The Night Blaise Pascal Could Not Look Away

On the evening of November 23, 1654, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal sat alone in his room in Paris when something shattered his ordinary world. For two hours, beginning around half past ten, Pascal encountered the living God — not as an idea to be debated, but as a consuming fire that left him trembling and weeping. He later scribbled his experience on a scrap of parchment in broken, breathless phrases: "Fire.…