Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the 'Pensees'

Abstract

Although Blaise Pascal's Penses have occupied a uniquely privileged niche in the literary canon in France for over three centuries, they had long slumbered in America. It is just in the last thirty years that critical theorists in this country have been discovering in them texts rich in modernist and post-modernist readings. Still, critics here have largely ignored the renewal in traditional Pascal studies that has occurred in France over the last four decades. Pascal and Disbelief introduces readers to the recent developments in Pascal scholarship, particularly the return of the Penses to their original status as the working draft of Pascal's never-completed Apology for the Christian Religion. All sources, including critical commentary and little-known seventeenth-century texts, are presented both in their original French and in English translation. The Catholic University Press of America