The Remarkable Thoughts of Blaise Pascal (Part 1)

Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, where Pascal is buried in Paris. He died August 19, 1662

Some years ago, I discovered an early edition of Pensées by Blaise Pascal, in a charity shop in Canterbury, England. For years, I have kept it by my bedside and opened it for a brief reading before falling to sleep. “Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone,” he wrote, “but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ… Thus, without the Scriptures, which has Jesus Christ alone for its object, we know nothing…” Nuggets like this abound in his perceptive thoughts (the word Pensées is French for thoughts) about Christ and the gospel.

Many intellectuals in the modern era have attempted to reduce Pascal to a mere mathematician, a man of equations and formulas. To be sure, he was a brilliant mathematician! Being somewhat math challenged myself (my math genius father would have begged to differ, and might have suggested that I’m understating my limitations—he’d be right), I don’t even have categories for things he intimately knew and understood about math and physics!

Launch into reading Pascal’s most famous work, and it will become immediately apparent that, as fascinated and as skillful as he was with mathematics and physics, it was the theological that mattered most to him. Yet, not a mere recreational theology, as someone might take up fishing for sport. Pascal believed that the theological was far more difficult to understand, far larger than any scientific discovery, and required the entirety of his humanity even to begin to grasp. For Pascal, God and the matters of the heart were far more important than crunching numbers, or measuring the effect of altitude on barometric pressure. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that he believed that mathematics and all learning was a theological activity. Without right knowledge of God, however clever we think we are, “…we know nothing.”

Three-hundred years after Pascal lived, poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot wrote that “Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation.” Because our world and its values are in constant flux, and our attitudes and opinions are pummeled about by the tempest of the latest thing, reading and getting to know men like Pascal can give us intellectual, moral, and theological ballast to weather the deluge of our ever-changing culture.

Though Pascal’s writing is imminently relevant throughout time and thus in our own day, we will best understand how it came to be so by placing him in his context, the world in which he lived, the details of which God in his all-wise providence precisely ordered to shape Pascal into a man for all time.

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE

Born in 1623, five years before his contemporary John Bunyan, Pascal lost his mother when he was only three years old. His father was a well-educated government official who stewarded his finances carefully, positioning his son and two daughters solidly into the upper middleclass. The family moved to Paris in 1631, where they dined in the first circle. Hence, Pascal grew up in the social circle of some of the most prominent men of science and the arts in the 17^th century. Far more importantly, the Pascal home was a devoutly and sincerely Christian home.

Pascal’s education was entirely a Christian homeschool education, his father the principal teacher. And young Pascal loved every minute of it. He had an active mind and loved finding things out for himself. As an adult he would observe, “People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” Early in his life, it was clear to anyone who spent a few minutes around the boy that he was highly gifted in mathematics. Without having read Euclid’s ancient classic on geometry, young Pascal, working things out with a piece of charcoal on a tile floor, discovered Euclid’s first thirty-two geometric propositions—entirely on his own. He was twelve.

At sixteen, Pascal composed an essay on the intersection of points in a hexagon (a six-sided shape) superscribed by a circle. It was so groundbreaking that his discovery bears his name to this day, the “Pascal theorem” and the “Pascal line.” When the much older and well-known mathematician Rene Descartes read the boy’s essay, he was convinced Ettienne Pascal, Blaise’s father had written it. When he was assured that a boy of sixteen had in fact made the discovery, he sniffed derisively and poo-pooed the significance of young Pascal’s work, insisting that “…other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a sixteen-year-old child.”

Descartes, a rationalist (someone who believes everything can be learned just using our minds), and Pascal, a supernaturalist, disagreed on important things. “I cannot forgive Descartes,” he would later write. “In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God, but he couldn’t avoid letting him put the world in motion; afterwards he didn’t need God anymore.” Pascal repudiated the merely rationalistic arguments offered by some of his contemporaries, explanations that would evolve into Deism (the belief that if there is a God, he is impersonal and not involved in our lives) in the coming years. Faith is a gift of God, Pascal believed, and cannot be acquired by the mere workings of the mind.

Lest we think young Pascal’s contributions were all theoretical, consider how he solved a practical problem for his father...

Douglas Bond is author of more than thirty-five books (including imminently forthcoming INFANT HOLY INFANT LOWLY), leader of church history tours in Europe (Bond France Tour in 2026, which includes Pascal in Paris), editor, father of six, and doting grandfather of ten and counting. This post is an excerpt from a chapter in another forthcoming book on people who God raised up to do extraordinary things.