Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) assumed the responsibility of rendering the Christian religion intelligible and credible at the dawn of the modern period, the time of Copernicus and Kepler, Montaigne and Descartes. His intellectual framework and problems are ours in important respects. Still, while I know contemporary Augustinians and Thomists, even Newmanians, I know of no Pascalians.

Whatever the reasons for his relative neglect, Thomas Hibbs is intent on bringing Pascal and his distinctive thought to the fore. In doing so, he makes a signal contribution to our understanding of modern philosophy itself. He not only rehabilitates Pascal, but sheds important light on his philosophical interlocutors, Montaigne and Descartes. This book could be profitably read merely for its treatments of Montaigne and Descartes. But the triangle of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal is historically apposite and philosophically quite illuminating.

What all three thinkers have in common is the notion that the fundamental human issue is the question of the right way of life, the good life, for human beings. This necessarily involves an investigation into the various ways of life of human beings. And when all is said, these reduce to two: the way of philosophy and the way of faith. Hibbs is quite aware that these commonalities are not commonly recognized, so he has the task of showing that they are at work in Montaigne's labyrinthine Essays, as well as the variegated oeuvre of the founder of mathematical physics.

Hibbs's point of entry is another commonality: Socrates. Each of the modern thinkers appealed to the ancient thinker, in part to get back behind the Scholasticism of their day, but more importantly to revive the original impulse of philosophizing as the search for self-knowledge and for knowledge of the good. Each, though, thought that he had taken the measure of the master.

Montaigne admires Socrates, but he deliberately omits the latter's erotic openness to transcendence and reshapes the ancient thinker after his own ideas and image. Hibbs styles this construct “Socratic immanence.” Montaignian studied insouciance towards “the big questions” (and to death) is to replace erotic flights of speculation and aspiration. Man is to stay within the parameters of “the human condition.” But if he is to do so, of course, these need to be laid bare. Pascal joins the issue at this crucial level and sets about exposing Montaigne's dubious, even reductionistic, moves and presents an alternative account of la condition humaine.

It is one of patent, if often ignored, ambiguities, paradoxes, and even contradictions. However, argues Pascal, “the Christian hypothesis” brings them together into an intellectual satisfying whole. Central to this resolution are the hoary Christian doctrine of original sin and the remarkable biblical doctrine of “the hidden God.” The former makes sense of the haunting intimations that man was once more than he is now, while the latter entails the “divine irony” that Pascal deciphers and emulates. The Christian hypothesis, however, is not a slam-dunk case, and the famous “wager” nicely acknowledges the uncertainty and freedom present in all human decision. In this, though, it further confirms that Christianity knows its subject and its addressee.

In his intellectual context, Descartes followed Socrates in conducting his own critical examination of the Great Tradition, leading to his own “knowledge of ignorance.” But the differences between the ancient and the modern are fundamental and decisive. Descartes's criteria of clarity, certainty, and utility were rooted in an unexamined “extreme desire” that Socrates surely would have probed, and Descartes followed up the one-sided critique of the tradition by resolving on a path that he claimed would lead to certain and useful knowledge of both nature and oneself, to wisdom. He thus aimed to surpass the congenital Socratic conditions of aporia and eros.

A new passion called générosité would fuel the endeavor and replace the Socratic dispositions. As Richard Kennington put it: “In the passion of générosité Descartes believed he found the basis by which philosophy could be both immanent and transcendent as regards nature” (On Modern Origins, ed. P. Kraus and F. Hunt [Lexington Books, 2004], 171). This transcendence, however, only bears on “what nature teaches” is the articulation of the world into heterogeneous kinds, not on an order of grace or some promise of a next life. Quite the contrary, Descartes intimated as the ultimate objective of the new science of bodies what one could call “interminable life,” rather than eternal life. Descartes's thought and aspirations, too, were decidedly immanent. He was pivotal in turning men's minds from eternity to this-worldly progress.

With his mordant “Descartes: useless and uncertain,” Pascal will have (almost) none of this. In particular, he indicates to his fellow mathematician-scientist that there is more to wonder at (and dread) in the universe as revealed by modern science, and more to marvel at (and be perplexed by) in the human condition thus suspended between two infinites, than he acknowledges. The truth is that man, the part that seeks to know both the Whole and himself, is a “prodigy” and a “monster” within nature. The transparency of the ego and the self-satisfactions of générosité are not, and cannot be, the final words about philosophy or the human condition. Among other things, Cartesian egoism conveniently omits the somber truth that nous mourrons seuls. More generally, Pascal is a proponent and incisive practitioner of “methodic pluralism.” He thus returns to the premodern insight that the object should determine the approach, not vice versa.

This object-appropriate pluralism, however, does not preclude the effort to limn a “synoptic vision” of man-in-the world. This endeavor yields distinctively Pascalian versions of the philosopher's “learned knowledge of ignorance” and of man's “impotence” to achieve the happiness he naturally desires. Here is where the deepest engagement, with Socrates, occurs.

Pascal sees in Socrates a predecessor and a model. Because of our ignorance of ourselves and of the human good, life is rightly seen as a quest for what we lack. One thing we do know about ourselves, however, is an unquenchable desire for truth and happiness, for true happiness, for true good. And we know that death awaits us all. Thus is the human predicament posed. What to do?

Pascal was struck that on the eve of his death, Socrates “proposes that we act on the hypothesis that is at once probable and most noble. He thus urges a kind of wager on immortality that would inform how we live here and now” (25). Here was an opening for a dialogue with the pagan master. In general, Pascal's strategy was to deepen and darken the portrait of the human condition beyond what Socrates had seen. Then, having problematized the human predicament even more than the pagan did or could, Pascal proposed a resolution—the Christian hypothesis—that makes sense of the general human darkness and the glimmers of light found within it.

Pointedly, Pascal includes Socratic philosophizing itself in his darkened portrait. On its own terms, “philosophy is left with a tantalizing question, a frustrating aporia” (25). As Pascal describes them, “seemingly insoluble questions about the good are not [to be] contemplated with detached pleasure but with growing unease, with the painful realization that the deepest longing of the heart appears subject to violent and tragic frustration” (25–26).

As for those who maintain that articulating the questions is the best that reason can do, and is sufficient unto itself, Pascal retorts that “the very activity of inquiry becomes distorted if its goal-directed character, whose primary intention is to know the truth, is replaced with the counsel to be content with the questions themselves” (26). In this, Pascal brings the philosopher back to his initial question, how am I to live? This question pertains to the practical order and is subject to its strictures and conditions. It must be answered one way or another, and it is always being answered by the conduct of our lives. Postponing an answer is itself an answer.

Moreover, questions are asked to be answered. One could be reasonably suspected of not truly posing them, if one resolves to be content with raising and, at best, refining them. Lurking behind this attitude may be a vice that is also a sin: pride, the pride of rational autonomy, the demand to find answers on one's terms, the presumption that one's powers and judgment suffice. Is that, Pascal asks, a rationally justified position? It seems, rather, a petitio principii.

In short, Pascal detects in the Socratic life an unwarranted detaching of reason and its needs from the whole of the person, its hypostatization as it were, and an unwarranted equanimity in the face of the full facts of the human situation. There is a subtle dogmatism and complacency detectable even in the strongest of philosophical minds. Pascal confronts them with a portrait of the human condition that goes beyond the uncanny and even perplexing to the unfathomable and the “monstrous,” and the thinker with the fact of his own death. This is the truly wrenching truth of the human condition, and the philosopher should feel it more acutely than others. Thus the Socratic gadfly is himself stung.

This does not imply that no remedy is forthcoming. It comes, however, in an initially surprising mode. Reflection, though, indicates its utter suitability to malady, patient, and physician. It also comes in a mode that should be congenial to the Socratic.

He who says “Socrates” says “irony,” and the title of Hibbs's book attributes the same to the Christian God. Irony is a thread running throughout the book, from Socrates through the trio of modern thinkers to God Himself. There is a genus-species classification at work here, with the genus being something like “strategies to deal with disproportion.” The species range from self-protective dissimulation to pedagogical provocation—and beyond. Montaigne and Descartes practiced irony in dealing with the claims of revelation and theology; Pascal exposes theirs, then turns the table: “Ironic reversal is Pascal's dominant strategy in his engagement [with] Descartes” (111).

In Hibbs's judgment, Pascal brings something new to the table: “the focus on irony [in Pascal] sheds new light on irony itself” (16–17). In part, this is found in his literary form, neither dialogue nor essay nor autobiographical discourse. Substantively, “Pascalian irony … is a pedagogical tool inviting, castigating, bewildering—all with the intention of awakening dormant human souls” (2). But above all, what is distinctive about Pascalian irony is its model and source: “divine irony.” “Revelation's mode of pedagogy is ironic” (1).

Many elements go into Pascal's “deciphering” of this ironical divine pedagogy: the unbridgeable disproportion between the infinites of nature and the human mind, a disproportion, however, which the latter can glimpse, points to the Infinite Mind of God which alone can fathom it; the infinite “abyss” of the human heart, which only Infinite Truth and Goodness can satisfy, testifies to its made-for-God nature even in the midst of its misery and diversions; the mysterious type-antitype relationship of the Old and New Testaments is another, which provides remarkable evidence for the truth of Christianity, but still calls for faith. All of these, however, receive their full Pascalian significance in the light of the Christian hypothesis, that is, of Christ himself. Pascal takes with utmost seriousness the intensive and extensive meaning of “Christian apologetics.” Christ is the key to everything.

Since the original sin was pride, pride had to be countered by its humiliation and its opposite, humility. But fallen man was not only subject to his original besetting sin, he now could feel the sting of despair. Hope, then, needed to be provided as well. The kenotic humility of the Word, the ignominious way of the Cross, and the glorious vindication of self-sacrificing Love teach men to avoid the Scylla of pride and the Charybdis of despair; more positively, they display the hidden God to man, and man to himself. It is Pascal's wager that they will become visible to the one who “searches while groaning.”