Blaise Pascal--Hero of the Faith

 

 BLAISE. PASCAL

  (1623–1662) 

 

 French mathematician and scientist. 

 

Christian apologist.

 

  Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrond,  When Pascal was three, his mother died, leaving him and two sisters in the care of their father.

 In 1631 the family moved to Paris, where the elder Pascal could provide better cultural and educational opportunities for his children. Blaise Pascal was extraordinarily gifted, especially in mathematics.

 By the time Pascal was twelve, he had worked out the equivalent of many of Euclid’s geometrical theorems. Subsequently, he made original contributions to geometry and calculus. The elder Pascal, much interested in the science and arts of his day, had a wide circle of like-minded friends, intellectuals like himself.

 Blaise Pascal was often present when these eminent men gathered for conversation. In this way Pascal met René Descartes, the noted philosopher, who has been called the father of modern rationalism and whose ideas Pascal was soon to regard as enemies of the Christian faith.

 At nineteen Pascal invented the first workable calculating machine to help his father complete his burdensome daily reports as a tax collector. The machine was based on a system of rotating discs—the foundation of arithmetical machines until modern times. 

 In 1646 the entire Pascal family was converted to Jansenism, a reform movement in Roman Catholicism. But Blaise Pascal’s devotion to the Christian faith really began with a mystical vision in November 1654. He described the details of his experience on a piece of parchment, which he sewed into the lining of his coat and which was found there at his death.

 In 1657 Pascal published his Provincial Letters, a masterpiece of irony and satire written to support the Jansenists’ demand for a re-emphasis on Augustine’s doctrine of grace within the Catholic church. Around 1658 Pascal undertook to prepare an Apology for the Christian Religion. The work was never completed, for Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine.

 He left only a series of remarkable notes, first published in 1670, eight years after his death, as Pensées (Thoughts). The work is a classic of literature and apologetics. It puts the case for vital Christianity against the rationalism of Descartes and the skepticism of the French writer Montaigne.

 Pascal noted that man’s need for God is made evident by his misery apart from God, his constant need for diversion, and his resort to the world of the imagination. God can be known through an act of faith, itself given by God. Pascal held that the supporting evidence for the truth of Christianity is overwhelming: fulfilled prophecies, miracles, the witness of history, the self-authentication of Scripture.

 In spite of the strong external evidences, God is known by the heart. “The heart has its reasons which the reason does not know,” wrote Pascal.