I was ecstatic to find a short Wiki article on “Christian Humanism” – some sign that my beliefs in God and the dignity of man were shared under some impressive sounding philosophical label – and at the bottom of the page were a list of “Christian humanists.” Who’s name was included? Blaise Pascal.

I don’t know why he stuck out to me more so than the other names on the list – it would see to me that anyone interested in the concept should flock to the work of Kierkegaard as they go about formalizing a belief system – but the Frenchman who’s triangle we learned about in Algebra II stayed in my head.

I spent the course of the next several months trying to figure out why exactly Pascal was included on that list. Any Google searches for “Pascal Humanism” or “Pascal Humanist” resulted in atheists bashing the poor Frenchman for his wager. Yet by the end of my freshman year at Swarthmore College in PA I had discovered why Blaise deserved to be on that list: Pascal was not working to compose an apology that would attack disbelievers for having turned their backs to God; Blaise believed that suffering defined the human condition (his term for this was “wretchedness”) and wished to explain what he believed was the only cure – man’s belief in the Christian God.

Rather than write an entire essay on the Pensées (the one above is perhaps one of the best I’ve read on the web) I’ll leae any readers with some of the text’s greatest fragments – esp. those which support my interpretation of his would be apology (I’ve given the numeration from the Penguin edition):

“First Part: Wretchedness of man without God. Second part: Happiness of man with God.” (6)

“Man infinitely surpasses man” (131)

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (423)