Biblical motifs in Pascal's Three Discourses on the Condition of the Great

Abstract

Pascal's thinking contains several important aspects and offers a possible synthesis of these. One of these important aspects is the Bible.

The Bible is in the focus of Pascal's major work, the Pensées – this is indisputable. A few biblical motifs also appear in his „Three Discourses on the Condition of the Great”. An examination of these biblical motifs through the Pensées, which appear mostly tangentially, shows that they are not merely surface phenomena in the thought-process of the Three Discourses, but deeply positioned ideological contents. In our study, we would like to present the following three of these biblical motifs in the following approaches:

• the appearance of the motif of the God who hides Himself, through the phenomenon of chance,

• the inverse idea of the parable of the false king: the real king who has lost his throne and has abdicated or renounced his title as a motif pointing to the mans's original greatness and Jesus Christ,

• the motif of concupiscence and the biblical idea of man's depraved nature (linked in theological history to the issue of so-called original sin).