[PDF] Blaise Pascal (1623 1662)



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Blaise Pascal (1623 1662) 108

Blaise Pascal (16231662)

Blaise Pascal was the middle child of an upper-

class magistrate in ClermontFerrand, France. His mother died when he was three years old, and five Paris. His father, Etienne, an excellent amateur mathematician, educated young Blaise at home. Etienne first taught young Blaise Latin and Greek, deciding to wait on his own love, mathematics, until his son was older. By the age of twelve, however,

Blaise had figured out many of the principles of

Euclidian geometry on his own. His father finally

relented and bought Blaise a copy of Euclid, which he devoured. Over the next several years, father and son attended weekly mathematical lectures and were regular guests at important intellectual salons in Paris. In 1638, the family underwent another trauma when Etienne Pascal was forced by a con- flict with the powerful Cardinal Richelieu to flee queline, performed so well in a childr the Cardinal that their father was given a pardon and installed as tax commissioner for Rouen.

At Rouen Blaise Pascal began to concentrate on

mathematics. While still a teenager, he wrote his first book (on conic sections in geometry) and developed a plan for a calculating machine to help his father with his tax work. In 1644 he built the first no small feat given the state of metalworking at the time. ting machines were so important that a major con- temporary programming language is named in his honor. Pascal also experimented on the nature of a

In 1647 Pascal became seriously ill and returned

to Paris with his younger sister to recover. Fol- a convent, leaving Pascal alone. Over the next several years Pascal seemed to drift: he outwardly enjoyed the social life of Paris as a successful

1 Pensées and Other

Writings, tr. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1995), 178.

mathematician and eligible bachelor, but he was in- wardly dissatisfied. Although he had undergone a conversion in 1646 under the influence of the Jansenists, a group of devout Catholics, Pascal still found himself without direction. On the night of

November 23, 1654, Pascal had a remarkable

second conversion experience, the description of which he sewed inside his coat: From about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight. Fire.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not

of philosophers and scholars.

Certainty, joy, certainty, emotion, sight, joy

God of Jesus Christ. ...

Oblivious to the world and to everything except

GOD....

This is life eternal, that they might know you,

the only true God, and him whom you sent,

Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ

I have cut myself off from him forever. I have fled from him, denied him, crucified him.

Let me never be cut off from him.

He can only be kept by the ways taught in the

Gospel. Sweet and total renunciation.

Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.

I will not forget thy word. Amen.1

Pascal committed himself to living out his faith by doing good works. He wrote a remarkable series of Provincial Letters defending the Jansenists against the Jesuits. Pascal also worked on one of the first regularlyscheduled public transit services, with profits for the poor; the line became operational most important mature work was his Apology for the Christian Religion, the completed portion of which is now known as the Pensées (Thoughts). Colle

39, the Pensées is considered a French classic

109
despite its fragmentary character. Touching on numerous areas of religious and philosophical thought, the Pensées the infinite immen- cartes, Pascal claims that reason is insufficient to find certainty. While the cogito something more important than thought and reason:

As for knowledge of God, Pascal claims that rea-

son is utterly insufficient for the enterprise. Against

Descartes, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others, proofs

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