Born of a Rouen tax collector, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was an important mathematician (developing probability theory), inventor (he invented the hydraulic press and the syringe, and was one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator), and physicist. After a mystical experience (the nuit de feu), he threw in his lot with the Jansenists of Port-Royal, who strenuously objected to Catholic laxity as a response to Calvinist rigorism, advocating for a kind of Puritanical Catholicism. In his satirical Provincial Letters (an exemplary instance of French prose writing), Pascal takes up the great controversy between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the latter being the shock troops of the Counter Reformation set in motion by the Council of Trent (1545-1563). To Pascal, Jesuit casuistry simply reconciled people to worldliness.

No other person exemplifies the Enlightenment more than does Voltaire, nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778). His father was a lawyer serving as a minor treasury official, and his mother belonged to the minor nobility. Voltaire tirelessly opposed regnant power structures, especially the Catholic Church (himself being a deist), and he fought for civil rights. First published in 1733, when Voltaire was already famous as a playwright and poet, the satirical Philosophical Letters (or the Letters upon the English Nation) was a bestseller based on his time in England. In the Twenty-Fifth of these letters, Voltaire resists the pessimism of Pascal’s Pensées. Reading Pascal and Voltaire together, we are confronted by the possible inhumanities of both worldliness and religiosity.