SOURCE: "Good Reason, Bad Reason, Heart," in God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 145-60.

In the following excerpt, Kolakowski examines several key aspects of Pascal's theology, including his concepts of heart, free will, truth, faith, knowledge, and reason.

[The] heart, at least in its primary sense, that related to the acquisition of religious truths, is not a sentimental attitude or an emotion. It is a faculty of intellectual intuition whereby we accept truths unattainable either by mathematical reasoning or by the testimony of sense experience. In the essay De l'Esprit géométrique the word "heart" does not appear, but fragment 110 of the Pensées clearly confirms that the notion is applicable even in the context of geometrical investigation. This essay is immensely rich, and only one crucial point needs to be...