Pensées, Blaise Pascal

"Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you."

After last month's substantial meal of Cicero we turn to sampling a tasty buffet of thoughts from Pascal (who by the way had this to say: "All the false beauties which we blame in Cicero have their admirers, and in great number."). His Pensées is a fragmentary, posthumously-published assembly of notes and aphorisms, preparation for his planned, but never written, defense of Christianity. As such this is the work in which Pascal put forward his famous wager:

"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

But don't read this expecting mere preaching. This book is far more wide-ranging than that. Blaise Pascal was a polymath that made significant contributions to mathematics, philosophy, and technology in addition to theology. He was a Catholic, and yet his Pensées was on the Vatican's list of prohibited works. Not for nothing did Nietzsche call him, mostly on the strength of this one book, "the only logical Christian"!

There are many translations from the French as usual. One of them has an introduction by T. S. Eliot even. But I'll be reading Levi's translation, available here (paid link).

We will meet, as always, in Napoleon's Parlour at Vino's on Los Olas, and aim at Pascal's suggested mean: "Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same." See you there!