Why Read Pascal
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Why Read Pascal?
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is known in the English-speaking world principally for the wager (an argument that it is rational to do what will affect belief in God and irrational not to), and, more generally, for the Pensées, a collection of philosophical and theological fragments of unusual emotional and intellectual intensity collected and published after his death. He thought and wrote, however, about much more than this: mathematics; physics; grace, freedom, and predestination; the nature of the church; the Christian life; what it is to write and read; the order of things; the nature and purpose of human life; and more. He was among the polymaths of the seventeenth century, and among the principal apologists of his time for the Catholic faith, against both its Protestant opponents and its secular critics. Why Read Pascal? engages all the major topics of Pascal's theological and philosophical writing. It provides discussion of Pascal's literary style, his linked understandings of knowledge and of the various orders of things, his anthropology (with special attention to his presentation of affliction, death, and boredom), his politics, and his understanding of the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Pascal emerges as a literary stylist of a high order, a witty and polemical writer (never have the Jesuits been more thoroughly eviscerated), and, perhaps above all else, as someone concerned to show to Christianity's cultured despisers that the fabric of their own lives implies the truth of Christianity if only they can be brought to look at what their lives are like. Why Read Pascal? is the first book in English in a generation to engage all the principal themes in Pascal's theology and philosophy. The book takes Pascal seriously as an interlocutor and as a contributor of continuing relevance to Catholic thought; but it also offers criticisms of some among the positions he takes, showing, in doing so, how lively his writing remains for us now.
Why Read Pavel Florensky
This book offers an excellent, accessible introduction to the life and thought of Father Pavel Florensky, one of the most prominent religious philosophers of Russia's highly creative Silver Age at the beginning of the twentieth century. Florensky, an Orthodox priest, died in Stalin's gulag in 1937. His writings were long suppressed in the Soviet Union, and Western Protestant and Catholic theologians have known little about him. John Burgess argues that it is time to give Florensky his due. His worldview is as important today as it was during his lifetime: a deep sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world; a conviction that the religious cult?acts of worship and ritual?make human culture possible; and an understanding of the Christian faith as, above all, a way of seeing God's glorious presence in all of creation. The book takes a unique approach by examining Florensky not primarily as an academic philosopher but rather as an Orthodox priest and theologian, who speaks out of his personal religious experience to communicate the Christian faith to people who are seeking truth but do not yet know church life. The book makes an original contribution to Florensky scholarship and literature, especially in the United States, where his colleagues Sergei Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdiaev have been better known. John Burgess is a Protestant theologian who has lived and travelled in Russia, and has visited key places associated with Florensky. The author's experience, even as an outsider, of Orthodox worship and practice?its liturgical cycles, iconography, seasons of fasting and feasting, and monasteries and holy sites?has enabled him to understand Florensky's admonition that one must enter into Orthodoxy in order to understand it (and Florensky's) thinking.
Flannery O'Connor and Blaise Pascal
Flannery O?Connor is a guide for the Catholic who seeks to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to live the life of faith in the modern world. O?Connor describes herself as a Catholic burdened by the modern consciousness which the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung views as ?unhistorical, solitary, and guilty.? Ann Hartle understands O?Connor?s fiction as her confrontation with this specifically modern form of consciousness. The seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal helps us to experience the meaning of O?Connor?s fiction because Pascal confronted that same consciousness in its origins in Montaigne?s philosophy. O?Connor recognizes in Pascal a truly Catholic modern philosopher who speaks to the experience of the searching mind of modern man. Flannery O'Connor and Blaise Pascal approaches O?Connor?s fiction from a philosophical perspective rather than the perspective of a literary critic. The goal of this volume is to deepen the experience of the meaning of her stories insofar as they are addressed to a specifically modern audience burdened with the form of consciousness that is highly skeptical of the historical reality of the Christian mystery. Hartle's argument is that modern consciousness rests on the ?spiritualization? of the Incarnation. Both Montaigne and Jung abstract a purely human meaning from the historical embodied reality of the Incarnation and place that meaning in the service of modern man?s attempt at self-creation and self-redemption. O?Connor presents us with an especially vivid picture of Jung?s truly modern individual in Hazel Motes, Hulga Hopewell, George Rayber, and The Misfit. In her comic art, O?Connor brings out the possibility of grace against the background of the pervasive psychological attitude toward human conduct. She shows us how the modern distortions of the human personality can be addressed in a specifically Catholic way, that is, through the meaning of the Catholic sacramental view of life and the Catholic principle of mutual interdependence.