Brian Thompson, translator The mystery of Pascal has baffled philosophers, literary critics, and theologians; and only an author of the stature of Romano Guardini, who is conversant with each of the three disciplines represented, could hope to understand this seventeenth-century figure who stands with Faustian man as one of the dominant symbols of the modern spirit. In this study - which takes on added interest because of the recent four-hundredth anniversary of his death - Blaise Pascal is seen as the prototype of man at once just and sinning, at once believing and doubting, who gambled all on faith, and by the very totality of his wager won through to assent. With admirable balance and tact Msgr. Guardini discusses the central crisis of Pascal's life - the "Mémorial" experience - his image of man, his place in the evolution of intellectual history, his conception of society, culture, and education, his theology, his theory of knowledge, his "argument of the wager," and finally, in the culminating chapter of the book, Pascal's personality and its impact on contemporary sensibility. In "Pascal for Our Time" a master of modern Christian thought, Romano Guardini, scrutinizes judiciously and reverently one of his own great predecessors.