The Genius Who Met Fire

“I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” — Exodus 3:6 (KJV)

Imagine a boy who teaches himself geometry before anyone gets round to teaching him. Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, in central France. His mother died when he was small, and his father, a clever and careful man, taught him at home in Paris.

At sixteen Blaise wrote a treatise on geometry that impressed the leading mathematicians of the day. At nineteen he built a calculating machine to help his father with the endless sums of his job as a tax official. Later his experiments on a mountain called the Puy de Dôme showed that the air has weight, and his letters with another mathematician, Fermat, helped found the mathematics of chance and probability. Scientists still measure pressure in a unit named after him: the pascal.

But his life was not easy. From the age of eighteen, he said, he never passed a day without pain. His body was weak, and he was often ill.

In 1646, when Pascal was in his early twenties, his family met some very devout Christians linked to a convent called Port-Royal, near Paris, and they were all stirred up about God. But for Blaise the change did not yet go deep. For a while he was more interested in his work, his friends and his reputation.

Then, on the night of 23 November 1654, alone in his room, something happened that changed him for good. He met God. Afterwards he wrote down what he had experienced on a scrap of paper and sewed it into the lining of his coat, and he kept it with him for the rest of his life. It begins like this:

“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.”

Notice what he says. Pascal was one of the cleverest people alive. He knew all the arguments about God. But that night he met not an idea, a God “of the philosophers and the learned”, but the living God who had spoken to real people like Abraham and who had come to us in Jesus Christ. And what he felt was not confusion but certainty, joy and peace.

Pascal spent the rest of his short life using his brilliant mind for that God. He began a great book to help people who doubted or did not care about Christianity. Illness stopped him finishing it. When he died, his friends found piles of notes, some pages long, some only one line. They published them as the Pensées, which is French for “thoughts”.

This book retells the best of those thoughts. They are about things you know very well: boredom, phones and distraction, wanting people to like you, feeling tiny in a huge universe, doubts, and whether God is real. Pascal wrote them nearly four hundred years ago, but they could have been written about you.

One thing to do this week: keep a “thoughts” notebook this week, on paper or on your phone. Each day write one honest question you have about God, life or yourself. Don’t try to answer them yet. Just notice what your real questions are.