Comptes rendus 215 and expression, but additionally the fine points of the contemporary novel. His thirty-six chapters are lean and hard-hitting, organized around one or two well-examined moments or issues. He has stripped away any remnants of the anachronistic, “ye olde” jargon that so often hampers historical plots, creating dialogues that are capable of both depth and rapid development. The text is neither a 500-page endurance contest, nor an easily-discarded TGV potboiler, but instead a genial and convincing tale that integrates the finest of scholarly tradition with an admirable sense of what a novel should be. Without doubt, it makes those of us who dabble in creative historical fiction or non-fiction in English dream of what could be done. Maybe… James F. Gaines Tetsuya Shiokawa : Entre foi et raison : l’autorité. Études pascaliennes. Paris : Champion, 2012 (coll. “Lumière classique”, n o 97). 252 p. On any list of the major contributors to the francophone scholarship on Blaise Pascal the last forty years, the name of a Japanese scholar will figure prominently. Since the 1977 publication of his dissertation, Pascal et les miracles, which is still today considered the seminal study on the subject, Tetsuya Shiokawa has published a long series of important articles in leading French journals and collective volumes. However, it was not until 2012 that a second book on Pascal came out in French, from the by now professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, bringing together seventeen important titles, a few of which are here made available for a French audience for the first time, the others revised for the occasion. Although written over four decades, the texts in the volume show a clear coherence both when it comes to method and subject. They are all studies in the very concrete sense that they are problem-driven; they have a clear and concrete starting point in a specific and perplexing question that propels the reflection forward. For example, what exactly did Pascal understand by the term imagination? (The driving question in article I-3.) The answer may seem wrongly obvious to a modern reader, but the strangeness of Pascal’s use of the term is highlighted by the fact that in the Port-Royal edition of the Pensées the word is often replaced by “fantaisie et opinion” or quite simply “opinion”. And as a second example, the most consistently recurring question of the book: How can it be that Pascal spent his last years working on a rational persuasion of his readers, all while stressing that such a persuasion would be useless for their salvation? (The question around which the central section of the volume revolves.) The result is an intellectual stance that combines erudition and humility in the best possible way. Assisted by the author’s immense learnedness, the PFSCL XLI, 80 (2014) 216 reader moves through often highly technical arguments (the political context of Pascal’s last Provincial Letters is another key example, from part 3 of the book) without ever losing sight of the higher stakes and in a way that allows the initial question to function as a prism throwing a new light on a much wider set of discussions. It is symptomatic in this respect that most of the articles end with a question, not closing the subject, but inviting the reader to pursue the reflection on questions that have certainly been illuminated in the text we just read, but which are too central, too important to have a definitive answer. The book is divided into three parts consisting of five articles each, framed by a prelude and an epilogue both highlighting the exterior perspective of the Japanese reader of Pascal. The first part, “Termes et concepts”, consists of penetrating meditations on key Pascalian concepts such as “la pensée”, “l’autorité”, “l’imagination”, “la guerre et la paix”, and “le temps et l’éternité”, all approached in the manner just described. Each of these texts remains indispensable references for anyone interested in the topics, although sometimes they need to be read alongside seminal contributions of later scholarship (this is especially true for the article on imagination from 1990, in relation to the decisive interventions by Gérard Ferreyrolles (Les reines du monde, 1995) and John D. Lyons (Before Imagination, 2005)). It is less the case, however, for the oldest article of the volume, “L’autorité”, originally published under the title “La connaissance par l’autorité selon Pascal” in 1977, which through its resonance with the title of the book serves as an introduction to its two remaining parts. The question of authority, “entre foi et raison”, is obviously at the heart of Pascal’s thinking, from early polemics on science and epistemology through his later reflections on apologetics and theology. Therefore, when the author on the first page of this 1977 article states about the concept that “l’unité et la cohérence n’en ont pas été bien comprises” (47), it is tempting to read it as the formulation of a long-term research program of which the 2012 book is the account. At the very least it is this project that gives a surprising coherence to the volume. The second part of the book is very concisely defined by its title: “Stratégie et limites de l’apologétique”, with articles exploring the place of rhetoric, faith, proofs and the Wager argument within Pascalian apologetics, as well as the conception and finality of the apologetic project itself. To this reviewer this part is the highlight of the book and where a synergy is most productively generated by the bringing the different articles together. We are presented with a profound meditation on what we could call Pascal’s meta-apologetics, starting with the observation that “parallèlement aux arguments proprement apologétiques qui visent à la persuasion rationnelle Comptes rendus 217 des lecteurs sont ainsi développées [dans les Pensées] des considérations pénétrantes sur l’essence, la signification et la légitimité de l’apologétique” (118). The concept of authority is here central at two different levels. First, in relation to the freethinking reader, whom Pascal seeks to lead to the recognition of the limits of reason and thereby to a new consideration of the credibility of the authority of Scripture and Tradition. This approach has the merit of bringing into focus one of the paradoxes of the whole enterprise: Pascal’s meta-apologetics as a meditation on the authority of authority. Second, in relation to Pascal himself. With which authority does he take on such a project? What agency does he claim? Isn’t it “une témérité satanique que de tenter une pareille entreprise, en ce qu’elle viserait à usurper la place de Dieu” (133)? Again, the formulation of the problem serves to pinpoint a central paradox of the enterprise, since Pascal’s main reproach both of the “moi haïssable” and the “extravagante créature” is exactly to have usurped the place of God. The author suggests an intriguing way out of these paradoxes by probing the extent to which prophetic voices and spirituality are inscribed already in Pascal’s apologetics, although, to this reader, this leads the author to new paradoxes when the agency of certain parts of the Pensées is displaced to God, since “Pascal ne devait certainement pas avoir conscience d’employer un artifice rhétorique” when integrating the voice of God in his writing (171). In the third part of the book, the perspective shifts from apologetics to politics. The origin of these articles is concisely described in the introduction as “une enquête historique suscitée par la découverte de la source d’une citation [et qui] a également occasionné une interprétation textuelle des deux dernières Provinciales et de certains écrits annexes” (9-10). Although the archival finding itself was published 25 years ago and has since been integrated in the annotation of academic editions of the Provinciales, the articles remain important in the wider context of the volume by stressing the very specific political context inside which not only Pascal’s writing on authority and faith in the last Provinciales took place, but also the writing on similar issues by Arnauld and Nicole, including, importantly, in the Logique de Port-Royal. The framework of the volume stresses the point of exteriority from which it is written, the prelude by discussing a specific difficulty in the rendering of the famous “nez de Cléopâtre” into Japanese (should it be literal and evoke its length, or rather its height, which makes more sense culturally? ); the epilogue by drawing a quick but fascinating tableau of “Pascal au Japon: rétrospectives et prospectives”. The text’s assessment of the present state of Pascal studies in Japan highlights two major problems: on the one hand, an exaggerated cult of erudition, at the risk of losing sight PFSCL XLI, 80 (2014) 218 of the wider stakes; on the other, a tendency to identify too closely with the author, both affectively and intellectually, at the risk of ending up in the arbitrary. Presumably, both these problems are the result of inadequate reactions to the position of exteriority of the foreign scholar, two ways of over-compensating, so to speak. However, it doesn’t need to be this way. Indeed, the volume closes on a hopeful note about the position of Japanese scholars toward their object of study: “n’est-ce pas un atout pour un chercheur que ce sentiment aigu de différence à l’égard de son objet d’enquête? ” (252). The scholarship on display in this volume provides a resounding positive answer to its final question. Hall Bjornstad