Blaise Pascal, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
God conceals himself, and this concealment is just. We deserve nothing but God's wrath — perfect clarity would harm rather than help us. He would be unjust if he were so manifest that no sincere seeker could miss him, and unjust if he were so hidden that even those to whom his mercy was offered could not find him (fr. 149). What he provides is the precise measure: "enough clarity to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humble them; enough obscurity to blind the reprobate and enough clarity to condemn them and leave them without excuse" (fr. 236).
That God hides himself is the decisive mark that Christianity is true — no other religion teaches a hidden God. The post-Cartesian silence of nature is not the refutation of faith but its condition.1234
If God had permitted only one religion, it had been too easily known; but when we look at it closely, we clearly discern the truth amidst this confusion. The premiss.--Moses was a clever man. If, then, he ruled himself by his reason, he would say nothing clearly which was directly against reason. Thus all the very apparent weaknesses are strength. Example; the two genealogies in Saint Matthew and Saint Luke.Pensées
If He had willed to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, He could have done so by revealing Himself so manifestly to them that they could not have doubted of the truth of His essence; as it will appear at the last day, with such thunders and such a convulsion of nature, that the dead will rise again, and the blindest will see Him.Pensées
Everything bears this character.... Shall he alone who knows his nature know it only to be miserable? Shall he alone who knows it be alone unhappy?... He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see sufficient for him to believe he possesses it; but he must see enough to know that he has lost it. For to know of his loss, he must see and not see; and that is exactly the state in which he naturally is....Pensées
Our religion does, all this: Vere tu es Deus absconditus. 585 If there were no obscurity, man would not be sensible of his corruption; if there were no light, man would not hope for a remedy.Pensées
The Enlightenment critique — that the hiddenness doctrine makes Christianity unfalsifiable — misidentifies what the argument is. It is not an empirical hypothesis that might be falsified by the absence of divine signs in nature; it is a theological claim about God's relationship to fallen humanity and the role of grace in making faith possible. Goldmann's "hidden God" captures the structuring role of the doctrine across the Pensées and correctly reads it as central, though the sociological reduction of the tragic vision to Jansenism-as-class-phenomenon misses the theology. Kołakowski (1995) correctly reads how Pascal converted Cartesian silence into a theological resource rather than a threat. The conversion is genuine, not merely defensive.