  While it would be anachronistic to describe Pascal as an existentialist, one of the most prominent features of his work is the philosophical reflection on the radical contingency of human affairs that emerges especially in the final years of his life. He used these reflections to puncture the pride, arrogance, and self-love of those who thought of themselves as superior to the vicissitudes of human life. Oliver Cromwell provided a contemporary illustration by his fall from power as a result of a relatively trivial illness. “Cromwell would have ravaged the whole of Christendom; the royal family was lost, and his own family was about to become all-powerful, except for a little grain of sand that lodged in his bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. Once this little piece of stone became lodged there, he died, his family was disgraced, peace was established all round, and the king was restored” (Fragment 632: II, 799). Many of Pascal's intuitions about the contingency of human existence were a commonplace in the period, especially among Calvinist theologians (Rivet, 1651). They were inspired in part by a growing acceptance within cosmology of the infinite extent of the universe and, in contrast, the relative brevity of human lives. They owed even more to a theological perspective that claimed to represent human affairs from God's perspective, including the absolute will by which He predestines individuals for salvation or eternal perdition. Pascal's distinctive contribution was to capture some of these insights in the elegant, pithy phrases that characterized the poetic style of the Pensées. Fragment 104, for example, compares a human life to a ‘thinking reed.’ “It is not in space that I should search for my dignity, but in the control of my thoughts … The universe comprehends me by space and engulfs me like a point; by means of thought, I comprehend it” (II, 574).