Why Read Pascal? is a good question. If we are to set aside time, concentrate, and investigate a book as old, strange, and difficult as the French polymath’s masterwork, the Pensées, we need good reasons. We need such reasons especially in our time, when many of us are too distracted to read much of anything.

Why are we so distracted? Our ubiquitous screens and their mischievous algorithms surely deserve some blame. But the effectiveness of such algorithmic exploitation reveals something strange about us: we find amusements we know are shallow and unsatisfying—Twitter flame-wars, Tik-Tok dance videos—almost impossible to resist.  

We should read Pascal because he can help us understand this human oddity. He offers an account of human beings not as political animals or rational animals but as distractible animals. He makes us stop and wonder at ourselves by fixating on this strange tell of our character. In the course of so doing, he introduces us to someone every bit as strange as we are—the person he calls “the God of the Christians.” And he deploys his distinctive argumentative powers to turn distractible animals into animals with purpose, seeking in anguish after a God who, happily, is also seeking after them.

Paul Griffiths’s Why Read Pascal? answers the question of its title in just this way, arguing that Pascal deserves our attention because his thought “shows, with an intensity rarely approached, how strange we are and how strange Christianity is, and how reciprocal those strangenesses are.”  

In one long yet exact sentence, Griffiths sums up Pascal’s Christian portrait of human strangeness. We are 

fragile, opaque, often bored, in desperate need of diversion from our inevitable death and suffering, bound by custom and habit, incapable of coming to agreement about what is good for us, violent, greedy for self-gratification, despairing, miserable, afflicted, out of place in a cosmos infinitely larger and infinitely smaller than we are—and yet also, unlike anything else in the cosmos (so far as we can tell) self-aware, capable of assessing and to some degree understanding the workings of the cosmos, responsive to beauty, thirsty for love, and most significantly, puzzled by ourselves, by the strange, even monstrous, combination in us, as it seems to us, of subjection at once to physical necessity and unsatisfiable desire, while at the same time striving for something other than that subjection.

To look at ourselves is to behold beings of agonizing disproportion. We desire infinite life, happiness, and knowledge; we are fated for death, suffering, and ignorance. We long to avert our eyes from that unhappy spectacle. Inane distractions appeal to us not because of what they draw our eyes to but because of what they draw our eyes from—the excruciating emptiness of ourselves.

As Griffiths argues, the disproportion and anxiety of beings who cannot give themselves the goods they cannot help desiring explains a lot about human beings, including the disorder of our politics. Pascal notes the unsettling incapacity of human beings to identify laws that command universal, unchanging assent. He argues that most laws are merely impositions of force tricked out in the frippery of justice. While some derive a perverse satisfaction from describing this state of affairs, Pascal knows that it leaves us haunted, for human beings cannot rest easy while they are governed by laws they think unjust. The constant agitation of the political world springs from this irritating gap between the true justice we desire and the half-baked, at times perverse justice we get. This bears remembering in moments such as our own, when our attitude toward politics oscillates between despairing lassitude and impossible hopes.

We not only desire goods we cannot give ourselves, but goods we cannot even properly imagine: for what could possibly satisfy the contradictory desires of the monstrous beings Pascal and Griffiths show us to be? Happily, in their view, we have been gifted an answer to questions and desires to which we cannot invent or discover answers on our own. That answer is God himself, who presents himself to us in a form every bit as strange as the beings who go in search of him. Pascal describes that God in a fragment Griffiths deploys as his epigraph:

The God of the Christians does not consist in a god who is merely the author of geometric truths and of the order of the elements; that is the part given to pagans and Epicureans. He does not consist only in a god who exercises his providence over the life and goods of men, to give a happy span of years to those who adore him: that is the part given to the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and of consolation; he is a God who fills the soul and the heart of those he possesses; he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their misery and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to them at bottom of their souls; who fills them with humility, joy, confidence, and love; and who renders them incapable of any end other than himself.

This God of Pascal’s does not present himself to all humanity in thunder and lightning. He is instead a “hidden God,” who, in the “sweetness of his coming,” refrains, like a gentleman, from imposing himself on those with no interest in him. He thereby leaves them merely “in privation of a good they do not want.” God appears only to those who seek him. The whole human question is whether we will choose the life of seeking or put our heads in the sand.

Pascal writes in words calibrated to set us in motion toward that God. As Griffiths notes, he has an “unusual capacity for dialectics”—for playing two convincing but contrary arguments off one another so as to leave us both disoriented and attentive. One sees this dialectical approach at work in one of Pascal’s most famous fragments: “If [man] exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him. And I continue to contradict him until he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible monster.” Griffiths describes the intention of such a passage: “you find yourself without a place to stand in the tension between uplift and bringdown.” Having no place to stand is an excellent reason to start moving.   

Griffiths puts all this on the table with the quiet competence and impressive erudition of a seasoned scholar of religion. Sometimes, it is true, his scholarly habits get in the way of his message. He begins some chapters with exercises in professorial throat-clearing, and routinely writes sentences of seventy words or more. All this assumes the reader’s patience rather than grabbing that reader’s attention, which would seem to be the proper task of a book called Why Read Pascal?

As is often the case, however, the scholarly habits that give rise to Griffiths’s small weaknesses also give rise to his great strengths. Some of his most striking insights emerge when he argues with Pascal, treating him like a respected interlocutor in a seminar that crosses the centuries. Pascal holds that Christianity supersedes Judaism, but Griffiths notes that God made a covenant with Israel and never revoked it. He therefore suggests  that “the halakhic lives of observant Jews” remain a proper Jewish response to the Lord’s call to Israel, and that Jewish “coming-to-Zion” and Christian “coming-to-Jesus-Christ” must be two “compatible promises, even if the texture of their compatibility isn’t yet evident.”

Pascal’s wrestling with the mystery of original sin brings him “very close to categorizing the fact of death generically, and every particular death specifically, as . . . intended by the Lord as healing punishment.” Griffiths holds that Christians need not believe any such thing, and that the “Lord has nothing, conceptually or causally, to do with” the many terrible deaths human beings inflict on one another, “other than, after death, to soothe and welcome those who suffer them.”  

Here, Griffiths follows Pascal into the deepest difficulties of the Christian way of thinking and comes up with ways through those impasses that can help us better discern the features of the God of the Christians. His book, like Pascal’s, shows why we should bother to seek to understand that God: for some, because he is our own fondest hope; for others, because he is the fondest hope of our neighbors; for still others, because we are quite without hope, and might find reasons to rediscover it welcome. Even those looking for nothing more than a good distraction might turn to Pascal and Paul Griffiths, for an examination of the human heart that is unfailingly absorbing. They might discover that the most effective diversions turn out not to be diversions, at all.