  Following Augustine, Pascal emphasized the extent to which any recovery from the fallen state of human nature was a gift from God, which could not be earned or deserved in any way by human agents. This divine gift included, as one of its elements, religious faith itself, that is, the capacity of humans to believe the theological interpretation on which the implied worldview depended. Other philosophical commentators on Christian belief in the seventeenth century, such as John Locke or John Toland, argued that what a Christian is invited to believe must be intelligible; according to them, there were no mysteries in Christianity if that term includes propositions that we cannot understand. Thus religious faith merely compensated for a lack of evidence in support of a particular proposition, and made it possible for a Christian to accept it as true (Clarke, 2011). For Pascal, however, faith provides appropriately disposed Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what is intelligible and to accept as true even matters that they cannot understand. To claim otherwise would be to set limits to the reality of God and to reduce religious faith to the compass of human understanding. The Pensées suggest: “if one submits everything to reason, our religion will contain nothing that is mysterious or supernatural” (Fragment 162: II, 602). Thus those who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expected not only to accept things that are uncertain but, especially, to accede to realities that are incomprehensible. Pascal offered no explanation of how this was possible.