David Mathis describes Pascal:
His is one of the great minds of Western civilization—indeed, the history of the world. He was a child prodigy and first a mathematician and physicist, then a philosopher and theologian.... Because he refused to swallow Descartes’s pill of naively applying the scientific method to every discipline, Pascal’s seventeenth-century writings prove hauntingly relevant today in a postmodern milieu in which more and more are awakening from the Enlightenment’s folly.
It was November 23, 1654. He was 31 years old. For two hours, from about 10:30 PM until 12:30 AM, he experienced a kind of spiritual inferno. He journaled the experience on a piece of a paper he sewed into his coat to keep near his heart.
Read more about this brilliant Christian.