The hidden God in French literature and cinema: From the Classical Age to the twentieth century

Humankind has always grappled with the notion of God's imperceptibility, and this quandary of the hidden, present but absent, God has found expression at virtually every stage in our cultural, intellectual and spiritual evolution, from the Old Testament onward. Within the French tradition, critic Lucien Goldmann has shown that the hiddenness of God in relation to tragic man and the world is what defines the human condition for Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and Jean Racine (1639–99). But it would be wrong to conclude from Goldmann's seminal study that “le dieu cache” belongs exclusively to Pascal's and Racine's pre-Enlightenment worldview.; French writers in each successive age have recreated the figure of the hidden God in the image of their own spiritual crises. Illustrating the figure's ubiquity and variety across periods and genres, the present study reads Pascal's Pensées together not only with Racine's Phèdre , but also with a pair of novels from the 1830s by Honoré de Balzac and with films by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Robert Bresson, and François Truffaut.; Pascal's theological elucidation of the notion of the hidden God and his argument of the Wager constitute a theological point of reference for subsequent considerations of the concept. Racine's Phèdre illustrates the centrality of the concept of God's imperceptibility in the wholly extratheological context of classical tragedy.; Two novels by Honore de Balzac, Le Père Goriot and Séraphîta, display how the concept of the deus absconditus continues to trouble the nineteenth century writer. Balzac uses the “superhuman” characters in Goriot to produce a philosophical impasse requiring nothing less than a theosophic “wager” (in Sèraphîta) not unlike Pascal's famous “solution” to God's hiddenness.; Cinema brings new technical resources to depicting the quandary this concept represents to man. Kieslowski's Rouge provides the twentieth-century avatar of the hidden God; Bresson's Journal d'un curé de cainpagne portrays in palpable detail “tragic man;” and Truffaut's Le dernier métro presents to us a new “wager,” an invitation to human solidarity, even as tragic man's fundamental questions remain shrouded in mystery.