The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) enjoys pride of place in the history of early-modern thought. Renowned for his Pensées and his famous wager on belief in God, praised as a father of modern science, his name memorialized in a unit of pressure (the pascal), he is largely remembered for his intellectual triumphs.
A new biography by Graham Tomlin, a British writer and theologian, describes Pascal as a maker of the modern world, even while emphasizing that the Frenchman’s great scientific accomplishments cannot be understood apart from his profound stake in religion. That difference distinguished him from such contemporaries as Descartes, who tried to make Christianity compatible with Enlightenment rationalism. Tomlin argues that Pascal’s “sense of the deep ambiguity of our knowledge of the world,” grounded in his Christianity, charted a different path from those of his peers who attempted to ground faith in rational certainties. If the increasingly disenchanting pressures of reason and science would define secular modernity, Pascal’s appreciation of the unique truth claims of religion in some ways anticipated the postmodern turn of our own more recent times.
For all Pascal’s accomplishments, however, the cause he came to be most identified with in his own time was a failure. From the year 1640 onward, beginning with the posthumous publication of Cornelius Otto Jansen’s treatise Augustinus, conflict grew between a school of religious interpreters of Saint Augustine—who became known, pejoratively at times, as the “Jansenists,” and with whom Pascal was allied—and the Jesuits, a new religious order against whose modernizing spirit Pascal directed his scathing Provincial Letters (1657).
What began as a debate on the nature of grace soon developed into a theological scandal of such proportion that only papal intervention could quell it. While the Jansenists, with their reputation as moral rigorists, reaffirmed the utter dependence of the soul on the grace of God, the Jesuits sought to soften the Augustinian position on grace, salvation, and repentance so as to keep Christians securely within the care of the institutional Church.