by James Matthew Wilson.

It would be nearly impossible to overstate the influence on modern Christianity of the French mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In his lifetime, Pascal was known chiefly for his work on the mathematics of probability and his experiments proving the reality of the vacuum, in addition to his controversial writings in defense of French Jansenism.

Late in his short life, however, Pascal engaged his fellow Jansenists and his unbelieving "libertine" friends (whose interior lives seemed to prove the reality of a spiritual vacuum) with whom he would sit long hours at the gambling table (to make use of his theory of probability), arguing for the truth of Christianity. We have evidence of these efforts only from a set of notes found after his death.

Pascal's Pensées (Thoughts), as these notes came to be called in their published form, has given shape to how we talk about Christianity ever since. Pascal provides a stark, indeed chilling, account of the human condition and adapts the ancient wisdom of St. Augustine to his own view of the world, all with the purpose of inducing all human beings to seek God.

Pascal's notes come to 923 different fragments, some a sentence long, some extending for pages, but their argument can be summarized briefly. Christianity teaches, Pascal states, that the human condition is a fallen one. Human reason has difficulty knowing anything: our rational powers are often specialized and narrow, and, in any case, prone to distortions of vanity and imagination. Furthermore, we are "disproportioned" to the universe. The outer world consists merely of matter, but we are composed of matter and thought. The outer world is an infinite abyss, but we are finite. Christianity teaches that our God is a hidden God. Indeed, we cannot see him anywhere in the infinite emptiness of the universe.

Human behavior offers further evidence of our fallenness. We are endowed with the greatness of thought, but we spend our energies continuously trying to avoid thinking, lest we be made aware of the vanity and emptiness of our interior selves: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."

We would like to be happy; we would like to rest in happiness. But in fact we keep ourselves in constant "stir," diverting ourselves from thought and deceiving ourselves with the belief that this or that activity - whether the hunting of hares, the new business venture, or our next bet at the casino - will at last allow us to rest content.

Do we realize our absurdity? No, we double down on it: the immortality of the soul and the existence of God are two questions of absolute importance whose answers would determine how we should live. But most human beings give those questions only perfunctory consideration before shrugging their shoulders and heading back to the roulette wheel.

Reason alone would counsel us to bet on the existence of God, but reason is a small thing compared to the confused depths of the human heart. Fallen man squanders his days with diversions rather than pursuing the truth about what matters most.

In Christianity, true faith is a gift from God, as Pascal knows well. We receive it in supernatural grace and cannot seize it by reason's natural efforts. But this much reason can see: we are surrounded by an infinite universe, impossible to cross.

Even the most minute thing - an insect or an atom - is infinitely divisible mathematically. But there is still one more infinite abyss for us to discover. If we look inside ourselves, we will discover that a faint "trace" of our unfallen condition remains. That trace tells us that we were once happy, but are not now. And the spiritual hole within us is infinite in size. Only an infinite spiritual being can fill it. Only God can full-fill us.

Later in Pensées, Pascal provides an elegant list of typological evidence from Scripture that would...