If education, insistently focused on immanent goods, refuses to help us think through the questions of our nature that yawn beneath our practical alternatives, life’s significant choices will seem groundless.1

Law school or a PhD? The young fixate on such questions. Trying to be prudent, they investigate them by deploying the modes of analysis they have been taught to use: looking up countless opportunities, tabulating pluses and minuses, making spreadsheets to keep track of it all. But the question of how to live cannot be answered by aggregating

His unstable fortunes introduce him to the full range of human possibilities, “from the lowest up to the highest, except the throne,” in the capital of the Enlightenment at its peak.4 Then he turns his back on it all. One day, in the grips of a vision he invites us to compare to the illumination of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Rousseau

Rousseau, by contrast, sees that Pascal had touched on truth. Voltaire will come to hate him even more than Pascal because Rousseau uses the kinds of arguments and evidence the Enlightenment has developed to critique the Enlightenment itself. He is, in Voltaire’s eyes, a philosophe who gives aid and comfort to the priestly enemies of philosophy and

Pascal seeks to understand just what the soul enjoys in diversion—in being “turned aside,” as the etymology of the word suggests.

Pascal himself explains his rhetorical approach to man: If he exalts himself, I humble him. if he humbles himself, I exalt him. and continue to contradict him until he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible monster. Neither exaltation nor misery is proper to us on its own, for we are both “great and miserable.” If Pascal can bring his reader to

Pascal will build his next project when he suddenly abandons The Provincial Letters at the height of their literary success. He does so because he has concluded, prophetically, that “eloquence amuses more people than it converts.”

The political cunning of the Jesuits makes plain that they are no innocents. Worse, they openly pray for the damnation of their enemies, such as the author of the Provincials. One wonders if those who pray that others might go to hell ever had any interest in the salvation of souls in the first place. For Pascal, the word that most properly

To Pascal, the universe revealed by modern physics is a boundless vacuum in which man finds himself at sea, prisoner of a meaningless nature that is utterly silent in the face of the human demand for the wisdom we need in order to live well.