Pascal’s Wager: The Man Who Played Dice With God by James A. Connor is a short, popular biography of, well…Blaise Pascal. Connor is the author of a previous book on Kepler, and teaches at Kean University in New Jersey.

Connor is an English professor and a former Jesuit and you can tell. How? First, this type of book – a popular treatment of an historical figure, of a particular moment in time – is popular, and while most in the genre are well-written, they tend to be rather journalistic in tone. Connor’s got a grace to his writing and a wry, but thorough insight into the matters at hand – religion and the sciences – that makes this a very easy read, but one with substance. Secondly, well – if you know anything about Pascal, you know a lot of the story is about Jansenism, and that story features an enemy: Jesuits. I’m not an expert on Jansenism, and it does seem clear that Pascal did create quite the Straw Jesuit in Provinciales, but something about Connor’s treatment of the Jesuits of the 17th century is definitely tilted in the direction of the uncritically laudatory. 

I wrote the the above on 1/3 and it’s now 2/14, and the book is long returned to the library shelves, so I can’t do much specific with it, except to say that the biography was most interesting, to me, in connecting the dots between the gambling culture of Pascal’s wealthy friends, his mathematical theories, and, of course, the wager. The Jansenist context  – something I feel I need to know more about because I have long casually accused the French-Canadian Catholic side of my family as imbedded in my genes as having Jansenist tendencies, and I really should learn more and see if that ‘s true – is well-established and clarified as is the scientific world of the period and Pascal’s place in it. The Pensées, however, get short shrift, which I found kind of odd…

So, a good popular bio, an introduction – worth your time if Pascal and his considerable achievements and short life are of interest and also if you’re interested in movements, heresies and near-heresies within Catholicism and to whom they tend to appeal and why.