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Brice Parain, in your book
De fil en aiguille,

you state that your earliest philosophical
questionings were prompted by Pascal.

However, back then,
it was in the context of mathematics.

I wouldn't phrase it
exactly the same way today.

Anyway, I was in tenth grade.

If you read Pascal at that age,
it really shakes you up,

and you should read him,
because you need shaking up.

At that age you're starting
to be aware of death,

and as a result,
you realize things about life

and you realize
these things bear reflection.

I don't think
Father Dubarle would agree.

Oh, I don't know,

but it's funny to see we discovered
Pascal at almost the same age.

I was in eleventh grade.

It wasn't through mathematics —
that came later for me —

but by reading his Pensées.

It affected me deeply too,

but in a curious way,

I was also annoyed
by that kind of writing.

I remember tearing him to pieces
before my school chaplain

and saying I couldn't stand
that kind of belief.

I was totally opposed
to Pascal's vision of existence.

Forgive me,
but were you perhaps afraid

of the harshness
with which Pascal judges life,

and his mistrust,
which is a terrifying thing?

Do you remember?
- Yes, very well.

No, I wasn't at all afraid.

I'd already been confronted
with death at a young age,

though not personally.

No, it was more
a complete rejection

of a judgment
that seemed incorrect.

But it didn't cause me anxiety.

Perhaps it was about lying.

Pascal sharply accuses mankind
of being hypocritical.

Mankind's greatest sin is lying.

It's the original sin.

Lying is the basic,
cardinal sin of mankind.

Yes, it is. As Christians say,
"the father of lies."

It's awful, but all the same,

it seems to me there's an element
that's difficult to grasp,

but the older I got,
the more I thought about it.

It comes down
to an undue emphasis.

In my opinion, Pascal focuses
on one aspect of the Bible,

the Old Testament
as seen by a Christian,

but perhaps something
occurred later

that isn't represented
in these writings.

Yes, of course.

There's no redemption,
no right to life in Pascal's viewpoint.

When reading Pascal, you might
wonder if you have the right to live.

Very true.

Nevertheless, Pascal never questions
our right to think.

Never.

Nor our right to live, really.
- No, not really.

But I wouldn't want a life
like the one Pascal accords us.

That's true. It's heavy.

Not just heavy.
It seems incorrect to me.

Why incorrect? Is it because —

Yes, perhaps because
in your heart

you believe in redemption,

that mankind isn't so bad,

so totally at the mercy
of hardship and chance.

To save time, I'll explain that,
before Pascal,

a certain phrase obsessed me,
even as a kid,

and has stayed with me all my life.

St. John wrote, "For we believed in love,"
and that always prevails.

That said, I'd like to start over.
We'll come back to that later.

We need to talk about Pascal
the thinker, the great mathematician,

the young man of 27 or 30 in 1650

who suddenly
discovered equilibrium,

not as it's understood today.

That came later, with differential
and integral calculus,

and the work of Newton and Leibniz

45 years later.

But the man who discovered
the foundation,

the 17th-century man
who knew he was bidding farewell

to the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance

to enter a new and infinite world,

one that Pascal commanded,

and it foreshadows the man

who will later find his place

in relation to the planet,
to the expanding universe

with its spirals of cosmic dust,

and ponder his role,
what he's here to do,

and what he must attempt
as a man.

Pascal could have been,
and was, a great scientist.

It's said he knew
differential calculus inside out,

and he threw it all to the dogs
and turned to religion.

There's the crux of the matter.

I'm not sure
he really threw it to the dogs.

Of course, there was still
his work with roulette.

One can learn a lot
from the history of science.

Sure, Valéry said
Pascal wasted his time

sewing notes into his pocket
one November night

when he could have given France
the glory of infinitesimal calculus.

But is that really true?
- Certainly not.

My vision of Pascal could be
summed up in Pascal's own words

on the subject of Archimedes:

"Oh, how he shattered
the spirit world."

Going beyond Cartesian
and Copernican foundations,

which didn't yet include the mechanics
and physics of infinitesimal calculus,

which wouldn't come along
for another 40 years,

it seems to me Pascal suddenly
sent up this amazing rocket

without which I don't think
infinitesimal calculus

could later have come into being.

As Leibniz said

when he read Pascal's text
on the characteristic triangle,

he was surprised to see,

as if leaning
over the author's shoulder,

knowledge the author himself
was unaware of.

I think Pascal's greatness,
like that of any true scientific genius,

is to encode in his works
knowledge that the next generation,

as if leaning over his shoulder,
will decode.

Listening to you, I was thinking —

How can I say this?

You couldn't have been
all that shocked by Pascal

because in a way you obeyed him.

The fact you chose a religious path

shows that, in a way,
you don't need Pascal.

Because what does
Pascal tell us?

"Without God, man is unhappy.

Believe in God."

His real struggle lay
in trying to prove that to us,

but he doesn't need
to prove it to you.

That seems to be
the difference between us.

What I'm about to say
may surprise you,

but my struggle with faith occurred

after I entered religious life,
not before.

Before, I was quite comfortable.

I had a fine Christian upbringing,

and then the strange idea
of entering religious life

came over me quite suddenly.
I thought I had everything all worked out.

But I was already in revolt
against Pascal at that point.

I found him overdramatic,
too angst-ridden,

waxing rhetorical on issues
I felt were self-evident.

Later, of course, I began to see
what lay behind that rhetoric:

the abyss, the desert,

the dried-up wells
on long voyages across arid lands.

Those things certainly
happened to me,

but I didn't experience them
in the same way.

And sometimes Pascal shocked me

with his ill-digested bitterness.

Perhaps it's unfair to say that.

Later I understood why he was
so harsh in his Provincial Letters,

but even today,
I think he was too hard at times.

In certain cases,

I don't think
it's the true severity of the Gospel

that's behind his formulations.

Sometimes he gets carried away
by his own style.

I can't say I'm a believer.

I can't pretend to have
the faith I might have

if I'd entered a religious order.

Yet as a result,

that makes me feel closer to him,

because I have the same anxiety,
the same worries.

I wonder,
"What is reason's role in all this?

I wonder if we shouldn't examine
Pascal the mathematician,

who discovered and understood,

perhaps better than we realized
for two centuries,

how to calculate probability.

Pascal didn't call it that.
To him it was "the problem of points."

To this kind of mathematics
he brought both reason

and what usually falls
outside the bounds of reason.

This is at the heart of the wonder
of Pascalian rationality,

if rationality
is the appropriate term,

and of Pascal himself, certainly.

When he says
"to work for an uncertainty,"

we sense that
at the very highest levels of the spirit,

his concrete expression of it
was to follow the Christian faith,

but regardless of its expression,
everyone has a moment of truth

when we "act and work reasonably
for an uncertainty,"

though we're unsure of success.

Perhaps this is where
Pascal's true greatness lies.

That's not what bothers me.

What sometimes worries me

is that from those great heights,

this eternal truth for mankind

that has taken even deeper hold
in the soul of modern man,

he falls back on a certain rhetoric.

There's certainly
an eloquence to Pascal's writing.

His phrases are long and well-crafted,
with many examples.

But the many times he refers
to the use of literary devices,

what he calls "false windows,"

he's talking about himself,

because he's overflowing
with enthusiasm.

He wants to prove his point.

But there's something
alarming in his work...

and that's his relationship
with reality.

To him, reality is insurmountable,
impossible to prove.

It's the devil.

This is beyond
the reach of mathematics.

In 1661 or '62, when he said

he'd have nothing more
to do with geometry ever again,

that was astounding
for a man like Pascal.

- Of course.
- And he really meant it.

He wanted to reach something deeper
and more real than mathematics.

I don't doubt it. It's just that...

in Pascal's work,
I witness an extraordinary struggle

that doesn't exist anywhere else
in French literature,

except perhaps
in a few contemporary writers.

It's a struggle
between words and numbers,

which Pascal uses
with great skill on occasion,

and that which is beyond all words
and numbers, which I'd call "grace."

Suddenly, the rhythm breaks
and something very humble appears,

yet it's greater than what had until then
appeared to be greatest.

In some of his writing
this "something else" slips through.

- You won't find it anywhere else.
- Very true.

What you will find
are men who more fully accepted

the poverty of language

and the imperfection of the human heart
that seeks to express itself.

And it's easier to forgive them
than Pascal,

who struggled
and sought to overcome instead.

It's idiotic, of course,
to strive to achieve what's impossible.

It's crazy and arrogant.

But what else can a human being do?
- True.

Despite everything, he was human.

There's something else as well.

You can see I'm full
of objections and reservations,

always playing the devil's advocate.

It bothers me
to see style become a weapon,

even when used
against men guilty of great wrongs,

a weapon used to run a man through

and fix him in literature
before posterity for all time.

Is it right to use the pen
to run a man through,

even if he's guilty,

even if your style is admirable?

I think we must.

It's something that touches me
deeply in Pascal's work:

this kind of violence

that oversteps
the bounds of convention.

Keep in mind two things:

I don't remember where exactly,
but he said...

"We don't have the right to love."
He made that statement.

We only have
the right to love God

because humans
are fragile and mediocre,

so rationally,
we don't have the right to love.

That's quite extreme,
because it forbids life.

Another position
of the same order

is in the letter
to Mademoiselle de Roannez,

which I looked at last night.

We must even
accept hypocrisy and blindness.

We mustn't be shocked when
our opponents are willfully blind,

because Jesus himself
was subjected to that.

Even a statement of proof
can't expect to be believed.

He heads straight for the worst,
the most devilish part in man.

He sees it and accepts it.

This is quite something,
because he wants to remake mankind,

not starting
from "the honest man,"

as for a while
he thought he might,

but from the worst among men.

That's his task,
and it's a challenging one.

But can we do anything less?

I accept this second stance
of Pascal's completely.

We must make of man
what he should be,

but starting from what he is.

But this makes me oppose
the first statement

with even greater force.

No, we all have the right to love,
without exception.

And I don't just mean
to love God alone

or love others in God's name.

I think the path to God's love
starts by loving poor humanity,

and God will lead us from there.

It's not only a right.
It's a pressing obligation.

And this may be where
the conflicting elements come together.

I think "pressing obligation"

says it much better
than "the right."

An obligation
is more terrifying than a right.

We don't have the right to love,
and yet we must.

That's what I feel
when reading Pascal.

It's much more profound

than our normal way of loving,

which we take to be something
simple and natural and safe.

That's wrong.
Love is a challenge.

A challenge in the face of death,

in the face of
our inability to communicate,

in the face
of hypocrisy and conflict.

The power of contradiction
is very strong here.

If what he's asserting here
isn't simply silly and vain,

which it would be
if it were simply of the devil,

then it surpasses everything,
even geometry.

All the same,

I think the young man who seeks
his beloved has the right to love.

The rest comes later.

Secondly, when we've experienced
what you said,

we reach a point beyond
the pressing obligation to love

where we reach the right to love
and the peace of love.

Perhaps Pascal didn't live
long enough to reach the age

where the right to love
replaces the obligation to love,

and where the peace of love
becomes the greatest of rights,

the most marvelous obligation,
and the greatest part of man.

Perhaps that's why I always feel

that Pascal is immense
yet incomplete in his immensity.

I praise his immensity
and am thankful for his incompleteness,

because if a man were complete,

perhaps that would be too much.

We are all incomplete,
completed only by Jesus Christ.

Even though I've lived longer
than Pascal ever did,

I haven't found
the peace you speak of.

I still don't know
whether we have the right to love.

I wonder if Pascal's authenticity
hasn't been transformed

by the romanticization
of its tragic aspect.

We need to put the man
back into context

among the men of
that incredible period of the 1650s

who know that a page
in European history has been turned

and a new one is to begin,
though it's unclear where it will lead.

It didn't only lead
to the French Revolution.

It led us to today,
where we face a whole new world.

We need to go back
to Pascal's rationality,

which I feel has been largely
abandoned along the way.

Then why don't we start
"working for an uncertainty"?

Very well.