Pascal for Our Time

by Romano Guardini, Brian Thompson (Translator)

Brian Thompson, translator

The mystery of Pascal has baffled philosophers, literary critics, and theologians; and only an author of the stature of Romano Guardini, who is conversant with each of the three disciplines represented, could hope to understand this seventeenth-century figure who stands with Faustian man as one of the dominant symbols of the modern spirit.

In this study - which takes on added interest because of the recent four-hundredth anniversary of his death - Blaise Pascal is seen as the prototype of man at once just and sinning, at once believing and doubting, who gambled all on faith, and by the very totality of his wager won through to assent.

With admirable balance and tact Msgr. Guardini discusses the central crisis of Pascal's life - the "Mémorial" experience - his image of man, his place in the evolution of intellectual history, his conception of society, culture, and education, his theology, his theory of knowledge, his "argument of the wager," and finally, in the culminating chapter of the book, Pascal's personality and its impact on contemporary sensibility.

In "Pascal for Our Time" a master of modern Christian thought, Romano Guardini, scrutinizes judiciously and reverently one of his own great predecessors.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

236 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Romano Guardini was a Catholic priest, author, and academic. He was one of the most important figures in Catholic intellectual life in the 20th century.

Guardini was born in Verona, Italy in 1885. His family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. After studying chemistry in Tübingen for two semesters, and economics in Munich and Berlin for three, he decided to become a priest. After studying Theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen, he was ordained in Mainz in 1910. He briefly worked in a pastoral position before returning to Freiburg to work on his doctorate in Theology under Engelbert Krebs. He received his doctorate in 1915 for a dissertation on Bonaventure. He completed his “Habilitation” in Dogmatic Theology at the University of Bonn in 1922, again with a dissertation on Bonaventure. Throughout this period he also worked as a chaplain to the Catholic youth movement.

In 1923 he was appointed to a chair in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin. In the 1935 essay “Der Heiland” (The Saviour) he criticized Nazi mythologizing of the person of Jesus and emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. The Nazis forced him to resign from his Berlin position in 1939. From 1943 to 1945 he retired to Mooshausen, where his friend Josef Weiger had been parish priest since 1917.

In 1945 Guardini was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and resumed lecturing on the Philosophy of Religion. In 1948, he became professor at the University of Munich, where he remained until retiring for health reasons in 1962.

Guardini died in Munich on 1 October 1968. He was buried in the priests’ cemetery of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Munich. His estate was left to the Catholic Academy in Bavaria that he had co-founded.