Part 1: Introduction
Part 1: Introduction
Welcome!
Pascal’s Calculating Machine, 1645 Polished Brass Box 14 x 5 x 3 inches
We extend a warm welcome to each one of you this morning as we begin a new 10-week series on the life and teachings of Blaise Pascal. Malcolm Muggeridge said that what Pascal bequeathed us was “his incomparable picture of man – ourselves – confronting an empty, silent and illimitable universe, in which the only choices before man are this emptiness and the crucified Christ.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Douglas Groothuis, PhD, Philosopher: “In Blaise Pascal one discovers a brilliant intellect who combined scientific and philosophical acumen with a lucid and memorable style. Pascal addressed matters of ultimate concern with great urgency, cogency, and even humor.” • A.J. Krailsheimer, PhD, ChristChurch College, Oxford University: “Pascal systematically eliminates the props with which man sustains himself in his illusions. Cherished values are shown to be purely imaginary, arbitrary concessions to the convenience or prejudice of the moment….The Pensées (Thoughts) are as much a denunciation of the false god of self as an apology for Christianity.”
Example: Pensée 166
“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Peter Kreeft, PhD, Philosophy Professor, Boston College: “I know no pre-twentieth-century book except for the Bible that shoots Christian arrows farther into modern pagan hearts than the Pensées. I have taught “Great Books” classes for twenty years, and every year my students sit silent, even awed, at Pascal more than at any other of the forty great thinkers we cover throughout the history of Western philosophy and theology.” • Morris Bishop, PhD, Cornell University: “Pascal seems essentially the mind of genius, driven by passion. The story of his life is the history of his struggle to bring genius and passion into harmony.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, author, satirist: “Like a sublime kaleidoscope, Pascal presents us with thought after thought, all shining with truth as they come in mint condition from his brilliant mind.” • Os Guinness, DPhil, Oxford University: “With Pascal, as with the greatest of Christ’s saints, we see the ultimate – a human being ablaze with the glory of God as if consumed with divine fire. Of course, we are only to follow Pascal in so far as he followed Christ. But to do just that is sooner or later to reach the place where our shoes must come off, for we ourselves are on holy ground.”
About This Study The primary purpose of our engagement with Pascal is to explore what Peter Kreeft calls “the greatest book of Christian apologetics ever written,” and “to taste and maybe swallow some of his wisdom about your life.” We will begin with a brief biographical sketch of Pascal’s life in order to provide context for his work, after which we will turn our attention to his Pensées in order to see how he “smuggles Christianity back into Christendom” (Kreeft). Ultimately, we will discover that “every pensée, every word in every pensée, is a cobblestone in the road leading to the same Christ, a sign pointing to the same home.”
What is a Biography? “A written account of a person’s life that focuses on the character and career of the subject. Ideally, a biography is an accurate life history of a particular person, placed in the times in which he or she lived, but centered on a well-rounded and factual portrait of personality, character, and habits of mind.” - Kathleen Morner & Ralph Rausch NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms
On Reading Biographies
Biography
“When I start to read a biography, I often think of what Solomon wrote: ‘He who walks with the wise grows wise’ (Prov. 13:20). Phillips Brooks amplified that truth when he wrote (in 1886): ‘A biography is, indeed, a book; but far more than a book, it is a man….Never lay the biography down until the man is a living, breathing, acting person to you.’” - Warren Wiersbe
The Importance of Modeling 1. People translate conceptual truth into understandable reality. 2. “Modeling is the greatest form of unconscious learning” (Albert Bandura, Stanford University psychologist). 3. We are profoundly affected by other people. 4. We gain deep penetrating judgment & wisdom by inspecting the lives and stories of other people. 5. We are able to see for ourselves how “ideas have consequences” (Richard M. Weaver).
The Importance of Modeling 6.
7. 8.
We gain new insights and increased understanding by which we are able to govern our own lives for the glory of God. “Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened” (Mortimer J. Adler). We become “sharpened against the whetstone of another man’s wisdom and character” (Dr. Howard Hendricks).
“Join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Phil. 3:17).
Diversity of Souls “Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something – it may be without knowing that he knows it – which no one else knows: and…it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest.” - George MacDonald
George MacDonald 1824-1905
Chronology 1623
Blaise Pascal born in Clermont on June 19, son of Etienne and Antoinette Pascal (married in 1617)
1626
Pascal’s mother dies; Etienne is left with 3 children: Gilberte (1620), Blaise (1623), and Jacqueline (1625)
1631
Family moves to Paris so Etienne can educate his children
1635
At 12, Blaise unlocks the first 32 propositions of Euclidean geometry using his own logic
1638
Etienne in hiding from Cardinal Richelieu for two years; children alone
1640
Family moves to Rouen on January 2 after Etienne is appointed as tax commissioner
1640
Blaise publishes his first work, Essay on Cones (conic sections)
1645
After 3 years of planning and working, Pascal invents the first calculating machine
Chronology 1646
Pascal finds God (first conversion)
1646
Pascal begins experiments on the vacuum in the fall; publishes first work on the vacuum
1647
Pascal returns to Paris; meets the philosopher Descartes
1647
Blaise and Jacqueline begin ties with Port Royal
1649
Family moves back to Clermont-Ferrand
1651
Etienne Pascal dies on September 24 at the age of 63; Blaise is 28
1651
Jacqueline’s first retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs, November 2-5
1652
Jacqueline enters the convent on January 4
1654
Pascal’s two-hour encounter with God and conversion, November 23; The Ecstasy
Chronology 1655
Pascal’s retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs
1656
Writes the first of 17 Provincial Letters (continues until 1657)
1658
Begins work on his Apology of the Christian Religion or Pensées
1659
Pascal seriously ill until 1660
1661
Jacqueline dies in October
1662
Death of Pascal, August 19; he was 39 years old
1662
Pascal buried at St. Etienne du Mont, Paris
1670
First publication of the Pensées
3. Move to Rouen January 2, 1640 1640-1647
2. Move to Paris, 1631 Education of Children 1631-1640 1. Pascal’s Birthplace Clermont-Ferrand June 19, 1623 1623-1631
Etienne’s Educational Methods • First, learn to develop reason and judgment • Learn the nature of fact and its value • Information must come as an answer to curiosity, as a reward for the desire to know • Etienne taught history, geography, philosophy • Used games to illustrate and enforce principles • Deferred language (Latin) until 12 years of age • Taught children civil and canon law • Religious education: Bible, Church Fathers, Councils, ecclesiastical history
Etienne’s Educational Methods • Science; principles of the experimental method, observing, classifying, and proposing generalizations from his evidence (training in the experimental approach to truth was unknown in the schools of the time) • By the age of eleven, Pascal possessed the rudiments of the scientific method
Discovery of Geometry • Pascal heard his father’s friends talking about mathematics and geometry. • Blaise pleaded to learn geometry, but his father refused, fearing the charm of geometry would distract him from the classics. • His Father promised him geometry as soon as he learned Latin and Greek. • Etienne locked up his textbooks and cautioned his friends against mentioning mathematics in his presence. • All Blaise knew was that geometry is the science of making true diagrams and finding the proportions between them.
Discovery of Geometry • Alone in his room at 12 years of age, Pascal used charcoal and made diagrams on the floor, trying to make a perfectly round circle and an equilateral triangle. • He began to notice certain evident truths, or axioms, and formulated some definitions. • Using his reason, he proceeded from step to step. • He reached the 32nd proposition of Euclid: the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. • His father entered the room, unperceived, and forgave all.
The Academie libre (Academic Library) • Etienne Pascal was a member of the Academie libre. • The association met every Thursday to discuss scientific matters, particularly mathematics and physics. • Thirteen-year-old Blaise sat in the midst of these doctors, disputing with the best of them. • These men had found a new method: that exact observation and mathematical measurement are the first principles of our study of our universe; they accepted the inductive method. • Pascal learned that the way to truth is trial and error, experiment, and reason.
Move to Rouen • The family arrived on January 2, 1640 in Rouen; Etienne began work as the Royal Commissioner in High Normandy for the Tax Service. • At 16, Blaise published a tiny treatise on conic sections (disappeared). • He aided his father in endless mathematical calculations. • He wondered if a machine could overcome the drudgery. • Blaise imagined a calculating machine in 1642 or 1643 when he was 20, devoting three years in passion and hard work. • With the help of those who built machines, he made over 50 models.
The First Calculating Machine at 20 “The calculating machine represented Pascal’s genius in a new form. In his study of conics and projective geometry, he had trained his imagination to work in three dimensions. From picturing the behavior of planes and curves in space, he could turn his mind readily to the behavior of wheels and gears” (Bishop).
Pascal’s Only Successful Mechanical Invention
“Pascal knew how to animate copper and give wit to brass” - A friend
Pascal’s Health • “Pascal told his sister, late in his life, that from the age of eighteen, he had not passed a day without suffering. His spirit, naturally so emotional, was to be exasperated by the arrogant, urgent body. Days of health, of simple well-being, became dear and precious. Always close at hand, at the sick-room door, lurked the sense of death” (Bishop). • “He was constantly interrupted by sickness, which dogged him all his short life from the age of twenty-four on. The last few years of his life he was particularly weakened, and probably in 1660 he composed his ‘Prayer for the Good Use of Sickness’” (Guinness).
Biographical Summary “Blaise Pascal was, simply, one of the greatest men that have ever lived. Having made the discovery of mathematics at the age of twelve, at sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections which is the herald of modern projective geometry. At nineteen he invented, constructed, and offered for sale the first calculating machine. He gave Pascal’s Law to physics, proved the existence of the vacuum, and helped to establish the science of hydrodynamics. He created the mathematical theory of probability, in a discussion of the division of gamblers’ stakes. His speculations were important in the early development of infinitesimal calculus. After a night of religious revelation, when he was but thirty-one, he abandoned science, returning to it only to solve, as a
Biographical Summary diversion from the toothache, the problems of the cycloid. Espousing the theological principles of the Jansenists, he wrote, in their defense, the Letters provinciales, a controversial weapon which has not yet lost its edge. His prose style, novel in its strong simplicity, determined the shape and character of the French literary language. He devised a new method of teaching reading. He organized the first omnibus line. In the lucid moments of cruel illness, he wrote his Pensées, in preparation for an apology for Christianity, thoughts which have affected the mental cast of three centuries, thoughts which still stir and work and grow in modern minds. He died at 39.”
Welcome!
Pascal’s Calculating Machine, 1645 Polished Brass Box 14 x 5 x 3 inches
We extend a warm welcome to each one of you this morning as we begin a new 10-week series on the life and teachings of Blaise Pascal. Malcolm Muggeridge said that what Pascal bequeathed us was “his incomparable picture of man – ourselves – confronting an empty, silent and illimitable universe, in which the only choices before man are this emptiness and the crucified Christ.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Douglas Groothuis, PhD, Philosopher: “In Blaise Pascal one discovers a brilliant intellect who combined scientific and philosophical acumen with a lucid and memorable style. Pascal addressed matters of ultimate concern with great urgency, cogency, and even humor.” • A.J. Krailsheimer, PhD, ChristChurch College, Oxford University: “Pascal systematically eliminates the props with which man sustains himself in his illusions. Cherished values are shown to be purely imaginary, arbitrary concessions to the convenience or prejudice of the moment….The Pensées (Thoughts) are as much a denunciation of the false god of self as an apology for Christianity.”
Example: Pensée 166
“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Peter Kreeft, PhD, Philosophy Professor, Boston College: “I know no pre-twentieth-century book except for the Bible that shoots Christian arrows farther into modern pagan hearts than the Pensées. I have taught “Great Books” classes for twenty years, and every year my students sit silent, even awed, at Pascal more than at any other of the forty great thinkers we cover throughout the history of Western philosophy and theology.” • Morris Bishop, PhD, Cornell University: “Pascal seems essentially the mind of genius, driven by passion. The story of his life is the history of his struggle to bring genius and passion into harmony.”
Introducing Blaise Pascal • Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, author, satirist: “Like a sublime kaleidoscope, Pascal presents us with thought after thought, all shining with truth as they come in mint condition from his brilliant mind.” • Os Guinness, DPhil, Oxford University: “With Pascal, as with the greatest of Christ’s saints, we see the ultimate – a human being ablaze with the glory of God as if consumed with divine fire. Of course, we are only to follow Pascal in so far as he followed Christ. But to do just that is sooner or later to reach the place where our shoes must come off, for we ourselves are on holy ground.”
About This Study The primary purpose of our engagement with Pascal is to explore what Peter Kreeft calls “the greatest book of Christian apologetics ever written,” and “to taste and maybe swallow some of his wisdom about your life.” We will begin with a brief biographical sketch of Pascal’s life in order to provide context for his work, after which we will turn our attention to his Pensées in order to see how he “smuggles Christianity back into Christendom” (Kreeft). Ultimately, we will discover that “every pensée, every word in every pensée, is a cobblestone in the road leading to the same Christ, a sign pointing to the same home.”
What is a Biography? “A written account of a person’s life that focuses on the character and career of the subject. Ideally, a biography is an accurate life history of a particular person, placed in the times in which he or she lived, but centered on a well-rounded and factual portrait of personality, character, and habits of mind.” - Kathleen Morner & Ralph Rausch NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms
On Reading Biographies
Biography
“When I start to read a biography, I often think of what Solomon wrote: ‘He who walks with the wise grows wise’ (Prov. 13:20). Phillips Brooks amplified that truth when he wrote (in 1886): ‘A biography is, indeed, a book; but far more than a book, it is a man….Never lay the biography down until the man is a living, breathing, acting person to you.’” - Warren Wiersbe
The Importance of Modeling 1. People translate conceptual truth into understandable reality. 2. “Modeling is the greatest form of unconscious learning” (Albert Bandura, Stanford University psychologist). 3. We are profoundly affected by other people. 4. We gain deep penetrating judgment & wisdom by inspecting the lives and stories of other people. 5. We are able to see for ourselves how “ideas have consequences” (Richard M. Weaver).
The Importance of Modeling 6.
7. 8.
We gain new insights and increased understanding by which we are able to govern our own lives for the glory of God. “Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened” (Mortimer J. Adler). We become “sharpened against the whetstone of another man’s wisdom and character” (Dr. Howard Hendricks).
“Join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Phil. 3:17).
Diversity of Souls “Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something – it may be without knowing that he knows it – which no one else knows: and…it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest.” - George MacDonald
George MacDonald 1824-1905
Chronology 1623
Blaise Pascal born in Clermont on June 19, son of Etienne and Antoinette Pascal (married in 1617)
1626
Pascal’s mother dies; Etienne is left with 3 children: Gilberte (1620), Blaise (1623), and Jacqueline (1625)
1631
Family moves to Paris so Etienne can educate his children
1635
At 12, Blaise unlocks the first 32 propositions of Euclidean geometry using his own logic
1638
Etienne in hiding from Cardinal Richelieu for two years; children alone
1640
Family moves to Rouen on January 2 after Etienne is appointed as tax commissioner
1640
Blaise publishes his first work, Essay on Cones (conic sections)
1645
After 3 years of planning and working, Pascal invents the first calculating machine
Chronology 1646
Pascal finds God (first conversion)
1646
Pascal begins experiments on the vacuum in the fall; publishes first work on the vacuum
1647
Pascal returns to Paris; meets the philosopher Descartes
1647
Blaise and Jacqueline begin ties with Port Royal
1649
Family moves back to Clermont-Ferrand
1651
Etienne Pascal dies on September 24 at the age of 63; Blaise is 28
1651
Jacqueline’s first retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs, November 2-5
1652
Jacqueline enters the convent on January 4
1654
Pascal’s two-hour encounter with God and conversion, November 23; The Ecstasy
Chronology 1655
Pascal’s retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs
1656
Writes the first of 17 Provincial Letters (continues until 1657)
1658
Begins work on his Apology of the Christian Religion or Pensées
1659
Pascal seriously ill until 1660
1661
Jacqueline dies in October
1662
Death of Pascal, August 19; he was 39 years old
1662
Pascal buried at St. Etienne du Mont, Paris
1670
First publication of the Pensées
3. Move to Rouen January 2, 1640 1640-1647
2. Move to Paris, 1631 Education of Children 1631-1640 1. Pascal’s Birthplace Clermont-Ferrand June 19, 1623 1623-1631
Etienne’s Educational Methods • First, learn to develop reason and judgment • Learn the nature of fact and its value • Information must come as an answer to curiosity, as a reward for the desire to know • Etienne taught history, geography, philosophy • Used games to illustrate and enforce principles • Deferred language (Latin) until 12 years of age • Taught children civil and canon law • Religious education: Bible, Church Fathers, Councils, ecclesiastical history
Etienne’s Educational Methods • Science; principles of the experimental method, observing, classifying, and proposing generalizations from his evidence (training in the experimental approach to truth was unknown in the schools of the time) • By the age of eleven, Pascal possessed the rudiments of the scientific method
Discovery of Geometry • Pascal heard his father’s friends talking about mathematics and geometry. • Blaise pleaded to learn geometry, but his father refused, fearing the charm of geometry would distract him from the classics. • His Father promised him geometry as soon as he learned Latin and Greek. • Etienne locked up his textbooks and cautioned his friends against mentioning mathematics in his presence. • All Blaise knew was that geometry is the science of making true diagrams and finding the proportions between them.
Discovery of Geometry • Alone in his room at 12 years of age, Pascal used charcoal and made diagrams on the floor, trying to make a perfectly round circle and an equilateral triangle. • He began to notice certain evident truths, or axioms, and formulated some definitions. • Using his reason, he proceeded from step to step. • He reached the 32nd proposition of Euclid: the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. • His father entered the room, unperceived, and forgave all.
The Academie libre (Academic Library) • Etienne Pascal was a member of the Academie libre. • The association met every Thursday to discuss scientific matters, particularly mathematics and physics. • Thirteen-year-old Blaise sat in the midst of these doctors, disputing with the best of them. • These men had found a new method: that exact observation and mathematical measurement are the first principles of our study of our universe; they accepted the inductive method. • Pascal learned that the way to truth is trial and error, experiment, and reason.
Move to Rouen • The family arrived on January 2, 1640 in Rouen; Etienne began work as the Royal Commissioner in High Normandy for the Tax Service. • At 16, Blaise published a tiny treatise on conic sections (disappeared). • He aided his father in endless mathematical calculations. • He wondered if a machine could overcome the drudgery. • Blaise imagined a calculating machine in 1642 or 1643 when he was 20, devoting three years in passion and hard work. • With the help of those who built machines, he made over 50 models.
The First Calculating Machine at 20 “The calculating machine represented Pascal’s genius in a new form. In his study of conics and projective geometry, he had trained his imagination to work in three dimensions. From picturing the behavior of planes and curves in space, he could turn his mind readily to the behavior of wheels and gears” (Bishop).
Pascal’s Only Successful Mechanical Invention
“Pascal knew how to animate copper and give wit to brass” - A friend
Pascal’s Health • “Pascal told his sister, late in his life, that from the age of eighteen, he had not passed a day without suffering. His spirit, naturally so emotional, was to be exasperated by the arrogant, urgent body. Days of health, of simple well-being, became dear and precious. Always close at hand, at the sick-room door, lurked the sense of death” (Bishop). • “He was constantly interrupted by sickness, which dogged him all his short life from the age of twenty-four on. The last few years of his life he was particularly weakened, and probably in 1660 he composed his ‘Prayer for the Good Use of Sickness’” (Guinness).
Biographical Summary “Blaise Pascal was, simply, one of the greatest men that have ever lived. Having made the discovery of mathematics at the age of twelve, at sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections which is the herald of modern projective geometry. At nineteen he invented, constructed, and offered for sale the first calculating machine. He gave Pascal’s Law to physics, proved the existence of the vacuum, and helped to establish the science of hydrodynamics. He created the mathematical theory of probability, in a discussion of the division of gamblers’ stakes. His speculations were important in the early development of infinitesimal calculus. After a night of religious revelation, when he was but thirty-one, he abandoned science, returning to it only to solve, as a
Biographical Summary diversion from the toothache, the problems of the cycloid. Espousing the theological principles of the Jansenists, he wrote, in their defense, the Letters provinciales, a controversial weapon which has not yet lost its edge. His prose style, novel in its strong simplicity, determined the shape and character of the French literary language. He devised a new method of teaching reading. He organized the first omnibus line. In the lucid moments of cruel illness, he wrote his Pensées, in preparation for an apology for Christianity, thoughts which have affected the mental cast of three centuries, thoughts which still stir and work and grow in modern minds. He died at 39.”
