FRANKLIN LIBRARY LEATHER 100 Greatest PASCAL Pensees

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FRANKLIN LIBRARY BLAISE PASCAL PENSEES With an introduction by T. S. Eliot Beautiful Topgrain Leather Limited Edition FROM "THE 100 GREATEST BOOKS OF ALL TIME" COLLECTION . Blaise Pascal was a man of astonishing intellectual versatility who broke new ground as an inventor, scientist and mathematician. Had he never written a word on religion, he would undoubtedly still be famous as the inventor of the first calculator, a mathematician who anticipated the modern theory of probability, a scientist who helped lay the groundwork for modern science, and a writer who transformed French prose. Ironically, Pascal’s lasting fame rests on a disorganized, often illegible collection of notes found among his papers after his death, at the age of 39, in 1662. They were to have been used in a work Pascal never completed; a projected apology for the Christian religion. These notes, which posthumously were given the title Pensees (thoughts), have since been published in countless editions by scholars and editors who have often disagreed about the structure Pascal meant to give his argument, the order and form of the materials, and even, in many instances, the meaning of a cryptic or indecipherable jotting. Despite their fragmentary nature, the Pensees are so eloquently and powerfully written that they have assured Pascal a place in history as one of the world’s greatest religious thinkers and writers. Pascal believes only God is good; man is corrupt as a result of his original fall from grace. And while salvation is possible, it cannot be gained through reason. Truth resides in the heart, not in the intellect. Pascal does not deny the role of reason, but he does define its limits: “The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that t is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this.” What reason cannot attain is the truth of God. The philosophical concept of the infinite preoccupied most thinkers of Pascal’s time, and Pascal himself had devoted much of his mathematical efforts to a study of infinitely small quantities. The infinite plays a major role in Pascal’s meditations. The image of man poised between the infinitely large and the infinitely small recurs throughout the Pensees, and becomes one of the chief arguments Pascal uses to establish the limits of reason. Neither the philosopher nor the scientist, says Pascal, can ever discover the ultimate reality of things; rather, each answer, each solution only raises new questions. But if that is so, how can man come to know God, how can he attain goodness? The answer: through God’s grace, which comes through the heart. And Pascal says that only one religion acknowledges that man is poised between wretchedness and greatness, “that t is in man some great source of greatness and a great source of wretchedness.” Only the Christian religion reconciles grace and sin and enables man to live a moral life. Pascal believes that that grace and that salvation come through Christ. T remains Pascal’s problem of how to persuade the unbeliever to accept a God who cannot be perceived by reason. Pascal’s solution is one of the best known arguments in the Pensees , that of the wager. Pascal the mathematician, having watched his friends gamble, worked out a theory of the probability of numbers. In the Pensees , Pascal the religious apologist translates his mathematical interest in wagering into a religious argument for accepting God. First, he challenges the unbeliever to a bet on whether God does or does not exist. He then calculates the odds of winning by wagering for God: “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” This beautiful book features: Top Grade Full Tooled Leather Blue Binding Hubbed Tooled Le... read more

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