How Pensées drew on The Complete Essays
A documented line of influence: Blaise Pascal demonstrably engaged Michel de Montaigne’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Complete Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1580
RenaissanceThe influenced
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · 1670
EnlightenmentRelevance
10/10
On Pensées’s page
- The Pensées are Pascal arguing with Montaigne on nearly every page — taking his skepticism and his portrait of human restlessness as the ground to build on
- Pascal's 'Disproportion of Man' grows straight out of Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond; he read it closely and said so
- Read the Essays first and the Pensées sharpen into a reply: Montaigne shows you the doubt, Pascal tells you where it has to lead
On The Complete Essays’s page
- Pascal named Montaigne, alongside Epictetus, as one of his two most-read books — and said so plainly in his 1655 conversation with M. de Saci
- Montaigne's Essays hand Pascal his starting material: the radical skepticism and the restless, self-contradicting human animal of the Apology for Raymond Sebond
- The Pensées borrow that doubt and that anatomy of human disquiet — then bend both toward God, which Montaigne never did