IN THIS absorbing and ambitious biography, Graham Tomlin proves an informed and enthusiastic guide, who illuminates an extraordinarily creative and often anguished life. Blaise Pascal is remembered chiefly today for his “wager” argument — that salvation and ultimate happiness rest on rational human beings’ wagering with their lives on a cosmic gamble concerning the existence or non-existence of God. Tomlin examines the argument in some detail, but his principal concern is to introduce a 17th-century French scientific genius and religious contrarian.
In these pages, Pascal emerges as an enigma and a conflicted soul, capable of speaking to our time as well as his own. In turn mathematician, inventor, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by some as the “Aristotle” of his age, he was credited with the development of probability theory (the mathematics of predicting the future), the invention of the first mechanical calculating machine, and an urban public transportation system of huge benefit to the poor.
A moralist with an intellectual passion for truth, Pascal also became infamous for his part in a protracted religious controversy within the Roman Catholic Church. Unable to accept the moral laxity and sophistry of the Jesuits, he employed his literary gifts and lacerating wit in the cause of Jansenism — a radical movement in Roman Catholicism which emphasised good works and the necessity of a personal prayer life and inward examination as the bedrock of faith.
Pascal denied that true religion could be reduced to a matter of taste — to a flaccid adjunct to the vapid pretensions of a fashionable Parisian society in thrall to the opulence and excess of the Royal Court of Louis XIV, both wonderfully brought to life here by Tomlin. Pascal needed certitude — a faith that could satisfy the mind and heart in a changing and ambiguous world.
New scientific discoveries concerning the possibility of an infinite universe disturbed him, as did his dark estimation of man as “a monster, a chaos, a contradiction and a prodigy” — wretched without God, and given to helpless self-absorption. In his reading of the human predicament, Pascal foretold the troubling narratives that would hold sway in the 20th century and beyond.
T. S. Eliot wrote: “I can think of no Christian writer more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but who have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being.”
Peace, accompanied by an unsurpassed joy, came to Pascal in a timeless moment of conversion on 23 November 1654, a note of which survived in his own hand and defined his remaining years. Sewn into the coat that he was wearing, and discovered only after his death, it began: “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, not of the philosophers and scholars.”
From that night, Pascal gave himself unreservedly to God and defended Christianity against its detractors. In a spiritually arid time, he pointed to “the mystery of the Redeemer” and a God who exceeded the limits of reason, and could speak to the deeper intuitions of the human heart.
Whom was this God for? As Tomlin observes, certainly “not for the contented . . . unaware of any deep yearning of the soul”. He was, by contrast, the beginning of an answer to those who felt the tragedy and the beauty of things: those who acknowledged a hunger or longing within themselves beyond words, and were prepared to lead morally strenuous lives with the face of the crucified Christ always before them.
Pascal died, aged 39, in chosen poverty. Enigmatic to the end, he prepared well for death and what lay beyond — “a world he yearned for and on which he wagered his life”. Tomlin commends him to us as a dazzlingly original thinker, a serious seeker after God, and a disquieting but necessary presence along the Christian journey.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian. His latest book is Reappraisals: A life less ordinary (Liverpool Hope University Press, 2025).
Blaise Pascal: The man who made the modern world
Graham Tomlin
Hodder & Stoughton £25
(978-1-3998-0764-7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
