“Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it.”Footnote ¹

This is how T. S. Eliot introduced Pascal’s work a few generations ago, anticipating the task of this book: why, and how, should we read Pascal today? One of Pascal’s key ideas is that what is in your heart can change the way the world appears, so Eliot’s remark is not only convenient for this introduction but also philosophically astute. However, though there is something for almost everyone in Pascal, this can be difficult to discern. For the contemporary reader, Pascal’s texts often appear disjointed and distracted by obscure theological disputes. But they contain intense embers that seem to have been lying in wait to catch our dry and brittle contemporary hearts. His beautiful words have delighted, inspired, and sometimes horrified readers throughout the centuries. Today, if you look not only closely but also broadly enough, they enlighten.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was one of the most important and brilliant thinkers of the early modern period. But of all the famous early modern philosophers, he is probably the least read and understood today. He is also one of the greatest stylists (in French) of them all. The Pensées, his best-known work, is fun to read: full of explosive and surprising ideas in short, sometimes tweet-sized notes. He presents a picture of humankind and its place in nature that is at once classic (largely based on Augustinian theology), modern (containing similarities with and reactions against his contemporary Descartes), and well ahead of its time not only in its use of probability and confirmation but also in its proto-existentialist tendencies and surprisingly accurate descriptions of the contemporary human condition. His ideas can be applied to many pressing, current problems in and beyond academic philosophy, including our place in nature (and our corruption of it), the ways in which our beliefs can be manipulated, and what control we have or lack over our lives.

It is relatively easy to sum up Pascal’s overall philosophy: without God, humanity and every individual is irredeemably corrupted, hopelessly lost, and miserable. The only way out of this sad state – and you may be too corrupted to even know that you are miserable and in need of saving – is by turning your heart toward God and by His grace, He can save you. If we leave it at that level of detail, there is nothing unique here; it is a standard and familiar Christian theology. But his philosophy is worth working through for several reasons. The way in which we come to know (or in many cases remain ignorant) of our condition and how to cure it is entirely nonstandard, even alien to the philosophy of today. We can learn a lot from this epistemology. The place of reason and understanding in Pascal is complicated but surprisingly minor, while the heart – an affective faculty that loves, fears, wills, is attracted, and is repulsed, which consequently determines the range of things one can believe and even see – plays the foundational and central role in our cognitive and practical lives. He was neither empiricist nor rationalist, long before Kant made that cool. His religious philosophy is, for the standard approach of today, daringly anti-epistemological (especially for an eminent mathematician and scientist) and anti-metaphysical, with proofs and evidence taking a back seat. His insights into the tortured human condition are as eerily relevant today as ever, so we have much to gain by reflecting on ourselves in their light.

It may seem to today’s secular reader that there is nothing of philosophical interest in Pascal’s work because it all unfolds within an explicitly religious context. But this is true only on the most superficial and selective skimming of the text. It pays to keep in mind that Descartes, Pascal’s esteemed contemporary, had an epistemological picture that also featured God at the center, and yet philosophers have managed to make much use of his ideas in a secular context. The same, I will suggest, applies to Pascal: there is a lot to gain from his thought even outside of a religious context, even setting aside the somewhat obscure theological debates he was engaged in. In fact, his epistemological (or anti-epistemological) insights in the religious domain can be applied analogously, and with much to gain, to our situation as would-be knowers today. For example, the way in which a nonbeliever is lost and insulated from the only evidence that can help, in Pascal, resembles in promising ways the conspiracy theorist’s, the political extremist’s, the arrogantly confident ignoramus’, and even the seeker of meaning’s situation today – not that these are all on a par. From a Pascalian perspective, their mistake is not that they have forgotten to recheck the evidence or failed to do more research. Rather, it is that they aren’t looking at things in the right way, and that is because their hearts are in the wrong place.

This is not to say that his religious ideas as such are irrelevant today. Arguably his apologetics will appeal better to today’s nonbelievers than the typical attempt at evangelism, and this will naturally interest today’s believers as well. Conversations and debates about religion (and Christianity especially) tend to revolve around arguments for God’s existence, including appeals to apparent design – how could all of this marvelous complexity have come about randomly? – and arguments against God’s existence, including the problem of evil – how could catastrophic evil have come about divinely? Pascal offers a perspective from which these disputes fail to engage their subject matter, in two ways: they misunderstand the religion and “God” they’re directed at, and they misunderstand the nature of belief and the role of arguments and reason in its formation. He operates on the more direct, visceral level on which the world seems ambiguous: containing mysterious, unfathomable beauty and immeasurable, unspeakable horrors. What should we make of this ambiguity? Why are we capable of seeing and judging the world in these ways? Pascal today promises to reset a stale and predictable dialectic about a matter as important as any, and as ever, to human life.

This advertisement for Pascal’s promise might surprise you, even though you have very likely heard of him before. This is because, though everyone knows his name, almost no one in the Anglosphere has read him thoroughly or carefully, and many have never read him at all. He is both famous and underread. These facts about the state of Pascal literacy deserve at least a brief explanation before we get to know him and his texts a little better.

0.1 Renown and Neglect

There is a variety of ways to have heard of Pascal. He invented the calculator, found early empirical evidence for the existence of a vacuum, was a giant of mathematics responsible for the foundation of modern probability theory, and even thought up arguably the first scheme for public transit (the “five penny coaches”). But his brilliance shined in other ways, too. As already mentioned, he is regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the French language, a brilliant polemicist, and an important religious thinker. In a typical introductory course in philosophy, chances are good that you will encounter an argument named after him, “Pascal’s wager.” Other things are named after him today too, corresponding to his seminal contributions to each field: a popular programming language, a triangular mathematical array, a standard unit of pressure. All of this and he never lived to see his fortieth birthday! As you can see, despite his short life often burdened by serious illness, Pascal thought big. His ideas are rigorous, deep, and wide in scope. As Pope Francis recently put it in an apostolic letter, on the occasion of Pascal’s quadricentennial in 2023, Pascal was “a man marked by a fundamental attitude of awe and openness to all reality.”

Despite being so renowned, Pascal is severely underread. His contribution to philosophy is often reduced with the so-called wager, an argument that, as we will see in Chapter 5, is usually taken out of both historical context and the context of Pascal’s own texts, and consequently misunderstood. It is a matter of great frustration, for those few who have dived deep into Pascal’s world, that his contribution is often reduced by philosophers to this argument apparently for the conclusion that it is worthwhile, in your own interest, to try to believe in God. It turns out this wasn’t exactly his argument, and most discussions of this “wager” miss his point.

This misunderstanding is not entirely readers’ fault. The note that is usually referred to as the source of “the wager” is a fragment entitled “infini rien” from a bundle of notes found on his desk after his death. Several bundles of these notes were found in this way. They were written, sometimes jotted haphazardly, for a planned Christian apology. The aim was to convince the “libertines” or nonbelievers of his day to find God in the Catholic tradition. He died before he wrote it, so all we have are the preparatory notes.Footnote ² For generations since, these collected notes have been edited and ordered in different ways by different scholars, and the result is Pascal’s Pensées, or “thoughts,” the main source we have for his philosophy. But these notes appear fragmented and the connections between them unclear at first. So, it is understandable if a reader takes something out of context. Out of many hundreds of notes, infini rien, or what came to be known as “the wager,” is one – we will see later in this book why he titled it infini rien instead of pari (which is the word for “wager”). Beyond correcting the record on “the wager,” much of the present work aims to show that Pascal’s Pensées offers so much more: it is a treasure trove of insight into belief, our nature as divergent believers, our place in whatever the universe is, the human condition in general, the place of religion in life, the source of our desires and the problems they give rise to, and the basic problem we face in relating to reality.

Not only does the unusual format of the Pensées go some way toward explaining the widespread misunderstanding of “the wager,” it might also account for why so many never read beyond it and miss the bigger picture. Depending on the edition you read, the passages often skip around to different topics and sometimes even appear inconsistent with each other. This can create an impression that there is no larger picture and no “system” to Pascal’s thought. But this is a false impression, even if the format makes his system harder to discover. This book is intended to help with the process of deciphering the bigger picture in the Pensées, by bringing some of these apparently disparate elements together into one coherent and relatable picture, sometimes with the help of other works of Pascal.

One might speculate that the neglect of Pascal is entirely explained by the fact that the Pensées is a collection of notes. But that is not plausible. After all, so is much of Wittgenstein’s work, and he is certainly not neglected. What else keeps people from reading Pascal today?

Another reason for neglect might be his reputation. He is regarded as a dark, stern, finger-wagging figure. There is a tradition of reading Pascal as both depressing and fanatical. Adam Smith regarded Pascal as a “whining and melancholy moralist” and Smith’s friend David Hume once quipped that Pascal was unduly influenced by “the most ridiculous superstitions.” (In fact, as we will see, Hume’s philosophy was remarkably similar to, and probably borrowed from, Pascal’s.) Likewise Voltaire, who appreciated Pascal as a stylist, called him a “sublime misanthrope,” whose wager for God was “indecent and childish.”

It is undeniable that Pascal did some moralizing. An early biographer of Pascal, his own sister, describes a severe figure whose view of human nature was uncompromising, and whose moral sense most of us would find grotesque: he once chastised her for letting her children show her too much affection. It is hard for us to relate to this today, but in Pascal’s view it would have been better for the children to cultivate a love of divinity instead of an attachment to earthly things, since “we must love only God and hate only ourselves” (S405/L373).Footnote ³

If that seems offensive, don’t worry but get used to telling yourself not to worry. This is part of Pascal, but it is not the whole story, and it is not all of you that he suggests you hate. As for accusations of misanthropy and whining, they are as unjust as they have been influential. While it is true that Pascal dwelled on the apparent absence of divinity in the world for some of us, he also held that you could see God everywhere if only your heart were in the right place. The problem is that most of us in the modern world have our hearts in the wrong place. His efforts to draw our attention to this may have resulted in some harsh descriptions of our condition, but as we will see, those descriptions were aimed at bringing about an awareness of our shortcomings so that we realize our potential greatness. And they ring truer today perhaps than ever.

As already mentioned, one of Pascal’s insights is that what you see in the world depends on what is in your heart when you investigate. The same applies to his own work and what attitude we bring when we read it. It is true that Pascal thought humanity was corrupted to the core (as I explain in Chapter 4), but he also wrote that we are capable of greatness:

How do we react to this? Is it optimistic? Insulting? Depressing? Inspiring? Perhaps Pascal would have wanted all these reactions. But I suggest that before deciding how to react, we should put such statements in their place within a larger Pascalian worldview. We have it in our hearts to become great, but as he will remind us, we need help. In fact, I will suggest that one of his key philosophical moves is to argue that, left only to our own devices and faculties, we know nothing (Chapter 1) and are nothing (Chapter 4); by reaching out beyond ourselves, we can know a lot (including our limits, see Chapter 3) and have a chance at greatness (Chapter 5). So he wasn’t so much a misanthrope, but rather thought that a human in isolation is hopeless and wretched. Pascal offers a worldview that gives love and connection to something beyond oneself a central place, since it is love that connects us with all we need in order to be great (Chapter 2). For Pascal, the solution to our problems is religious. The thing beyond yourself that you must love is God. But, along the way and in the final chapter of this book, I will suggest ways in which the core of the solution need not be specifically religious. So if it is Pascal’s darkness and pessimism that has prevented you from delving into his thought, I hope this book shows that this is not a good reason, because it is not all doom and gloom (though there is some of that, too).

Why else might one resist reading Pascal? Many of his texts deal with seemingly obscure theological disputes, which hold little interest to most of today’s contemporary philosophers. This is fair enough. But to see through this and to get to some real and fundamental philosophical insights, only a minimal understanding of the theological context is required, and I will provide it as needed in what follows. As we will see, the main background that is required to understand Pascal’s philosophy is a classic Augustinian theology.

0.2 Is This History?

If this book aimed to argue thoroughly that Pascal meant this rather than that, it would require a substantial understanding of the theological and philosophical debates of Pascal’s day. But exegesis is not our primary aim.Footnote ⁴ Rather, we will extract some central ideas within his writings in order to see how they might fit together and what is so philosophically fascinating and relevant about them. I will argue that there are ideas within Pascal that matter philosophically today, so that it is worth reading him. Sometimes this will involve developing his ideas a bit further, beyond the text itself, and sometimes this will go in a direction that Pascal never intended and probably would not have agreed with. But it will be clear when that happens, and always for the purpose of arguing, not that some claim or idea is what Pascal meant, and not that we should endorse or accept it, but that it presents a reason to read Pascal carefully and engage with his ideas.

Accordingly, the aim is not to describe intellectual history. To be sure, that history is both interesting and important for understanding Pascal. Pascal was massively influenced not only by Augustine but also by Jansen’s interpretation of Augustine, Montaigne’s interpretation of skepticism, by his contemporary, Descartes, the many Cartesians in his circle, and many others. But as Pascal wrote:

In defense of the somewhat (I would say rather conservative) revisionary aspect of this book, note that Pascal apparently seemed not to have a problem with the way I propose to use his text:

Finally, a brief prefatory note about the religious nature of much of Pascal’s thought as we will explore it. The reader, I assume, is either a contemporary version of Pascal’s audience in the Pensées (a nonbeliever), or a believer of today that is interested in that perspective. Even if you are a Christian, chances are that you are not the kind of Christian that Pascal wants you to be, and so it is still helpful to regard you as a nonbeliever. In any case I will address Pascal’s arguments to the nonbeliever, and assume that contemporary Christians are still interested, because it is important for them to understand how to engage with a nonbeliever, and Pascal has important ideas about this.

To be clear about the target audience of this book, it includes anyone, religious or not, who is philosophically interested, even those who profess a condescending indifference to the religious matters that occupied Pascal. The latter’s notion is that we have already figured out pretty much everything, certainly with respect to divinity: there is none, so religious philosophy is all ridiculous and trifling. Pascal addressed this attitude directly: stop pretending you’re indifferent! You may have made up your mind (and hopefully Pascal will reopen the matter for you), but don’t confuse your misplaced confidence with indifference. It matters what created nature and humankind, whether there is a purpose to human life, and whether this life is all there is for us (S681-2, L427-28). It matters whether you’ve made a mistake about this.

0.3 An Overview

Chapters 1–3 are about Pascal’s epistemology. “Epistemology” is not exactly the right term, though, because his view was not just about knowledge (êpisteme), and not just about rational belief. He was deeply and, in the Pensées, primarily concerned with faith. If we can include faith among the topics of epistemology (as some do in what is today called “religious epistemology”), we can credit Pascal’s epistemology with some surprising and important elements.

In Chapter 1, we will see that Pascal held that one’s own cognitive resources, especially reason and experience operating on their own, are insufficient in various ways. In order to get things right and achieve certainty or knowledge, we need a sort of faith that can only arise with the help of something external to the individual. As is so often the case in Pascal, this is an idea we find also in Augustine:

Pascal shows the need for an external source of illumination by adopting, repurposing, and augmenting some skeptical arguments familiar from Montaigne and Descartes. The incapacity of reason and experience on their own to produce knowledge applies not only to abstract first principles but also to sensory appearances and, most importantly for Pascal, the significance (or “measure”) of human life and religious faith. Left to our own reasoning and sensory faculties, we are in the dark.

Pascal’s epistemology gives a central, foundational role to something outside of reason and experience: “the heart.” The heart is the missing ingredient whose necessity skepticism demonstrates. For this reason, we can think of Pascal’s epistemology as cordate (or “heart-shaped”). The heart makes the difference between a lost soul grasping hopelessly in the dark and a fully enlightened agent who is engaged appropriately with reality. The heart, though it is internal to a person, reaches for and, in a sense, contains something wholly distinct from the individual, something inscrutable to reason, and it can be affected by something external to or distinct from the individual – this is what happens when God affects your heart. Again, Pascal offers a modern development of an Augustinian (and to some extent biblical) idea. Pascal is neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, because at the foundation is an affective state or relation, not a rational insight or experience. In the end, the foundation of all our knowledge, and the center of Pascal’s epistemology, is the heart, an affective faculty that wills and loves. This is the topic of Chapter 2.

Key to Pascal’s philosophy is that the world is ambiguous. Two people looking at the same world might reasonably draw two entirely different and sometimes opposed conclusions. This is because their hearts differ. We will see that, in today’s terms, this does not imply relativism nor what some today call “permissivism.” It is instead a view about the nature of how things appear, how we process the way things appear into beliefs about the world, and the fundamental ambiguity of the world itself – all part of Pascal’s general theological outlook, “the Fall,” which can also shed light on some contemporary concerns. The ambiguity of the world, and the role of the heart in it, confirms some worldviews and rules out others. It also has application to today’s polarized society. This is the topic of Chapter 3.

Philosophy concerns not just what to believe but also how to live. Chapters 1–3 focused on belief and how it is tangled up with the state of one’s heart. But the heart also, and even primarily, is the seat of the will and the source of our decisions. So the determinant of what we believe also helps to determine how we live, and the choices we might make to change how we live. As in the case of belief, we also find both dark and inspiring ideas about the human condition in Pascal. On the one hand, we are “a paradox,” and our default state as post-Fall beings is “concupiscence,” a heart that loves only the self, and grasps at creation for its own purposes. This makes us miserable and corrupt. On the other hand, we see that we could be great, that we could love that which is beyond and is the source of the world around us. In Chapter 4, we will see how the human heart is corrupted and desires all the wrong things. But by thinking well, we can see this and our potential to change for the better.

In Chapter 5, we will consider why, having glimpsed one’s corruption and the possibility of rising above this misery, one might want to seek a particular kind of change: to seek God in one’s heart and belief. This is the most famous part of the Pensées, the so-called wager. We will see that, despite the strategic and self-interested nature of these considerations, the course of action Pascal’s argument recommends is not a sort of self-deception. The wager is a decision to put yourself in a position where a change of heart is possible, so that you see things differently, and where you have infinitely much to gain and nothing to lose (hence the title of the fragment, infini rien). The key to avoiding common misunderstandings of the wager is that this is about inviting a change of heart, rather than tricking yourself to believe something, and this invitation potentially benefits you even if your heart never changes.

Finally, in Chapter 6, we will consider what a secularized version of a Pascalian view, wager and all, might look like.