Blaise Pascal

==Pensées==

{{Main|Pensées}}
{{blockquote|text=Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.}}
:::::Blaise Pascal, ''Pensées'' No. 200
Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as the ''Pensées'' ("Thoughts") is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in ''French prose''. When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), [[Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve|Sainte-Beuve]] praised it as the finest pages in the [[French language]].<ref name="finest">Sainte-Beuve, [https://books.google.com/books?id=I0P0A8XK29QC&pg=PA167 ''Seventeenth Century''] {{isbn|1-113-16675-4}} p. 174 (2009 reprint).</ref> [[Will Durant]] hailed the Pensées as "the most eloquent book in French prose".<ref name="eloquent">''[[The Story of Civilization]]: Volume 8, "The Age of Louis XIV"'' by [[Will Durant|Will & Ariel Durant]], chapter II, Subsection 4.4, p. 66 {{isbn|1-56731-019-2}}</ref>

The ''Pensées'' was not completed before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination and defense of the [[Christian faith]], with the original title ''Apologie de la religion Chrétienne'' ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). The first version of the numerous scraps of paper found after his death appeared in print as a book in 1669 titled ''Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets'' ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic.

One of the ''Apologie''{{'}}s main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of [[Pyrrhonism]] and [[Stoicism]], personalized by [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne]] on one hand, and [[Epictetus]] on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God.