Leszek Kołakowski

We are going to talk about what is perhaps the most formidable and intractable puzzle of Christian thinking-the confrontation of divine grace with the human free will-not in order to depicts its centuries-long and very confusing history or, God forbid, to contribute to its solution, but to see how this puzzle became the focus of a struggle between modernity and reaction embodied respectively in Jesuit and Jansenist doctrines in the seventeenth century, how Saint Augustine became a victim of this battle, and what role was played in it by Pascal.

— from God owes us nothing, 1994