians take care of his injured father. Their love in action earned Pascal’s admiration. Then, on the evening of November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced the presence of God in a new and personal way, which he described on a piece of parchment which he sewed into his jacket and carried with him for the rest of his life:
FIRE—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not philosophers and scholars. Certainty, certainty. Sincere joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your God will be my God.
In his writings, Pascal’s notions of probability meet his faith in God. A compilation of his collected manuscripts was published after his death in a volume entitled, Thoughts, Or “Thoughts.” The best known is his famous “bet” that, in the face of uncertainty and in a game with such high stakes, it makes much more sense for fallen human beings to believe in the existence of God than to doubt it. “If you win, ” he wrote, “you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. So bet without hesitation that He is.
Pascal also proposed one of the most in-depth diagnoses of humanity:
The human being is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but it is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush it; a breath of steam, a taste of water is enough to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes even nobler than the one who kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe has no idea.
Or even better:
What a chimera man is! What novelty, what monster, what chaos, what contradiction, what prodigy! Judge of all things, you imbecile worm; depository of truth and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and waste of the universe.
He also described our moral conditions as human beings“(We hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and…we love it when they are deceived in our favor” (Thoughts 100).
Apart from God, Pascal observed, people turn away from the reality of death. But the diversions run out, and then humanity
feels its nothingness, its abandonment, its insufficiency, its dependence, its weakness, its emptiness. From the depths of his heart will immediately arise weariness, gloom, sadness, irritation, vexation, despair. (Thoughts 131)
“Between us and heaven or hell, there is only life, which is the most fragile thing in the world” (Thoughts 213 ).
With a poetic nod to his work on vacuum cleaners, Pascal concludes:
What then does this desire and this incapacity proclaim to us, except that there was once in man a true happiness of which only the mark and the empty trace remains…? But all this is insufficient, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is, only by God himself..
A generation later, as the waves of the Enlightenment swept across Europe, the continent’s most eminent thinkers could not escape Pascal’s genius. According to the philosopher Dr. Patrick Riley,
Holbach, until the 1770s, still felt the need to quarrel with the author of the Thoughts, Condorcet, by publishing the works of Pascal, renewed the old debate; Voltaire, throughout his life, and even during his last year, launched sallies after sallies against the writer who frightened him every time he, a hypochondriac, felt ill..
On the human condition in particular, the French Revolution would prove Pascal right and Voltaire wrong. Divorced from God and instead devoted to the cult of “pure reason”, France has become a violent and anarchic desert.
Even today, the intellect, passion and eloquence of Blaise Pascal have lost none of their ardor, dedicated to the God who claimed his total devotion. As he wrote on the parchment sewn into his jacket,
Jesus Christ.
I have gone away: I have fled from Him,
He denied him, he crucified him.
May I not fall forever.
We retain it only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.
Eternally in the joy of a day of exercise on earth.
I will not forget your word. Amen.
This Breakpoint was co-written by Kasey Leander. If you like Breakpointleave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources for living like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit breakpoint.org.