Blaise Pascal Biography and Books

Few people in history have been as brilliant as Blaise Pascal. At sixteen he wrote a treatise on geometry that the older mathematicians of Paris could hardly believe was his own. At nineteen he built one of the first mechanical calculating machines. Before he was thirty his experiments on the vacuum had overturned an idea as old as Aristotle, and his letters with Pierre de Fermat had laid the foundations of probability theory. Yet the most important night of his life had nothing to do with numbers. He spent it alone in his room with a Bible open before him, and when it was over he wrote one word in capital letters: FIRE.

A Gifted Child in a Grieving House

Blaise Pascal was born on 19 June 1623 in Clermont, in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France. His father, Étienne Pascal, was a respected magistrate and a gifted amateur mathematician. His mother, Antoinette Begon, died when Blaise was three, and Étienne never remarried. He gave himself to raising his three children: Gilberte, the eldest, Blaise, and little Jacqueline. In 1631 he moved the family to Paris and taught them himself.

Étienne had a clear plan. Blaise would learn Latin and Greek first and mathematics only later, so the father kept his geometry books out of the boy’s reach. The plan did not survive the child. According to his sister Gilberte, the young Blaise, not yet knowing the proper names of things, worked out for himself many of the first propositions of Euclid, drawing figures in charcoal on the floor. After that, Étienne opened the books and brought his son to the gatherings of scholars around Father Marin Mersenne, where the finest scientific minds in France met to talk.

From childhood Pascal was also frail. Gilberte later recalled him saying that from the age of eighteen he never passed a day without pain. Headaches, digestive torment and at times near-paralysis followed him for the rest of his short life. His whole genius had to work through a body that was always failing him.

In 1639 Étienne was appointed a royal tax commissioner in Rouen, in Normandy. The work meant endless arithmetic. To lighten his father’s load, Blaise designed a machine of gears and wheels that could add and subtract. He built some fifty prototypes over the following years, and the “Pascaline” is still remembered as a milestone in the history of computing.

The First Awakening

In January 1646 Étienne slipped on the ice in Rouen and badly injured his hip. Two gentlemen skilled in bone-setting, the brothers Deschamps, came to live with the family for some months while he recovered. They were devout followers of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran and of the movement centred on the convent of Port-Royal. That movement, later called Jansenism, stressed humanity’s total dependence on the grace of God and called believers to a serious, wholehearted Christian life.

The brothers brought books with them, and the Pascal household began to read. Blaise read, and was deeply moved. For the first time he saw Christianity not as a respectable inheritance but as a demand on the whole of life. The entire family was changed. Jacqueline, the most ardent of them, began to long for the religious life.

But this first conversion did not yet go to the root. Pascal remained a scientist of burning ambition. In 1647 and 1648 he set out to prove that a true vacuum could exist in nature. At his direction his brother-in-law, Florin Périer, carried a column of mercury up the Puy de Dôme, the old volcano above Clermont, and showed that the mercury fell as he climbed. The air had weight, and the idea that “nature abhors a vacuum” had to be dropped. The experiment made Pascal famous across Europe.

The Worldly Years

Étienne Pascal died in September 1651. Jacqueline, now free, soon entered Port-Royal as a nun. Blaise opposed her decision at first, partly out of loneliness and partly over the matter of her inheritance, and the break hurt them both. With his father gone, his sister in the convent and his doctors urging rest and amusement, Pascal entered the salons of Paris. He made friends with the young Duc de Roannez and with polished men of the world, and he studied gambling and games of chance. From that study came his famous correspondence with Fermat in 1654, which founded the mathematics of probability.

Later he would look back on these years with sorrow. Yet even in the midst of them he felt, as he later told Jacqueline, a growing disgust with the world and a strange sense of abandonment by God. Brilliance, company and fame had not filled him. By the autumn of 1654 he was visiting his sister at Port-Royal and pouring out his emptiness to her.

The Night of Fire

On Monday, 23 November 1654, Pascal was alone in his room in Paris. What happened there he never spoke of. After his death a servant felt something stiff in the lining of his coat and found a folded piece of parchment, and inside it an older sheet of paper, both carrying the same words in Pascal’s hand. He had sewn the record into each new coat he wore for eight years. It begins with the date and the hour, “from about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight,” and then:

FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned. Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ.

— Blaise Pascal, the Memorial

The God Pascal met that night was not the “first cause” of the philosophers, whom a clever man might reason his way towards. He was the living God of the Bible, the God who had called Abraham and who is known only through Jesus Christ. From that night the centre of Pascal’s life moved. He did not give up thinking, but he no longer lived for his own glory.

In January 1655 he went on retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs, the convent in the valley south-west of Paris. There he talked at length with its spiritual director, Isaac Le Maistre de Saci, about the pagan philosopher Epictetus and the sceptic Montaigne. He came away convinced that each saw half the truth about man, his greatness or his wretchedness, and that only the gospel held the two together.

The Provincial Letters

Within a year Pascal’s pen was needed. In early 1656 Port-Royal’s leading theologian, Antoine Arnauld, was on trial before the Sorbonne, and the friends of Port-Royal wanted the public to understand what was at stake. Under the pen name “Louis de Montalte,” Pascal wrote a letter supposedly addressed to a friend in the provinces. It was so clear, so witty and so readable that it sold out at once, and seventeen more letters followed between January 1656 and March 1657.

In the Provincial Letters Pascal turned his fire on the moral theology taught by some Jesuit writers of his day. It was a system of subtle distinctions, he argued, that let people keep their sins while still feeling at peace with God. He quoted their books against them, with devastating irony. The letters were condemned and burned by order of the authorities, but they could not be unread. They are still counted among the founding works of modern French prose. Behind the wit lay a pastor’s concern: that the love of God should not be traded away for an easy conscience.

The Holy Thorn

In the middle of that struggle, something happened in Pascal’s own family. His ten-year-old niece and god-daughter, Marguerite Périer, Gilberte’s child, was a pupil at Port-Royal in Paris. For more than three years she had suffered from a lachrymal fistula, a festering ulcer at the corner of her eye that swelled her face and gave off a foul discharge. Her doctors held out little hope except a painful cautery.

Pascal was deeply stirred. He took for his seal an eye surrounded by a crown of thorns, with the words of Paul, Scio cui credidi, “I know whom I have believed.” The event also turned his mind to a larger work. If God still gave signs, why did so many still not believe? How could the honest sceptic, the pleasure-seeker, the indifferent man of the world be brought to take Christ seriously?

The Great Apology

Pascal set out to write a defence of the Christian faith unlike any before it. He did not mean to begin with proofs from nature, which he thought convinced no one. He would begin with man himself: his greatness and his misery, his restlessness, his endless diversions from the one question that matters. He wanted to show that Christianity alone explains that riddle, and then to show that it is true.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

He worked on it for years, jotting thoughts on scraps of paper, sorting them into bundles and threading them together on string. Illness kept breaking into the work. By 1659 he could often do little at all, and the great book was never finished. What remained after his death, nearly a thousand fragments, was published by his friends at Port-Royal in 1670 as the Pensées, or “Thoughts.” Among them is the famous wager, in which Pascal presses the doubter to see that he cannot avoid staking his life on one side or the other. And among them is a line that has outlived its author by centuries:

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

By “the heart” Pascal did not mean mere feeling. He meant the part of us that grasps first truths directly and loves or refuses God. Faith, he believed, is “God felt by the heart, not by the reason.” Yet the Pensées are not only argument. Some of their most moving pages are meditation, above all “The Mystery of Jesus,” written as Pascal knelt in spirit beside Christ in Gethsemane. There he hears the Lord say to him, “Console thyself, thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me,” and he writes:

Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Sickness Rightly Used

Pascal’s last years were marked by sorrow and pain. In October 1661 his beloved sister Jacqueline died, on her thirty-sixth birthday. Her death came soon after the nuns of Port-Royal had been pressed to sign a formulary against the teachings they held dear. Pascal’s own health collapsed further. He gave up every comfort he could spare, sold much of his furniture and gave the money to the poor. He took a characteristic interest in a new scheme: the first public carriages in Paris, the “five-sol coaches,” which began to run in March 1662. It was the city’s first omnibus service, and Pascal had pledged his share of its income to the poor.

His charity followed him to the end. He had taken a poor family into his home, and when one of the children fell ill, he did not turn them out. Instead he left his own house and moved to Gilberte’s. There, in the summer of 1662, he grew steadily worse. He begged to be carried to the Hospital for Incurables so that he might die among the poor, and when his doctors would not allow it, he asked that a poor sick man be brought into the house and cared for as he was. He longed to receive Communion, and in his last hours, when a lucid moment came, he received it with joy.

“May God never abandon me” were among his last words. Blaise Pascal died at one o’clock in the morning on 19 August 1662. He was thirty-nine years old. He was buried in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, a short walk from where he died.

Legacy

Pascal left behind a scientist’s legacy that would have satisfied most people: Pascal’s triangle, Pascal’s law of pressure, the foundations of probability, the calculating machine. A modern unit of pressure and a computer language bear his name. But it is the notebook of unfinished thoughts that has done the most good. For more than three centuries the Pensées have spoken to people who would never open a book of theology: students, sceptics, the bored and the restless, anyone who has sensed that their diversions are hiding something from them. Pascal meets them there, with an honesty about the human condition that is hard to escape.

He also shows that a great mind and a humble heart are not enemies. The same man who weighed the air above a mountain knelt in the dark of Gethsemane and heard Christ say, “I thought of thee in Mine agony.” He had tested the claims of reason further than almost anyone of his age, and he found its limit. His whole life came to rest in the few words he carried in his coat: “God of Jesus Christ… Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.”