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Blaise Pascal: Death
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Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose. When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.[19] Will Durant, in his 11-volume, comprehensive The Story of Civilization series, hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose."[20] In Pensées, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity—seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. Rolling these into one he develops Pascal's Wager.
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The company of Mersenne may have been Pascal's first introduction to the idea of sprituality but it was not to be his last. Sometime during his father's stay in Normandy as a high official in the government, Étienne sustained an injury which resulted in him being provided with care by a local order of Jansenite priests. It was through this family involvement with the priests that Pascal acquired a strong interest in religion, which was to last until his death. As a result of his forays into the realm of spirituality, he wrote many religious works.
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Pascal espoused Jansenism and in 1654 entered the Jansenist community at Port Royal, where he led a rigorously ascetic life until his death eight years later. In 1656 he wrote the famous 18 Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters), in which he attacked the Jesuits for their attempts to reconcile 16th-century naturalism with orthodox Roman Catholicism.
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Pascal was troubled by constant illness, including recurrent migraines and what proved to be cancer of the stomach. His various contacts with illness and death from 1646 on, and his own near death in a carriage accident late in 1654, together with the influence of a morbidly religious sister, turned him toward the Jansenist version of Catholicism. On this, his mental energies were increasingly expended.
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