Abstract

The dissertation is a study of the composition, publication and posthumous reception and critique of the Pensees of Blaise Pascal. It lays out a new historical view of the famous Enlightenment attack on the Pensees leveled by such philosophes as Voltaire, Diderot, and Condorcet. The author first traces the origins of the Christian apologetic argument of the Pensees to Pascal's life, especially his conversion to the religion of Port-Royal and Jansenism, and analyzes the manner in which Pascal's plan for the apology was ultimately presented by his posthumous editors under the title Pensees sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets. The dissertation then examines the interpretation of the Pensees by various thinkers and writers, notably Michel Mauduit, Jacques Abbadie, Montfaucon de Villars, Pierre Bayle, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Pierre-Jacques Brillon, Robert Challe "le militaire philosophe", and finally, Voltaire. The author's emphasis is on the close analysis of texts as the means to ascertaining each reader's understanding of Pascal's work. Only passing attention is paid to the issue of Pascal's influence on the course of French and European thought. ;The author's thesis is that the oft-remarked misunderstanding implicit in the Enlightenment criticism of the Pensees must be viewed in light of the critical tradition which had developed before the emergence of the Enlightenment. It is argued that some Christian apologists who came after Pascal were eager to appropriate his "moral proofs" of religion to their own apologetic schemes, although those schemes were most often logically and epistemologically incongruous with Pascal's own. These apologists thus introduced distortions into Pascal's key concepts and arguments, and prepared the ground on which Voltaire would mount his attack. Voltaire's life-long struggle with the Pensees should therefore be viewed both as the culmination of a prior tradition of interpretation as well as the first expression of a distinctly modern understanding of Pascal' s religious vision.