Pascal et Arnauld

Abstract

By Michel Le Guern. Paris, Champion, 2003. 239 pp. Hb €45.00. This book gives a very successful account of the often complex relationship between Antoine Arnauld and Blaise Pascal. Covering fully the period both before the two men met and the major moments of their collaboration after their first encounter, notably in the battle against the Jesuits, and in the publication of works like the Provinciales, the Pensées and La Logique, Michel Le Guern charts the different stages of their friendship and intellectual association. Le Guern convincingly shows how Arnauld's influence appears in many of Pascal's writings, most prominently in his musings upon grace and in his response to Descartes. He argues that, to a large extent, the image which we have today of Pascal was that created by Arnauld at the time of the posthumous publication of the Pensées in 1670. Pascal's influence on Arnauld, on the other hand, was less marked, but in Arnauld's understanding of rhetoric and certain key passages of La Logique, Pascal's voice is clearly discernible. The one serious deficiency of this book is Le Guern's neglect of those works in English which deal with Arnauld in particular, such as Steven Nadler's Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas and Thomas Carr's Resilience of Rhetoric. It is all the more unforgivable given the fact that he opens the book with a lament on the lack of any works which deal with the two thinkers together.