Though Blaise Pascal’s years were few (1623–1662), they were replete with versatile accomplishment. For he was not only the inventor of a sophisticated computing machine, and the designer of a public transportation system for Paris, but a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, Christian apologist, theological controversialist, and rhetorician of striking genius. But although, like Leibniz after him, he could pass for the very model of a modern-era polymath, his claims on the attention of posterity, like Leibniz’s, far exceed those of mere breadth or of mere knowledge. He is a spiritual blood-brother to every one of us, believer or not, who has, like Jacob, wrestled with the angel. What has made him so is the testimony of his pen, above all in the fragmentary remains known to us as the Pensées. They, together with the exquisitely finished Provinciales, have secured him a place in the foremost rank of France’s immortal writers and thinkers. As contributions to the modern world’s intellectual and literary capital, his achievements are un acquis.

But the foregoing grandiose platitudes should not be allowed to mislead, true as Gospel though they are. (And how true that is, readers who have experienced the haunting insight and penetrating expression that Pascal marshalled on behalf of the Faith are peculiarly well-equipped to say.) For, although Pascal was well aware of his abilities—and was, indeed, proud of them—unlike, say, Thucydides, he never set out to bequeath to posterity a “possession for all time.” Nor, indeed, did he aim to confect “literature” at all. Yet, certainly with the Pensées, and arguably with the Provinciales, he not only succeeded, but succeeded eminently at doing both. However, his literary success is not only largely incidental insofar as it is a success, but also, from his point of view, insofar as it is “his.” For like his master, St. Augustine, he was deeply imbued with a conviction that seemed both demanded by orthodoxy and confirmed by introspection—to wit, that the credit for “our” good is properly not ours at all but Another’s. Non nobis, Domine.