Pascal and Disbelief

Although Blaise Pascal's Penses have occupied a uniquely privileged niche in the literary canon in France for over three centuries, they had long slumbered in America. It is just in the last thirty years that critical theorists in this country have been discovering in them texts rich in modernist and post-modernist readings. Still, critics here have largely ignored the renewal in traditional Pascal studies that has occurred in France over the last four decades.

Pascal and Disbelief introduces American readers to the recent developments in Pascal scholarship, particularly the return of the Penses to their original status as the working draft of Pascal's never-completed Apology for the Christian Religion. All sources, including critical commentary and little-known seventeenth-century texts, are presented both in their original French and in English translation.

This new work aims to answer a question that has puzzled readers since the Penses first appeared in 1670: To whom is Pascal's call to Christian conversion really addressed? David Wetsel asserts that the answer lies in a series of fragments he believes represent Pascal's draft of a preface to the Apology. He argues, based on these fragments, that Pascal's call to conversion was directed not at the erudite atheists or resolute skeptics of his time but at those "seekers" who had not yet fallen into hardened disbelief. This conclusion depends on an essential distinction that Pascal makes throughout the Penses between two forms of disbelief, the alterable and the incorrigible. This distinction, Wetsel maintains, is deeply rooted in Pascal's allegiance to the Augustinian doctrines of election and predestination. For Pascal, the truly hardened, incorrigible disbelievers must be numbered among the damned. The "seekers," however, would be susceptible to the shock tactics he employs in the first half of the Apology. By approaching the Penses from the vista of the contemporary study of the history of religions, Wetsel seeks to contribute to a rapprochement between modernist and traditionalist Pascal studies and thereby initiate a new dialogue between theology and critical theory.