2023-06-18 14:14:18
► Educational
Pascal
by Pierre Lyraud
Cerf, 188 p., 14 €
Young researcher born in 1992, author of a thesis on The Figures of Finitude in Pascal, currently assistant professor in the French language department of the University of Montreal, Pierre Lyraud offers in this book a good introduction to the life and work of the philosopher. Its chronological account sweeps the great periods of Pascal’s life, while deploying the itinerary of his thought. A precise and documented work, for a first contact with the work.
► Passionate
Blaise Pascal. This is what faith is. 15 texts presented by Jean de Saint-Cheron
Salvator, 210 p., €17.90
In this tribute book, the essayist Jean de Saint-Cheron, chief of staff to the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris (ICP) and regular columnist at The cross, testifies to his attachment to the work of Pascal through an original exercise: the choice and commentary of fifteen major texts by the philosopher. In doing so, he lets his powerful style be heard, which is not common in a work intended for the general public.
Jean de Saint-Cheron chooses an enthusiastic reading of Pascal and often manages to draw his reader along with him. However, he fails to convince that Pascal is always right, yesterday and today. Should we, for example, rehabilitate without critical rereading its Prayer to ask God for the proper use of illnesses ? Maybe by wanting to save everything in Pascal, we take the risk of diminishing what he offers most powerfully…
► Literary
Pascal. Tomb for an order
by Marianne Alphant
P.O.L, 438 p., 16 €.
Essayist, novelist, literary critic, Marianne Alphant, with her very beautiful pen, follows the maze of Thoughts pascaliennes and shares with us his intimacy with this mysterious, unfinished and fragmentary text, impossible to edit. “Talking about the reading of the Pensées, its movement, its history, its tones: anxiety, bewilderment, admiration, concern, regrets, melancholy, passion. » With sensitivity and depth, she approaches this literary object, examines its writing and its style, “crossed out notes, shortcuts, nervous spelling, interruptions, rewriting, paper cuttings”.
With finesse, she sheds light on Pascal’s paradoxes and his chiaroscuros. “How to sink into complexity without getting lost in it? This is the very question of the Thoughts. (…) Strange power of a text that seems to stem from trial and error and light at the same time. »
► Spiritual
Converting to God with Blaise Pascal
by Hélène Michon
Editions du Carmel, 218 p., €21
Lecturer in 17th century literature at the University of Tours, Hélène Michon offers here a personal rereading of the work of Blaise Pascal, with a clearly catechetical intention. In the footsteps of the “converted” thinker – in the sense of the 17th century, that is to say animated by a renewal of faith and entered into an ardent desire to adjust his life to it -, she proposes a spiritual path which crosses the main stages of faith: the obstacles to conversion, the journey towards God then life with God (prayer, relationship to Christ, to the Scriptures, to the Church). A didactic work, clear and informed, which starts from Pascal to go to the man of today more than the reverse.
► Biographical
Pascal
by André Le Gall
Flammarion, 600 p., 26 €
For Pascal’s 400th birthday, Éditions Flammarion is republishing this great life of Pascal, published in 2000 by André Le Gall, former senior civil servant, radio producer and author of numerous biographies. His work embraces the life and work of Pascal, but also that of his entourage and his time.
With precision he approaches this complex man “tributary to a physiological state, a sociological situation, worked in the depths by forces that escape it, notes André Le Gall. But the apparatus of vision with which he was endowed enabled him to discover himself and to discover others with such exceptional acuity that in wanting to circumvent it, in trying to look down on it, one runs the risk to verify only one or the other of its flashes ». A book for those who love vast panoramas as much as the luxury of detail.
► Philosophical
Pascal’s philosophy. The worry principle
by Laurence Devilairs
PUF, 256 p., €24
The philosopher Laurence Devillairs, teacher at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, invites us to reread the Thoughts through the prism of concern. It places at their heart an understanding of the human condition “where the desire for truth and happiness cannot be satisfied, (…) where there is also an “instinct which elevates us” and which must lead to affirming that “man passes man””.
From this front door, Laurence Devillairs easily crosses paths with other Pascalian concepts: entertainment, boredom, misery and the greatness of man… For her, Pascal offers a “counter-history of philosophy”, where the essential is no longer of the conceptual order, but of life. For Paschal, “to live is the only imperative, the only task to be assigned to philosophy”she summarizes.
► Politico-religious
Pascal and the Christian Proposal
by Pierre Manent
Grasset, 432 p., 24 €
Worried about the evolution of modern societies and questioned by the amnesia of Europeans who lost “intelligence and use” of Christianity, Pierre Manent, former director of studies at the EHESS and specialist in political philosophy, returns to the Pascalian gesture: it is a question with Pascal of rediscovering an understanding of society and Christianity, but also of developing a project apologetics to revitalize a Church which once again becomes more sure of itself, at ease with its dogmatics and its hierarchical character, not letting the modern spirit take hold in its heart, accused of leveling hierarchies and values. A Church that would not go astray in dialogue with skeptics or in a positive rereading of secularization.
Pierre Manent seems to seek in Pascal a timeless Christianity whose incarnation in history is often difficult to understand. Without convincing, his book is argued and deserves attention.
► Argued
Rigorism against moral freedom. The Provincials : topicality of an anti-Jesuit polemic
by Paul Valadier
Lessius, 118 p., 12 €.
In the controversy which opposed Pascal to the Jesuits, notably linked to the place of rigor in Christian life, history often retains only the former’s point of view. Philosopher and theologian, professor emeritus at the Center Sèvres-Facultés ésuites de Paris, Paul Valadier gives the keys to this debate and puts forward – for once – the arguments of the Jesuits, concerned with a Christian life embodied in the realities of the time, playing on encouragement more than on concern for salvation. Another spiritual path then emerges, less dramatic than the route of Pascalian summits and abysses, and yet no less evangelical.
► Classic
Pascal and philosophy
by Vincent Carraud
PUF, 480 p., €25.
Professor of history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne, Vincent Carraud is one of the best current French specialists in the work of Pascal. This landmark work, published in 1992 and of which this is the 3rd edition, enters on this 400th anniversary in the famous “Quadrige” collection of the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).
Dense and copious, it tackles head-on the question of Pascal’s relationship to philosophy: is Pascal a philosopher? How does it fit into the history of philosophy? What relationship does it have with philosophy, metaphysics, but also theology and mysticism? Through this prism, Vincent Carraud addresses many themes in a very comprehensive way: the work of reason and the grandeur of thought, Pascal’s links with the ancient philosophers, then Montaigne and Descartes, the questions of the self and the infinity.
► Expert
Pascal: certainty
by Vincent Carraud
PUF, 486 p., €36
“The truth, Pascal understood it as certainty”, writes Vincent Carraud, in this brand new work, the fruit of thirty years of frequenting and patient exploration of the philosopher’s texts. For Paschal, “The human soul is great because it is capable of access to the truth, that is to say, capable of certainty”. Vincent Carraud explores this essential theme through this series of in-depth studies around the “true religion”.
This volume includes in particular a fine analysis of the Memorial, a writing born of the spiritual “night of fire” that the philosopher went through in November 1654 and whose handwritten text he kept with him until the end of his life. A book primarily intended for researchers (and enthusiasts).
► and also… Summer
A summer with Pascal
by Antoine Compagnon
Equateur editions, 240 p., €14
In 2020, Antoine Compagnon, historian of French literature and professor at the Collège de France, accompanied the summer of France Inter listeners with a series of daily 4-minute nuggets on the life and work of Pascal. This set of short texts allows picking and free wandering through many themes, but does not always help to grasp the overall movement of the work. The series is also available on the France Inter website (www.radiofrance.fr)
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