What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same language but were also near contemporaries. When René Descartes was born in 1596, Michel de Montaigne had only been dead for four years. Blaise Pascal, the third of them, was born in 1623, when Descartes was not even thirty and yet to make a name for himself. In 1647, Pascal and Descartes, the young scientific prodigy and the celebrated founder of modern rationalism, would meet in person, but the encounter didn’t go very well. Descartes didn’t seem particularly impressed by Pascal, while Pascal must have found Descartes a touch too patronising. To ensure the survival of their mutual admiration, certain people should perhaps steer clear of each other. 

Pascal’s main objection, though, was philosophical. ‘I cannot forgive Descartes,’ he wrote. ‘In his whole philosophy he would like to be able to get by without God; but he could not help giving him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion; after that he had nothing more to do with God.’ Descartes’s God was a retired engineer sort of God, conspicuously absent from the workings of the world. The Cartesian God was nothing but a philosophical premise, a mental construct, and Pascal had no use for such a thing. His whole life was a continuous, anxious search for the divine presence in the world, for the ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned’. God was above all something to do with the heart, and the heart for Pascal was everything. In Pensées, he wrote, ‘It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason’ – and, more famously, ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ You cannot miss the irony: blessed with one of the greatest minds of his time, Pascal thought of the mind as something precarious and second rate.

Pascal’s quarrel with Montaigne was also philosophical, but it had other sources too. Montaigne fascinated and repelled him in equal measure. Pascal found much to praise in Montaigne’s joyous undermining of all human vanities, intellectual humility and uncommon literary gifts, but at the same time could not stand his paralysing scepticism, moral relativism and indifference to such urgent questions as what will happen to us when we die. ‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening,’ wrote Montaigne in his Essays. Rather than letting himself be crushed by the big, unanswerable questions, Montaigne pursued more practical lines of interrogation, such as ‘When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?’ Pascal found such philosophical nonchalance intolerable.

Descartes’s and Montaigne’s positions are answers to the question of what it means to be modern, to which Pascal added his own. The task that Graham Tomlin sets himself in this book is to give an account of how Pascal achieved that. In doing so, he not only discusses Pascal in relation to Descartes and Montaigne, but also places him against a much wider background, encompassing the early scientific revolution, Jansenism, Jesuitism and Calvinism, the Port-Royal and 17th-­century France as a whole. The Pascal that emerges from the pages of Tomlin’s book is a convoluted figure, at once fascinating and puzzling, as hard to label as he is easy to misrepresent. He was a scientist of genius who, however, chose religion as the centre of his life. The possibility of an infinite universe that modern scientific discoveries started to suggest left him not awed but terrified: ‘The eternal silence of those infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ But he was no ordinary believer either. His was an agonistic faith, rooted not in philosophical arguments but in ineffable personal experience. The decisive moment of his life came during a ‘night of fire’, when he received God’s revelation.

For all his involvement in the science, philosophy and literature of his day, Pascal cut an odd figure in Louis XIV’s France. His central insight – that humanity is simultaneously great and wretched, at once noble and despicable – around which much of his work (and especially his Pensées) is built, removes him from his immediate environment and places him in proximity to such thinkers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil. We might well call him an ‘existentialist’ were the word not so diluted through overuse.

There is much to praise about Tomlin’s book. It’s ambitious and comprehensive, well researched and well structured. It offers a solid discussion of a crucial yet somewhat neglected figure of early modernity to whom we postmoderns owe so much. One of its greatest merits is to make Pascal seem not just relevant to but instrumental in our own self-understanding. ‘In a world caught up in culture wars, poised between the modern and the postmodern,’ Tomlin writes, ‘the conditions that birthed Pascal’s thought are remarkably familiar.’ Having carved out his own path ‘between the confident rationalism of Descartes and the doubting scepticism of Montaigne’, Pascal may show us a way out of our own intellectual deadlocks.

Stylistically and rhetorically, however, this book seems to suffer from something of an identity crisis. It is not always clear for whom it has been written and to what genre it belongs. Most of the time, Blaise Pascal reads like a serious, probing work of scholarship. Yet sometimes it switches abruptly to textbook mode, becoming didactic and repetitive. This dumbed-down quality, mildly irritating at first, becomes positively annoying as you carry on reading. There is no need, in a book like this, to speak of ‘the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault’ or ‘the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’. It should be presumed that anyone who has decided to read it will be aware of the nationalities of these philosophers and when they lived. Yes, it is helpful to know that Pascal’s life was brief, but why say it ten times over? For such a short life, once would have sufficed.