Pascal & Giussani

The Roman Catholic church is not generally considered doctrinally "broad," and indeed many of its most fascinating theological voices -- ranging from Pelagius in the fifth century to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., in the twentieth -- have often bordered on, or crossed over into, outright heresy. However, I wish to look at two explicitly Roman Catholic apologies for religious belief -- one written by an actual cleric, Monsignor Luigi Giussani, and the other written by the great French polymath Blaise Pascal -- to compare and contrast the rationales offered for religious belief. Pascal's affiliation with Jansenism -- more of a religious revival within Catholicism, although eventually condemned as heretical by the Vatican -- may have led him to a fraught relationship with organizational structures of the Church (particularly the Jesuits) but I think overall we will find that Pascal's thinking is more in line with the...
[ View Full Essay]