Writings on Grace

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 Ecrits sur la grace. 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 Ecrits 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 Ecrits 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 completes, 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.