Robert Bresson's refusal, from Journal onwards, of professional actors is of a piece with his rejection of psychology and character. Lacanian discourse has a complex and multiply determined relationship with Catholicism, and Bresson has the reputation of being the cinema's greatest Catholic director. If two of Bresson's first three feature films, Les Anges du péché and Journal, take the religious life as their setting, that life, like the God that is its ostensible inspiration, subsequently dwindles to near-invisibility. Few Catholic artists, however, have found the institutional life of 'their' Church a congenial or inspirational topic, and its declining importance in Bresson's later work is not of itself particularly surprising. Pascal's wager on the existence of God has what contemporary linguistics might call a performative effect, for it is only thanks to the wager that God's existence becomes certain and available to the believer.