Pascal, Indifference and Bresson
thought for the day, pensée for eternity
Has Blaise Pascal (1623-62) influenced the cinema? This is a novel question – you could even call it oxymoronic. Yet there is a connection, a connection squared even, for two of cinema’s masters made confession of his significance: first, Robert Bresson said, “Pascal is of such importance for me, but he is important for everybody”; second, Roberto Rossellini, as part of his project to describe on film the history of civilization, devoted one of his films to recounting the life of Blaise Pascal in all its many-sidedness: mathematician, scientist, inventor, polemicist, philosopher.
These thoughts have been awakened by reading the chapter on Pascal in Lucy Beckett’s ‘In the Light of Christ: writings in the western tradition’ which is a substantial examination of the truth of the Augustinian conception of the world in classical Western literature beginning with Aeschylus and Sophocles, Cicero and Vergil in the ancient world, and carrying on through Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hopkins, Beckett and Czeslaw Milosz, to name just some of the many writers she covers. The book was published by the Ignatius Press in America -- as if only they were bold enough to print a work so committed to faith in God (or as she likes to put it, to the three absolutes of goodness, beauty and truth), as if British publishing was now so secularized as to be unable to countenance such commitment.
This secularization sheds an oblique light on a piece of research published in the journal ‘Intelligence’ by Professor Richard Lynn, recently (June 2008) reported in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, to the effect that the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to believe in God. Lynn claims there is a direct correlation between the rise in average IQ levels in western Europe over the past century, and the decline in religious observance. He surveyed academic scientists who have been elected to the illustrious Royal Society in London, of whom just 3.3% described themselves as believers at a time when 68.5% of the general population say they believe in God. “Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population?” Lynn asks. “I believe it is simply a matter of IQ.”
Or is it a failure of imagination on the part of ‘reasonable’ people? Pascal wrote famously, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,” which is a central idea to his Pensées. For example number 424: “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.” Pascal is striking for his relentless attack on atheism for its inadequacy as a response to the world’s wretchedness, and to read him now is to feel that he is writing less for a 17th-century audience than for a 21st-century one. Take pensée 427 which is of comparatively extended length (six pages long, while many of the individual pensées are only a few lines in length) and is included in a group headed ‘Against Indifference’.
He starts with the idea that we do not have a clear sight of God, and “He will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart”. He then argues that the immortality of the soul is of such importance that not to care about it is to have lost all feeling, and whether it exists or not should decide all conduct. This leads him to distinguish between those who wrestle with the question, and those “who spend their lives without a thought for the final end of life”. “This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake . . . seems quite monstrous to me.” He then puts a speech into the mouth of his “extravagant creature” who expresses indifference to the momentousness of death. Such indifference serves to prove the corruption of the nature; it is “against nature”. Yet such people can be sensitive to quite minor things, such as “losing some office or at some imaginary affront to [their] honour”, while being insensitive to the greatest thing. Pascal calls this a state of “supernatural torpor”, which moves him to turn the description ‘reasonable’ on its head. The reasonable person is not the atheist, but “those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him”.
We come back then to Bresson, whose Fontaine in A Man Escaped (1956) wrestling with the prospect of damnation can well be described as a man “who seeks [God] with all his heart because he does not know him”. [For an exploration of this film in particular, click here.] Another Pascalian work is the picture in Au Hasard Balthasar (1965) of the wretchedness of the human condition, its beauty but also its greed, its cruelty, its blindness, all passively witnessed by Balthasar the donkey. In the IQ stakes Balthasar and the Royal Society seem a long way apart, but this is the creature that Bresson (in an interview in 1966) said “is taken for an idiot but who is of such intelligence”, an intelligence that should to my mind stir all those not sunk in the torpor of indifference.
There’s a twist to this tale: as Rossellini’s film makes clear, Pascal was such an important mathematician and scientist that were he to be alive today, he would be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and I venture to suggest that while he would be counted among the tiny minority of the Society’s believers, by virtue of his scientific brilliance he would also be counted among the Society’s most illustrious members.
Sources
Lucy Beckett In the Light of Christ: writings in the western tradition (Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2006)
Blaise Pascal Pensées, translated by Alban Krailsheimer (Penguin Books, London 1966, revised edition 1995)
‘The Question’, interview with Robert Bresson by Michel Delahaye and Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinéma no. 178, May 1966.
© Tim Cawkwell 2008