‘Not the God of the Philosophers…’: Can Aquinas’s Approach to God Be Reconciled with Pascal’s?

Abstract Pascal stressed the importance of ‘reasons of the heart’ in leading us to God, and insisted that the God to whom he turned during his ‘night of fire’ on 23 November 1654 was ‘not the God of the philosophers and scholars’, but the God of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ. This suggests a very different approach from that of Thomas, who characterises God in seemingly abstract terms, such as ‘being itself’ and ‘goodness itself’. This paper first explores the methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Pascal’s notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ and argues that we have good reason to take them seriously. The second half of the paper discusses Aquinas’s apparently more impersonal conception of the deity, as an ‘infinite ocean of substance’ (John of Damascus) on which all things depend. But it then explores Aquinas’s account of the passage in Exodus where God addresses Moses in personal terms, and argues that this account, together with what Aquinas has to say on the subject of prayer, indicates that the God of his philosophical deliberations can indeed be reconciled with the intensely personal God of Scripture to whom Pascal turned during his night of fire.