Why I wrote a biography of Pascal

This past few weeks, my mind has been rather occupied with the publication and launch of my new biography of Blaise Pascal: ‘The Man who Made the Modern World’. I first had the idea of writing a biography of Pascal about 30 years ago when I was working on my PhD thesis on St Paul, Martin Luther and Pascal. After finishing it, as a teacher of theology, I ended up focusing on Luther, because there was much more call for Reformation teaching in most theological curricula but always wanted to return to Pascal one day. When we started Seen & Unseen a few years ago that seemed at the right time to pick him up again as he is one of the great cultural witnesses of our times.

I remember reading the Pensées as a teenager and it made quite an impression on me. I've read it many times since then and it always seems to me one of the most illuminating, haunting and provocative books you could read about life, death, God and belief. I wanted people to discover Pascal's ideas but a rather dull book of essays on different themes in Pascal didn't seem that enticing. Ideas emerge out of real life and history, so it seemed to make sense to describe his ideas in the context of writing the story of his life. Most philosophers’ lives are rather dull. They tend to sit in universities, think and write books. Pascal's life was anything but dull. There's intrigue, subterfuge, drama, jealousy, passion politics, science, faith – you name it – it’s there.

Pascal had a huge impact on the modern world, playing a key role in the development of things like probability, the calculation of risk, computers, urban transportation, let alone his wider scientific and philosophical contributions. He's also hugely quotable - he would have been a genius on social media! Phrases like ‘the God of the philosophers’, ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’, ‘the sole cause of our unhappiness is that we do not know how to stay quietly in a room’ - are often quoted today by people who know little of their author.

His descriptions of the human condition are still among the most haunting you could find anywhere. He's surprisingly modern in seeing the fragility and apparent insignificance of humanity in a vast universe. And yet his profound Christian faith, his reflections on the relationship between faith and reason, and his understanding of the nature of modern unbelief as well as belief, I think make him an ideal travelling companion for us today, shedding light on many of our contemporary concerns.