Perspective

Blaise Pascal's perspective is as complex as the man himself. Pascal was a perpetually ill child prodigy, a probability theorist of great historical import, a talented scientist in his own right, a well-known apologist for the Christian religion and a philosopher. More specifically, he was a Roman Catholic Jansenist, the perspective most relevant to the Pensees. The view focuses on original sin and the depravity of human beings. It holds that divine grace is crucial to saving belief and that in an important respect God predestines the elect. The movement existed within the Catholic Church between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and counted Pascal as one of its most important movements. Jansenists saw themselves as followers of Augustine.

The Jansenists focused on an interpretation of Augustine's concept of "efficacious graces" which holds that only part of humanity is predestined by salvation, though it held that God's love was...