Letters and Conversations: Pascal’s Personal and Public Correspondence

Letters to Family is a complete collection of letters between Pascal and his three sisters (Gilberte Périer, his older sister), Jacqueline Pascal (a poet and younger sister of Pascal) and Marguerite Périer, the niece of Pascal. Pascal's family were accomplished in their own right. Jacqueline was an accomplished Poet, and Gilberte wrote a biography on Pascal after he passed. The Letter on the Possibility of Fulfilling God's Commandments (1656) is a major theological work by Blaise Pascal, written during the controversy between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. In this letter, Pascal defends the Jansenist view of grace and human free will, and addresses the question of whether human beings can fulfill God's commandments without divine grace. Pascal argues that while God's commandments are just and righteous, human nature after the Fall is too corrupted by sin to fulfill them without the intervention of God's grace. This letter criticizes the Jesuit belief in the human ability to fulfill the divine law through personal effort, without the need for grace. Pascal insists that only through God's grace can man achieve true obedience to His laws. This work is part of Pascal's broader defense of Jansenist theology, which emphasizes the role of grace in salvation and human dependence on divine assistance for moral and spiritual progress.

This new Reader's Edition contains a new Afterword by the translator on Pascal's personal relationship with Descartes and his intellectual objections to the new Cartesian rationality which fundamentally changed the course of both Science and Philosophy and a short biography on Pascal's life and impact. This is followed by a timeline of his life and relationships, an index of his core Philosophic terminology, a chronological list and summary of all of his published and posthumous works, and the text of Pascal's Memorial, a poetic, fragmented account of his divine vision in 1654. This extra material introduces the reader to Pascal's metaphysical works and brings to life Pascal's witness of the dawn of a new Scientific age. This is volume 2 of the 7-part Complete Works of Pascal by Livraria Press.

This volume covers Pascal’s groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, science, and engineering, as well as his Scientific-Philosophical commentary on the Enlightenment's Scientific progress.

This volume contains:

1643: Letters to Family

1649: Letter on the Death of Pascal the Father

1656: Letter on the Possibility of Accomplishing God’s Commandments