Pascal for Today

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Pascal for Today

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?

Because that's what Pascal is: a maverick philosopher in today's Establishment; a sage rather than a scholar; a human being rather than a "thinker"; not just smart but wise. That's what philosophy is supposed to be "the love of wisdom"--but we've come a long way since Socrates, alas.

There are also religious reasons for ignoring Pascal. For one thing, he's too Protestant for Catholics and too Catholic for Protestants. Yet he's not somewhere in the muddled middle.