Justified True Belief

(●) A first-rate scientist who turned the same attention on the human heart, and left unfinished the most widely read defense of the faith ever written in French. + Blaise Pascal built a working calculating machine at nineteen, proved that the air has weight, and founded the mathematics of probability in an exchange of letters about a gambling problem. Any one of those would have secured him a place in the history of science. He is remembered instead for a book he never finished, assembled after his death from scraps of paper found in his rooms. The scraps are the Pensées, the French word for "thoughts." Pascal had spent his last years on an apology for the Christian religion, an argued defense of the faith addressed to the clever, comfortable, sceptical people he knew from Paris society. He wrote it in fragments, sorted the fragments into bundles, and died at thirty-nine with the bundles still on his desk. What his family printed in 1670 was not the book he meant to write. It has never been out of print since. Here is the fact about him that a reader will remember. Eight years before he died he sewed a scrap of parchment into the lining of his coat, and moved it from coat to coat for the rest of his life, and told no one. A servant found it when the clothes were sorted after his death. It records a night, an hour, and one word written large and alone: FEU, fire.

(●) 1623 AD: Born at Clermont in the Auvergne to a tax official who decided to teach his children himself. + Blaise Pascal was born on 19 June 1623 at Clermont, the hill town in the volcanic country of central France that is now Clermont-Ferrand. His father Étienne was a lawyer who held a senior post in the local tax court, and a competent mathematician in his own right. His mother Antoinette died when Blaise was three, and he grew up with two sisters: Gilberte, three years older, who would write the first account of his life, and Jacqueline, two years younger, who was a published child poet and the person he loved most in the world. When the family moved to Paris in 1631, Étienne made an unusual decision. He would educate the children at home, alone, and he would keep mathematics away from Blaise until the boy had a firm grasp of Latin and Greek. The plan failed in the way such plans do. Gilberte records that the twelve-year-old worked in charcoal on the tiles of a room where he was left to play, and got as far as the thirty-second proposition of Euclid’s first book, calling a circle a round and a line a bar because nobody had told him the real names. His father, finding him at it, wept and handed over the geometry books. The household was not a happy accident but a deliberate one. Étienne taught his son that a thing is to be understood rather than believed on authority, and took him along to the meetings of the mathematicians who gathered around Father Marin Mersenne in Paris, the informal circle that did the work an academy of sciences would later do. Blaise was fourteen and sitting among the best minds in France.

(●) 1640 AD: Not yet seventeen, he printed a theorem on conic sections, then built a machine to do his father’s arithmetic. + In February 1640 a single printed sheet appeared in Paris under the name of a sixteen-year-old: the Essai pour les coniques, an essay on conic sections, which are the curves you get by slicing a cone (the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, the hyperbola). On that one page sits the result still called Pascal’s theorem, about six points lying on such a curve. Descartes read it. Adrien Baillet, who would later write Descartes’s life, reports that Descartes preferred to believe the boy’s father was the real author, a story later scholars have doubted; what Descartes himself wrote to Mersenne was drier, that he did not find it strange the young man had demonstrations on conics better than the ancients had. The family had left Paris for Rouen in December 1639, where Étienne had been appointed to assess and collect the king’s taxes in Upper Normandy. The work was drudgery of a specific kind: columns and columns of livres, sous and deniers, a currency in which twelve deniers made a sou and twenty sous a livre, so that no two columns could be added the same way. Blaise watched his father work late, and set out to build a machine that would do it. He worked at it from 1642 to 1645, and the hard part turned out not to be the mathematics. It was the workmen. The clockmakers he dealt with could not cut parts to the tolerance the design needed, and he went back to the drawings again and again to suit what their hands could actually make. By 1652, when the manufacture stopped, some fifty prototypes had been built. What came out of all of it, the Pascaline, was a brass box of geared wheels that added and subtracted with an automatic carry, so that a nine ticking over to a ten shifted the wheel beside it without anyone having to remember to do so. It was the first calculating machine ever manufactured and offered for sale. Eight or nine survive, most of them in French museums. It made him famous and almost no money.

(●) 1646 AD: A fall on the ice brought two devout bonesetters into the house, the whole family took up their Jansenism, and within two years he had weighed the air. + In January 1646 Étienne Pascal slipped on ice in Rouen and dislocated his thigh. Two gentlemen of the district, the Deschamps brothers, were skilled bonesetters, and they moved into the house for three months to nurse him. They were also serious readers of a movement inside French Catholicism called Jansenism, and three months is a long time to have a man who believes something intently sitting at your father’s bedside. Jansenism took its name from Cornelius Jansen, the Dutch-born bishop of Ypres, whose enormous book Augustinus appeared in 1640, two years after his death. Its claim was that the church had gone soft on Augustine: that human nature is more damaged than anyone admits, that no one turns to God unless God moves first, and that the Christian life is therefore a matter of grace rather than of moral effort well managed. Its centre in France was a convent south-west of Paris, Port-Royal des Champs, and around the convent had gathered a group of lawyers and scholars who had walked away from careers to live simply and write. The whole Pascal household took the movement to heart. Biographers call it Pascal’s first conversion, and it was real but not yet deep: he believed, and went on living much as before. In the same months he took up a report out of Italy. Evangelista Torricelli had filled a glass tube with mercury, upended it in a dish, and found that the column fell to a certain height and then stayed there, leaving a space at the top that appeared to contain nothing at all. Nothing at all was exactly the problem, because the settled physics of the day, inherited from Aristotle, held that a vacuum is impossible and that nature abhors a void. Pascal repeated the experiment at Rouen and then pushed it much further, filling a crystal tube forty-six feet long with red wine in a glassworks yard so that a crowd could stand in the open and watch the level fall for themselves. He published his findings in 1647. Then he thought of the test that would settle it. If the mercury is held up by the weight of the air pressing down on the dish, there ought to be less air pressing at the top of a mountain than at the bottom, and the column ought to fall. The mountain he wanted stood in the country he came from, far to the south, so he wrote and asked his family to make the climb for him. On 19 September 1648 his brother-in-law Florin Périer carried a barometer up the Puy-de-Dôme, the extinct volcano above Clermont, and found the column standing three inches lower at the summit than at the foot. The ocean of air we live at the bottom of has weight, and it can be weighed.

(●) 1651 AD: His father died, his sister left for the convent against his will, and Pascal went out into Paris society. + Étienne Pascal died in September 1651. Writing to console Gilberte, Blaise produced a letter on death that is already the voice of the Pensées: grief is real, he says, and the pagan consolations are useless, and a Christian may not treat a death as a mere fact of nature. Four months later Jacqueline entered Port-Royal. Blaise fought her over it, refused for a while to release her share of the inheritance, and gave in only after the convent agreed to receive her without a dowry. He had lost the two people he lived with inside a single year. What followed were the years his sisters called worldly, from 1652 to 1654. He kept a carriage and a household, moved among the gambling, talking, dueling nobility of Paris, and made two friendships that lasted: with Artus Gouffier, Duc de Roannez, a young nobleman of real seriousness, and with the Chevalier de Méré, a professional gentleman who gambled and wanted to know why the dice behaved as they did. Out of Méré’s questions came something nobody expected. In the summer of 1654 Pascal exchanged letters with the Toulouse magistrate Pierre de Fermat about the problem of points: if two players are interrupted partway through a game they had agreed to play to the end, how should the stake be divided? The right answer, they saw, does not depend on what has happened but on what each player can still expect to happen. Between them, in a handful of letters, they founded the mathematics of probability, which is to say the tool with which the modern world measures risk, from insurance premiums to weather forecasts. The man who worked out how to reason about an uncertain future was months away from staking his own on God.

(●) 1654 AD: Two hours on the night of 23 November converted him for good, and he sewed the record of them into his clothing for the eight years he had left. + That autumn Pascal was restless and unwell. His early biographers repeat a story that his carriage horses bolted on a bridge at Neuilly and went over the parapet, leaving the carriage hanging, and that the shock turned his mind toward eternity. The story cannot be confirmed from anything he wrote, and careful biographers treat it as a tradition rather than a fact. What is certain is dated to the half hour. From about half past ten on the night of Monday 23 November 1654 until about half past midnight, Pascal underwent something he could only record in broken lines: a page of exclamations, Scripture in French and Latin, and one word standing alone. He copied it onto parchment, sewed the parchment into the lining of his coat, and transferred it whenever he changed coats. Nobody knew. A servant sorting his clothes after his death in 1662 found the thickened seam and cut it open. The text is called the Memorial. It is not an argument and was never meant for a reader; it is the private note of a man who had spent his life proving things and had just met someone. In January 1655 he went into retreat at Port-Royal des Champs, and from then on the mathematics was a hobby he took up when pain kept him awake.

(●) 1656 AD: Eighteen anonymous letters made the whole of France laugh at the moral theology of the Jesuits. + In January 1656 the theology faculty of the Sorbonne was moving to condemn Antoine Arnauld, the chief theologian of Port-Royal, and his friends asked Pascal to write something in his defense. What they got was not a treatise. It was a letter from an ordinary Parisian to a friend in the provinces, reporting with wide-eyed courtesy on what he had discovered by simply going and asking the experts what they taught. Eighteen of them appeared between January 1656 and March 1657, published in secret under the name Louis de Montalte, printed on presses moved from house to house ahead of the police. The first three defend Arnauld. The rest go after the moral theology taught by some casuists of the Society of Jesus. Casuistry is the discipline of applying moral rules to particular hard cases, an honourable and necessary thing in itself: a doctor deciding what he may tell a dying patient is doing casuistry. Pascal’s charge was that a school of it had grown up in which, by heaping up authorities and refining intentions, almost anything could be permitted to someone who wanted it permitted. He quoted the manuals at length and let them do their own damage. Educated France read the letters aloud at dinner. Rome placed them on the Index of forbidden books in 1657, and they stayed in every French schoolroom anyway, because they are the book in which French prose learned to be quick. Two months into the campaign, on 24 March 1656, Pascal’s ten-year-old niece Marguerite Périer was healed at Port-Royal. She had a lachrymal fistula, a running ulcer at the corner of the eye that had defeated the surgeons and left her face swollen and foul-smelling; a relic said to be a thorn from the crown of thorns was touched to it, and within days the ulcer was gone. Physicians examined her and signed a statement in April that they could not account for it. Consider where this landed. Pascal was in the middle of a fight his side was losing on every front, defending a convent the crown and Rome between them meant to break, and the child healed was his own niece. He read it as a verdict handed down from outside the courtroom. He began collecting notes on miracles, and those notes grew into the apology he would never finish. He took a personal seal from about that time, an eye ringed with a crown of thorns, and set round it the words of the apostle Paul, I know whom I have believed (2 Timothy 1:12).

(●) 1662 AD: He opened the first public bus line in Paris, sent his share to the poor, and died at thirty-nine with the book unwritten. + Around 1658 Pascal described to friends at Port-Royal the book he intended: a defense of the Christian religion built to be read by a man who did not want to read it. He got as far as several hundred fragments, some of them a single line, which he began sorting into titled bundles. He never assembled them. The last four years were a losing fight with pain, headaches and stomach trouble that no physician of the time could name, and he worked when he could. In 1658, kept awake by a toothache, he solved a set of outstanding problems about the cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the rim of a rolling wheel, and issued them as a public challenge under the false name Amos Dettonville. Grief came too. Jacqueline died at Port-Royal on 4 October 1661, worn down, her friends believed, by the government’s campaign to force the nuns to sign a document condemning Jansenism. Her brother was left with the argument she had lost. The last thing he built was a public service. In January 1662, with the Duc de Roannez, he obtained a royal privilege for coaches that would run fixed routes across Paris on a fixed schedule at a fixed fare of five sous, whether or not anyone was aboard: the first public transport system in the world. The first line opened on 18 March 1662, and what he did with the money is the point of the story. Pascal asked the fermiers, the contractors who were taking the routes on lease and would run them for whatever the fares brought in, for a thousand francs in advance on his share, and sent the whole of it to the poor of Blois, who had come through a hard winter. Gilberte told him the business was not secure enough yet and that he should wait a year. He answered that he would make the money good himself if it failed, and that the need was too pressing to make charity wait. His will remembered the hospitals for the poor in the same spirit. The venture disappointed him in a way he did not live to see fully. The Parlement of Paris registered the privilege only on terms that barred soldiers, pages, liveried servants and labourers from riding, so that the carriages meant for everyone ended up carrying the comfortable. By then he was ill past working, and had been taken to Gilberte’s house when he could no longer be left on his own. In his last weeks he asked to be moved to a hospital for incurables so as to die among the poor, and was refused as too weak to be carried. He died on 19 August 1662, two months past his thirty-ninth birthday. Gilberte reports that his last words were a cry that God would never abandon him. The autopsy found his stomach and other organs badly diseased, and lesions in the brain.

What He Taught

(T1) A morality that can be bent to fit whatever a man already wants to do has stopped being a morality. + Imagine asking four doctors whether you may keep taking a drug you like, and being told that although three say no, one respectable specialist says yes, and that the one is enough. That is roughly the rule Pascal set out to destroy. The theologians called it probabilism: an opinion counts as "probable," and may therefore be acted on with a clear conscience, when a serious authority has argued for it. Pascal quoted the manuals themselves on the point, that the opinion of a single grave doctor is all that is required, and then simply asked what a person does with a rule like that when he badly wants an answer to come out a particular way. His method in the Provincial Letters was to play the innocent. The narrator is a layman who has heard that these fathers are the most learned men in Europe and goes to find out what they teach; the Jesuit he interviews is friendly, obliging, and quotes his own authorities at length on when a debt need not be paid, when an insult may be answered with a sword, when a promise binds and when the mind may quietly reserve a meaning the hearer will not catch. Pascal barely comments. The comedy is that the fathers convict themselves out of their own printed books, and the seriousness under the comedy is a single question: is the rule of the Christian life Scripture and the mind of the church, or is it whatever a competent expert can be found to permit? Two cautions are owed him, and they cut both ways. He was arguing against a school within the Society of Jesus and not against the Society entire, and later readers have shown that some of his quotations are sharper out of their contexts than they were in them. But the target was real, and Rome came round to the substance of the charge even while it kept his book on the Index. Alexander VII, the pope whose brief condemned the letters in 1657, went on to condemn long lists of lax casuist propositions in 1665 and 1666, and Innocent XI condemned sixty-five more in 1679, some of them the very ones Pascal had held up to the light.

(Q) "I always thought that we were bound to take the Scripture and the tradition of the Church as our only rule, and not your casuists." + Source: Pascal, Provincial Letters, Letter V (M’Crie translation, 1856). The narrator has just been told that he may safely follow an opinion permitting him to court the occasions of sin, on the authority of Basil Ponce and Father Bauny, and that the father recommending it does not follow it himself. This is the sentence he answers with, and it is the whole of Pascal’s case in one line (T1).

(T2) Man is the only creature great enough to know that he is wretched, and that double fact is the key to him. + A dog that is dying does not know it is dying. A tree blown down in a storm is not humiliated. Only one animal on the earth lies awake at three in the morning knowing exactly what is wrong with its life and unable to fix any of it, and Pascal thought that fact was the most important thing about us. Something that can be miserable about itself is not simply an animal that has gone wrong. It is a ruin, and a ruin implies a building. He builds the whole of his apology on the pair. Take man’s greatness alone, the thinking, the mathematics, the art, and you get the philosopher’s flattering picture, which cannot explain why we are also cruel, bored, and afraid. Take his wretchedness alone and you get the cynic’s picture, which cannot explain why the wretchedness bothers us. Pascal keeps both and says that any account of the human being which drops either half has failed the evidence. He watches men hunt, gamble, and go to war, and argues that most of it is not pursuit of anything but flight from the empty room: he calls this divertissement, diversion, and it is his name for everything we do to avoid sitting still with ourselves. The observation cost him nothing to make. He had kept the carriage and played at the tables himself. The doctrine that fits the evidence, he argues, is the one nobody likes: that man was made for something and fell from it, so that both the memory and the ruin are real. And the fit is the argument. Knowing God without knowing our misery breeds pride, he wrote, and knowing our misery without God breeds despair, and in Jesus Christ we find both together (Pensées 527). The apostle Paul had put the wretched half in one cry: "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24).

(Q) "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." + Source: Pascal, Pensées 347 (Trotter translation). The fragment goes on: the universe does not need to arm itself to crush him, since a vapour or a drop of water will do it, but if the universe crushed him he would still be the nobler of the two, because he would know he was dying and the universe would know nothing at all. A note on the numbers, since they can send a reader to the wrong page. Pascal left his fragments unnumbered, and later editors numbered them in several incompatible ways. The numbers attached to the fragments are Léon Brunschvicg’s, from his edition of 1897, which W. F. Trotter’s public-domain English version follows. A modern edition will give this same fragment as Lafuma 200 or Sellier 231.

(T3) God has hidden himself on purpose, with light enough for anyone who wants him and darkness enough for anyone who does not. + The complaint is old and it is fair. If God wanted to be believed in, he could write his name across the sky tonight and settle the question by breakfast. Pascal takes the complaint seriously enough to make it the hinge of his apology, and his answer is that God’s hiddenness is not an oversight but a policy. Start with what a proof does to a person. Nobody loves the multiplication table, and nobody is changed by it; a demonstration compels the mind and leaves the will exactly where it was. If God’s existence were as plain as the noonday sun, Pascal argues, we would all assent and none of us would be converted, because assent is not the thing he is after. So the evidence is pitched at a level that rewards the seeker and does not corner the man who would rather not look: enough to make honest searching succeed, not enough to make refusal impossible. Pascal found the phrase for it in Isaiah, and copied the Latin of it into his notes: "Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior." (Isaiah 45:15). Two things follow, and they are both uncomfortable. The first is that indifference is not a neutral position. A man who says the evidence is insufficient and then never troubles to examine any of it has, on Pascal’s account, already told God his answer. The second is that this shifts the question from the head to the will, which is exactly where Jesus put it when he thanked the Father for hiding these things from the wise and understanding and revealing them to little children (Matthew 11:25).

(Q) "There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition." + Source: Pascal, Pensées 430 (Trotter translation), Brunschvicg numbering. The sentence closes a long passage Pascal writes in the voice of divine Wisdom addressing the reader. God did not come the first time as he will come the last, in thunder that the blindest will see, but in a way open to those who seek him with all their heart and closed to those who flee him with all their heart (T3).

(T4) The heart knows things the reasoning mind cannot prove, and it is by the heart that God is known. + This is the most quoted thing Pascal wrote and the most misread, so it is worth being careful about what he means. He does not mean feelings, and he is not saying that faith is a mood. By "the heart" he means the faculty by which we know first principles directly, without proof, and cannot help knowing them. Try to prove that time passes, or that there are three dimensions of space, or that you are not dreaming at this moment. You cannot, because every proof has to start somewhere, and these are the sort of thing proofs start from. Pascal’s point is that we are perfectly certain of them anyway, and that reason is not humiliated by this but dependent on it: the mathematician who demands a demonstration of the axioms has not been rigorous, he has been silly. So when the heart also perceives God, it is doing the thing it always does, and doing it in the mode in which the most certain knowledge we have already comes to us. It is the heart which experiences God and not the reason, he writes, and this is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason (Pensées 278). Which is why the God of the Memorial is not the God of the philosophers and the wise. Pascal was not sneering at proofs; he had spent his life on proofs, and his own apology is one long argument. He was saying that a conclusion at the end of a demonstration is not yet the living God, and that a man may hold the conclusion firmly and never once have knelt. Descartes, whose proof of God he knew well and had grown up among men who admired, comes in for exactly that complaint elsewhere in the notes, and Pascal disposes of him in two words: useless and uncertain. The objection is not that the proof fails. It is that a God reached that way has nothing left to ask of anybody, having been called in, as Pascal puts it, only to set the world moving and then dismissed. Scripture had already said that this is not the road: the world did not know God through wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:21).

(Q) "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things." + Source: Pascal, Pensées 277 (Trotter translation), Brunschvicg numbering. The fragment continues by asking whether it is by reasoning that you love yourself. Pascal is pointing at a whole class of things we know and act on with total confidence and could not begin to demonstrate (T4).

(T5) With eternity at stake and the evidence short of proof, refusing to bet is itself a bet. + This is the wager, and it is the passage everyone has heard of and almost nobody has read in place. Two things about it are usually missed. The first is who it is for. The wager is not addressed to the seeker; it is addressed to one specific man Pascal knew well, the clever gentleman who has followed the arguments, found them inconclusive, and treats his own suspension of judgement as the sophisticated position. To him Pascal says: you are not suspended. You are alive, you will die, and you are already living as though one answer were true. The refusal to choose is a choice made silently. The second is that the wager is a piece of decision theory, which is the study of how to choose sensibly when you cannot know how things will turn out, and Pascal is inventing it on the spot, having already worked out the mathematics it runs on. The rule he lands on is the one every insurance company lives by. When an outcome is uncertain you do not compare the odds alone; you compare the odds weighted by what is at stake. Bet a coin on a coin-flip and the stakes are trivial. Here, Pascal says, the stakes are not two lives or three but an infinity of life and happiness against a finite loss, and against an infinite gain any finite odds will do. What do you actually stand to lose if you are wrong? A few pleasures, some of them poisonous anyway. And he does not stop at the sum, which is the part most often forgotten. The gentleman objects that he cannot simply decide to believe, and Pascal agrees: go and do what the believers do, take holy water, hear the Masses, keep the company, and belief will follow the practice as it always has, because we are not pure minds but creatures of habit. The objections are serious and worth naming. Which god are you betting on? An argument that pays out infinitely for the Christian God pays out just as well for any god at all, provided somebody attaches an infinite reward to him. And is a belief taken up for profit worth having, or would God even want it? Pascal has replies in the surrounding fragments, and his best one is that the wager was never meant to stand alone: it is the passage that gets a man to stop pretending he has no stake, so that he will look at the evidence for the Christian claim in particular, which is what the rest of the unwritten book was to be about.

(Q) "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." + Source: Pascal, Pensées 233 (Trotter translation), Brunschvicg numbering. The fragment is written as a dialogue, and the man on the other side is allowed to interrupt and object throughout. Just before this, he has tried the exit that Pascal will not let him take: the true course, he says, is not to wager at all. Yes, comes the answer, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked (T5).

(Q) "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, Not of the philosophers and the wise." + Source: Pascal, the Memorial, 23 November 1654 (C. Kegan Paul’s translation, 1901). The lines that come next are single words: "Security, security. Feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ." Where Kegan Paul writes "security" the French has certitude, and most translators since have kept the cognate. This is the text he sewed into the coat lining. It is dated to the half hour, names the saints whose day it was, and then breaks into single words. The God it names is the God who introduced himself to Moses at the burning bush as the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob (Exodus 3:6), which is to say a God with a history and a people rather than a conclusion at the end of a proof. Further down Pascal has copied out the words of Jesus that eternal life is to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:3), and further down still, twice, in the plainest words he wrote that night, the request that he never be separated from him. He published none of it and showed it to no one. Everything the church has since made of Pascal begins with the discovery that the coldest mind in France had been carrying this around for eight years.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The unfinished book taught apologetics to begin with the reader rather than with God. + The defenses of Christianity Pascal grew up with began at the top: proofs of a first cause, then the attributes of God, then the credentials of revelation, then at last the human being who was supposed to be listening. Pascal turned it over. He begins with the reader, in the reader’s own chair, bored on a wet afternoon and reaching for something to do; he spends a hundred fragments on the misery and the greatness before God is so much as argued for; and only then does he ask which account of the world explains the creature we have just been looking at. Show first that religion is not contrary to reason, he wrote in a note on the order of the book, then make it lovable, "to make good men hope it is true," and only then prove that it is (Pensées 187). Since then, every apologetic that starts from the human condition has been walking a road he cut. The pattern of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which spends its whole first section on the moral law inside the reader before it names God at all, is Pascal’s pattern. Lewis kept a warm regard for him, and set a passage of the Pensées at the head of the first chapter of The Problem of Pain. Later apologists have built the argument from desire, that our unsatisfied longing points to something no created thing supplies, out of material Pascal had already laid down. The book itself came into the world twice. Port-Royal printed a selection in 1670, smoothed and rearranged and with the sharper fragments left out, and that was the Pensées the eighteenth century argued with. Not until Prosper Faugère’s edition of 1844 did editors go back to the manuscripts and try to recover Pascal’s own bundles, and the twentieth-century editions of Louis Lafuma and Philippe Sellier went further, restoring the order in which he had filed the papers. The result is that the book has kept getting better as it has got older, which happens to almost nothing.

(†) Christians who agree on almost nothing else have claimed him. + Pascal died a Catholic, in a movement his own church was in the act of suppressing, and was buried in his parish church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris. On the ordinary reckoning he should have become the property of one party. Instead he was adopted by everybody. John Wesley put an abridgement of the Thoughts into A Christian Library, the fifty-volume set of devotional classics he assembled between 1749 and 1755 for his Methodist preachers to read, which is a striking thing to do with a French Jansenist. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish Lutheran who spent his life attacking comfortable Christendom, read Pascal closely and worked the same seam: the leap that reason cannot make for you, the offense of a God who hides. In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction to the Everyman edition of the Pensées in 1931, and said there that he could think of no Christian writer, not Newman even, more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt but who have the mind to conceive and the sensibility to feel the disorder and the mystery of life and suffering. The philosophers took him too, on their own terms. The wager is now standard reading in decision theory, and Ian Hacking called it the first well-understood contribution to that subject: what Pascal saw was that a choice under uncertainty must weigh outcomes and not just odds. The argument that a rational person maximises expected value starts here, in a fragment about God written by a dying man.

(†) Where his own record will not bear following: the narrowing of grace, the refusal to be worked with, and the knives he turned on himself. + Honesty about a man one admires means keeping the other column, and Pascal’s own writings and his sister’s account of him supply three entries. - The reach of grace. In his Écrits sur la grâce, written privately in the 1650s, Pascal sets the Augustinian account of grace against two rivals at once. One is the Calvinist account. The other is the Molinist, named for the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, who had proposed that God knows what each person would freely choose in any situation he might be placed in, and builds the world accordingly, so that his grace and our free choice never have to collide. Pascal will have neither, and holds instead that God’s saving will is absolute for the elect alone, the elect being those he has chosen to save. Where Scripture says that God wills all men to be saved, Pascal takes all to mean men of every sort rather than every man without exception. Reformed Christians will recognise a near neighbour of a doctrine they hold and defend from Scripture, and this is a place where the church has long divided rather than a place where Pascal simply erred. But he presses his reading as the only faithful one, and a large part of Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, has declined to follow him there and takes the plain sense of texts like 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 against him. - The signature. When Rome required the clergy and religious of France to sign a formulary condemning five propositions as Jansen’s, Arnauld and Nicole worked out a compromise: sign as to the doctrine, reserve judgement as to whether the propositions were actually in Jansen’s book. Pascal wrote against his own friends in 1661 and would not have it, and a story told at Port-Royal has him fainting away in the meeting where he lost the argument. He may well have been right that the compromise was an evasion. He was also, at the end, a man who could not be worked with, and the community he was defending had to live on after him. - The war on himself. Gilberte records that in his last years he put an iron belt studded with points next to his skin whenever visitors were announced, and drove his elbow against it whenever he caught himself enjoying the conversation or taking pleasure in praise. She adds that he could not bear even the affection her own children showed her, holding that it could only do them harm. He wrote that the self is hateful, and he turned the judgement on his own, and he treated the body that was killing him as an enemy that deserved it. Scripture speaks otherwise about the body, which it calls a temple of the Holy Spirit and not a thing to be punished for existing (1 Corinthians 6:19), and it nowhere asks a mother to hold her own children off. None of this is the kind of failure that cancels a life, and Pascal would have been the first to say that a man who needs a rule to keep him from vanity has told you the truth about himself. It is the same ledger he kept on everyone, applied to him.