Pascal for Today | Peter Kreeft

Pascal for Today | Peter Kreeft | From the Preface to Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensées (Edited, Outlined, and Explained)

Pascal is the first postmedieval apologist. He is "for today" because he speaks to modern pagans, not to medieval Christians. Most Christian apologetics today is still written from a medieval mind-set in one sense: as if we still lived in a Christian culture, a Christian civilization, a society that reinforced the Gospel. No. The honeymoon is over. The Middle Ages are over. The news has not yet sunk in fully in many quarters.

It has sunk in to Pascal. He is three centuries ahead of his time. He addresses his apologetic to modern pagans, sophisticated skeptics, comfortable members of   the new secular intelligentsia. He is the first to realize the new dechristianized, desacramentalized world and to address it. He belongs to us. This book is an attempt to reclaim him.

I thought of titling this book "A Saint for All Skeptics"—but Pascal was no saint, and he wrote for nonskeptics as well as for skeptics. But I know no pre-twentieth-century book except the Bible that shoots Christian arrows farther into modern pagan hearts than the Pensées. I have taught "Great Books" classes for twenty years, and every year my students sit silent, even awed, at Pascal more than at any other of the forty great thinkers we cover throughout the history of Western philosophy and theology.

Why then is he not better known? Why was I taught every major philosopher except Pascal in studying the history of philosophy in four colleges and universities? "Late have I loved thee", Pascal; why did I have to discover you so late, as a maverick?

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Comments

[Ray]

Sounds like a fascinating book! I recently read the biography of Pascal by James A. Connor, an ex-Jesuit. He does an excellent job of explaining the heresy of Jansenism, to which Pascal (but his sister in a much deeper way) paid allegiance. It turns out that it was Pascal who coined the word "Jesuitical."

[Ed Peters]

Now THIS looks cool. (Okay, most IP books look cool, but you know, THIS one looks really cool.)

[rd]

wait, according to peter kreeft in the preface excerpt above, pascal was NOT a jansenist. should we believe kreeft or that connor guy?

[Stephen Sparrow]

If Pascal was a genuine Jansenist he could never have written his Pensees. He would have been too afraid. He doesn't appear to me to have feared anything.

[Thomas]

Pascal was not a Jansenist. He was certainly sympathetic to his sister and criticized the Church's handling of the Jansenists, but he was not a heretic himself.

Now where did I learn that? Oh, yeah, Prof. Kreeft's class when reading his book on the Pensees.