Wagering on an Ironic God: Pascal on Faith and Philosophy

by Thomas S. Hibbs

Overview

"Philosophers startle ordinary people. Christians astonish the philosophers."
—Pascal, Pensées
 
In Wagering on an Ironic God Thomas S. Hibbs both startles and astonishes. He does so by offering a new interpretation of Pascal’s Pensées and by showing the importance of Pascal in and for a philosophy of religion.
 
Hibbs resists the temptation to focus exclusively on Pascal’s famous "wager" or to be beguiled by the fragmentary and presumably incomplete nature of Pensées. Instead he discovers in Pensées a coherent and comprehensive project, one in which Pascal contributed to the ancient debate over the best way of life—a life of true happiness and true virtue.
 
Hibbs situates Pascal in relation to early modern French philosophers, particularly Montaigne and Descartes. These three French thinkers offer distinctly modern accounts of the good life. Montaigne advocates the private life of authentic self-expression, while Descartes favors the public goods of progressive enlightenment science and its promise of the mastery of nature. Pascal, by contrast, renders an account of the Christian religion that engages modern subjectivity and science on its own terms and seeks to vindicate the wisdom of the Christian vision by showing that it, better than any of its rivals, truly understands human nature.
 
Though all three philosophers share a preoccupation with Socrates, each finds in that figure a distinct account of philosophy and its aims. Pascal finds in Socrates a philosophy rich in irony: philosophy is marked by a deep yearning for wisdom that is never wholly achieved. Philosophy is a quest without attainment, a love never obtained. Absent Cartesian certainty or the ambivalence of Montaigne, Pascal’s practice of Socratic irony acknowledges the disorder of humanity without discouraging its quest. Instead, the quest for wisdom alerts the seeker to the presence of a hidden God.
 
God, according to Pascal, both conceals and reveals, fulfilling the philosophical aspiration for happiness and the good life only by subverting philosophy’s very self-understanding. Pascal thus wagers all on the irony of a God who both startles and astonishes wisdom’s true lovers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481306386
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Thomas S. Hibbs is Dean of the Honors College and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Irony, Philosophy, and the Christian Faith 1

§1 Pascal and the Ancient Quarrel over the Best Way of Life 2

§2 Irony Rehabilitated 11

§3 The Figure of Socrates in Early Modern Philosophy: Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal 18

§4 Divine Irony as an Alternative to Deism and Voluntarism 30

2 Socratic Immanence: Montaigne's Recovery of Philosophy as a Way of Life 39

§1 Socratic Self-Knowledge and the Art of Living 42

§2 Against Speculative Philosophy 46

§3 Montaigne's Confessions 54

§4 Death, Diversion, and the Supernatural 60

3 The Virtue of Science and the Science of Virtue: Descartes' Overcoming of Socrates 67

§1 The Arts of Writing and the Science of Living 69

§2 Recovering and Overcoming Socrates 73

§3 Descartes' New Science of Virtue 81

§4 Theology, Philosophical Irony, and the Arts of (Re-)Writing 88

4 The Quest for Wisdom: Pascal and Philosophy 101

§1 Socrates and the Quest for the Good Life 102

§2 Ironic Reversal: The Reduction of Cartesian Certitude to Socratic Amazement 106

§3 Philosophy Deconstructed? Pascal Deconstructed? 113

§4 'The Restless Heart: Pascal's Residual Teleology 122

§5 Pascal's Methods and the Quest for a Synoptic Vision 132

5 Wagering on an Ironic God 143

§1 Rereading the Wager 145

§2 Wagering as Self-Emptying 163

§3 The Problem of Hope 169

§4 Neither Deism nor Voluntarism 175

§5 Christ as Eucharistic Cipher 183

Bibliography 193

Index of Names and Authors 203

What People are Saying About This

V. Bradley Lewis

This exceptionally rich book will challenge the way many people understand modern philosophy by showing the often unnoticed continuities with ancient philosophy as the Socratic quest for the best way of life. In reconstructing the trialogue between Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, Hibbs also presents the claims of both philosophy and of Christianity with the radical immediacy often obscured by the common interpretations of these thinkers and by the characteristic prejudices of our time.

David O’Connor

Tom Hibbs' new book invites the reader into a fascinating debate about Socratic irony among three great French thinkers—Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. With many fresh insights for the scholar, Wagering on an Ironic God will draw in any reader responsive to Socrates' challenge to live the examined life.

David O’Connor

Tom Hibbs’ new book invites the reader into a fascinating debate about Socratic irony among three great French thinkers—Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal. With many fresh insights for the scholar, Wagering on an Ironic God will draw in any reader responsive to Socrates' challenge to live the examined life.

Peter Lawler

This is the most profoundly relevant book I’ve read in years. Hibbs, with a rigorous and meticulous marshalling of all the available evidence, shows us how to live as if the truth and my particular life really matter. The ‘Christian Socratism’ of Hibbs and Pascal is the most wondrous and dialogic form of inquiry around these (and all) days, and we can hope it saves many—including most professors of philosophy—from their dreary restlessness in the midst of prosperity.

Editorial Reviews

Hibbs’s book is appropriate for those interested in Pascal’s thought, and the major philosophical influences that played a central role in the forming of Pascal’s thought. It also serves as a corrective for the common tendency to focus only on the wager, while ignoring all else found in Pascal’s Pensées.

The Review of Metaphysics - Jeff Jordan

…Thomas Hibbs is intent on bringing Pascal and his distinctive thought to the fore. In doing so, he makes a signal contribution to our understanding of modern philosophy itself. He not only rehabilitates Pascal, but sheds important light on his philosophical interlocutors, Montaigne and Descartes. This book could be profitably read merely for its treatments of Montaigne and Descartes. But the triangle of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal is historically apposite and philosophically quite illuminating.

The Review of Politics - Paul Seaton

Wagering on an Ironic God is clear and bright, brisk and vigorous. These are excellences in any work but hold a special luster in a book on Pascal, about whom it is so difficult to write well and so easy to falter. It offers an interpretation of his thought that is complex and nuanced—one is tempted even to say profound, if the use of that word in earnest is still permitted in Anglophone philosophy.

Virgil Martin Nemoianun Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Thomas Hibbs’s exploration of Pascal’s thought offers an important corrective to a common tendency that takes Pascal’s Pensées as the idiosyncratic, private musings of a solitary thinker. In Hibbs’s work, Pascal emerges not as a lonely genius but as a thinker very much in conversation with the philosophical tradition, especially René Descartes and Michel de Montaigne…After engaging Wagering on an Ironic God, readers will find their encounters with Pascal complicated and enriched.

The Thomist - Randall G. Colton

Towards the end of Wagering on an Ironic God, Thomas Hibbs asks his reader: 'How much more rewarding would our discussions (dare we say our lives?) be if they were informed by the writings of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal?'. Wagering reads like an invitation to such a discussion with Hibbs, and evidences many of the delights and peculiarities of such a conversation.

J. Columcille Dever

An original and probing interpretation of Pascal’s wager, reconstructed along the line of Socratic ignorance.

International Philosophical Quarterly - John J. Conley

Wagering on an Ironic God is clear and bright, brisk and vigorous. These are excellences in any work but hold a special luster in a book on Pascal, about whom it is so difficult to write well and so easy to falter. It offers an interpretation of his thought that is complex and nuanced—one is tempted even to say profound, if the use of that word in earnest is still permitted in Anglophone philosophy.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly - Virgil Martin Nemoianu

Towards the end of Wagering on an Ironic God, Thomas Hibbs asks his reader: ‘How much more rewarding would our discussions (dare we say our lives?) be if they were informed by the writings of Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal?’. Wagering reads like an invitation to such a discussion with Hibbs, and evidences many of the delights and peculiarities of such a conversation.

Modern Theology - J. Columcille Dever