The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Blaise Pascal
1623–1662FrenchRoman Catholic (Jansenist)
A first-rank mathematician who met God one night and sewed the record of it into his coat.
Summary
- Lived 1623–1662, French.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Roman Catholic (Jansenist).
The life
Blaise Pascal was a prodigy: he built a working mechanical calculator in his teens to help his father with tax accounts, settled questions about vacuum and air pressure by experiment, and worked out the beginnings of probability theory in letters with Fermat.
On the night of 23 November 1654 something happened that he wrote down on a scrap of parchment, fire, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the god of philosophers and scholars, and he sewed the scrap into the lining of his coat and moved it to each new coat for the rest of his life. A servant found it after he died. He spent his remaining years defending the Jansenists at Port-Royal in the Provincial Letters and collecting notes for a book arguing the Christian faith to skeptics.
He never finished it; the notes were published as Pensees eight years after his death, and they have outlived almost everything written to answer them. He died at thirty-nine.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · 1600–1730
- 1620The Mayflower sailsRoughly a hundred passengers, about half of them from a separatist congregation that had already fled to Holland, cross to a cold New England coast in November. Close to half die before spring.
- 1628John Bunyan is born at ElstowA tinker's son in a Bedfordshire village, baptized that November. He will have almost no formal schooling and will write the most-read book in English after the Bible.
- 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
- 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Blaise Pascal at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wrote down the night God met him, sewed the paper into his coat, and carried it until he died.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.