The Pensées of Blaise Pascal, in the words of the editor of the World Classics edition, are ‘a jumble of notes’ for a book project which was abandoned, and whose proper ordering is ‘an impossible intellectual conundrum’. Readers unfamiliar with this fact would gain a quite different impression from William Wood's impressive book, which presents a sustained ‘Pascalian’ theological treatment of the human condition. On Wood's reading ‘for Pascal, the fall is a fall into duplicity’ and ‘as fallen selves in a fallen world human beings have an innate aversion to the truth, that is at the same time, an aversion to God’ (p. 1). As a result, human knowledge is infected with error. We are wrong about what makes us happy, and thus persist with frustrating endeavours which deep down we know to be futile. We are wrong about what holds our societies together, mistaking (and then disguising) force for rational authority. We are wrong, even, about our innermost selves. These are constructs of the imagination with which we pretend to each other, and at the same time deceive ourselves.

What drives all this error is the subjection of truth to desire. Human beings avert their minds from truths which are uncomfortable. And yet, paradoxically, it is only in acknowledgement of the truth that real happiness and spiritual peace are to be found. Reorientation to truth is the work of grace, and Wood bases his account of Pascal's solution to the fall, not on the Pensées, but on another, very short work On the Conversion of the Sinner. ‘God’ Pascal says ‘inspires in a soul that he truly deigns to touch . . . an understanding and an extraordinary view through which the soul considers material things and itself in a whole new way’ (p. 213). Initially this ‘touch’ disturbs us greatly, but then sets us upon a Neoplatonic journey towards the truth that is God.

By calling this account of the fall, sin and grace (and his own position) ‘Pascalian’, Wood signals the degree to which his book is a work of theological construction, a construction which only a very fine mind could accomplish. It is evident that the Pascalian picture he paints, both its bleakness and its hopefulness, is the outcome of wide reading and careful thinking. And yet, for all its sophistication, the grounds upon which one might endorse his Pascalian vision are hard to identify. This is partly, I think, because Wood is strikingly uncritical of Pascal. He treats the keen psychological insights, which readers of Pascal have always admired, as empirical evidence of humanity's fallen nature, but he never asks about the problem of overgeneralisation. The human heart may indeed often work in the duplicitous ways that Pascal identifies, but is every human heart always like this? Wood employs the character of Nicholas Bulstrode from George Eliot's Middlemarch as an extended example of self-deception. Even if we agree, however, that in the general run of human beings Bulstrode is far from exceptional, it hardly follows that he is the norm. Similarly, much is made of the way imagination can displace truth with gratifying, but duplicitous constructs. This happens, certainly, but there is no recognition of the ways in which imagination can also aid the uncovering of truth – in psychological understanding as much as in scientific and historical explanation.

The book is at its most critical in the fifth chapter. Here Wood examines arguments from ‘analytic’ philosophy which purport to show that the concept of ‘self-deception’ – which is key to his whole account – is either self-contradictory or at any rate ‘paradoxical’. This engagement, in which the philosophers do not come off very well, is especially interesting in light of the recent rise of ‘analytic theology’. Wood is a counter to those proponents of analytic theology who think that their methods are rejected only because they are not understood, since he combines a profound lack of sympathy with great facility for this kind of argument. In the final chapter, he makes brief reference to Wittgenstein on religion (in the standard ‘Wittgensteinian’ version) and this suggests a different kind of philosophical preference.

This fine book is worth reading, and it may serve to prompt some renewed interest in Pascal. Whether it succeeds in adding a new voice to ‘changing paradigms in historical and systematic theology’ (the name of the book series in which it appears) is rather less certain.