 The philosophical value of Mersenne’s apologetics may be differently assessed. Mersenne seemed to pay little attention to contemporary arguments according to which the Bible is not to be taken literally on questions dealing with nature (see, e.g., Galileo’s 1615 Letter to Christina). His exegesis indeed offers a rather rough example of what will be later called “concordism”, the conception that there cannot be any discrepancy between the teachings of the sciences and those of the Bible, taken in the most literal sense. However, the most distinctive aspect of Mersenne’s apologetics, the edifying use of mathematics, although sometimes naïve in its formulations, did have philosophical influence. Pascal, who does not spare his sarcasm on those who think they can “prove God from the course of the moon and the planets” (Pascal 1963: 599, fg. 781), is nevertheless quite faithful to Mersenne’s use of mathematics, when he discusses men’s disproportion and God’s greatness from the mathematical model of the infinite divisibility of space, or from a speculation on the two infinites whose terms are reminiscent of similar passages from the Impiété.