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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.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher, who laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities. The Pensées are made up of some 800 fragments, that have proven to be an enduring masterpiece since their initial publication in 1670. This volume is a translation of Philippe Sellier’s edition of Pascal’s Pensées, in addition to two shorter texts, the Exchange with M. de Sacy and The Life of Monsieur Pascal by Pascal’s sister, Gilberte Périer. In addition to a Preface and an Introduction, there is a comprehensive apparatus criticus. The text was originally produced by a team of international Pascal scholars, who translated individual sections and was revised by the General Editor. The introduction situates the Sellier edition in the history of Pascal scholarship and highlights the advance its reordering of the fragments and of the folders or bundles represents, both the translation itself and the notes allow for a deeper reading of the text. It not only gives English readers a version of the authoritative Sellier edition of the collection of reflections known as The Pensées, it also proposes material which help assess the philosopher’s significance and the originality of his thought. On the whole, this translation gives a comprehensive view of the progress of Pascal’s intended Apology of the Christian Religion as well as of other writings on related topics. It also provides today’s readers with a challenging set of arguments, prayer, and quotations from Scripture, and even the record of a mystical experience, known as the Memorial. It highlights all facets of Pascal’s genius, his familiarity with Scripture combined with a talent for controversy, irony mixed with fervor, and altogether the production of an intriguing and challenging writer and thinker.

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.

A few years before he died in 1662, Blaise Pascal wrote fifteen interconnected essays on grace, which have collectively come to be known as the Écrits sur la grâce. These were not published before his death, and were not polished and revised by him with an eye to publication, which means that they show his mind at work experimentally, trying out lines of argument and engagements with magisterial and patristic texts without resolving them into anything like a final system. The Écrits are replete with experimental formulations and bursts of literary and intellectual energy; taken together, they provide an intense and extreme presentation of Pascal's version of Augustinianism with respect to grace, election, and predestination, the meaning of the Council of Trent, and much else. These essays provide one of the keys to the entirety of Pascal's thought, and they provide a view of grace's workings -- perhaps better, a grammar of grace -- which still warrants serious attention by Catholic theologians. Less than one-fifth of the Écrits has yet been published in English. This book provides a complete translation, made from the French text provided in Michel Le Guern's edition (1998, 2000) of Pascal's Oeuvres complètes, and annotated to provide full information about Pascal's sources and how he used them. The translation is followed by a substantial interpretive essay in which Pascal's positions and approaches are restated and argued with.