Page 66 - Eclipse of God

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THE LOVE OF GOD AND

THE IDEA OF DEITY

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In those scribbled lines affecting us as cries of the very soul,
which Pascal wrote after two ecstatic hours, and which he car-
ried about with him until his death, sewn into the lining of
his doublet, we find under the heading Fire the note: “God of
Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob— not of the philoso-
phers and scholars.”
These words represent Pascal’s change of heart. He turned,
not from a state of being where there is no God to one where
there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the
God of Abraham. Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew
what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the
God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of
thought. The God of Abraham, the God in whom Abraham
had believed and whom Abraham had loved (“The entire re-
ligion of the Jews,” remarks Pascal, “consisted only of the love
of God”), is not susceptible of introduction into a system of

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