Blaise Pascal

Pensées (Wiseblood Classics) (Volume 21) Blaise Pascal

" 'The heart has reasons which the mind does not understand.' How often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the 'heart' over the 'head,' a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal's terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart. For him, in theological matters, which seemed to him much larger, more difficult, and more important than scientific matters, the whole personality is involved." ?From the Introduction by T. S. Eliot Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) left his Pensées incomplete at his death, but the meanings these "thoughts" contain continue to be resurrected. Herein he sets forth a defense of the Christian faith that directly incorporates skepticism and stoicism, that confronts infinity and nothingness, intuition and analysis, being and death, boredom and despair. Amidst all of these thoroughly modern problems lies Pascal's infamous wager: to have faith in God's existence or not. WISEBLOOD BOOKS is a publishing line particularly favorable toward works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy that render truths with what Flannery O'Connor called an unyielding "realism of distances." Such works find redemption in uncanny places and people; wrestle us from the tyranny of boredom; mock the pretensions of respectability; engage the hidden mysteries of the human heart, be they sources of either violence or courage; articulate faith and doubt in their incarnate complexity; dare an unflinching gaze at human beings as "political animals"; and suffer through this world's trials without forfeiting hope. Visit us at www.wisebloodbooks.com We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of beauty. We are wide-eyed for new epiphanies of truth.