God

This chapter begins by showing Pascal’s central theme to be the first and most fundamental distinction—Infini rien—between the transcendent God and all else, which, without God, would be nothing. It identifies the distinction in Pascal’s work and articulates it. It then considers the difficulties attending the distinction’s disclosure, focusing on the problems faced by traditional natural theology, which is ambiguous between what is first in nature and what transcends nature as its ground. It argues that only divine initiative is adequate to the disclosure of the Infini rien distinction. God’s free entry into nature as part of human history forms the center of a sacred tradition available to man in memory.