A review by aspiringorakle
Pensées by Blaise Pascal

5.0

Pascal is clearly one of the smartest men to ever have lived. Being such a disparate work, it is hard to comment on it as a whole, filled with clever asides, indecipherable aphorisms, and chunks of text meant to connect to things forty pages away. I can say this: we need Pascal's pessimism. He sees very clearly the potential foibles of human nature and our wretchedness, our willingness to hide ourselves and dress ourselves up in false rank and deception. Perhaps in this he misses some human beauty. But he reminds us of what we are capable of (and the way we are, by default). We are wretched and glorious all at once. And Pascal is absolutely right about this (simple and naive though it may seem): we have a God in Christ who loves us anyway.