Pensées (For Teens)

A French mathematician, scientist and Christian thinker, born in 1623 in Clermont. As a teenager he wrote on geometry and built a calculating machine; his experiments showed that the air has weight, and his letters with Fermat founded the mathematics of probability. After meeting God on the night of 23 November 1654, he gave his gifts to defending the Christian faith. He died in Paris in 1662, aged thirty-nine.

It is French for “thoughts”. Pascal was gathering notes for a big book defending Christianity, but illness stopped him finishing it. After his death his friends published the notes, some long and some only a line, under that title.

Pascal’s argument that everyone has to bet their life either that God is or that he is not, because not choosing is also a choice. If you bet on God and are right, you gain everything; if you are wrong, you lose very little. Pascal did not think the wager could make anyone believe. He used it to wake people up, and then pointed them to seek God honestly.

Not that feelings beat facts. Pascal loved reason and used it brilliantly. He meant that we know some of the deepest things, including God, not only by working them out but by a knowing deeper than argument, which he called the heart. Faith uses both.

No. Pascal is honest about how restless and messed up people are, but only so that we will see how great we are too, and how much we need Jesus. He says knowing our misery without God leads to despair, and knowing God without our misery leads to pride; Jesus shows us both and heals us. If you are feeling low most days, please talk to a trusted adult.

He was a Roman Catholic, close to a strict renewal group centred on the convent of Port-Royal near Paris. Christians of every tradition have read and loved the Pensées, and this retelling keeps to the parts all of them share.

No. It is a retelling for teenagers in plain modern words, drawn from across the Pensées and keeping Pascal’s own sentences where they say it best. The full Pensées is also available.