Pensees

Summary

The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy. Because the order of the fragments is uncertain, every edition is an interpretation. The Port-Royal edition of 1670 smoothed and censored them, and the 1897 edition by Léon Brunschvicg, followed in Trotter's English, regrouped them into fourteen thematic sections. Section I gathers thoughts on mind and style, including the distinction between the geometrical spirit, which reasons from few clear principles, and the spirit of finesse, which grasps many subtle ones at once. Section II, on the misery of man without God, contains Pascal's most penetrating psychology. Man is suspended between two infinites, too large for the infinitely small and too small for the infinite. Imagination, 'that mistress of error and falsity', rules judges and physicians through robes and caps and can make the wisest philosopher sweat on a wide plank over a precipice. Disease and self-interest corrupt judgment. Above all, humans cannot bear to be alone with themselves. Weariness, the condition of being without passion, business or diversion, produces gloom and despair, so people hunt, gamble, make war and seek office to avoid thinking about death and their own condition. Section III contains the wager. Reason cannot decide whether God exists, but one must choose, and the infinite gain of a right choice outweighs any finite stake. Pascal advises the reluctant to act as if they believed, taking holy water and having masses said, to quiet the passions that block faith. Section IV distinguishes reason from the heart, which knows first principles and loves God directly ('The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know'). Section V on justice argues that custom and force, not reason, found laws. Section VI on the philosophers sets Epictetus's pride against Montaigne's despair and places man between greatness and wretchedness: a thinking reed, neither angel nor brute. Sections VII to XIII develop the positive case, through original sin as the key to human contradiction, the perpetuity of the true religion, Old Testament figures and prophecies, the proofs of Jesus Christ and miracles. This last subject was sharpened by the 1656 healing of Pascal's niece at Port-Royal by the relic of the Holy Thorn. Among them is 'The Mystery of Jesus', a meditation on Christ's agony in Gethsemane while the disciples sleep. Section XIV collects polemical fragments against the Jesuits. Unfinished and broken, the Pensées read less as a treatise than as the notebook of a mind arguing with itself, and their compression is a large part of why they have outlasted the apologetic project they were meant to serve.

Plot or Argument

• Section I: the geometrical spirit and the spirit of finesse

  Notes on two kinds of intelligence, on style and persuasion, and on the order of the planned book. Pascal judges Montaigne, Epictetus and Descartes, the last 'useless and uncertain'.

• Section II: wretchedness, imagination and diversion

  Man's disproportion between two infinites; imagination and disease as sources of error; the vanity of custom and opinion; weariness and the restless pursuit of diversion (hunting, gambling, war, office) as flight from the thought of death.

• Section III: the wager

  Since reason cannot settle God's existence and abstention is impossible, the rational gamble is on God. Pascal answers the objector who 'cannot believe' by prescribing habit and ritual to subdue the passions.

• Section IV: the heart, custom and the means of belief

  Reason, custom and inspiration are the three ways to belief. The heart perceives first principles and God; the 'automaton' of habit inclines the mind.

• Sections V–VI: justice, the philosophers and the thinking reed

  Laws rest on custom and force, and 'Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side'. Stoic pride and sceptical despair each grasp half of human nature. Man is a reed, but a thinking one, and his dignity lies in thought.

• Section VII: morality, doctrine and the hidden God

  Original sin explains the doubleness of human nature; self-love and concupiscence; the God who hides himself; the members of a body as an image of the Church; 'The Mystery of Jesus' and the agony in the garden.

• Sections VIII–XIII: proofs of the Christian religion

  The perpetuity of the Jewish and Christian tradition, Old Testament types and figures, fulfilled prophecies, the character of Jesus and the apostles, and miracles, including reflections connected to the Holy Thorn healing at Port-Royal.

• Section XIV: polemical fragments

  Notes against the Jesuits and on the controversies of Port-Royal, continuous with the Provincial Letters.

Characters

• The libertine interlocutor, implied addressee

  The worldly unbeliever, indifferent to his salvation, whom the apology aims to unsettle and whose objections Pascal voices in the wager.

• Michel de Montaigne, foil and source

  Pascal's constant reading, praised for exposing human weakness and blamed for 'thoroughly pagan views on death'.

• Epictetus, foil

  The Stoic who saw human greatness but not human misery, paired with Montaigne as the two halves of philosophy.

• René Descartes, target

  The philosopher who, in Pascal's view, needed God only to set the world in motion.

• Jesus in Gethsemane, subject of meditation

  The suffering Christ of 'The Mystery of Jesus', in agony while his disciples sleep, who speaks to the believer in the second person.

Lessons

• Diversion as the flight from oneself

  Pascal argues that people seek constant activity, from hunting to war, because being alone with their thoughts is unbearable. The analysis anticipates later accounts of boredom, avoidance and compulsive distraction, though Pascal's remedy is religious rather than therapeutic.

  • What would Pascal make of the smartphone?
  • Is his claim that 'all the unhappiness of men' comes from being unable to stay quietly in a room psychologically plausible?
  • How does diversion differ from rest or recreation in his account?

• The imagination rules the judge and the physician

  Fragment 82 describes imagination as a power that can make people 'healthy and sick' and that gives authority to robed doctors whose real knowledge is thin. It is an early analysis of placebo, prestige and phobic fear, and also a warning that judgment is always embodied.

  • Is the white coat Pascal's square cap?
  • Pascal's philosopher on the plank 'cannot bear the thought without a cold sweat'. What does this show about the limits of reason over fear?

• Wagering under uncertainty

  The wager applies the newly invented mathematics of expected value to the deepest existential question. Whatever one thinks of its theology, it introduced decision theory under uncertainty and the idea that a refusal to choose is itself a choice.

  • Does the wager work if many gods are possible?
  • Pascal's advice to 'act as if' one believed anticipates behavioural approaches to changing belief. Is that manipulation or wisdom?

• Greatness and wretchedness together

  Against Stoic pride and sceptical despair, Pascal insists that humans are both noble and miserable, a thinking reed, neither angel nor brute. Trying to be purely one or the other ends in its opposite.

  • How does 'he who would act the angel acts the brute' apply to moral perfectionism?
  • Can the thinking reed's dignity survive without Pascal's theology?

Context

Pascal wrote amid the scientific revolution and the religious conflicts of seventeenth-century France. Jansenism, an Augustinian movement centred on the convent of Port-Royal, stressed human corruption and the necessity of grace, and was attacked by the Jesuits and condemned by Rome. The libertins érudits and the readers of Montaigne represented a fashionable scepticism. Descartes's new philosophy promised certainty through reason. Pascal, himself a first-rank mathematician and experimenter, turned the tools of the new science (probability, the analysis of infinity) against the self-sufficiency of reason.

Composition

Pascal worked on his apology mainly from about 1656 to 1658, after the Holy Thorn miracle, and gave a lecture outlining its plan at Port-Royal around 1658. Illness increasingly stopped him from working. After his death, his family and Port-Royal friends had the fragments copied and published a selective, edited version in 1670. Modern editors (Faugère 1844, Brunschvicg 1897, Lafuma 1951, Sellier 1976) have argued over whether to follow the surviving bundles or a thematic order. Trotter's translation (1908) follows Brunschvicg; the Everyman edition of 1931 added T. S. Eliot's introduction.

Reception

Voltaire attacked Pascal as a 'sublime misanthrope' in the Lettres philosophiques (1734). The Romantics and Chateaubriand revered him as a tragic genius. Nietzsche admired and pitied him, and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and twentieth-century existentialists read him as a forerunner. The wager remains a standard topic in philosophy of religion and decision theory, and the diversion fragments are routinely cited in writing on boredom and distraction.

Comparisons

• essays-montaigne

  Montaigne is everywhere in the Pensées: the diversion fragments, the instability of custom and the 'truth on this side of the Pyrenees' all rework the Essays. Pascal uses Montaigne's scepticism to humble reason, then condemns his serene acceptance of death.

• confessions

  Pascal's Jansenism is Augustinian at root. The restless heart that finds no rest outside God, and the doctrine of grace that underlies the wager's appeal to the passions, both descend from Augustine's Confessions.

• discourse-on-method

  Descartes founds certainty on clear and distinct ideas; Pascal answers that the heart knows first principles reason cannot prove, and that a God who merely starts the world in motion is not the God of Abraham.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kierkegaard's analysis of despair as a misrelation of the self develops Pascal's picture of weariness and diversion, and both thinkers treat inner misery as evidence of a spiritual condition rather than mere unhappiness.

• essays-and-aphorisms

  Schopenhauer's swing of life between pain and boredom echoes Pascal's weariness fragment closely, but he offers aesthetic contemplation and resignation where Pascal offers grace.

• the-varieties-of-religious-experience

  James's 'sick soul' lectures describe the melancholic temperament and conversion crises that Pascal's Night of Fire exemplifies. James treats Pascal's wager more directly in his separate essay 'The Will to Believe'.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The fragmentary form. These are notes for an unfinished apology, and the Brunschvicg numbering is an editor's arrangement, so read each fragment as a complete thought and then ask how it fits the planned argument from human misery to Christian remedy.
• The diversion fragments in Section II (139 and following), where Pascal explains hunting, gambling, war and the king's busy court as ways of avoiding the thought of death. Watch how he anticipates every objection about why people actually enjoy these things.
• Fragment 82 on imagination, with its philosopher sweating on a wide plank over a precipice and its judges and physicians in square caps. Notice how often Pascal argues by picture rather than by syllogism.
• The wager in fragment 233, which is a dialogue. Track when the voice is Pascal's and when it is the objector's, especially at the point where the objector says he is so made that he cannot believe.
• The Mystery of Jesus in fragment 552, where the tone changes completely from argument to prayer and Christ speaks to the reader in the second person.

Key terms and names

Diversion (divertissement)

Pascal's word for any activity that turns the mind away from itself and its mortality, from hunting a hare to seeking office. In Section II it explains why people cannot stay quietly in a room.

The wager

The argument of fragment 233 that, since reason cannot decide whether God exists and refusing to choose is itself a choice, one should stake one's finite life on God, because the possible gain is infinite.

Spirit of geometry and spirit of finesse

The two kinds of mind described in Section I. The geometrical mind reasons slowly from a few clear principles; the mind of finesse grasps many subtle principles at once, as in judging people.

The heart

In Section IV, the faculty that knows first principles and perceives God directly, without proof. It is not mere emotion but a kind of immediate knowing that reason depends on.

Thinking reed

Pascal's image in fragment 347 for human beings: as fragile as a reed that a vapour can kill, yet nobler than the universe that crushes them, because they know that they die.

Hidden God

Pascal's conviction, drawing on Isaiah, that God neither shows himself plainly nor hides himself completely, so that those who seek him find him and those who do not are left without excuse.

Port-Royal and Jansenism

The convent near Paris and the Augustinian movement around it that emphasized human corruption and the necessity of grace. Pascal's sister Jacqueline was a nun there, and his niece's healing by the Holy Thorn in 1656 took place there.

Libertine

The worldly, indifferent unbeliever of seventeenth-century polite society, the reader Pascal hoped first to unsettle and then to persuade.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension According to the diversion fragments, why do people prefer the hunt to the hare, and why is a king without diversion a wretched man?
2. Comprehension Lay out the steps of the wager in fragment 233. What does Pascal tell the objector who says he cannot make himself believe?
3. Comprehension What examples does fragment 82 give of imagination overpowering reason, and why does Pascal say magistrates and physicians need their robes and square caps?
4. Interpretation Pascal sets Epictetus and Montaigne against each other as two halves of philosophy. What does each see truly about human nature, and what does each miss?
5. Interpretation When Pascal writes that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know, is he abandoning reason or describing a deeper kind of knowing? Use Section IV to support your answer.
6. Interpretation The line about the eternal silence of infinite spaces stands alone as fragment 206. Whose voice is it, Pascal's or the unbeliever's, and how does your answer change its meaning?
7. Interpretation Why does Pascal claim that he who would act the angel acts the brute? How does that warning connect to his account of human greatness and wretchedness in Section VI?
8. Big Question Pascal says all human unhappiness comes from the inability to sit quietly in a room. Is he right that much of our busyness is flight from ourselves, and is quiet reflection the cure or only the beginning of one?

Faith Connections

• Isaiah 45:15 (Scripture)

  Isaiah addresses God as one who hides himself. Pascal cites the verse and builds on it his doctrine of the hidden God, who gives enough light for seekers and enough obscurity to humble the proud.

• Psalm 8:3-5 (Scripture)

  The psalmist looks at the heavens and asks what man is that God is mindful of him, yet says man is crowned with glory and honor. Pascal's thinking reed, small before the infinite spaces yet greater than them because it knows, is a meditation on this same doubleness.

• Matthew 26:36-46 (Scripture)

  In Gethsemane Jesus asks his disciples to watch with him, and three times finds them asleep. Pascal's Mystery of Jesus turns this scene into a summons to the reader, who must not sleep while Christ is in agony.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Pascal's restless gamblers and hunters who cannot stay in their room are Augustine's restless heart observed in the salons and courts of seventeenth-century France.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Human beings are a contradiction: capable of thought that comprehends the universe, yet weak, deceived by imagination, and unable to bear their own company. No philosophy explains both the greatness and the wretchedness, since the Stoics see only the first and the sceptics only the second. Christianity explains both through creation in God's image and the fall, and offers a remedy in grace through Christ. Therefore a person who honestly examines his own condition has reason to seek God, and since reason cannot settle the question by proof, he should wager his life on God's existence.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. Pascal repeatedly sets opposites side by side to show human doubleness, as in fragment 347, where man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but a thinking reed, and in fragment 358, where man is neither angel nor brute and he who would act the angel acts the brute. The balanced clauses make the contradiction itself the argument.

Debate: Resolved: Pascal's wager gives a rational person sufficient reason to seek faith.

Memory Work

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

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber

Writing Prompts

Essay: Pascal plans to move the indifferent reader from discomfort to faith. Using the diversion fragments of Section II, the wager in fragment 233 and the thinking reed of fragment 347, argue whether Pascal's strongest weapon is logical argument or psychological insight, and why.

Comparison with Essays: Pascal read Montaigne constantly, borrowing his observations on custom, vanity and diversion while rejecting his calm acceptance of death. Compare how the two writers describe human weakness and what each concludes a person should do about it, and argue which offers the more honest account of the human condition.

Medical Lens

The Pensées offer one of the most acute early-modern phenomenologies of boredom, anxiety and avoidance. Weariness (131) lists the affective consequences of idleness in terms close to a description of depressive mood. Diversion (139 and following) explains compulsive activity, gambling included, as an escape from rumination on death. Fragment 82 credits imagination with making people healthy or sick, describes acrophobic fear in the face of known safety, and mocks physicians who rely on costume for authority. Fragment 109 notes how illness reshapes desire and how anticipatory fear outruns actual suffering. Pascal was chronically ill from youth: he had headaches, digestive disorders and an episode of leg paralysis, and the autopsy reported by his sister Gilberte Périer described abnormalities of the brain and intestines. Retrospective diagnoses (migraine, tuberculosis, gastric cancer, intestinal disease) remain speculative. His separate 'Prayer to Ask God for the Good Use of Sickness' and the Memorial of 1654, an ecstatic experience recorded in fragments of exclamation, are central texts for the history of illness, piety and altered states. The wager's advice to quiet the passions through habit is sometimes compared, cautiously, with behavioural therapy.

• Fragment 82, Section II

  Imagination as the 'mistress of error', able to make men healthy or sick; the philosopher sweating on a plank above a precipice; cats, rats and a crushed coal that 'unhinge the reason'; physicians in cassocks and mules; diseases that spoil judgment.

  Mind BodyNeurosis AnxietyPhysicians DoctorsQuackery Charlatans
• Fragment 109, Section II

  Health and sickness each produce their own desires; we take medicine cheerfully when ill; our fears come from imagining a state we are not in.

  HypochondriaNeurosis Anxiety
• Fragment 131, Section II

  Weariness: at rest without occupation, man feels his nothingness and from his heart rise gloom, sadness, fretfulness and despair.

  Melancholia Depression
• Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II

  Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.

  AddictionNeurosis AnxietyDeath Dying
• Fragment 233, Section III

  The wager, ending with the counsel to act as if believing, taking holy water and having masses said, to abate the passions and 'deaden your acuteness'.

  Philosophy AS TherapyPsychology Unconscious
• Fragment 552, Section VII

  The Mystery of Jesus: Christ's self-inflicted agony in Gethsemane, the sleeping disciples, and the voice that says physicians will not heal.

  PainPhilosophy AS TherapyAltered States

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Read fragment 82 as a seventeenth-century theory of the placebo response and the white-coat effect, and assess what it gets right and what it cannot explain.

• Fiction

  Write the night of 23 November 1654 from the point of view of the servant who, after Pascal's death, finds the Memorial sewn into the lining of his coat.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Pascal and Montaigne about whether one should think about death daily, with a modern palliative-care physician as moderator.

• Classroom

  Give students the wager as a decision matrix and have them test it against the objection of many gods, then discuss what Pascal's 'act as if' advice adds.

Further Reading

• Pensées (trans. A. J. Krailsheimer), Blaise Pascal

  Modern translation following the Lafuma ordering.

• The Provincial Letters, Blaise Pascal

• The Hidden God, Lucien Goldmann

  Sociological reading of Pascal and Racine as tragic visions of Jansenism.

• Pascal, Alban Krailsheimer

• Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey