Can Blaise Pascal be a Guide for us Today? With Graham Tomlin

Hi everyone. A very warm welcome to today’s conversation. We have nearly 1200 people registered for this and with all else that you have going on, as summer winds down, we are so grateful for your attention. I understand over 100 of you are with us for the first time, and you are in at least 21 countries, ranging from Zimbabwe to Macau, which is quite a range. And I think you will find the concerns that we talk about today are indeed universal ones. A quick introduction for those who are new to us. What is the Trinity Forum all about? We are a community of people engaged in a common effort to renew our culture by bringing wisdom from the Christian tradition to bear on our concerns today. Many of you are part of this work as members of our Trinity Forum society community. We thank you. What we try to do in these conversations is to provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. Turning to today’s theme, we live in a time of polarities. Reason versus faith. Commitment versus skepticism of commitment, and, of course, sharply different visions of faith in the public square. As it turns out, 17th-century France was a disorienting time as well. In the wake of the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation across Europe, in a time of bitter division within the Catholic Church, and with new ideas coming from the Enlightenment and particularly the Scientific Revolution, it was just a time of of new uncertainty and confusion for many.

And right in the middle of it all was Blaise Pascal. He was a brilliant polymath, ranging across the worlds of science and mathematics to politics, to church life, to the deepest questions of theology. He grappled with the tensions between faith and reason, and he understood modern unbelief as well as belief. So our question today –  can Blaise Pascal be a guide for us in meeting the challenges of modern life? And helping us to answer the question today is Graham Tomlin. Graham is joining us from Oxford, where he is the director of the Center for Cultural Witness. President of Saint Mellitus College and editor in chief of Seen and Unseen. He is the Church of England’s former Bishop of Kensington, and has taught theology at Oxford University and in London. Some of Graham’s previous books include Luther’s Gospel: Reimagining the World, The Death of Christ in Paul, Luther, and Pascal, and Why Being Yourself Is a Bad Idea. His new book, which is the one we’re talking about today, is called Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World, and will offer you all the chance to land a signed copy of Graham’s book at the end of this conversation. Of course, we’ll have time for questions and answers as we go along, too. Graham, you’re very welcome.

Thanks, Tom. Very good to see you. And very good to be with you. Looking forward to the conversation today.

Thank you. Well, right there in your subtitle, you describe Pascal as having made the modern world, which is a big claim and one that I think can be read in several senses. Uh, a lot of us here in the English-speaking world maybe don’t know Pascal as well as we might. So can you sketch out a few key points of his life for those of us who don’t know him so well, and explain what you mean in particular by that phrase about making the modern world?

Yes. Of course. Well, he was born in 1623, which is a, as you say. He was saying a moment ago that the 17th century was a very disorienting, disorientating time. And it was a time when there was a bit of warfare going on. You had the 30 Years’ War. That was right in the middle of that. Um, that time it was like a backdrop to his life. Uh, he was in a time where kind of the, the role of kings and monarchy was becoming more controversial. It was getting the power of kings was growing in France. It was a big issue in England. Here we had the Civil War around the same sort of period, too. Um, there’s also a time when science was beginning to be discovered and expanding the horizons of human knowledge. Fairly recently, both the telescope and the microscope had been invented, which enabled people to sort of see the vastness of space, but also the smallness of, you know, the, you know, the tiny sort of parts of, of sort of microscopic reality that are there. So in other words, it’s a time where the, the place of humanity within the universe was changing for many people. And so Pascal, as I say, was born in 1623. His mother died when he was about three years old. So he doesn’t really remember his mother very well. Uh, his father was a kind of, um, intellectual of sorts. He liked being involved in the intellectual discussions in Clermont, in the Auvergne, which is in the middle of the south of France, which is where he was born, um, partly because the Clermont was a pretty small back in a backwoods place. He moved the family to Paris when Pascal was nine, and, um, Pascal lived most of the rest of his life in Paris from that time onwards.

Um, uh, he was known during his time mainly as a scientist, as a mathematician, but he was also an inventor, an entrepreneur. Um, and I guess you ask about that, um, that title, The Man Who Made the Modern World. And the reason why I went for that is because so many of the things that we take for granted in our world  have Pascal’s fingerprints all over them. Um, so, for example, he was one of the first people in Europe to wear his, his timepiece on his wrist rather than in his pocket. Um, he invented one of the very first functioning calculating machines, which is often seen of as a, as a sort of forerunner of the computer. He basically invented probability theory, um, which is at the basis of all of insurance premiums and all kinds of guessing. And, and probability is right at the heart of so much of our kind of modern life. He also invented buses, and he invented a system for urban transportation, one of the very first urban transportation systems in Europe, in Paris, towards the end of his life. And so, um, he’s someone who actually had a hand in so many of the things that we take for granted. That’s one of the reasons why I think he’s one of the, the key figures, one of the makers of the modern world. He died very young, uh, in 1662, uh, aged only 39, but achieved an extraordinary amount in that time and is, I think, one of Europe’s great polymaths, of that period or any period at all.

Well, I’m glad you mentioned the fun fact about him inventing mass transit in Paris. I thought that was a remarkable aspect of this, and I think we’ll perhaps get later in the conversation to why he did it, because that’s an interesting story as well. Um, but first I thought I would just, um, get into a bit of his view of human nature because I think we want to focus in this discussion a bit on his ideas and, uh, his theological, uh, perspectives as opposed to some of his scientific, uh, pursuits, which are also very worth, worthwhile. Um, but he is described in your book as having a view of human nature that is both more gloomy and more hopeful than that of most of the rest of us then or now. So, how so? And in particular, does this reflect his influence by Saint Augustine?

Yeah, very much so. Saint Augustine was his great theological hero in many ways. And, uh, he refers to Saint Augustine a great deal, and we may touch on him a little bit later on. But certainly I think, you know, Pascal, one of his one of the appeals that he has is the way he describes the complexity and the enigmatic nature of the human condition, which is why he appeals to so many people, you know, for someone who, anyone who recognizes that life is messy, it’s complex, it’s not easily understood, Pascal is the kind of person you want to read. And so, you know, he has this view of humanity that embraces both extremes of it. He talks about what he calls the miser and the grandeur, the misery and the grandeur of human, of humankind. He talks about humanity as the glory and the refuse of the universe. We are the glory of the universe. On the one side, there is, this, what he calls the grandeur of the human soul, our capacity to understand remarkable things. He’s aware of the growth of science and his day. He’s right at the forefront of that in his experimental work. Um, he’s aware of, you know, the capacity that humankind has in our rational capacity and our ability to, you know, cast our minds over so much of reality.

Um, we have this capacity for goodness and for care and for love and for compassion, and we have all of that. And yet at the same time, we also have this sense of deep dissatisfaction within ourselves and this capacity for cruelty, for hardship, for malice, and for some of the things that so many, you know, we all kind of recognize. And he diagnoses at the heart of that is a problem that is much deeper than we often think it is. And that is at the heart of the human condition is a radical, self-oriented character. And that self that he talks about, this focus upon the self, which is kind of endemic within us, actually pits us against one another and against God. He actually says at one point, all men naturally hate one another because he thinks that our focus upon ourselves essentially pits us against one another and sees us in competition with other people. And so he is this. He wants, he tries to embrace both the greatness and the frailty and brokenness of humanity at the same time, which is so redolent for so many of us who read him today.

This really chimes a bit with the conversation we had recently with Miroslav Volf on his new book, The Cost of Ambition, which pairs nicely with this. So just to just to get into some of the other thinkers, uh, that, uh, make for a helpful contrast with him. One of them that you discuss is Montaigne or Montaigne, um, who preceded him in time, but who had a radical skepticism about our ability to know, uh, the world and thus came to really focus on the self, uh, on himself. And I think that’s probably true of many, many of us today. There’s a real focus on self, this kind of self-absorption or even self-exaltation. Uh, how do we see this echoed in our world now, and how do you think Pascal would caution us?

Yeah, well, Montaigne is a very big figure in Pascal’s sort of mental map. And he lived a century before Pascal. He was 16th century, uh, not 17th. Um, but he’s clearly read Montaigne. He’s both fascinated and repelled by Montaigne at the same time. Montaigne represents that great skeptical tradition that stretches right the way back to the classical period, and there has always been a strand of, of kind of Western intellectual life that’s had that. And, um, and Montaigne stands for that tradition that in our day is expressed in those who would say, pretty well everything is socially constructed. There’s nothing really we can rely on that is objectively true. There’s nothing that’s fixed. Everything basically is up for grabs. And Montaigne writes a great deal about how many of our laws, many of our, uh, ways of thinking, things we assume are simply customary. They’re kind of random. They’re not fixed in nature in any way. Uh, and therefore, as a result of that, um, you end up with a fascination with yourself, because if basically everything is up for grabs, everything has to be recreated, that includes ourselves. And so the self has to be recreated. And so Montaigne is fascinated with his own self, his own motivations, why he does things. And he also, a bit like Pascal has a great well, he has a more of a sense of the kind of weakness and frailty of humanity that we can’t know anything for sure.

There’s nothing really firm and objective out there. And so he kind of represents that kind of postmodern skepticism about truth, that sense there’s nothing really you can rely on out there, um, that, um, that results in a fascination with the self at the same time. Pascal drew on a lot of that for a lot of what he says about the frailty and weakness of humanity, he draws on Montaigne. But at the same time, he also realized that there is a kind of given to the world. And that’s what his science taught him in a way that actually science taught him. There is a regularity, there’s a given to the world, and that skepticism always bumps up against reality. Yes, he says at one point, I maintain that a perfectly genuine skeptic has never existed. There’s no such thing as the perfect, you know, the total skeptic. Even the most skeptical postmodern philosopher, you know, puts water in the kettle and turns it on and expect it to boil. There’s like a regularity. There are certain things within nature that are given. And that’s what he would caution against in that kind of skeptical strand of thinking.

And that tradition of skepticism, I believe you trace all the way back to the Stoics of the classical world, who have made somewhat of a comeback now. Am I getting that right?

Yeah. That’s right. In fact, um, one of the figures that Pascal represents, you know, he talks about quite a bit is Epictetus. He has a famous conversation with a kind of, um, a theologian at the time called Monsieur de sassy, where he can contrasts Descartes on the one hand, Epictetus on the other, as a sort of stoic, uh, someone who, if you like, has a very sort of, sort of strong sense but has no sense of God, um, but a strong sense of, um, of a kind of skepticism about, um, about the world. And so he kind of allies that stoic and skeptical tradition at the same time. Yeah. He does.

So since you mentioned Descartes, let’s focus on him because he’s also, uh, important, uh, in, in, um, placing Pascal. So he really exalted knowledge in, in a way that’s, that’s the opposite of Montaigne. And with this idea of reasoning our way to belief in a, in a sort of distant God. And why did Pascal, who was very much a man of science, why why would that, which might have seemed a natural fit for him, why did he consider that so misguided?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, as you say, you would have thought he would have sort of veered towards Descartes because he, you know, he’s he’s so troubled by it, by Montaigne’s skepticism. But he doesn’t do that at the end of the day. And so Descartes, if you like, represents that great rationalist tradition that is very confident in the human capacity to understand the world. And we see it in our day and figures like Richard Dawkins and others who are very supremely confident in the scientific endeavor and its ability to master everything, and that one day it will answer all our questions. And, um, so there’s a bit of that within Pascal. He also realizes, you know, he is very enthusiastic about science, too. He has a very different approach to science than than Descartes. Descartes, uh, does his scientific work, his philosophy from a priori reasoning, whereas Pascal is much more of an experimental scientist, thinks that, you know, you do experiments and you find out where the evidence points you at the end of the day. Um, but at the end of the day, Pascal makes a big distinction between physics and metaphysics. Science can help you with physics. It can help you understand the way the world works. It cannot help you understand God. Because God is not an object within the world, like a tree or a historical event or a stone that you can kind of analyze and explain. Science doesn’t really help you with that. So there’s that’s one of the reasons why Pascal is kind of, um, doesn’t go for Descartes, partly because, uh, you know, because he as I was just saying, he, um, you know, he thinks God is not that kind of being.

Um, second reason, I think, is because Pascal also realized that that reason has its limits. Uh, he realizes that our, our longings are more powerful than our logic. Um, that actually he talks about the heart and the sense that, uh, we have this deep instinct for things that are ultimately true, which reason cannot get us towards things like space and number and time and God. Um, so reason has its limits. And Pascal’s kind of devotion to Augustine taught him that human desires are more powerful than the human mind. Reason, he says, can be bent in any direction. You know, you’d have a philosopher with a fly buzzing around his head, or he’s got toothache, and that will send his reason entirely out of the window. And so Pascal has all these and the other. The other reason, I think, why, um, Pascal doesn’t go for Descartes, actually, and also for Montaigne is because the God they describe, because they’re both Christians, they both have a belief in God, but the God they describe is really not very interesting. He’s rather dull and has no place for Jesus Christ. There’s very little kind of mention of Jesus Christ in either Descartes or Montaigne’s philosophy, whereas that’s a big factor for Pascal. So that’s some of the reasons why I think Pascal embraced some of Descartes’s ideas, but not all of them.

Something I meant to do at the beginning is to invite you anytime you have an aphorism or a line of Pascal to share them, because he was really quite an extraordinary architect of words and crafter of them. So one of the famous quotes from him is the is the heart has its reasons. And I wonder if how you would connect that to sort of our modern ideas on intuition versus reasoning that you were, that you were alluding to a moment ago?

Yeah. Exactly that. I mean, he has a strong sense of, of that. When he says that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing, that’s a statement that’s very often misunderstood because it sounds like, um, follow your heart. You know, the kind of essence of the romantic movement of the 18th, 19th century, uh, or Disney films or whatever, you know, follow whatever your heart says. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. That’s really not what Pascal means at all. What he means by the heart is a kind of ability we have to grasp by instinct, things that we cannot prove, things that we cannot reason our way towards, things like number or space or infinity or God. He says at one point during the wager argument, he says, you know the concept of infinity – we kind of believe in that, but we don’t know much about it. We don’t know whether infinity is an even number or an odd number, but we kind of believe in it anyway. And that’s kind of a bit like God. We may not know much about God, unless God reveals himself to us, but we still believe in him anyway. It’s possible to believe in things that you can’t prove that you can’t kind of know much about. And so one point he says, he says this about God. He says if there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension.

Since being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is. So in our natural state, as we know, God is not an object within the world that we can kind of get our heads around, that we can prove that we can show is part of a system of cause and effect, like historical events or a scientific experiment. We can’t put God in a test tube and analyze him in that way. And I think he would say that that route of human reasoning, which Descartes set us down, which, um, was basically a way of because Descartes confused metaphysics and mathematics and physics and said that, you know, actually that if reason is the way we can understand everything, well, reason must be the way we can understand God. Now, he kind of thought you could understand God in that way. And there were many apologists at the time who did come up with all kinds of reasons why you could somehow prove God, but Pascal was very skeptical of that kind of reasoning, because it says it’s only the heart that knows God, not the reason. God is not the subject of our kind of reasoning power. He’s not the God of the philosophers, which is again one of Pascal’s famous phrases.

So to veer from his beliefs for a moment to his biography and how they connect, he had what is known as the night of fire. Could you walk us through what? What was it in brief? And you describe it as a radical turn. So, from what to what?

Well, this is this comes at a time in Pascal’s life. It’s in 1654. He is, um, he by this stage, he’s quite famous. He’s quite well known as a kind of famous mathematician and physicist. Had done a very a well known experiment on the existence of the vacuum, which had gone viral across Europe. Everybody knew about Pascal. And there was the pull of, you know, fame, if you like. But on the other hand, he had been deeply involved, uh, early on in, in, through his family with, uh, a movement, a sort of spiritual movement within, uh, French Catholicism called Jansenism, which was a kind of a sort of extreme Augustinian movement, very austere, kind of Christian faith, demanding, kind of full obedience to. To God. And the Jansenists kind of tended to say, you either you either are for the world or for God. If you’re for God, you leave behind the world. Pascal always struggle with that a little bit. And I think up to this period in 1654, that’s what he’s struggling with. The call and his sister had joined the monastery, a kind of convent that was connected to the Jansenist movement. Uh, there were others who were saying, well, you ought to join as well. You should become a kind of male, solitary figure. Um, he was also called to this sort of scientific life, and he’s struggling with this, and, and he finds some resolution of it in this particular experience on a November night in 1654. Now, he never told anybody about this, we only know about it because after he died, um, uh, one of the servants who was preparing his body for burial opened his jacket and felt there was something, something inside the lining. And he opened the jacket and pulled out two pieces of paper, which both described the same event, a very similar kind of text. And, um, it was a description of something that had happened to him on November the 23rd, 1654, and he describes it in very powerful ways. I can maybe read it a little bit of it to give you a sense of it. Um, you know, as you as you listen, when you look at the the text, it has at the beginning, it says the year of Grace, 1654. Monday, 23rd of November, feast of Saint Clement, Pope and martyr. From about 10:30 in the evening until half past midnight. And then there’s the word, fire. That’s why it’s called the Night of Fire. He then goes on to say, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ, God of Jesus Christ. And he goes on to describe this powerful encounter he’s had, presumably in prayer with God that lasted two hours. Um, that was a really significant moment for it. Now, again, he never told anybody about it. We only they only found out about it after this, this this discovery of this, this manuscript after he died.

But looking back, it made a lot of sense of what happened from that point onwards. And what it did, is it didn’t really mean that he turned his back entirely on science and mathematics, but they found their place within his life. It was no longer something that was central to his identity. Central to who he was. That was a source of pride for him. Um, he still did them, but he found something of a distaste for him. Uh, it kindled in him a longing for God and the presence of God and a sense of joy and certainty that comes through that experience. And so, um, that’s I think what happens, what it gives him is a new sense of priorities. And from that point onwards, there’s two things that really dominate his mind. One is a desire to somehow enable his sort of trendy skeptical philosophical or gambling friends who used to go to him, go with the salons in Paris and engage in witty conversation. How would he convince them that their true happiness was to be found in God? And the other passion of his life from that point on was the poor. He became fascinated by poverty and his giving his life to serve the poor of Paris and elsewhere. And we could talk a bit more about that. But I think that’s what the, uh, The Knight of Fire is about. It’s a very significant moment for Pascal and his development spiritually.

And one of the other, um, kind of aphorisms or, or perhaps accounts for which he is best known is what’s known as the wager. And, uh, our Trinity Forum, uh, friends will know this is the subject of, uh, of an excellent Trinity Forum reading, um, introduced by our co-founder Os Guinness with questions by Peter Kreeft. And so I recommend it to everyone. But the wager, it’s something that I believe you feel is widely, widely known and widely misunderstood. Um, can you, can you help us to grasp it? I think the Knight of Fire and the wager are two things that people will have awareness of, but not quite fully grasped, perhaps. Yeah.

And they’re linked in a way, because the Knight of Fire gave him this intense passion that he had discovered this deep happiness that he had not found anywhere else. And he wanted to share that with other people, to enable other people to find that their happiness is found, not into the fleeting distractions of life, but in something far, far deeper. This encounter with God. Um. And so he what he starts to do is he starts to write notes, which is towards a grand apology for the Christian religion that he’s going to write. He never finishes it. He dies before he finishes it. And so his friends gathered together the bits of paper that he’d written and published them as the Pensées of Pascal. Now, one of those pensées, one of the longer ones is this text called The Wager. In fact, actually not. Pascal never calls it the wager. He calls it Amphitryon. Um, infinity. Nothing. That’s the real title of it, but everyone knows it as the wager. And it’s a very interesting argument where he, um, he kind of. I think he would have come in the form of a conversation with one of these skeptical friends. And maybe the person you can imagine is someone who’s been a little bit of a spiritual journey. They’ve become aware there might be the possibility of God, but they’re not really that convinced about it. And they’re kind of in two minds. And so, what Pascal does in this argument is to say, okay, well, you know, this is someone who think, well, there might be a God, there might not be a god.

And Pascal says, um, uh, well, you’ve got to bet one way or the other. And the guy says, well, do I really have to bet? And he says, yes, yes you do. You’re already bet. Because if you’re either living your life as if God exists or God doesn’t exist, you’ve already bet one way. That’s the first point. You can’t escape this, this, this wager, if you like. And then the guy says, well, how about I know, is there evidence one way or the other? And Pascal says, well, there is, but it’s not strong enough to make you believe. You know, our longings are stronger than our logic. Um, and, uh, so the guy says, well, what do I do? And then that’s when Pascal brings up his probability work. He’s done this work on probability before, and he says, well, it’s a little bit like this, that, um, you know, life is a bit like a game, uh, where, you know, you’ve made a bet and you’re trying to work out whether you’ve made the right one or not. And he says, well, let’s do the probability on this. And so he says, well, let’s think about if you believe in God and if you’re right, um, well, you stand to gain a great deal. If you’re wrong, you don’t lose a great deal either. Maybe a little bit of discomfort and sacrifice in this life, but that’s basically it.

If you bet that God doesn’t exist and you’re right, well, you might have gained a little bit, you know, a few pleasures in this life or not, but you stand to lose a huge amount. So if you’re purely thinking about the probability, you’d always bet on God, that’s his argument. And then the guys comes back and says, well, yeah, but I can’t make myself believe something I don’t really feel or I don’t really believe. And Pascal says, I get that, I understand that, but then that’s, this is one of the key point of the wager comes Pascal says, well, at least get it into your head that the reason you do not believe is not because of your reason, it’s because of your passions. And that’s, I think, what he’s driving at. It’s not a it’s not an argument. Strong arming you into belief in God. People have had all kinds of critiques of the the argument that are well made because it’s not that. But what it is it’s trying to uncover the real reasons of unbelief or belief. It’s about desire. It’s about longing. It’s about are you open to the possibility of God or actually do you really rather God didn’t exist? And so that’s really what I think the, um, the wager is about is helping us to realize that the kind of real underlying reasons for unbelief that rather than forcing people into belief, if that makes some sense.

Yes, indeed. And as we go, let me just remind our viewers that we’re happy to, um, start taking some questions. We’ll turn to them in a little while. So if you have any, please, uh, please share them there in the Q&A box. So taking off from that point, one of his critiques was of the, um, distractibility, uh, that we seem to feature as, uh, as human beings. Uh, it’s often observed that we today live in an age of distraction. So what what did he think lies under our difficulty in paying attention to what’s important? Mm.

Well, I think he thinks that the art of it is a universal human desire for happiness. Um, one of the things he says about humans, he says all men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. Everyone wants to be happy. And he starts from that sort of observation. That’s one of the key things he begins from. But then he goes on to say, well, actually, the reality is that happiness is fleeting for us. As soon as we get it for a moment, it lasts for a short period of time and then it slips away. If any golf fans who are listening, you might remember the, uh, the interview with Scottie Scheffler, the world number one golfer, a little while ago where he was basically saying, look, when you win a tournament, you feel great for ten minutes, but after that it goes back to normal and you kind of wonder, what’s the point? That’s a very Pascalian thought. Um, and the point is that that he’s saying, and again it’s an Augustinian idea that, that we kind of think that these things are going to make us happy, these sort of transitory things that we search for and we and we look for. So we distract ourselves with the things that we think are going to make us happy. And, um, uh, but the problem is that they don’t. They’re fleeting. They just disappear from us. And one of the things that Pascal says, one of his very quotable lines, he says, you know, that the sole cause of our unhappiness is that we do not know how to stay quietly in a room. And, uh, you want to try that sometime. You know, sit for an hour with no book to read, no phone to look at, no music to play, nothing.

Just try and do it. It’s almost impossible. And he says that’s that’s our problem because we’re instinctive. We turn to find something to distract us. And that the reason going underneath that, just before that little quote, Pascal writes this, he says, being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance. People have decided in order to be happy not to think about such things. And so he thinks that’s why we are distracted. It’s why we spend our time doomscrolling through YouTube or through Instagram or Facebook or whatever else it is. It’s why we distract ourselves with games, or with activities that just keep us from thinking about the things that are deeper and more difficult things like death, wretchedness, and ignorance. But Pascal actually wants us to get beneath that distraction, beneath those trivial things, to go to the dark places of human experience. There’s places of death, wretchedness, and ignorance because it’s there. It’s in those places that we have the capacity and the possibility of meeting God. We have to kind of just wean ourselves off those distractions into the deeper things, to enable us to encounter the God who wants to meet us. In other words, you have to kind of look into the abyss, the abyss of your own heart, your own self-centeredness, the abyss of human cruelty and incapacity are kind of amazing ability not to think about the things that matter. And that, I think, is what’s at the heart of his kind of really perceptive analysis of our capacity to be distracted by things that really are trivial and don’t matter that much.

Thank you. Graham. So let me, um, share another quote that is quite striking, bracing. Christianity is strange. How is it that he, and potentially we, could consider this strangeness as opposed to a self-evidently rational belief system, a point in its favor? What can we learn from his observation that there are signs around us that both suggest God’s presence and his absence?

Yeah. Well, Pascal glories in the paradoxes of Christianity. You know, he talks about this. Yeah. Christianity is strange. We believe in a God who dies on a cross. We believe in a person who is both human and divine. We believe that when we go to church and we receive bread and wine, obviously he’s a he’s a, he’s a Catholic. He has a very sort of high view of the sacrament. He believes that his bread and wine actually is the body and blood of Christ. And that’s a kind of weird sort of idea. He’s aware of how weird that is. Um, and so he says Christianity is strange. But then he says, but then so is our experience of life. Life is strange. And so he sees this match between the strangeness of Christianity and the strangeness of our experience of life. When we dig into it, when we go below, beneath the surface and we ask those deeper questions. So if I can give you a couple of examples now, one of the things he draws out is the fact that the strange thing that God is not obvious. You know, you can look around the world, you can’t see God, you can’t really hear him. Not very often.

Obviously, people do claim experiences and, you know, hearing God in, in visions or in, you know, but for most people, God is not there. He doesn’t kind of shout at us every day. He’s not obviously there. There is some evidence to suggest there may be a God. There’s some evidence suggests that there may not be a god. Um, and so he says that if there is a god, then he must be a hidden god. And this god must in some way hide himself from us because he doesn’t appear to us every day. And then Pascal makes the move and saying, well, actually, that’s precisely what Christianity says, because Christianity says that when God revealed himself to us, the primary way in which God revealed himself to us was in the person of Jesus Christ. The reality about Jesus Christ is you could meet Jesus, you could shake his hand, and you could entirely miss the fact that you were shaking the hand of God. Because if you like, God was even hidden under the flesh of Jesus Christ. Um, so something like, again, you know, bread and wine of Holy Communion for him again, Pascal as a as a sort of loyal Catholic he says, this seems like just bread and wine, but actually it’s much deeper than that, something more than that.

And maybe another example is the doctrine of original sin and the idea that, um, when we’re born into the world, we are born with a kind of flaw built into us. And it’s that seems an offensive idea to, to us. And Pascal, you know, recognizes that. He says it’s strange, it’s offensive. We don’t like the idea that we’re born into the world with a with a bias and a twist to our nature. But then he goes on to say, well, it kind of makes sense of our experience that when we do stuff that is wrong, we’re both responsible for it, and yet somehow we’re all so caught up in a web of human wrongdoing that goes right back through our parents and grandparents, right back to the origins of the human race. And so what I think he’s talking about in that strangeness of Christianity is the explanatory power of Christianity to explain so much of our confused and enigmatic human experience. And that’s why I think it can be a really helpful way of explaining Christian faith to others.

You know, you, uh, have been a church leader and you now lead a center and a publication, Seen and Unseen, which I certainly recommend to all our viewers that seek to make the historic Christian faith accessible to all kinds of people, including those with no grounding in it. So what can people in our community who are engaged in similar kinds of pursuits, even just an ordinary, ordinary relationships, draw from Pascal, uh, in pursuing those kind of missions?

Yeah, that’s right. I think there’s several things I think that Pascal teaches us to do. One I think, is to is to interrogate the longings of the culture. That’s what he does all the time. He asks himself, why is it that we seek happiness when it’s so elusive? Um, why is it that that is a universal human desire? And yet we have this idea of happiness, but it just goes away from us as soon as we grasp it. And he then goes on to say, well, we only miss something that we once had. Um, he said, you know, and so it’s an argument for him to say, well, maybe once we had this experience of happiness, we knew true happiness in our original kind of fellowship with God in the garden, if you like. And so maybe that’s just, that longing for happiness is a sign that we were made for this deeper, true happiness with, with, with God. And he asks himself about why do we long for certainty? Where do we find certainty? Why are we so distracted by trivial things? You know, you could update that by saying, you know, why is it today that we so much crave the attention of strangers? Why do we all want so many likes or followers on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever, or X or whatever it might be? What is what’s behind that? What’s what is behind our desire for experience? For pleasure? That’s, I think, what some of the things that Pascal teaches us to do to interrogate the longings of the culture.

I think he also invites us to ask questions relentlessly. He’s always asking questions of his readers, making them think there’s more questions than there are statements. Maybe that is a good lesson for us. Rather than preaching at people, ask questions that uncover, um, some of these deeper issues in life. Uh, he talks about making faith attractive. Uh, for him, you only convince someone of Christian faith. Not primarily by logic, uh, but if you like, by making it attractive, making people wish it was true. How do you make people wish it was true? Because you paint a picture of faith that is so attractive that they long for it. Um, you know, using the imagination and not just logic. And I think the other thing is showing how Christian faith makes sense of human experience, how you can read the world, and Christian faith makes sense of it in a way that very few other things do. It’s what we try to do on, as you say on the website, SeenandUnseen.com, which is, um, something where we try to analyze stuff that’s going on in the news, in culture, giving a Christian perspective on that, trying to do some of the things that Pascal was doing at the same time.

Let me turn to a few questions from the audience and let me, let me package two that are that are quite related, I think, one from Mark Berner, one from Paul Kak. Um, tell us how you got interested in Pascal and how writing the book, uh, has changed you, and then what strategies do you suggest for reading, understanding, benefiting from the Pensées of Pascal?

Yeah, well, I first read Pascal when I was a rather angst-ridden teenager. It’s kind of what angst-ridden teenagers do, read Pascal and Nietzsche and people like that, or people like me do anyway. Um, and I was fascinated by him when I then turned to do my doctoral studies a little bit later on. I found that Pascal was interested in the very theme that I was interested in at the time, which was the theology of the cross. The idea that the cross of Christ is a means of knowing God. Um, and so I did my, some of my doctoral studies on Pascal, but on a very sort of narrow strand of his thinking. And I promised myself at that time, one day I’ll go back and write a biography of Pascal because I found his life, his story, so interesting. And there are many philosophers who don’t have very interesting lives. But Pascal did have a really interesting life. And so I kind of returned to that a number of years ago and, um, started to, to do the wider research about his life and the kind of conditions of 17^th-century France and so on. So that’s really what got me into him. And I’ve always found him a fascinating, um, person to read. And, um, and I and I, I suppose, how do you read Pascal? I mean, I think I would start with the Pensées. Get hold of a modern English edition or French if you read French, but you can know very good English translations of the Pensées and read it bit by bit.

It’s because it’s a fragmentary text and the fragments in the Pensées, it’s not like a novel. It’s not like a kind of philosophical book that follows an argument all the way through. It’s fragments, little notes that are collected together. Some of them are one line long. Some of them are a couple of paragraphs. Some of them are like essays, several pages. And I find when I’m reading them, I often have to read them in short bite bite-sized chunks. Now, some of them you can’t really make any sense of until you know a lot about Pascal. Um, and you just skim over those. But every now and again, one of them just hits you between the eye, and you have to sort of sit down and think about it for some time. And that’s the way I would read him. I would read the Pensées, I would read it slowly. Read it in chunks. It’s the kind of thing you can maybe pick up for five minutes a day, read a few, few pages. Just let those ruminate around you. And then beyond that, you might go on to the provincial letters, which is this very funny, um, in a satire that he does against the Jesuits at the time. They’re kind of, you know, a longer piece.

You might want to read those. Some of the other texts around the sort of time, uh, as well, is there are certain other things. Unless you’re a really strong physicist and mathematician, you probably won’t make much sense of his physics and mathematics. But, uh, his, um, he’s always a really interesting writer. He’s one of those strange scientists who could also write. Uh, he could write comedy. He could write philosophy. He could write in a really, really engaging way. And so I would read him. That’s why that’s so. And how has it changed me? I think it’s really deepened my appreciation of Pascal as a, as a kind of guide to our times, in the sense that he speaks to so many of the issues that we face, you know, distraction, um, the, the enigmatic nature of life, the ambiguity of the evidence for God, uh, the sense of, uh, you know, how God seems to be this hidden God rather than an obvious God. God is neither completely absent nor totally present, but this hidden presence within life. He speaks to so many of the things that matter to us, and so I find him just a fascinating person to read that sheds light on, on my path as a, as a person in the 21st century, as a Christian, um, and I think he can do the same for other readers as well.

One of the questions we get from John Brown is, Did Pascal’s Augustinian influence begin before his Jansenism? And I think this is a good point at which to briefly, since you just mentioned the Jesuits, give us the flavor of the Jesuit-Jansenist controversy that he was part of, and what are some of his ideas and approaches that can help us to reconcile the polarities we see now between modern and postmodern, rational, skeptical, conservative, progressive, these sort of things.

Yeah, yeah. I think, um, you know, his Augustinian influence really starts with his encounter with Jansenism. He’s he encounters Jansenism, first of all, with, uh, in an occasion where his father has an accident and breaks his hip. And as they did at the time, they brought in bone setters, people who would go on to maneuver the bone back into place again. And these bone setters happen to be Jansenists. Uh, they were followers of, um, Saint-Cyran, who was a kind of great spiritual leader at the time, who was the leader of the Jansenist party. Jansenism refers to a Belgian theologian, a rather obscure one, um, called Cornelius Jansenius, who had written a very long and very boring book on, on, on, on Augustine that hardly anyone ever read, because it’s about 1000 pages long. But it was deeply influential upon this spiritual movement. And so Pascal was influenced by these bone setters. The family were kind of converted to his sister, particularly, uh, Jacqueline was very convinced by the Jansenist path and, as I say, entered into the, the Port-Royal, which is the, um, the Jansenist convent in Paris. Uh, and she was deeply influenced. Pascal was kind of drawn to them, um, but in a kind of slightly half-hearted way. It was really the Night of Fire that kind of identified him with the Jansenist movement and brought him onside with the Jansenists. And who, um. And, uh. And it was after that that the Jansenists and the Jesuits were locked in a kind of battle, and the Jansenists were basically, you know, extreme Augustinians, a very strong emphasis on grace, on only grace can release the human, um, human will.

Uh, there’s nothing we can do to earn salvation. It’s all of grace. Um, the Jesuits were kind of influenced by the theology of Michael Molina, who was much more in the sense of, well, God gives what he calls, um, sufficient grace, enough grace to enable you to respond. So he has a much greater sense of, of, you know, human, human activity in it. Um, and the Jesuits, the real heart of the dispute between the Jansenists, the Jesuits, I think for Pascal, is the Jesuits were a kind of like modern day liberal in the sense that they were trying to kind of expand the, um, the tent of Christianity to say, well, you don’t really have to be that committed to be a to be a Christian. As long as you go to church occasionally, as long as you got a nod in the direction of Jesus from time to time, as long as occasionally you’re vaguely sorry for your sins, that’s enough. Um, that’s a very sort of caricature view of it, but that’s kind of the way it is. In other words, for Pascal, it was a kind of Christianity without repentance. And that’s what he thinks is the problem with it.

It’s a Christianity without repentance. Pascal thinks you cannot be Christian without repenting, because the heart of the human problem is this deep self-centeredness, this deep orientation towards self, which is the great enemy of love for God. That’s again, his Augustinianism because Augustine has, of course, you know, City of God, City of this world, oriented around a love for God or love for self. Those are the only two options. You can love yourself, or you can love God. And if you’re going to love God, you’ve got to learn a radical, um, kind of abnegation of the self. Pascal uses really strong language about that. He always talks about, he talks about the hatred of the self, which is very strange for us because we don’t we’re not used to that language. But Pascal is pretty rigorous in saying you actually need to put aside yourself and instead to give yourself wholly to God. And so, um, so that’s really part of what he really didn’t like about the Jesuits was this this idea of a kind of rather lukewarm Christianity that didn’t really involve any change in life. And he felt, actually, what that gave you was a rather, rather tepid, uninteresting form of God, a form of spirituality. The only real certainty, joy, happiness is found in this deep devotion to God. The more devoted to God, the more happy you are at the end of the day for Pascal.

Um, we had a question from an anonymous attendee about, could Pascal’s musings on people’s longings for happiness be related to Ecclesiastes three? The idea that God has set eternity in the hearts of men? And I guess that’s related a bit to the idea of the God shaped vacuum that’s often associated with Pascal. Could you comment on that?

Yeah. That’s right. Yes. I mean, it’s one of the, um, one of the things, I mean, Pascal never actually talks about the, um, the God shaped gap is what it was, but he does say this, and it’s worth just maybe, uh, reciting one of Pascal’s statements on this. He says, you know, he talks about human craving and helplessness, and he says, what else does this craving and this helplessness proclaim? But that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there, the help that he cannot find in those that are. Though none can help. Because this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object. In other words, by God himself. So this is Pascal’s idea that, you know, we once knew that happiness, the happiness that we longed for, we long for and we try to grasp, and it always slips away from us, you know, like kind of water through your hand or kind of trying to grasp the sand. It doesn’t last. That happiness. That is a deep instinct for us. We once knew it, before the fall. We once knew that. And, um. Uh, and that’s why we, we seek it so much. And that goes on to this, the second part of the question, which is how does that relate to our kind of polarities today? Um, I was talking earlier on about Pascal’s sense of the human greatness and misery, our kind of, you know, the grandeur of the human soul, the weakness of the human soul.

And in a way, the greatness of the human soul is the Descartes argument. The weakness of the human soul is the Montaigne argument. And Pascal says that, well, you don’t want to go for either one or the other of those, because in some ways they kind of both have a point. Um, there are things in human life that are socially constructed, um, you know, the world is fallen. It needs it needs changing. There are things that we need. So many of the things that we take for granted are our customary and they need changing. But on the other hand, there is a kind of regularity to the world, and that we can discover. And so he says, what we need is something that makes sense of that strange polarity between greatness and weakness. And that’s what he finds in the Christian doctrine of creation and fall, that we are both created by God in God’s image with this longing for God, with this memory of human, of happiness in the presence of God. But we’re also deeply and radically fallen, turned in upon ourselves to use Luther’s language. That’s what explains both the greatness and the misery of humanity. And so, in other words, what Pascal gives is a kind of bigger theory that embraces, if you like, in our terms, both the modern and the postmodern, you know, the progressive and the conservative that recognizes there’s something of truth in both of those things. But only Christianity is giving you something big enough to show you how that actually works in practice.

Thank you. Here’s a question from Diane Smith. You mentioned Pascal develops an interest in the poor. What does Pascal’s understanding of suffering and its role within Christianity? Is it all about escaping suffering and moving toward happiness, or does suffering have another role? And I should add to her question, he suffered a lot physically. I mean, he was he really was seldom very healthy.

Yeah. He once said he never had a day in his adult life without some form of pain. He was regularly in pain. In fact, he died at age 39, probably of stomach cancer, with probably secondaries in the brain. He had a clearly a brain tumor. At the same time, he had intense headaches, intense sort of stomach pains that he was unable to eat for, for, for many of the last months of his life. Um, so pain was a constant reality for Pascal. Now he writes an extraordinary prayer at the end of his life, a kind of long prayer, a prayer for the good use of maladies, prayer for the good use of illness, in which he views illness as a strange gift. Um, but it’s not something to be shunned, not something to be got rid of, not something to be avoided. But it is a kind of strange, uncomfortable odd gift that somehow God gives as a means of turning us towards the God who alone can bring us happiness, that can turn us away from that own, that self-centeredness, that desire to always be successful and always to be, you know, to have everything go our own way. It’s an extraordinary prayer. I kind of recommend people, people read it. Um, so he views sickness, his own sickness, his own experience of that as a kind of profoundly spiritual part of his spiritual path. Um, but he doesn’t think that about poverty. He doesn’t think poverty so much.

What he does at times he thinks about poverty is a gift that can lead you towards God. But at the same time, he wants to alleviate poverty. And so one of the things that he does is he gives away most of his possessions towards the end of his life. He actually dies in self-chosen poverty. Uh, he was a relatively I mean, not hugely wealthy, but he, he was wealthy enough because of his father’s income, uh, as a sort of tax official within the government, never to have to kind of do a day’s work in his life. He actually had enough money to just live on it, but he gave away most of that, gave away most of his possessions. He lives this intense because he wants to identify with the poor, because he says, you know, I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved poverty. Jesus Christ did spend his time with the poor, therefore, I must spend my time with the poor. It was part of his identification with Jesus towards the end of his life. Uh, incidentally, the reason why he invented buses was all out of the same thing. Uh, the city of Paris probably doubled in size in the first half of the 17th century, which was fine for the rich because they could, um, get in their carriages and be ferried across the city quite easily. But for the poor, it was a real problem where you really couldn’t walk that distance, um, to go and see family or friends or get to their workplaces or whatever.

So Pascal had this idea, well, what if we bought up a set of carriages and we, uh, we got the carriages to go from point A to point B, and they stopped along the way, and at certain points you could get on the carriage, you could pay a very small amount of money, sangsu, $0.05 if you like. Uh, and you could just go as far as you wanted to, and you could get the bus back at the end of the day. And, uh, he set up a company, got, uh, wealthy friends to invest in it. They got permission to do it from the city council, and they eventually established five routes across the city. Uh, it was a real success at the time. And, um, it was something Pascal gave himself to towards the end of his life. And it kind of captures a lot of Pascal because it’s this entrepreneurial trying to find solutions to real problems, but also this intense, sense of what can I do to help relieve the struggles and difficulties of the poor? And, um, so it’s a really fascinating story about, uh, the end of his life and the, the, the ways in which for him, um, poverty was something he thought about a great deal as, as was sickness and illness, too.

I’d like to raise a question from Marcia Geary, who asks, did Pascal influence C.S. Lewis? Which others credit Pascal as having influenced them? And then to that, I would like to add, and who were some of his critics? Who were some of the ones who found the most to take umbrage with in his, uh, in what he wrote.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m not aware of many places where C.S. Lewis references Pascal. He may do, and maybe that people people here know C.S. Lewis’s works better than I do. Um, he’s not uh, he’s not known as a sort of, um, uh, as a major influence on, on C.S. Lewis, although you can see very similar themes, uh, to him. Uh, there are other figures who do speak of Pascal quite a bit. T.S. Eliot was someone who, uh, clearly had read Pascal and speaks very warmly of him. Um, I often find when I read stories of people who come to faith in Christ, very often you just find people who’ve just come across Pascal, especially people who are kind of more intellectual in their backgrounds, Pascal is someone who has disturbed their unbelief. And that’s kind of what he does. He disturbs unbelief and opens people to the possibility of God. Um, so he’s been hugely influential, I think, on many people discovering Christian faith over the years. Um, you talk about his opponents. I guess two of his main critics were, um, Voltaire, um, philosopher of the French Enlightenment. Uh, and the other was Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche. Both of them were both attracted and repelled by Pascal at the same time. Voltaire called Pascal this sublime misanthrope. Um, he was sublime in the sense that he wrote beautiful French. He had extraordinary insights, and yet he hated Pascal’s view of human nature. Uh, Voltaire was a kind of an optimist. He thought human beings were fine. Reason would sort out everything in the end. He was fairly optimistic about human nature. It’s going to get better and better and better. I guess, looking back on it now, um, when we look at the way in which humankind has gone since then, at the other end of a couple of world wars, the capacity of our race to kind of turn against itself, to destroy the planet that we’re part of.

Voltaire’s view of humanity looks very naive now in a way that Pascal’s is much more realistic. I mean, again, Nietzsche liked Pascal when he spoke against the Jesuits. Um, because Nietzsche liked anyone who had a go at priests and the church. Um, but his idea of salvation, uh, was very different, of course. He doesn’t see salvation in Christ. He sees salvation as being the kind of emergence of the Superman, the Übermensch, you know, a vision taken up by modern transhumanism at the same time. And yeah, I guess, again, when we look at that vision now, the idea that somehow, you know, we will create this sort of great human being that will transcend everything in the future. That’s a slightly frightening image – um, what that would actually look like. And Pascal, I think, would say, well, is that what you really like, you know, our broken nature transported onto a sort of larger frame? Or actually is the, you know, the heart of human life seen in the love, the compassion, um, the beauty, the humility of Jesus Christ, which is as different from the kind of Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman, as you can imagine. So I actually think, you know, Pascal’s anthropology, his understanding of humankind, his understanding of human life has lasted actually better than Voltaire or Nietzsche’s has. And that’s why he’s such a good, um, he’s a critic of his critics at the same time.

Let me link two questions here. One from Emily Winneborg, she asks, have any other Christian apologists besides Pascal made Divine Hiddenness a core part of their apologetic? And a related question from Jewel Brooker, aspects of Pascal’s thought seem echoes echo Luther, especially the hidden god, Deus Absconditus, grace. So could you engage with both his relationship with Luther and then any others who echo?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. In fact, when I did my doctoral work, it was on Luther and Pascal and Saint Paul, um, finding all kinds of resonances between Luther’s thought and Pascal’s thought. They both have this idea of the, self curved in upon itself has been the heart of the human problem. Uh, as, um, as you were saying, you know, this idea of a hidden god. Luther talks about that. Calvin does as well. Uh, Calvin is another theologian of the hidden God. Um, it’s a kind of unique theme. And in some ways, Pascal is very different from a lot of modern apologetics. A lot of modern apologetics tends to be quite rationalist in, um, in tone, bringing up evidence for the existence of God or the evidence of the resurrection. And Pascal’s never that convinced by the argument from design and that kind of thing. Because again, because this idea that ah that ah, our heart is stronger than our heads, you know, our longings, you know, our reason can be bent in any direction. And that’s why he actually thinks you have to kind of make Christianity attractive to people rather than make it somehow logical or rational.

Not that he doesn’t think there are good reasons for believing in God. He just doesn’t think they’re psychologically powerful enough to change people’s hearts and people’s minds. And, um, and so that’s why the idea of the hidden God is a very, it’s a kind of very evocative idea that makes you think, you know, maybe there is. And I often find that in conversations with people to say, well, you know, people say, well, where’s the evidence for God? Um, and, uh, you know, I can’t see God and therefore he can’t exist. He said, well, maybe there is a hidden God. Maybe there is a God who’s there, but he hides himself, and he waits to be found by those who are really interested to know him. And that opens up the possibility that maybe this, this non-availability of God in the kind of in, through our senses is not a final objection to God as well. So Pascal is a really interesting apologist, both in his own time and in the modern day as well.

Thank you, Graham. Well, in a moment we’ll give you the last word. But first, a few bits of housekeeping for our viewers. Immediately after we conclude on your screen, you’ll see an online feedback form. Would be so grateful for your thoughts on how we can make these conversations even more valuable to you. And if you take the survey, you’ll be gifted a free digital copy of the Trinity Forum reading of your choice. There’s over 100 of them, and one of them is the one on Pascal’s Wager, as we’ve been discussing. And then tomorrow we’ll send all of you who registered an email with the link to today’s video and some other resources. Please share. Share with friends. We want to reiterate our special thanks to our sponsor today David campaign with Blue Trust and to our co-hosts Hodor and Seen and Unseen. And we also hope all of you will consider joining us in our community, the Trinity Forum society. The link is in the chat to look into it. And as a special incentive, if you become a member today with a gift of $150 or more, you’ll not only receive four of our readings in the mail during the year, but we’ll also send you a signed copy of Graham’s book on Pascal so you can go deeper with your new friend, Blaise Pascal. Your membership and support helps keep these conversations free. Thank you for taking part in renewing our culture by bringing wisdom from the Christian tradition to bear on our concerns today. You can also register now for our online conversation on September 26th with our senior fellow, Will Inboden. He’s the provost of the University of Texas. And it’s on the question, can character be taught? Also, when you have a moment to subscribe to our podcast. If you don’t already, some of our recent guests include the writer Marilynne Robinson, historian Tom Holland, and theologian Miroslav Volf. With that, Graham, over to you for the last word.

Yeah. Thank you, Tom, and thank you for your questions. They’ve been really interesting. Thank you to everybody listening in for your really, really interesting questions as well. I guess the last word I think I’d leave with, with Pascal himself. Um, uh, one of the things that strikes you on the night of fire, this, this extraordinary account he gives of this experience that he had for two hours on November the 23rd, 1654, is, um, he talks about it, not the God of the philosophers, the God of Jesus Christ. That’s the God he’s interested in. Uh, he’s not talking about discovery of the God of Descartes. I often think, you know, Descartes went into a room at one particular side of his life, that resulted doubt everything he could until he found something he could not doubt. And the thing he couldn’t doubt was the fact that he was thinking. So he comes up with the greatest, um, kind of line in Western European philosophy. You know, I think, therefore I am, the thinking self is the heart of everything. Pascal goes into a room and finds a very different God. Of course, Descartes kind of then thinks that the, you know, God is the first thing that the thinking self perceives outside of himself. And so has God, but he’s not really that interested in God. God is a kind of guarantor of the system. He’s not someone that would really interest you. Whereas Pascal discovers on that night the God of Jesus Christ, and he has this description of that God which I’ve always found, I keep going back to it.

I find it, um, kind of really powerful, really compelling. And I just want to read that as the, um, as we close. Um, he says, this. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation. He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses. He is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy. He unites himself with them in the depths of their soul. He fills that soul with humility, joy, confidence, and love, who makes them incapable of having any other end but him. And I love that description of this God of passionate engagement, this God who desires us far more than we desire him. And the image I have in my mind of Pascal, just overwhelmed with this sense of this God of love and consolation that he talked about. And I guess my hope and prayer is that everybody who reads the biography of Pascal that I’ve written will not only discover Pascal, but will discover that God at the same time, um, even more important. Um, but also I would really recommend, obviously, alongside reading the biography, read the Pensées. There they are fascinating texts to read, and I really hope you enjoy your engagement with Pascal as much as I have over the years too.

Thank you, Graham, and thanks to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.