Georges Bernanos: The Theological Source of His Art 9780773560451

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georges bernanos

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Georges Bernanos The Theological Source of His Art michael r. tobin

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn 978-0-7735-3232-8 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from St Thomas More College and the University of Saskatchewan. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. “The Mystical Saint” first appeared in Mystics Quarterly (20, no. 1, March, 1994). A short segment of “The Beloved Saint” first appeared in Christianity and Literature (44, nos. 3–4, 1995). Both are reprinted here with permission.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Tobin, Michael Robinson, 1953– Georges Bernanos: the theological source of his art / Michael R. Tobin. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3232-8 1. Bernanos, Georges, 1888-1948 – Religion. 2. Bernanos, Georges, 1888-1948 – Criticism and interpretation. i. Title. pq2603.e5875z89 2007 Typeset in Sabon 11/14 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

843’.912

c2007-902405-x

For William Bush, with deepest gratitude.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

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xi 3

pa r t o n e 1 A Creative Wellspring: The Source (1906–1940) Castles in the Air 12 The Agnostic’s Sermon 17 The Fallen Idol 36 2 A Novelist of Genius: The Art (1906–1940) The Flawed Saint 56 The Mystical Saint 72 The Beloved Saint 88 The Apostate 106 The Literati 119 The Dead 139

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pa r t t wo 3 A Prophetic Essayist: The Source (1940–1948) 4 A Spiritual Testament: The Art (1940–1948) Conclusion Bibliography Index

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200 207

161 185

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank St Thomas More College and the University of Saskatchewan for their generous financial support. I am also grateful to Darlene Kelly, who first read the manuscript; Jane McWhinney, whose editorial skills amaze; and Dorothy Bittner, whose assistance in preparing the final submission was invaluable.

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Abbreviations

Cor I

Bernanos, Georges. Correspondance. Volume I (Combat pour la vérité), 1904–1934. Cor II – Correspondance. Volume II (Combat pour la liberté), 1934–1948. Cor III – Correspondance. Volume III (Lettres retrouvées), 1904–1948. Oe I – Œuvres romanesques (Complete Novels). Oe II – Essais et écrits de combat (Polemical Works) Volume I. Oe III – Essais et écrits de combat Volume II. SSS – Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan). J-L Bernanos, Jean-Loup. Georges Bernanos: à la merci des passants.

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georges bernanos

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Introduction

To all appearances, Georges Bernanos was a man of considerable contradiction. His wide-eyed political awakening as an adolescent to the militant glories of the extreme Right carried him through his university days in Paris in the first years of the century and lured him to street fracas and lecture hall brawls where success was assessed by the number of skulls cracked and honour was measured by the frequency of sojourns in municipal jails. His early twentieth-century enthusiasm for the anti-Semitic, royalist, ultra-nationalist organization Action Française – especially its violent political demonstrations against the Republic and its suspect democratic dogma – was forthright and unwavering. Yet by 1920 he had quit this popular, inchoate organ of French fascism, and by 1938, after a bitter public break, had demoted its leader, Charles Maurras, the hero of his youth, from pedestal to moral gutter with the dismissive epithet “petit bourgeois humaniste” [petty bourgeois humanist] (Oe II 581). Had the devotee of the Right been converted to the causes of the Left? So it may have appeared. Bernanos had moved his peripatetic family to the Spanish island of Majorca in 1934 just in time to become embroiled in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–38. His experiences there prompted him to compose the explosive anti-Falangist tract Grands cimetières sous la lune [Diary of My Times], which gained him the admiration of the liberal European intelligentsia. Even such

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distinguished thinkers as Simone Weil praised the courage of his witness (J-L 292). Yet, as recent scholarship has made clear, Bernanos’s sudden, violent attack upon Spanish fascism in 1938 was anything but consistent. In fact, from the time he arrived on Majorca, he had befriended the Falangist elite on the island. His son Yves was a member of the Falange and took part in the fascist uprising, while the Bernanos home became a centre for Falangist meetings and a hiding place for weapons. Bernanos was “unreservedly enthusiastic” about the Rightist rebellion and justified its bloody repression on Majorca as a necessity of war (Muntaner 36–8). What had he become? Was he a political oxymoron, an anti-fascist disciple of the extreme Right? There were those who were surprised, even dumbfounded, at the transformation. Other seeming contradictions dogged Bernanos throughout his life. He was, for example, very early accused of antiSemitism, a charge that stuck with him until the end of his life and which lingers to this day. In his early journalistic writings he had indeed referred to Jews as “the foreigner” (J-L 121); as well, in 1933 he had written La Grande peur des bien-pensants, a tribute to his early hero Edouard Drumont, a notorious anti-Semite who wrote La France juive [Jewish France]. Yet in 1944, in an article entitled “Encore la question juive” [“The Jewish Question Again”], he stated his view unequivocally: “Je ne suis pas antisémite – ce qui d’ailleurs ne signifie rien, car les Arabes aussi sont des sémites. Je ne suis nullement antijuif” [I am not an anti-Semite – which means nothing in any case, for the Arabs are also Semites. Neither am I anti-Jewish] (Oe III 614). His friendship in Brazil with the refugee Jewish journalist Jacques Epstein would seem to confirm the truth of this affirmation (J-L 339, 364). Throughout the Second World War and until his death, Bernanos’s many contradictions exasperated not only his foes but also his friends. It is true that, from his self-imposed exile in Brazil, he was a tireless and prolific anti-Nazi essayist. But he was also strongly anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and antiAmerican, and when peace finally came in 1945, he condemned

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it vociferously. Upon his return to France at the war’s end – de Gaulle had summoned him home, telegraphing, “Bernanos, your place is here with us” (J-L 403) – he castigated his admirers who had stayed behind to endure the Occupation, particularly those like fellow Catholic novelist François Mauriac, who championed a re-energized Christian socialism as an antidote to Communist fervour. They, who had endured the German occupation and in some cases risked their lives in clandestine opposition to it, were bewildered by Bernanos’s ferocious attacks upon their efforts to achieve national reconciliation and social justice. Bernanos’s penchant for credal variance emerged in his novels as well. Concerning his first novel, Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan), he had explained in a 1926 interview with Frédéric Lefèvre that in Father Donissan, the novel’s hero, he was trying to create “an exceptional saint” (Oe II 1042). Yet in the same year he seemed to deny this when he assured Jacques Maritain, the renowned Catholic philosopher and editor of the “Roseau d’or” series at Plon, which published the novel: “My saint is not a saint” (Cor I 210–11). Such equivocation is perhaps understandable given Bernanos’s awe of the great Maritain and given Maritain’s serious reservations about Bernanos’s theology, especially the theology implied by his treatment of Donissan. The problem for Maritain was that Bernanos seemed to be allowing evil an inordinate, indeed scandalous, ascendancy. But the eminent Thomist was not the only one who found Bernanos guilty of Manichean heresy. As Bernanos’s son Jean-Loup pointed out, some priests of the period forbade the novel to their flock, accounting it “satanic” (J-L 177). That occasion was the first, but certainly not the last, when Bernanos would earn the opprobrium of Church authorities. In 1936 some bishops and religious orders made a concerted effort to have Les Grands cimetières sous la lune placed on the Index, the list of books forbidden to Catholics (Speaight 179). Dom Paul Gordan, who knew Bernanos during his selfimposed Brazilian exile (1938–45) acknowledged his reputation

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as a “pamphlétaire anti-clérical dont le nom seul est interdit dans certains diocèses” [anti-clerical pamphleteer whose very name is prohibited in some dioceses] (J-L 378). An overview of Bernanos’s eight novels reveals a miscellany of characters: the first “saint,” who seems to belie his creator’s intention by dying in the shadows as if darkness had vanquished him; the apostate priest of La Joie [Joy] and L’Imposture [The Impostor] whose diabolical laughter mocks the crucifix, and the teenage mystic of the same novels, who is raped and murdered by the family chauffeur; the drugaddicted purveyors of despair in Un Mauvais rêve [A Bad Dream]; the anonymous priest-diarist of Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest], who brings joy to others but who himself lives in a spiritual and emotional penumbra; and the eponymous M. Ouine, whose tubercular carcass wheezes the decay of Western civilization. What vision held them together? One straightforward response would be, in short, that it was Bernanos’s Catholicism that made them cohere. Yet such an observation, however true, would have seemed problematic to many of his prominent Catholic contemporaries. His criticism of fellow Catholic intellectuals and writers was violent and hurtful, particularly since most of them were exponents of an intense and entirely orthodox religious faith. Bernanos dismissed, for example, the works of François Mauriac, the most celebrated French Catholic novelist of the century, as a kind of pubescent decay (Cor I 197) where “carnal despair sweats like the walls of an underground passage” [le désespoir charnel transpire comme l’eau au mur d’un souterrain] (Oe II 1237). Years after his compatriot’s death in 1948, Mauriac, still wounded and incredulous, recalled the Bernanos’s unsparing fury, which eventually turned upon almost everyone he had ever admired: Qui n’a-t-il tour à tour adoré et brûlé? Maurras, Daudet, Claudel, Maritain, tant d’autres! Et moi-même … Et

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Dieu sait de quels sarcasmes il accablait de plus obscures!” (Œuvres autobiographiques 519) [Which of us was not, in his turn, adored and then burned? Maurras, Daudet, Claudel, Maritain, so many others! And myself … And God knows with what sarcasm he condemned the more obscure among us!] In some respects, at least, Mauriac regarded Bernanos as a “passion divided against itself” [une passion divisée contre elle-même] (Œuvres autobiographiques 520). What sense can be made of such a bundle of seeming contradictions? The answer certainly does lie with Bernanos’s Catholicism, but the proposition needs to be greatly narrowed. The pertinent question is whether, within the larger framework of his fiercely held faith, one can identify a particular and pivotal theological point of view that might explain his intractable contrariness and political inconsistency, and, above all, bind together an extraordinary body of work.

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part one

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1 A Creative Wellspring: The Source (1906–1940)

George Bernanos was a highly strung, sickly youth whose frequent illnesses engendered a long-lasting fear of death (Cor I 75). Yet a classmate at his first boarding school, a Jesuit college in Paris where he was sent in 1897 at the age of nine, recalled him as a boy “full of fire” (J-L 40). He despised the constraints of school and did poorly, but by 1903 his teachers were already applauding the brilliance of his prose (J-L 40). Many years later, near the end of 1935, he wrote of his childhood, when scholastic frustrations had alternated with summers of freedom spent at his parents’ country home in the Artois region of northern France, as a time of secret reverie: Dès que je prends la plume, ce qui se lève en moi c’est mon enfance, mon enfance si ordinaire, qui ressemble à toutes les autres, et dont pourtant je tire tout ce que j’écris comme d’une source inépuisable de rêves. (Cor II 114) [As soon as I take up my pen, what wells up in me is my childhood, such an ordinary childhood, so like everyone else’s; and yet, from it I draw everything I write, as from an inexhaustible source of dreams.] Since it is a source that we seek, let us begin with the paradox of that “ordinary” boy who burned with an extraordinary fire.

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castles in the air From boyhood Bernanos abhorred the purely abstract, ideas that seemed to spin in a distant orbit far removed from the facticity of the human condition. It would be nonsense, though, to conclude from this that he was anti-intellectual; he was simply the type of thinker who is impatient to see the fruit of intellectual activity. This preference for the tangible act might shed light on his tendency so often to focus his invective on the messenger more than the message, and his consequent reputation for implacable, sometimes unjust, attacks on both enemy and ally. This same predilection, born of instinct rather than careful argument, may well contribute to understanding the adolescent Bernanos’s already radical politics, his love for the reactionary Edouard Drumont, and his frequent oaths of fealty to the ultra-nationalist movement Action Française. In the heady days of his youth Bernanos seemed unperturbed by the Action Française’s doctrinal hodgepodge of anti-Semitism, royalism, neo-classicism and Catholicism, an amalgam made all the more curious by the agnosticism of its leader, Charles Maurras.1 It was not so much Maurrasian theory that captivated the teenaged Bernanos as the organization’s seeming dedication to action. Organization members declared themselves ready to take to the street to deliver the “coup de force” that might at last topple the despised Republic, expel the “foreigner” from power and restore the monarchy. In 1906, anxious to begin his university studies in Paris or, more to the

1 Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was leader of the Action Française from 1908 until 1944. He championed what he termed “integral nationalism,” and after the fall of France in 1940 he supported the collaborationist government of Pétain in Vichy. He was sentenced to prison after the liberation of France, but was pardoned three years before his death.

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point, to join the street fray personally, he waxed lyrical about the Action Française in stirring, frequently excessive, letters to his former teacher and mentor, Father Lagrange. In each one he stresses, not the movement’s rarified and bizarre school of thought but its manifestation in action: Merci d’avoir acheté les livres en question. Qu’en ditesvous? Avez-vous celui de J. Lemaitre, avez-vous lu la lettre de Paul Bourget? Pour moi, j’admire de tout mon cœur ces vaillants de l’Action française, ces vrais fils de Gaule, avec du bon sens et de la foi, qui ne reculent devant aucune idée, qui s’imposent gaillardement, qui se définissent sans phrases. Comme c’est clair! Comme c’est [à l’] emporte-pièce! On y croit ou l’on n’y croit pas, mais on les entend toujours. (Cor I 88) [Thank you for buying the books in question. What do you think of them? Do you have L. Lemaitre’s, have you read Paul Bourget’s letter? As for me I admire with all my heart those valiant men of the Action Française, those true sons of Gaul, gifted with common sense and faith, who are not daunted by any idea, who gallantly compel recognition, who make clear where they stand without mincing words. How clear it is! How incisive! One can believe or not believe what they say, but one always hears them.] The eighteen-year-old Bernanos seems to inveigh here against letting ideas get in the way of action, but his real bête noire is intellectual paralysis. The intensity of his prose may be explained, partly by youthful enthusiasm, and partly by the fact that the skeptical Father Lagrange was more sympathetic to that other pole of Catholic political action of the period, Le Sillon. Needless to say, Marc Sangnier’s Le Sillon, which called on Catholics to rally to the Republic and to embrace social democracy, was anathema to Bernanos. In his eagerness to convert Lagrange, he tries to beat his opponent at his own game by resorting to a very revealing point of theology:

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Plaise à Dieu qu’on puisse en dire autant de vos petits employés du Sillon! Comme dit Henry Vaugeois, ils “aiment l’offensive des formules nettes et des schémas précis,” ils ont un “tempérament radical,” ils aiment les “luttes d’idées” non de grands mots. L’égalité, la liberté et la fraternité leur semblent de la théologie, de la philosophie pure, “antiréelle.” Grattez un démocrate, vous trouverez un théologien … Eh! qui songe à blâmer, au point de vue des principes, toutes les longues phrases du Sillon! Mais pourquoi diable vouloir appliquer ça en ce monde! Il faut croire au perfectionnement indéfini de l’espèce humaine, il faut passer par-dessus le péché originel et la commune détresse. Pourquoi bâtir des nuages en l’air! Guerre au nuées. Pacifisme, égalitarisme, anarchisme, communisme, tous ces mots en isme se tiennent. Et, dirait Cyrano, c’est “du rêve.” (Cor I 88–9) [Would that you could say as much about the little clerks of Le Sillon! As Henry Vaugeois says, they “like to go on the offensive with neat formulas and precise outlines,” they have “radical temperaments,” they prefer “ideological struggle” to essential values. They imagine equality, liberty and fraternity to be theology, pure philosophy, “anti-real.” Scratch a democrat and you’ll find a theologian … Oh! as far as principles go, who would dream of condemning Le Sillon’s flowery language! But why the devil would anyone want to put it into practice in this world! One would have to believe in some vague perfectibility of the human species; one would have to overlook original sin and human misery. Why build castles in the air? I declare war on castles in the air. Pacifism, egalitarianism, anarchy, communism, all these “ism” words are alike. And as Cyrano would say, they’re “the stuff of dreams.”] The doctrine of Original Sin that Bernanos insisted upon here would remain an essential part of his theology. While still a

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provincial youth, he employed it against his political targets in the passage just quoted. His point was this: humankind may be redeemable, but it cannot be reformed. For a fiercely devout Catholic like Bernanos, the very necessity of redemption clearly gives the lie to dreams of social reform; indeed it shocked him to discover Catholics who actually believed in human progress. He considered the ideas of Le Sillon to be perverse precisely because they seemed to deny the debased state of human nature that required the death of God to put it right. As such, they were to him worse than political phantasm; they were heresy. Conversely, he acknowledged the political “theories” of the Action Française as the real truth about the human condition. Even more to the point, he embraced them because he believed them to be incarnate realities with an historical life. Again he wrote to Lagrange: Je resterai dogmatique en diable, dégoûté des compromissions d’idées et des reculades de principes, absolument persuadé que le sort de la France – même au point de vue religieux – dépend d’une politique traditionelle positive, de faits précis et concrétisés, qui est à tout le moins la seule accommodée au tempérament national et à la race, puisque c’est la race qui l’a faite. (Cor I 90) [I’m bloody well going to remain dogmatic, disgusted by the compromise of ideas and the retreat from principle, absolutely certain that France’s fate – even from a religious point of view – depends upon positive, traditional politics, precise and concrete facts, which is, to say the least, the only kind of politics suited to the national temperament and to the race, since it issues from the race.] As this passage suggests, Bernanos’s youthful polemics had less to do with political conviction as such than with a deep religious instinct that pitted the incarnate and the concrete against the unsubstantial and the unrealizable. Bernanos’s

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teenage views of French political life at the start of the century were really the secular equivalent of his Catholic orthodoxy. These principles, which were inculcated by his mother’s catechism lessons by the time of his First Communion at the age of eleven, had already coloured a worldview that was to remain childlike, though never childish, and immutably consistent throughout his sixty years.2 His religious faith assured him that Christianity consisted neither of deistic moralism nor of vague sentiments of piety, but rather of the actual physical intervention of the divine into human history. His faith was also the source of an intuition that told him, in the scattered and unfocused way of adolescence, that ideals must take flesh or be suspect. For this reason, the violence and street brawls that he engaged in during his student days in Paris need to be seen as something other than fanaticism; they are best understood as a desperate and misguided attempt, almost literally, to flesh out the “truth.”

2 Bernanos’s First Communion was in fact a profound, almost mystical experience, something unusual in a child so young. He approached the altar on 11 May 1899 with the following petitions to God: “– d’être missionnaire, c’est-à-dire témoin de Jésus-Christ dans le monde. – La gloire, telle qu’elle nous est proposée par l’Evangile et selon les règles de la chevalerie. – Premièrement: humilité – deuxièmement: humilité – troisièmement: humilité.” (J-L 40) [– to be a missionary, that is, a witness of Jesus Christ in the world. – The glory the Gospel calls us to, and according to the rules of chivalry. – First: humility – Second: humility – Third: humility.]

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Only the intense religious fervour of the young Bernanos, who wrote to Lagrange in 1905 that “la vie, même avec la gloire … est une chose vide et sans saveur quand on n’y mêle pas, toujours, absolument Dieu” [“life, even a glorious one, is an empty, tasteless thing unless God is always and absolutely involved in it”] (Cor I 76) could explain the anti-Republican violence he threw himself into once he had begun his university studies in Paris a year later and found his way into the ranks of the “Camelots du Roi.” His participation in the lunatic activities of these front-line royalist shock-troops, ranging from defacing of statues and organized brawls to a crack-brained scheme to restore the deposed King of Portugal to his throne (J-L 101–14), reveals the need that this sensitive, even fragile, youth felt for a solid achievement of some kind. It was vital for him that the eternally “true” be seen to be breaking through into the temporal realm even if a few skulls had to be cracked in the process. There seemed to be an almost neurotic urgency in the Bernanos of this early period. It emerges, for example, in a series of anguished letters written in 1908 during one of the intense emotional crises that were to afflict him periodically throughout his life. Although the rather desperate confessions he made to his friend Yves de Colleville might suggest thoughts of suicide or madness, it seems more likely that Bernanos did not long for death, but for something worth dying for: “Et je bénirai celui qui me fournira une occasion intelligente de me faire tuer pour quelque chose ou quelqu’un” [“I would bless the person who could provide me with an intelligent opportunity to get myself killed for something or someone”] (Cor III 30). These letters, suffused with romanticism, betray a religious nostalgia for self-sacrifice which, on the political level, expresses a starry-eyed longing to live and die for his “Prince.” In contrast to the despised list of “isms” that he believed to be the province of democratic political theory, the king or the prince (in this case the Count of Paris, then pretender to the French throne) embodied in his very person the chosen race of Christendom – by which Bernanos

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meant the French people, of course. The monarchy was something personal and substantial that Bernanos could, as it were, sink his teeth into and be satisfied intellectually at the same time. The seven short stories that he wrote in 1907 for Panache, a bi-monthly royalist magazine, suggest why this Quixotic view of the monarchy appealed so powerfully to him. The young king is clearly pre-eminent in these historical tales of dashing dukes and gallant marquises, because in his body “brûlait le sang d’une race” [“burned the blood of a race”] (Oe I 1047). Unlike the president of a republic, a king is not simply the temporary administrator of the state; he is the living embodiment of the “eternal” values of a people. In the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War, when Bernanos had finished his university studies and found employment as editor of the royalist weekly L’Avant-Garde de Normandie, this incarnational principle was given a somewhat more sophisticated, though no less romantic, quality. His editorials brim with monarchist apologia and, though they claim to articulate the French people’s putative need to see their tradition reified in the person of their king, they say much more about Bernanos’s own passionate preference for the embodiment of ideas over political abstraction. The following passage is typical: Lorsque jadis la foule parisienne pressée autour des grilles du Louvre ou de Versailles, acclamait l’héritier du trône, elle ne saluait pas un dieu, ni même un maître: seulement l’image du pays, par conséquent la sienne propre, la plus haute manifestation des goûts, des sentiments, des idées, des traditions, que chaque Français sent au-dedans de lui, à certaines minutes graves de son existence. (Oe II 1017) [In times past, when the Parisian masses thronged around the gates of the Louvre or Versailles, acclaiming the birth of the crown prince, they were paying their respects not to a god, or even to a master, but simply to the image of the country, and consequently to their own image, the

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most exalted manifestation of the tastes, the feelings, the ideas, the traditions that each Frenchman senses within himself at certain solemn moments of his existence.] Bernanos revered those who championed royalism in France, people like Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet (the latter a close friend and best man at his wedding in 1917) for the same reason that he venerated the monarchy itself: they incarnated genuine politics and the essential poetry and philosophy of “Eternal France.” Maurras in particular, during these years before Bernanos’s very bitter and public break with him, was raised to secular sainthood by this toadying editor of L’Avant-Garde de Normandie, who portrayed the leader of the Action Française as somehow one with the very destiny of France itself. The lyrical excess of this devotion may have disguised Bernanos’s nascent doubts about ascribing the values of medieval France to an agnostic whose own model of cultural apotheosis was classical antiquity. There was no doubt, however, that he saw in Maurras, or wished to see in him, a latter-day Moses grinding the golden calf of democratic Utopianism into dust. Maurras and Daudet, Bernanos asserted, had discovered the alchemic formula for transforming impotent political theory into the substance of a new order. For the young editor, this was everything: Il est sûr que sitôt qu’elles ont échangé les claires solitudes du froid royaume platonicien pour un cerveau vivant et pensant, les idées perdent leur netteté géométrique. Par un travail aussi mystérieux que celui de la génération matérielle, les conceptions de l’esprit s’amalgament au fond de l’obscur de l’instinct: elles s’assouplissent, elles deviennent assimilables. Ce n’est pas vainement que dans les détours de la substance cérébrale, elles se sont comme mêlées au sang, groupées et ordonnées à la cadence du cœur. Dès lors, elles peuvent aller ailleurs chercher d’autres asiles: elles sont formées par la conquête. (Oe II 945)

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[As soon as they had exchanged the crystalline solitude of the cold platonic realm for a thinking, living mind, ideas lost their geometric precision. By a process as mysterious as the generation of matter, the concepts of the mind combine in the shadowy depths of the instinct: they soften, they can be assimilated. It is not in vain that, in the twists and turns of the mind’s substance, they mingle with the blood, grouped and arranged according to the rhythm of the heartbeat. From that moment on, they are ready to seek out other places of refuge: they have been fashioned in the forge of conquest.] This evocation of the “mysterious” process of the incarnation of ideas reveals Bernanos’s unequivocal attachment to the notion of their successful transformation into a kind of heroic corporeity. His criterion for assessing the value of lofty ideals is whether they can, in some real way, penetrate the bloodstream and, by a sort of mysterious osmosis, enter the human experience in its most complete sense. This is how the Bernanos of the period understood heroism, and the praise he heaped upon his own personal heroes always flowed from this perspective. His political vision allowed no disjunction between the abstract and the incarnate. Moreover it echoed a religious faith that affirmed, in one way at least, the erasure of the distinction between the ideal and its realization, the spirit and the body, and between God and Man. Little wonder that the accusation the editor of L’Avant-Garde de Normandie hurled at France’s republican ideologues was precisely that they were unable to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, between “le Droit et les garanties du Droit” [rights and the guarantee of those rights].3 God, Bernanos asserted, had been exiled from France, the spiritual centre of the nation had

3 “La Jeunesse française autour de Maurras,” L’Avant-Garde de Normandie, 2 November 1913, 1.

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caved in, and the famous declaration of 1789 lacked any real authority. What purpose was served by the democratic elite, he asked, if they had neither the courage nor the generosity to realize their own dreams: Depuis un siècle, une demi-douzaine de brillantes images mènent comme des reines le peuple français, liberté, fraternité, démocratie, progrès social, laïcité – j’accuse la lâcheté conservatrice lorsqu’elle donne à ces mirages une autorité qui leur manque. Ils sacrifient à ces idoles; ils y sacrifient à regret, par indolence, par habitude, et par ambition.4 [For a century now a half-a-dozen flashy images have led the French people along like pied-pipers: liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, social progress, secularism – I accuse the conservative cowards who lend these mirages an authority that is not theirs. They offer sacrifices to these idols reluctantly, apathetically, by force of habit and through ambition.] By the time Bernanos had written these words it was spring 1914 and the Great War was about to interrupt his brief career in royalist journalism. Still, once his personal battle lines had been drawn, neither peace nor war could alter his perspective. In 1916 he wrote a letter to his fiancée, which confirmed that the two years spent wrestling with the idea of death in the trenches had done nothing to dampen his adolescent convictions: “Les grandes abstractions sont mes ennemis” [“Great abstractions are my enemies”] (Cor I 113). On his return to Paris, decorated and wounded at the war’s end, he found more enemies than he had ever faced on the battlefield.

4 “Le Péril conservateur,” L’Avant-Garde de Normandie, 9 May 1914, 1.

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It was a time of bitter disillusionment for Bernanos. Although his particular variety of idealism remained as galvanic as ever, the heroes of his youth had been exposed as tired, verbose, bourgeois conformists. Where were the men of action? What had become of the “coup de force”? Older and matured by fire, he came to see Charles Maurras for what he was: a man of neither faith nor action, but of intellect alone (Cor I 195). Bernanos consequently left the Action Française in 1920, although he never abandoned the movement’s original monarchical, anti-republican principles. The novel he began to write almost immediately after the Armistice – which would become Sous le soleil de Satan – was, as he put it, a reaction to the “immense disproportion” between the terrible sacrifices of France’s youth and the miserable ideology offered by the press and the government to the survivors upon their return from the trenches. They were canonized by the Paris dailies – “le saint Poilu” 5 – and inducted into the contrived and sentimental cult of “Goddess France” or “the religion of Progress,” in which the nation was divinized and universal democracy was hailed as the kingdom to come. Was this, he asked, what an entire generation had bled for: an equivocal idealism, a contrived and chimerical sacerdotalism that gave words the meanings it pleased, no matter how ambiguous and unrelated to reality they were (Oe II 1075–76)? The vocabulary of the brave new social order particularly enraged Bernanos. In 1926, the year Sous le soleil de Satan was published, an event occurred that gave him the pretext to speak his mind publically. The Vatican’s condemnation of the Action Française in December of that year aroused his indignation, despite the fact that he had long since left

5 “Poilu,” which literally means “hairy,” was the popular name given to the ordinary French soldier, the equivalent of the British “Tommy,” or the American “dough boy.”

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the organization. Believing that the censure resulted from modernist machinations in the Vatican, he lept to the defence of his old royalist friends and unleashed an anger that had been building for seven years. He pursued the same argument in a letter to La Revue Fédéraliste and in another to Comoedia, reflecting his own concerns more than those of the Action Française as such: that Christians had allowed the truths of their faith to be put at the service of “universal demagoguery.” Once transformed into “mad” abstractions, these truths would, he alleged, set the world ablaze (Oe II 1070). Although these letters, with their rather cryptic references to dark forces at work in Europe, are oblique, their basic premise was that democratic idealists had adopted a conceptualized version of Christianity in order to bolster their sagging prestige. It is clear, however, that the problem Bernanos raises is more serious than simply the fraudulent use of Christian vocabulary. Not until 1930, in his full-length polemical work La Grande peur des bien-pensants, ostensibly a tribute to Edouard Drumont, did he return to this theme, again impugning democracies’ war-time rhetoric and post-bellum hypocrisy: Car la guerre des Démocraties, la guerre des Peuples, la guerre Universelle a voulu son langage, universel lui aussi, oecuménique: pour le constituer, elle a pillé le spirituel comme le reste, fait débiter par tronçons à la vitesse maxima des rotatives une sorte de métaphysique à la fois puérile et roublarde, dont les mots les plus vénérables, Droit, Justice, Patrie, Humanité, Progrès, sortaient marqués d’un signe et d’un matricule, comme des bestiaux. (Oe II 318) [You see, the war of the Democracies, the People’s war, the World War, wanted its own language, a universal, ecumenical one: in order to create such a language it pillaged the spiritual like everything else, producing a childish, crafty metaphysics at the frenzied speed of

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a printing press. The most venerable words, Duty, Justice, Motherland, Humanity, Progress, rolled off the line stamped with an official reference number like branded cattle.] Bernanos came to the conclusion that, after the carnage of the Great War, the loss of a generation, and the impoverishment of much of Europe, democratic ideology was bankrupt, and that its adherents therefore tried to hide behind a linguistic construct whose moral authority was still intact: “God, Truth, Justice, Sanctity, Martyrdom” (Oe II 325). Yet, he saw in this moral plagiarism the tragic irony that, once having appropriated Christian concepts, the modern democratic state cynically discouraged the only thing that could possibly animate them: self-sacrifice. He accused the state of propagating the myth of the hero, both during and after the war, for its own purposes. A hero, to him, was the product of intrepid self-sacrifice, and Bernanos was certain that nothing more threatened bourgeois order, which he defined as the “simple agent de transmission entre la finance et l’industrie” [“little more than the intermediary between finance and industry”] (Oe II 320), than the genuine hero and his spiritual counterpart, the prophetic saint: “[L’Etat] sait très bien que la seule idée du sacrifice, introduite telle quelle dans sa laborieuse morale de solidarité, y éclaterait comme une bombe” [“(The State) knows full well that the very idea of sacrifice, thrown pure and simple into the laborious morality of solidarity, would explode like a bomb”] (Oe II 320). Real heroism was portrayed as a threat to socioeconomic permanence, whereas the modern state played the dubious game of spouting high-sounding ideas while deliberately minimizing the risk of their ever taking root. La Grande peur des bien-pensants goes further than any of Bernanos’s previous writings in arguing that democratic propaganda is merely a symptom of a more serious, and perhaps irremediable, malaise – the alteration of the modern religious instinct (EC I 332). The state was now a god, he

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wrote, and science was its Messianic promise. He evoked a brief scene to illustrate the kind of creature the new religion produces. An old Parisian worker living in a dingy basement stands over the body of his dead wife, which lies on a bed in the middle of a tiny room. Nothing in his appearance distinguishes him from former generations of the suburban proletariat, but he is in fact a new creation, hungry for hope but lacking its supernatural consolation. He runs his fingers over his wife’s lifeless features and cries out: “La Science vaincra la Mort … c’est sûr. Mais quand?” [“Science will vanquish Death, that is certain. But when?”] (Oe II 334). This parable of perverted instinct and ersatz faith is replete with pathos, but its lesson is apocalyptic. Bernanos imagined a future society, born, as he put it, of the intimate alliance of capital and science, of the plutocrat and the engineer, resulting in a sort of economic determinism (Oe II 336). His prophecies envisaged humankind as being at the service of the forces of industry, while the social order was transmuted into a kind of universal laboratory under the direction of scientific experts who sacrifice “human material” (Oe II 336) when necessary for the good of the machine. His ironic tone cannot disguise his revulsion: Il est déjà trop évident qu’une société digne de ce nom, sans préjugés de sensibilité ni de morale, est seule capable de triompher du plus tenace des fléaux, la misère, grâce à une rigoureuse hygiène sociale, c’est-à-dire en limitant les naissances et supprimant les infirmes ou les paresseux. Alors l’idée démocratique aura achevé de se libérer d’un vocabulaire religieux ou sentimental, désormais inutile, pourra se montrer telle quelle, ainsi qu’une conception entièrement neuve et totale de la vie. (Oe II 336) [It is already only too obvious that a society worthy of the name, without any of the prejudices of compassion or morality, is capable of triumphing over the most tenacious of scourges, poverty, only thanks to a rigorous social hygiene, that is by limiting the number of births

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and getting rid of the infirm and the lazy. Then the democratic ideal will have freed itself from its no longer useful religious or sentimental vocabulary and reveal itself for what it is – an entirely new conception of life.] At the core of La Grande peur des bien pensants is its grim prognostication of the inversion of the proper order of nature: humans at the service of a system, the incarnate sacrificed to the disincarnate. The essay marked a further important juncture in the maturation of Bernanos’s thought. A new theological depth emerges as he begins to shift the blame for the malignant alteration of religious consciousness – a change that in his view was nothing less than the de-Christianization of Western society – away from the sinister secular forces he had alluded to in earlier writings and assigns it instead to Christians themselves. In fact, the work’s angriest passages are reserved for the “traitors”within the Church, particularly among the clergy, who were so desperate to appear relevant that they willingly joined the democratic idealists to help bring about the “New Order” or the “New Society,” as if the Kingdom Christ spoke of were a vast liberal democracy only waiting to be realized. Bernanos observed that the Christian “elite,” his buzzword for the Church’s “clerical party,” that is, intellectual priests and politically motivated laity, were stricken with a serious inferiority complex, deeply embarrassed by their traditional baggage of “medieval” piety in the face of modern positivist “enlightenment.” They react, he asserts, by demythologizing Christianity, transforming it into a sort of respectable humanism with a sentimental religious twist. He pillories their sycophancy in a scathing little allegory: Maintenant la boutique est vide. La bande de calicot sur laquelle la démocratie chrétienne triomphante avait peint jadis en lettres gigantesques, sous le regard bénin des monsignores, liquidation générale, claque désormais au-dessus de la porte, fouettée par l’averse.

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On continue bien, pour la forme, à marchander le long du trottoir, les pieds dans la crotte, à proposer des échanges illusoires, à supputer d’invraisemblables bénéfices: chacun sait que l’anarchie cléricale n’a plus de compte en banque. (Oe II 346) [Now the store is empty. Above the door a calico banner on which, under the beneficent gaze of the Monsignores, Christian democracy triumphant had once painted in huge letters bankruptcy sale, flaps back and forth in the rain. For the sake of form, they continue haggling in the streets, their feet in the muck, engaging in illusory trading, calculating unlikely profits: everyone knows that the clerical anarchists have nothing left in the bank.] In his conclusion Bernanos portrays the Christian democrats as running in circles with their projects for co-operatives, mutual insurance plans, and unions, all part of a social evolution labelled “Christian social order.” In response, he poses his crucial question: “Qu’est-ce que l’ordre social chrétien, d’ailleurs, hors du plan de la Rédemption?” [“What is Christian social order, anyway, apart from the plan of Redemption?”] (Oe II 339). Where, he asks, among the Christian values and ideas that the democratic ideal pretends are its own, and in the truncated Christian dogma that the clerical party offers a withered modern imagination, where is the God-Man? This shift of focus is revealing. It demonstrates that Bernanos’s polemical interests, which had been largely political, had evolved by the beginning of the 1930s into specifically theological ones. Just how theological remains to be seen.

the agnostic’s sermon On his solemn First Communion day in 1897, Bernanos had added one final petition to God to the list he had prepared. With respect to the material needs of life, he asked for one thing only: “toujours la nécessité, rien de plus” [“only the

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basic necessities, nothing more”] (J-L 40). Although all his requests were to be answered, God seems to have responded to this last request with singular generosity. Near the end of his life Bernanos, looked back at its penury and remarked: “Je ne croyais pas que le nécessaire fût si peu de choses” [“I didn’t realize that the basic necessities amounted to so little”] (J-L 40). He did seem destined for poverty, thanks, perhaps, to a combination of divine ordination and, less mysteriously, to his own restless spirit and remarkable fiscal ineptitude. On one level at least, indigence had a beneficial aspect; his constant anxiety about providing for his wife and, eventually, for their six children gave rise to a tension that, he claimed, favoured creativity (Cor II 139–40). Ironically, his money problems can be traced back to his first taste of success, the publication of Sous le soleil de Satan in 1926 to great acclaim. Exhilarated by sudden fame, he opted to quit his job as an insurance inspector and live by his pen. Things went well at first: Sous le soleil de Satan was followed by more highly praised novels, and even by the coveted Prix Femina. But in 1933 a motorcycle accident left him crippled and dependent upon two canes. The family’s gradually deteriorating financial situation became precarious. He had rented a large villa in La Bayorre in southern France, but by 1934, despite a desperate arrangement with his publisher at Plon for advance royalties on each page of completed manuscript, the Bernanos family was forced to flee France in secret, leaving behind even Mme Bernanos’s beloved furniture (Cor II 57). They set out for the Spanish island of Majorca in the archipelago of the Balearic Islands, hoping to live more cheaply there. However, two years later, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted, and the family found itself in the midst of that dress rehearsal for a second global dance of death. Bernanos’s personal experience of the conflict led him to write another full-length polemical work, an anti-fascist essay finally published in 1938: Les Grands cimetières sous la lune (Diary of My Times).

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Bernanos himself gave this very long essay surprising prominence among his works, both fiction and non-fiction: in 1948, already stricken by the disease that was to kill him within months, he admitted to François Reyniers that “l’ouvrage dont il était le plus fier était Les Grands cimetières sous la lune” [“the work he was most proud of was Les Grands cimetières sous la lune”] (J-L 446). On the surface, this seems rather odd. Why should the author of eight masterful novels, a man who perceived himself as fundamentally a novelist rather than a polemicist, survey the body of his work and declare himself most proud of an essay, now largely unread, inspired by events on Majorca during the Civil War? Why not choose, for example, Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest], a novel crowned by the “Grand Prix du Roman” of the French Academy, a book for which he had expressed deep attachment: “Oui, j’aime ce livre. J’aime ce livre comme s’il n’était pas de moi” [“Yes I love this book. I love this book as if it had not come from me”] (Oe I 1879). Or perhaps he might have chosen Dialogues des Carmélites [Dialogues of the Carmelites], which he was then writing and which is generally viewed as his great “spiritual testament” (Oe I 1918). Why, then, did Bernanos single out this essay in such a way? In part, he was clearly proud of his moral courage in exposing the complicity of the Spanish hierarchy and clergy in the Falangist repression on Majorca. This pride can be discerned in his boast that Pope Pius XI himself had vetoed efforts by the Spanish Church to have the work placed on the Index: “J’ai des raisons de croire que Pie XI lui-même s’est opposé à cette condamnation, refusant de donner ce contentement aux simoniaques et aux assassins” [“I have reason to believe that Pius XI himself was opposed to such a condemnation, refusing to give that pleasure to the simoniacs and murderers”] (J-L 292). He was also very proud of a much-treasured letter from Simone Weil, an active participant in the war on the Republican side, in which she praised his integrity and love of truth (Cor II 203). This observation

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brings us much closer to the essence of Bernanos’s own attitude for, in his mind, “truth” was the essence of Les Grands cimetières sous la lune. In an essay written in 1948, he described its composition in just such terms: La vérité m’a pris au piège, voilà tout. En écrivant un livre comme Les Grands cimetières sous la lune, je me suis trop engagé dans la vérité. Je n’en pourrais plus sortir désormais, même si je le voulais (Oe III 675). [Truth caught me in its trap, that’s all. While writing a book like Les Grands cimetières sous la lune, I became too involved in the truth. From then on I couldn’t get away from it, even if I’d wanted to.] What truth did he mean? Was it the truth about the Falangist operations on Majorca, which apparently had the tacit support of the local bishop? This is partly the case, although, as Joseph Muntaner has recently shown, the essay’s politics are much more complex than they appear. It seems, for example, that Bernanos had at first been an ardent nationalist supporter and had actually advocated the use of violence against the Leftists. Furthermore, his son Yves, a member of the Falange, was involved in a number of military operations against government troops, and the Bernanos house was even used to store a cache of revolvers. Initially at least, it was the presence of Italian troops on the island, troops inimical to French interests in the Mediterranean, rather than outrage at Fascist atrocities, that altered his views on Spanish politics. The number of pages of Les Grands cimetières sous la lune actually devoted to the situation on Majorca and the Civil War in general is relatively small. But, as is common with Bernanos’s polemical writings, political actualities serve as a springboard into reflections on truth of quite another sort. Among the jumble of schoolboy notebooks that constitute the fair copy of the manuscript of Les Grands cimetières sous la lune is one small section that Bernanos himself, one assumes, had carefully set apart from the rest and neatly tied

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together with string, as if its status required unique recognition.6 A careful reading of the manuscript, written in that small, neat script he reserved for his publisher, reveals another anomaly: the pagination has been curiously altered. Bernanos first wrote the last line, immediately preceding the pages he was later to set apart, on the top of page 134. In an obvious afterthought, he scratched the line out and created a second page 133 (133 bis) to accommodate it. He could now continue on a clean page, distinctly separate from what came before and, by the later use of a bit of string, from what was to follow. The published text indicates no such intentional break in the flow of the essay’s development. In print, this separate bundle amounts to no more than sixteen pages in a work of well over two hundred, yet they were obviously special for Bernanos. What was their significance? A clue can be found in a very unusual sermon contained within its pages, unusual not because of its scrupulously orthodox Catholic sentiment but because of its agnostic preacher. The priest mounts the pulpit on the feast day of St Thérèse of Lisieux to address a congregation of “rightthinking” Catholics.7 He begins by assuring them that, although believers seem little interested in unbelievers, unbelievers are fascinated by those who profess faith in God. After

6 These observations are based upon my own reading of the manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. 7 St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) was a Carmelite nun who was canonized in 1925. Bernanos was deeply devoted to her and she, through her autobiography and other writings, was a major inspiration for his fictional heroes. She would have been extremely popular among this middle-class congregation, who knew her as the “Little Flower,” a saccharine epithet that betrayed, for Bernanos, the superficial sentimentality of their own religion. The significance of her feast day lies in the fact that the pious bourgeois have come to venerate a type of spiritual heroism that they are entirely incapable of comprehending.

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all, the possibility does exist that an eternity of infernal exile awaits those who eschew the apparent gullibility of the devout. Agnostics, he continues, observe believers closely, alert to the possibility of any convincing manifestation in the lives of the faithful of the truth of their religious profession. Much to their disappointment, what they come to realize is that the lives of the devout bourgeois are the same as everyone else’s, that “la foi qu’ils professent ne change pas grandchose à leur vie” [“the faith they profess doesn’t change their lives very much”] (Oe II 510). They take the same hardheaded, pragmatic approach to the affairs of the world as everyone else, embrace the tenets of liberal capitalism spiced with a pinch of Machiavelli, proclaim the value of hard work, and exude a solid optimism. And yet these same people claim to seek a kingdom that is not of this world and a king who warned them that the wealthy are unlikely ever to enjoy the bliss of paradise. Instead of conviction, the agnostic discovers mediocrity; instead of supernatural heroism, mere religious habit. “Mes chers frères, faute de cet héroisme sans lequel M. Léon Bloy affirmait qu’un chrétien n’est qu’un porc, le caractère anxieux de votre luxure vous ferait reconnaître entre tous” [“My dear brothers, for want of that heroism, without which, Mr Léon Bloy concluded, a Christian is nothing but a pig, the anxious quality of your lust would single you out in any crowd”] (Oe II 510). The agnostic condemns their mediocrity as the main impediment to his own conversion and complains, with a perfectly accurate grasp of Christian theology, that, since Christ Himself no longer walks the earth, the unbeliever must rely on the witness of those who call themselves Christians if he wishes to encounter the putative saviour: “Puis il est remonté aux cieux. Si nous le cherchons en ce monde, c’est en vous désormais que nous le trouvons, vous seuls!” (Oe II 515). [“Then he ascended into Heaven. If we look for him in this world now, it is in you that we find him, you alone!”] Does Bernanos mean simply by this that the authentic Christian must reflect Christ by genuinely putting his teachings into practice? Such a precept might constitute an ample expression

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of Christian authenticity for some, but Bernanos went much further. He was no advocate of the so-called imitation of Christ and, consistently rejected what he viewed as a bourgeois tendency to refashion Christ in the role of oracle while presenting the Gospel as just a depository of aphoristic wisdom. For Bernanos, Christianity was radical and revolutionary by nature. To make this position clear he alludes – or rather his unbelieving preacher alludes – to a prayer from the Roman liturgy: “C’est vous, chrétiens, que la liturgie de la Messe déclare participants à la divinité, c’est vous, hommes divins, qui depuis l’Ascension du Christ êtes ici-bas sa personne visible.” [“It is you, Christians, whom the liturgy of the Mass calls participants in Divinity; it is you, divine men, who, since Christ’s Ascension, are here below his visible presence.”] (Oe II 516). This was the first time Bernanos had referred to this crucial liturgical prayer, but it would certainly not be the last. It is intoned by the priest during the Offertory of the Roman Mass while he is pouring water into the wine already in the chalice. Bernanos, of course, would have been familiar with the Latin text: Deus, qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti: da nobis, per huius aquae et vini mysterium, eius divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps, Iesus Christus, Filius tuus, Dominus noster: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate spiritus Sancti Deus: per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen. [O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wondrously renew the dignity of man’s nature; grant that by the mystery of this water and wine we may be made partakers of his divinity, who vouchsafed to share our humanity, Jesus Christ thy Son, our Lord: who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God: throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.] This prayer encapsulates Bernanos’s essential theology of divinization: the Christian is not called merely to imitate

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Christ, but to become Him by sharing in His divinity and so, by implication, in His Incarnation. We note that the agnostic addresses his listeners as “divine men.” This title represents the high calling of their baptism, although the skeptical preacher doubts that their vacuous piety could ever allow them to lay claim to it. It is a name more suited to the saints, whose holiness is also the fundamental call of baptism. In fact, on page 163 of the manuscript of Les Grands cimetières sous la lune, Bernanos had at first written “saints” and then scratched it out to replace it with “hommes divins” [“divine men”]. Somewhat later, our agnostic homilist makes the same connection; sanctity is nothing less than the process of becoming divine. For Bernanos it was also the essence of the Christian vocation. The saints are divine and yet human, and indeed it is the utter fullness of their humanity that is the most striking aspect of their divinity. The sermon continues: “Je pense, par exemple, qu’à moins d’être un fol, nul ne peut rester insensible à l’extraordinaire qualité de vos héros, à leur incomparable humanité. Le nom de héros ne leur convient d’ailleurs guère, et celui de génie pas davantage, car ils sont à la fois des héros et des génies. Mais l’héroïsme et le génie ne vont pas d’ordinaire sans une certaine perte de substance humaine, au lieu que l’humanité de vos saints surabonde.” (Oe II 519). [I think that, unless one is mad, no one can remain insensitive to the extraordinary quality of your heroes, to their incomparable humanity. Although in truth, the name “hero” scarcely suits them any more than “genius,” because they are both heroes and geniuses at the same time. But heroism and genius usually result in a certain loss of humanity, while the humanity of your saints abounds all the more.] This description applies as well to the fictional Bernanosian “saint,” who never seeks to transcend the human condition but embraces it in all the complexities of its fallibility.

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However, the main body of the sermon is not about true Christianity, but addresses the false piety to which the bourgeois congregation subscribes. The agnostic finds no incarnations of Christ, just a fluency in the tired language of religious convention: “N’a-t-il pas notamment ce mot mystérieux: l’état de grâce? Lorsque vous sortez du confessionnal vous êtes “en état de grâce.” L’état de grâce … Eh bien, que voulez-vous, il n’y paraît pas beaucoup. Nous nous demandons ce que vous faites de la grâce de Dieu. Ne devrait-elle rayonner de vous? Où diable cachez-vous votre joie?” (Oe II 510)? [“Doesn’t it most notably contain this mysterious phrase: the state of grace? When you come out of the confessional you are “in a state of grace.” The state of grace … well, what can I say? It isn’t very visible. We wonder what you do with God’s grace. Shouldn’t it radiate from you? Where the devil do you hide your joy?”] Theirs is an equivocal religiosity that cloaks a middle-class ethic in Christian terminology. “State of grace” connotes a smug self-satisfaction, or perhaps a simple appeasement of the demands of guilt, while such cardinal virtues as “hope” are diluted in the wash of affluent optimism (Oe II 514). It is critical to understand that Bernanos’s unbelieving spokesman is not describing a common variety of Christian hypocrisy. The sermon is not a banal exercise in finger-wagging at the insincere and the feckless. Bernanos believed he had isolated the contagion that was infecting Christianity itself and that he could now name it: “Faute de vivre votre foi, votre foi n’est plus vivante, elle est devenue abstraite, elle s’est comme désincarnée. Peutêtre trouverons-nous dans cette désincarnation du Verbe la vraie cause de nos malheurs.” (Oe II 522) [“Because you have not lived your faith, your faith is no longer alive; it has become abstract; it is, as it were,

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disincarnate. Perhaps we will discover in this disincarnation of the Word the true cause of our misfortunes.”] A long progression of thought, or instinct, or faith – or all three – has brought Bernanos to this point. His boyhood disdain for the purely abstract, his early belief that ideas must take flesh to be valid, his postwar rejection of Christian “ideas” that were stripped of their substance, and his suspicion that Christians themselves were the real villains in this tragedy, led to this comprehensive neologism: “disincarnation.” As the above passage makes clear, this term designates more than the disincarnation of faith, or of its words and symbols; it is about the disincarnation of the God-Man himself, an erosion of the Body of Christ. And Bernanos identifies dis-Incarnation as the real menace to modern civilization. Divinization and dis-Incarnation: do these words imply a fundamental theological dialectic? It would be premature to assert as much. After all, a mere sixteen pages buried within a very long and complex polemical work, an essay that was itself but a segment of an ever-expanding polemical opus, may well seem insignificant. However, the events that soon overtook Bernanos – the mounting European crisis that culminated in the humiliation of his beloved homeland – allowed for no equivocation in the years to come. After the Spanish experience Bernanos would never be the same again; he was indeed caught in truth’s trap. As we shall now see, old alliances crumbled definitively and former heroes were soon unmasked.

the fallen idol Two events had inspired Bernanos’s analysis of the modern world and the role of the Christian during the 1930s. The first was of course the Spanish Civil War. The second was the capitulation to Hitler at Munich in September 1938, the impact of which was so personally wounding that it launched him

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on the largest polemical effort of his life, a series of major works, articles, and essays that are often referred to as his “War Journal.” Characteristically, he was inclined in these writings to concentrate his attention on individuals more than on the events in which they participated because he was naturally more interested in human beings than in issues. It is perhaps ironic that Charles Maurras, the hero of his youth, now became for him the principal symbol of France’s moral collapse. Maurras had led the Action Française in its support for the “peace at any price” appeasement of Hitler. Just as he had once represented to an adolescent’s romantic imagination the glory of ancient France, he now became the exemplar of a world that had lost its courage. From the retrospective vantage point of the contemporary reader of Bernanos, it is perplexing that he should have taken so long to see through Maurras. For years Bernanos had been unwilling to confront the inherent contradiction in an agnostic’s effort to reassert the traditional centrality of Catholicism in the life of France. Even his resignation from the movement in 1920, because of Maurras’s decision to allow several of its more militant members to enter the parliamentary elections of 1919, had resulted from a disagreement over strategy: a true royalist ought never to sully himself in compromising liaisons with the republic, even if the motive was to create a kind of loyal opposition for the pretender in the enemy’s camp. Bernanos’s ties to Maurras and the Action Française had remained strong throughout the twenties. He had vigorously defended the movement after its condemnation by the Vatican in 1926, going so far, or so he claimed, as to participate in its famous non possumus defiance of that condemnation and consequently freely accepting exclusion from the sacraments – though it must be said that such a self-imposed excommunication by a man whose faith was so primary seems hard to believe (see J-L 180–3). Even the famous public row between Bernanos and Maurras in 1932, precipitated by Bernanos’s siding with publisher François Coty in a dispute

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with Maurras (see Cor I 434–62), attests to the constancy of Bernanos’s emotional investment in the Action Française and his respect for its leader. His public “A Dieu” to Maurras, despite the hurt and indignation, was reverential in tone and even paid homage to the man who belonged “tout vivant à l’histoire de mon pays” [“during his lifetime to the history of my country”] (Oe II 1255). Bernanos was not able to make the truly definitive break, psychologically and spiritually, until the shadow of Munich fell. In the context of the repugnance he felt for the spirit of appeasement, the rupture had a more immediate cause: Maurras’s election to the French Academy on 9 June 1938. One can only imagine Bernanos’s fury at learning of Maurras’s presentation of his candidature and of its successful outcome. This was the man for whom he would have given his life, the man for whom he had apparently denied himself the spiritual succour of the Church, the man who was supposed to smash the Republic with a “coup de force.” Now, Maurras showed himself as the conservative bourgeois he truly was, and any vestige of association between the dreams of Bernanos’s youth and the man who had promised to fulfill them was shattered. It was this event that prompted Bernanos to interrupt the composition of his essay Nous autres Français, begun in reaction to Munich in September 1938, and to write the antiMaurrassian pamphlet Scandale de la vérité, published the following year. Maurras’s election to the Academy was clearly the catalyst that ignited a furious assault on the leader of the Action Française, which continued unabated through three volumes of polemics written between 1938 and 1940: Scandale de la vérité, Nous autres Français, and Les Enfants humiliés, the last of which was not published until 1949. As Bernanos came to understand, the underlying cause of the break was much more serious than Maurras’s rubbing elbows with the establishment. Bernanos charged him with a crime that was high in his catalogue of serious sins: Maurras’s phobic fear of socialism and anarchy had led him to betray honour. Both

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he and the official organs of the Action Française had campaigned diligently for compliance with Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia. For Maurras to compromise his own personal honour was one thing; but to incite France to abrogate her treaty obligations was to strike at her soul. For Bernanos, France’s honour was a Christian one. This last point is critical. In the first instance, the question of Christian honour transposes Bernanos’s dispute with Maurras away from previous disagreements about political strategy onto a higher plane. “L’honneur est un absolu” [“Honour is an absolute”] (Oe II 416), Bernanos had written in 1936. Now Maurras’s machiavellianism made it crystal clear that his former idol had an entirely different vision of the motherland. Bernanos believed in France’s “vocation surnaturelle” [“supernatural vocation”] (Oe II 581), whereas Maurras’s pragmatism allowed him to accept a dishonoured homeland provided, of course, that her political integrity and financial stability remained intact. Bernanos took as a simple act of faith his country’s privileged position as “le royaume d’élection du Christ” [“the Kingdom of Christ’s elect”] (Oe II 584) and believed, contrary to the craven opportunism of the agencies of appeasement, that she must dare run the risk of her Christian vocation. Yet, by singling out Christian honour – and it is the principal theme of both Scandale de la vérité and Nous autres Français – Bernanos does more than situate his critique of Maurassian philosophy on a spiritual level. It is worth recalling his own definition of Christian honour: “Il est humain et divin tout ensemble. Il est la fusion mystérieuse de l’honneur humain et de la charité du Christ” [“It is at once both human and divine. It is the fusion of human honour and the charity of Christ”] (Oe II 572). It was precisely this dual structure that made it inimical to the “esprit maurrassien” [“the Maurrassian mindset”]. By 1938 it became apparent to Bernanos that Maurras’s royalism was really the nostalgia of a “petit bourgeois humaniste” [“petty bourgeois humanist”] (Oe II 581) for the kind of social order that only absolute, centralized authority could

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bring. He made the distinction between his own “ancien régime” monarchism, which honoured the king as he who protected the people from the powerful and the greedy, and that of Maurras, who understood it as a guarantee of conservative interests against the forces of anarchy. It was for this reason, Bernanos wrote, that Maurras had been so easily seduced by the dictators (Oe II 587), particularly by Mussolini, and that was why, in the political climate of the thirties, his patriotism had become transposed into protectionist chauvinism. Above all, as Bernanos now saw, the artificiality of Maurras’s intellectual construct was more clearly revealed by his exclusively cerebral embrace of Catholicism than by his championing of monarchy. Maurras’s schizophrenic enthusiasm for the Roman Church coupled the rejection of its doctrine with the promotion of its political structure: “La majesté de sa hiérarchie, la prudence des ses diplomates, la profonde psychologie de ses casuistes, les services rendus par elle aux humanités gréco-latines, l’opulence raffinée des ses Papes de la Renaissance” [“the majesty of its hierarchy, the prudence of its diplomats, the profound psychology of its casuists, the services rendered to the Greco-Latin classics, the refined opulence of its Renaissance Popes”] (Oe II 676). And yet Maurras refused to recognize its supernatural substance for fear of being taken for an idiot by “les intellectuels du boulevard” [boulevard intellectuals] (Oe II 665). Bernanos’s objection to Maurras as an individual was that, like his bourgeois conservatism in royalist guise and his secularized Catholicism, the man and his doctrine excluded one another. The great Maurrassian ideal that had so fired the young Bernanos was exposed as essentially disincarnate: On ne comprend rien à M. Maurras dès qu’on juge l’homme par l’œuvre, car l’œuvre n’est pas l’homme … Sa doctrine ne l’exprime nullement, elle s’efforce seulement de le justifier, elle travaille inlassablement à fermer toutes les brèches par où nous pourrions pénétrer jusqu’à sa personne, jusqu’à sa vérité profonde cachée

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soigneusement à tous et probablement, hélas, oubliée de lui-même. Sa doctrine le définit comme les théologiens définissent Dieu, non par ce qu’il est, mais par ce qu’il n’est pas. (Oe II 664–5) [One understands nothing about Mr Maurras if one judges the man by the work, for the work is not the man. His doctrine is in no way an expression of himself; it strives only to justify him; it works tirelessly to close all the gaps through which we might reach his inner being, his profound personal truth carefully hidden from us all and probably, alas, forgotten by himself. His doctrine defines him in the way that theologians define God, not by what he is, but by what he is not.] The man Bernanos had once hailed as an activist he now condemned as liegeman to the abstract. How had Maurras devolved from idealist to cynic, and why had his thought decomposed before it could ever take flesh? Was hypocrisy the explanation, or had the seeds of good intention simply fallen on sterile ground? It seems that, even by 1938, Bernanos did not doubt Maurras’s original sincerity, but he certainly felt that the agent of decay lay at a deeper level than mere guile, or egoism, or the imperceptible erosion of will that sometimes comes with age: “Le malheur de M. Ch. Maurras est de ne pas aimer réellement sa pensée” [“Mr Charles Maurras’s misfortune is that he does not really love his own thought”] (Oe II 594). For Bernanos this lack of love explained why Maurrassian idealism had never deigned to descend from the ether and why a son of France could allow his country to degenerate into dishonour. Maurras himself felt no sorrow at this metamorphosis; how could he lament the degradation of something he had never truly experienced?: “C’est qu’il ne désespéra jamais de ses livres, il ne désespéra jamais de lui-même. Pour être tenté du désespoir, il faudrait d’abord avoir aimé” [“He will never despair of his books, he will never despair of himself. In order to be tempted by despair one must first have loved”] (Oe II 58).

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Bernanos maintained that it was because Maurras’s intellectual system so resolutely resisted incarnation that its impact had proved so insidiously pervasive in the few years preceding the fall of France in 1940: “C’est justement pour ne s’être jamais accomplie, réalisée, pour n’avoir jamais été fécondée par l’acte, qu’une part de cette pensée se décompose sous nos yeux, empoisonne notre air” [It is precisely because it has never been fulfilled, never realized, never born fruit in action, that a part of this thought is decomposing before our very eyes, poisoning our air] (Oe II 652). The poison in question was “l’esprit maurrassien,” a kind of bourgeois vulgarization of Maurras’s more abstruse doctrine. The intellectual rigour required to sift through his books was beyond the reach of most, and his actual readers were few. However, a simplified form of “Maurrassian philosophy” was popular among the propertied classes who, Bernanos claimed, were looking for a pseudo-intellectual justification for their pompous jingoism, which allied an outspoken approbation of foreign dictatorships with an aggressive opposition to socialism. Their willingness to endorse any tyranny that might exorcise the spectre of Stalin inspired Bernanos to define the Maurrassian mindset as a “caricature bourgeoise et académique de l’esprit totalitaire” [“bourgeois, academic caricature of the totalitarian mindset”] (Oe II 653). Maurras might claim that they had not understood him, but they had absorbed his apprehension and his contempt. Those who sought to adapt Maurrassian doctrine in a political climate so base that it prompted Bernanos’s retreat to Brazil in 1938, were an eclectic group: “Nos bourgeois de l’un et l’autre côté, nos capitalistes de l’un et l’autre bord, de l’une et l’autre confession, les cléricaux et les radicaux, les cléricaux radicaux, et les radicaux cléricaux, les intellectuels et les clercs, les intellectuels clercs et les clercs intellectuels” [The middle-class of one persuasion or another, capitalists of all stripes, clericalists and radicals, radical clericalists and clericalist radicals, intellectuals and clerics, clerical intellectuals and intellectual clerics] (Oe II 595). All were united in one

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goal: “ne pas payer” [“not to pay”] (Oe II 595); that is, not to pay for the cost of social change or economic reform. Whatever the political machinations of these odd bedfellows, Bernanos believed that their fundamental preference was for the abstract. Urged on by a monomaniacal dread of socialist chaos, the bourgeoisie was of one Maurrassian mind in viewing the Church and the family as essentially instruments of order. Similarly, they reduced “la Patrie,” a living and sacred entity for Bernanos, to the sterile notion of “the State.” Whereas the exploited had once cried out, “Si le roi savait” [“If the king only knew about this!”], they must now resort to an unlikely appeal: “Si l’Etat savait” [“If the State only knew about this!”] (Oe II 811). Still, their concepts are appropriate if only because “ils ont moins besoin que les bonnes gens d’une expérience concrète de la patrie, leur sensibilité est faite aux abstractions” [they have less need than the clans of old of a concrete experience of the motherland; their sensibilities are perfectly suited to abstractions] (Oe II 811). And so the disciples of popularized Maurrassian nationalism ceded wholly to the state, investing it with all the godlike supremacy requisite for the guarantee of their order, their prestige, their profits. The religion of the state and the religion of capital, Bernanos wrote, were born on the same day (Oe II 816). At the source of his anti-capitalism (not that he subscribed to any of the available political alternatives) was his conviction that in the bourgeois order of things, which is the modern order, all is taken as illusion except finance. Little wonder that “le faux juge, le faux soldat, le faux penseur, le faux prêtre” [“the phony judge, phony soldier, phony thinker, phony priest”] (Oe II 832) needed to create a new divinity in their own image: “Il ne faudrait pas moins d’un dieu, en effet, pour donner une réalité à des apparences et faire quelque chose de rien” [In fact, it would take nothing less than a god to give substance to appearances and create something from nothing] (Oe II 832). Bernanos’s constant emphasis on illusion, nothingness, the devolution from tangibility to rarified concept, was fundamental

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to his analysis of Europe’s malaise on the eve of war. He was single-minded in viewing the crisis, not merely in terms of politics or economics or social history, but in terms of a disincarnational force so powerful that in the end it devoured its own agents: “La Bourgeoisie s’est désincarnée elle aussi, elle n’est plus guère qu’un esprit, elle sera peut-être demain une religion, et une religion sanglante” [The bourgeoisie has disincarnated itself as well; it is scarcely anything more than a state of mind; tomorrow it will become a religion, and a bloody one at that] (Oe II 673). The middle class was the victim of its own tendencies. Unlike the peasantry, which Bernanos’s romantic imagination honoured as the embodiment of the ancient values of Christendom, or the nobility, who were, ideally at least, its champions, the middle class was not really a class at all; it was, rather, a collective world view propelled by a singular egoism: “L’esprit maurrasien est absolument dépourvu, dépouillé, destitué de toute charité, je veux dire de la charité du Christ” [The Maurrassian mindset is absolutely devoid of, stripped of, empty of any kind of charity, by which I mean of the charity of Christ] (Oe II 655). As he did when writing Les Grandes cimetières sous la lune, Bernanos soon brought his analysis to bear upon his co-religionists, for he would accuse his fellow Catholics of being the worst of a very bad lot. He believed that contemporary French Catholic bourgeoisie was the invention of the humanist clergy, whose roots were deep in a celebrated period of Western history that he abhorred, the Renaissance. Once the humanist cleric had displaced Christian truth with the wisdom of antiquity, he set about indoctrinating the people: “Vous avez mis les peuples au collège” [You have put the people in school] (Oe II 702) is the accusatory refrain of the fifth section of Nous autres Français. There, he contended that the middle-class Catholic of the thirties was little more than a compliant citizen, “le Bon monsieur, la Bonne dame” (Oe II 730), who sought moderation in all things, and whose profound mediocrity and blandness were endemic in every

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parish and church. Motivated by money alone (Oe II 730), they inverted the true order of things, mistaking a respectful attitude for respect, dignity for honour, docility for love (Oe II 703). Like their non-Catholic compatriots they were presented as having a genius for creating shadows where there once was substance. Bernanos exposed the irony inherent in these grotesque Catholics, who themselves seemed incapable of distinguishing “l’opinion catholique” and “la politique romaine” from true Christianity, sanctimoniously lamenting the de-Christianization of European civilization. He seems barely able to control his outrage when he confronts this preposterous inversion: Nous répétons sans cesse, avec des larmes d’impuissance, de paresse et d’orgueil que le monde se déchristianise. Mais le monde n’a pas reçu le Christ – non pro mundo rogo – c’est nous qui l’avons reçu pour lui, c’est de nos cœurs que Dieu se retire, c’est nous qui nous déchristianisons, misérables. (Oe II 632) [We repeat endlessly, with impotent, indolent, arrogant tears that the world is being de-Christianized. But the world did not receive Christ – non pro mundo rogo – it is we who have received him on its behalf; it is from our own hearts that God is withdrawing; it is we, unfortunate ones, who are de-Christianizing ourselves.] Bernanos’s touchstone for distinguishing the Tartuffe from the genuine article is simple enough: “Quelle opinion peut se faire du Christ et de sa doctrine l’homme de bonne volonté qui m’observe et me sait chrétien?” [What opinion of Christ and his doctrine will a man form who, knowing that I am a Christian, observes my behaviour?] (Oe II 608). Here we come to the crux of the matter: Christians, and with them Christian civilization, are being de-Christianized, or, more to the point, are de-Christianizing themselves, because they refuse to incarnate Christ. In short, de-Christianization is

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dis-Incarnation. The bourgeois taste for the abstract culminates here. Bernanos refines the point by returning to the liturgical text he had first invoked when he was on Majorca: Mais moi, je ne me lasserai pas de répéter à ces gens-là que la vérité ne leur appartient nullement, que la plus humble des vérités a été rachetée par le Christ, qu’à l’égal de n’importe lequel d’entre nous, chrétiens, elle a part à la divinité de Celui qui a daigné revêtir notre nature – consortes ejus divinitatis [sic] – entendez-vous menteurs? (Oe II 603) [But I will never tire of repeating to those people that the truth by no means belongs to them, that the most humble of truths has been redeemed by Christ, that, just like any Christian, it shares in the divinity of Him who deigned to clothe Himself in our nature – consortes ejus divinitatis (sic) – do you hear me, you liars?] Thus Bernanos reaffirms his understanding of the Christian mystery as a process of divinization, that is, a partaking of Christ’s divinity so as to share in His Incarnation. Bernanos’s critique of the European crisis must be understood as essentially theological. He despaired of the possibility of divinization among the “liars” of “l’opinion catholique” for whom religion was principally a school for civic rectitude; they, like Maurras himself and like all those baptized in the spirit he represented, were incapable of heroic generosity. The only way in which the true Christian could distinguish himself from the hypocrite was through love (Oe II 630); yet, Bernanos asserted, love was the one thing of which the Catholic bourgeoisie was utterly destitute (Oe II 596). What they had in abundance, he scoffed, were Catholic ideas about Catholic economics and Catholic art, and even the Catholic novel, all of which were timidly proffered to the secular order as evidence of their sophistication. Catholic reality, however, was quite another matter: “C’est de la sainte charité du Christ que le monde a peur, non de vous, ni de vos idées” [The world

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is afraid neither of you nor of your ideas but of the holy charity of Christ] (Oe II 846). The “world,” Bernanos’s polysemic reference to the part of Creation that does not confess Christ, preferred to deal with Christianity on the level of the abstract because it loathed its incarnational dimension: Le monde sait bien, au fond – du moins le prince de ce monde – que le christianisme n’est pas une idéologie, mais il agit constamment, systématiquement, comme s’il en était une. Il épargne sa chair et son sang, parce qu’il ne veut plus reconnaître, publiquement ni sang ni chair. (Oe II 846) [The world knows full well, or at least the prince of this world does, that Christianity is fundamentally not an ideology, but it consistently, systematically, behaves as if it were one. It spares its flesh and blood because it no longer wishes publicly to recognize either its blood or its flesh.] It seems almost to be a matter of the world’s ignoring Christianity’s corporeity in the hope that it would simply go away. Yet, when we recall Bernanos’s prolonged struggle to identify the essence of society’s malaise, like a psychoanalyst trying to pinpoint the subconscious demon in a particularly bad case of self-destructive behaviour, the accusation of behaving as if Christianity were an ideology seems curiously passive, even benign. After all, since the age of fifteen he had condemned the world for its cynicism, its hypocrisy, its expropriation of Christian vocabulary and thought, and, of course, for its pervasive disincarnational tendencies. In truth, the world’s calculated indifference to Christianity’s “flesh and blood” represents only part of Bernanos’s analysis of this cultural plague. In the spring of 1939, almost as if a foreboding of the cataclysm then only months away gave a new clarity to his thoughts, he wrote a sentence that is part definitive critique and part theological summation: “Le malheur et l’opprobre du monde moderne, qui s’affirme si drôlement

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matérialiste, c’est qu’il désincarne tout, qu’il recommence à rebours le mystère de l’Incarnation” [The misfortune and the shame of the modern world, which so ironically affirms its materialism, is that it disincarnates everything, that it is recommencing the mystery of the Incarnation backwards] (Oe II 673). The modern world is not only disincarnational, but, worse still, is a force of dis-Incarnation. This dis-Incarnation is the quintessence of evil, for it is the nature of the demon himself to seek to undo the divine will or, as Bernanos puts it, to do it backwards (à rebours). By 1940 this symbiotic relationship between the world, which strives to reverse the Incarnation, and the mediocre Christian, who colludes with the world by reducing faith to a mere concept, was crystallized for Bernanos in the relationship between Vichy and the Third Reich. It is difficult for contemporary readers to imagine what an affront the establishment of a co-operative Nazi satellite in France was to a patriot like Bernanos. Despite his aversion to living in his own country for any length of time, he nonetheless venerated France as the prophetic witness to what remained of European Christianity. It was not that Marshal Pétain’s government at Vichy surprised him; he viewed “l’esprit de Vichy” as the natural heir of “l’esprit maurrassien” and “l’esprit de Munich.” He was quite sure that the Vichy government and its supporters were the same “gens d’église” who had followed Maurras, who a few years earlier had refused to die for Austria or Czechoslovakia or Danzig (Oe III 257), and who were now content to live under a Nazi protectorate “pourvu qu’il assure la sécurité du leurs personnes et de leurs biens” [providing it guarantees the security of themselves and their possessions] (Oe III 257). Bernanos claimed that most of them were, like Pétain himself, good Catholics who regularly received the sacraments, responsible citizens of the state, true “honnêtes gens” (Oe III 510). The problem was that, in the France of 1940, the “honnêtes gens” were indistinguishable from the “impostors” (Oe III 507), the “Tartuffes” (Oe III 493 ), and the “pharisees” (Oe III 511). Bernanos gives a thumbnail sketch

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of the kind of people these epithets characterized for him: “politiciens, journalistes, femmes ambitieuses, intellectuels ratés, bourgeois aigris, militaires obtus, moines intrigants, monsignori diplomates et politiques” [politicians, journalists, ambitious women, failed intellectuals, embittered bourgeois, dull-witted military types, scheming monks, political church diplomats] (Oe III 128). This alliance of “grands bourgeois” and “intellectuels” (Oe III 219) exchanged the opportunism that had characterized the middle-class response to Munich for an ostensibly more dignified mystique of national purgation. Pétain, in particular, saw France’s subjugation as an act of expiation for her past sins and the Vichy enterprise as an effort at “une restoration spirituelle” [a spiritual renewal] (Oe III 32). They might chant the mantra of “le Travail, la Famille, la Religion” [“Work, Family, Religion”] (Oe III 32]), but, claimed Bernanos, it was little more than self-interest lurking behind a facade of formalist religion. A certain kind of Church establishment, the “gens d’église,” were the purveyors of this pseudo-legitimacy: Leur prestige est celui de l’Ordre, de la Morale, de la Religion. Beaucoup d’entre eux ont été élevés dans le catholicisme; les gens d’Église les en ont d’ailleurs honnêtement instruits. Malheureusement ce ne sont pas leurs leçons qu’ils ont retenues – la plupart restent de médiocres paroissiens – c’est l’esprit des gens d’Église qui les a marqués. (Oe III 75) [Theirs is the prestige of Order, Morality, and Religion. Many of them were raised Catholic and educated reasonably well by the Church establishment. Unfortunately, their lessons left little impression upon them – most of them are still mediocre parishioners. It was the spirit of the Church establishment that left its mark upon them.] “L’esprit des gens d’Eglise” was the spirit of hypocrisy that worshipped not the Trinity but a triune god of “Property,

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Work, Savings” [Oe III 84]. Bernanos insisted that it was fear, and not a spirit of repentance, that had driven the French bourgeoisie into Hitler’s arms, just as it had driven the Italians to Mussolini, the Spaniards to Franco, and the Portuguese to Salazar: “Plutôt Hitler que les réformes sociales qui nous coûteraient tant d’argent” [Better Hitler than social reforms that would cost us so much money] (Oe III 320). Hypocrisy, the pharisaism that adhered to the letter of the law but utterly neglected the spirit, defined Vichy for Bernanos. From time to time the haze of moral rhetoric lifted and Vichy’s true character would show itself. Whenever that happened, Bernanos robustly declared the emperor to be naked. There was, for example, the instance when the “respectable people” (Oe III 486) of Vichy decided to suppress divorce and to legalize deportation and political murder. The bourgeois elite were therefore guilty of a practice Bernanos had been condemning since his student days: cynical exploitation of Christianity: “Lorsqu’elle a un besoin pressant de morale, elle en emprunte au christianisme, juste ce qu’il faut, ni plus, ni moins” [When they have a pressing need for moral authority, they borrow from Christianity precisely as much as they need, no more, no less] (Oe III 50). Like others before them, they exploited “le vocabulaire du Moral et du Spirituel” [the vocabulary of the Moral and the Spiritual] (Oe III 139); they extracted out of context maxims from the Gospel and extolled the Christian principles that served their purposes (Oe III 118), while minimizing any risk of upsetting the social apple cart. Of course, Bernanos always scorned disincarnate principles: “Mais les principes à eux seuls ne sauraient sauver personne; les principes ne sauvent pas les hommes” [But principles on their own could never save anyone; principles do not save men] (Oe III 118). These objections are redolent of Bernanos’s Spanish experience, especially his charge that Pétain’s grand scheme to “reChristianize” France – meaning checking the ambitions of an apostate working-class – suffered from a serious case of moral inversion:

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Ce sont les chrétiens qui auraient besoin de se “rechristianiser,” c’est-à-dire de vivre leur foi, de la vivre réellement, substantiellement, héroïquement, au lieu de la compromettre dans toutes sortes de combinaisons politiques, comme s’ils désiraient s’en servir au lieu de la servir. (Oe III 308) [It is Christians who need to be “re-Christianized,” that is to live their faith, to really live it, substantially, heroically, instead of compromising it by engaging in all sorts of schemes as if they wished to exploit it rather than serve it.] This accusation, which recalls that made by Bernanos’s agnostic preacher, elevates Vichy’s sin above those committed by the average pious hypocrite onto the more serious plane of disincarnation: C’est pourquoi nous devons regretter de voir s’accroître sans cesse le nombre de ceux qui sollicitent, réclament, exigent la vénération, non pour ce qu’ils valent, ni pour ce qu’ils sont, mais précisément pour ce qu’ils devraient être et ne sont pas, pour ce qu’ils “représentent” et n’ont malheureusement pas le courage “d’incarner.” (Oe III 270) [This is why we must regret the ceaseless growth in the number of those who solicit, claim, demand reverence, not for their worth, nor for what they are, but precisely for what they should be and are not, for what they “represent” and unfortunately have not the courage to “incarnate.”] Pétain and his colleagues blamed the European crisis on their “unbelieving brothers,” especially the Communist ones, while crouching behind a facade of censorious rectitude. But, as Bernanos observed, the vocation of the Christian, who is a child of the New and not the Old Testament, is not to give up service to the law, but to accomplish it in word

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and deed: “Les principes valent; c’est eux qui ne valent rien. Ils font ce qu’ils ont toujours fait: ils définissent au lieu d’agir” [Their principles are valid; it is they who are worth nothing. They do what they have always done: they define instead of acting] (Oe III 108). In Bernanos’s lexicon, action betokens love, in the supernatural sense. Although Catholic “intellectuals, philosophers, novelists, poets and artists” create a flurry of activity, they leave no mark because they argue too much and love too little (Oe III 305). Their piety is exclusively private and their cerebral detachment is cruel, particularly in the face of immense human suffering. Without compassion, the form of love that is, Bernanos argued, the only one that gives substance to pious sentiment, Christianity begins to parody itself: De cette Renaissance catholique, je parlerai un jour plus longuement. Qu’il me suffise pour aujourd’hui de noter qu’elle semble avoir plus excité les cerveaux qu’elle n’a réformé les cœurs et les volontés. Chacun reconnaît, avec maréchal Pétain, que l’esprit de sacrifice a manqué aux générations de la dernière guerre. Je me permets d’en conclure que certains milieux ecclésiastiques égarés par les nouvelles méthodes de propagande qui grossissaient de jour en jour les effectifs, ont sacrifié parfois la qualité à la quantité, pris la publicité pour l’apostolat, et ses adhésions pour des conversions. Qu’est-ce qu’un christianisme qui n’apprend pas à souffrir et à mourir? (Oe III 267–8) [I will talk about this Catholic Renaissance at greater length another day. Suffice it now to say that it seems to have done more to excite the mind than to have reformed the heart or the will. Everyone knows, along with Marshal Pétain, that the generation of the last war lacked a spirit of sacrifice. Allow me to conclude from this that certain ecclesiastical circles, misled by the new methods of propaganda that were increasing the number of converts daily, sometimes sacrificed quality to quantity, mistook publicity for preaching, and membership for

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conversion. What kind of Christianity is it that does not teach us how to suffer and how to die?] This last sentence brings Bernanos finally to what he called elsewhere the “nub” of his case against Vichy: “Le Christianisme divinise l’homme” [“Christianity divinizes man”] (Oe III 195). Divinization leads inexorably to the Cross, where the Incarnation accomplishes its purpose. This is the suffering heart of the Christian mystery which, Bernanos insisted, the Catholics of Vichy so self-righteously eschewed: L’humanité rachetée, rendue participante à la divinité comme nous l’enseigne la liturgie de la messe, est pendue à la croix par des clous, mais qu’importe aux Pharisiens puisqu’ils ont payé la dîme et respecté le Sabbat? (Oe III 300) [Redeemed humanity, made a participant in God’s divinity as the liturgy of the Mass teaches us, is suspended on a cross with nails; but what does it matter to the Pharisees since they have paid the tithe and honoured the Sabbath?] He believed that Vichy’s fundamental absurdity lay in the fact that it was the creation of the very social order that it was trying to re-Christianize. They were allied in their hostility to the Incarnation. As the “phony war” ended, the sting of Vichy’s scandal diminished for Bernanos. As time went on, he became more preoccupied with the global struggle. In 1940 he stopped writing novels, permanently as it happened, and from a remote hacienda in Brazil8 he gave himself entirely to the defence of freedom, a subject we will discuss later. After 1940

8 Bernanos and his wife and children left for Paraguay in 1938. When it proved unsuitable, they moved on to Brazil. They remained there until 1945, when General de Gaulle appealed to the famous author to return home.

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the intensity of his reaction to the world’s agony made it impossible for him to sustain the two vocations, novelist and polemicist; but they had actively co-existed during the previous decades. Whether these dimensions of his creative life developed as parallel impulses or whether they intersected is a question that can only be considered if we go back to 1926, to Bernanos’s first novel and his first hero.

2 A Novelist of Genius: The Art (1906–1940)

Bernanos wrote Sous le soleil de Satan, his first novel, not by choice, he claimed, but in response to a driven, inner necessity: Je désirais simplement – mais passionément, j’avais passionément besoin – de fixer ma pensée, comme on lève les yeux vers une cime dans le ciel, sur un homme surnaturel dont le sacrifice exemplaire, total, nous restituerait un par un chacun de ces mots sacrés dont nous craignions d’avoir perdu le sens. (Oe II 1043) [I wanted simply – but passionately, I passionately needed – to focus my thought, as one lifts one’s eyes toward a summit in the distance, to a supernatural man whose total, exemplary sacrifice would restore each one of those sacred words whose meaning we had feared lost forever.] This passion was realized in Father Donissan, Bernanos’s first “supernatural man,” hero of Sous le soleil de Satan, which burst upon the French literary scene in 1926 and made its creator famous. Donissan in many ways anticipates other Bernanos characters. He is tortured, disturbing, and intense, crying out for the ineffable reconciliation that will come only later. He is a flawed saint.

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the flawed saint Sous le soleil de Satan1 was a product of the First World War and its political aftermath. For Bernanos, the war brought the mystery of evil into stark relief: how could one make such madness, such carnage, intelligible? Psychological explanations seemed pitifully inadequate, as did the conjectures of politicians, economists, and social historians. The spectacle of millions of dead was beyond all rational speculation and moved Bernanos to come forward, as he put it, as a witness to evil’s intent, to its personal nature, the depth of its malice – in short, as a witness to Satan himself. At the same time, as he explained in a 1926 interview with Frédéric Lefèvre, the novel was a protest against the empty effusions of postwar “democratic ideology” (Oe II 1039): the zinc homage to “Saint Poilu” in every village square and the ubiquitous “cardboard” slogans of a contrived and strained optimism – “le bœuf gras de ‘l’Allemagne paiera,’ le Poilu, la Madelon, l’Américain Amis-des Hommes, La Fayette tous les héros! tous” [the fatted calf of ‘Germany will pay,’ the Poilu, the Madelon, America Friend-of-Mankind, La Fayette all of them heroes, all of them!] (Oe II 1040). In this first novel, the painful experiences of early manhood follow from the adolescent’s war on castles in the air, and the discovery of true evil coincides with frustration over the devaluation of noble words. In a lecture given on 15 March 1927 entitled “Une Vision catholique du réel” (“A Catholic Vision of Reality”), Bernanos elaborated on this point: La guerre m’a laissé ahuri, comme tout le monde, de l’immense disproportion entre l’énormité du sacrifice

1 I am using William Bush’s definitive edition of Sous le soleil de Satan, the first based on a close study of the manuscript, rather than the version that appears in the Pléiade edition of the complete novels.

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et la misère de l’idéologie proposée par la presse et les gouvernements. Et puis encore, notre espérance était malade, ainsi qu’un organe surmené. La Religion du Progrès, pour laquelle on nous a poliment priés de mourir, est en effet une gigantesque escroquerie à l’espérance. Tout le vocabulaire idéaliste, décidément déprécié, n’aurait pas payé une croûte de pain noir! (Oe II 1077–8) [The war left me, like everyone else, stunned by the immense disproportion between the immensity of the sacrifice and the poverty of the ideology put forward by the press and by governments. And what is more, our hope was sick, like an overworked organ. The Religion of Progress, for which they had politely asked us to die, is in fact an enormous fraud perpetrated against hope. All the thoroughly depreciated idealist vocabulary would not have bought one crust of black bread!] The “masters of the abstract,” the democratic idealists, he continued, prefer to infuse words with meanings that suited them (Oe II 1075–6). As he had explained to Lefèvre, his novel was in part an attempt to redeem these cheapened symbols: La détente universelle était un spectacle insurmontable. Traqué pendant cinq ans, la meute horrible enfin dépistée, l’animal humain rentré au gîte à bout de forces, lâchait son ventre et évacuait l’eau fade de l’idéalisme puritain. Lequel d’entre nous ne se sentit alors dépossédé? L’idéologie démocratique était encore supportable, dans notre pays latin, parce qu’elle avait pris jusqu’alors le masque jovial, bon enfant, de l’arrivisme politique. Pour la première fois, nous avions vu sa vraie figure. On nous avait tout pris. Oui! quiconque tenait une plume à ce moment-là s’est trouvé dans l’obligation de reconquérir sa propre langue, de la rejeter à la forge. Les mots les plus sûrs étaient pipés.

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Les plus grands étaient vides, claquaient dans la main. (Oe II 1039–40) [The release of tension throughout the world was a gruesome spectacle. Stalked for five years, having at last given the horrible pack the slip, the human animal returned exhausted to its den, let its bowels loose, and evacuated the insipid water of puritan idealism. Who among us did not feel dispossessed? Democratic idealism had been bearable, in our Latin country, because, until then, it had worn the jovial, good-little-boy mask of political ambition. But then, for the first time, we saw its true face. They had taken us all in. Yes! At that moment anyone with a pen felt obliged to take back his own language, throw it back into the forge. The most reliable words had been loaded. The greatest of them had been emptied of meaning. They crumbled in our hands.] Reclaiming and refashioning a language would seem a daunting task for a first-time novelist. Yet it was Bernanos’s mission to win back one word in particular, the word that signifies humankind’s highest calling: Qu’aurais-je jeté en travers de cette joie obscène, sinon un saint? A quoi contraindre les mots rebelles, sinon à définir, par pénitence, la plus haute réalité que puisse connaître l’homme aidé de la grâce, la Sainteté. (Oe II 1040) [What could I have thrown into the midst of this obscene revelry, if not a saint? What could one compel the rebellious words to do if not to define, as an act of penance, the highest reality that man, aided by grace, can know, Holiness.] Bernanos’s hero was his response to the zinc statues that stood guard over the public squares. By portraying the essence of sanctity, in terms that drew criticism from the Catholic establishment, he hoped to resuscitate that “sacred”

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word. He went to great lengths to confront bourgeois piety and shatter the prayer-card image of vermilion lips, pallid complexion, ecstatic eyes upturned to the heavens. He wanted to create a foil for the vacuous popular icon of the delicate, ethereal, miracle-working saint who might evaporate at any moment (Oe II 1043). Bernanos’s saint was to be human, too human, as it happened, for some of the devout. Certainly, Father Donissan proved too indecorously fallible for Jacques Maritain, who, as we have already mentioned, in his capacity as editor of the “Roseau d’or” series at Plon, requested changes in the novel so as not to offend Catholic sensibilities.2 Donissan’s “effusion” of love makes him a saint, but the nature and virulence of his temptations make him one of us; unfortunately, these same temptations caused Bernanos to be charged with Manichaeism. Despite the obstacles and difficulties that Donissan faces, which we shall examine in due course, he resolutely answers the call to holiness, recognizing its all-or-nothing character.3 He responds passionately to his mentor’s exhortation: “Là où Dieu vous attend, il vous faudra monter, monter ou vous perdre” [You must ascend to where God awaits you, ascend or be lost] (SSS 111–2). Donissan first encounters the power and degradation of evil in the confesional, and there too, in the penumbra of whispered guilt, he begins to comprehend the price of a calling that has made him the servant of sinners, collectively henceforth his “Master,” “qui ne le lâchera plus vivant” [who will

2 For a scholarly account of the relationship between Maritain and Bernanos and its impact on Sous le soleil de Satan, see William Bush’s introduction to his definitive edition of that novel: Paris: Plon, 1982. 3 In this regard Bernanos is already showing the influence, which will become pervasive, of the spirituality of St Thérèse of Lisieux. See the author’s study on the subject in French Forum, Vol. 10, No. I, January 1985.

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never let him escape alive] (SSS 118). His willingness to assume the condition of a slave, an obvious Christological image, contributes, paradoxically, to a serious loss of direction: “Dieu m’a inspiré cette pensée que je devrais poursuivre Satan dans les âmes, et que j’y compromettrais infailliblement mon repos, mon honneur sacerdotal, et mon salut même” [God has inspired me to think that I should pursue Satan into souls even if it means the inevitable loss of my peace, of my priestly honour, and of my salvation itself] (SSS 207). Donissan’s willingness to risk his own soul in a battle with the Evil One is troubling, a fact that his superior recognizes early on. The sincerity of his self-abnegation is, however, beyond question. By the time he reaches old age and has become the famed confessor of Lumbres, we are told: “il a tout donné; il est vide” [“he has given everything; he is empty”] (SSS 220). To this Bernanos adds in italics, “Consummatum est,” to signal the deeper meaning intended in Donissan’s unique suffering. What no doubt contributed to the novel’s shock value in 1926 was the question of whether a saint should be so relentlessly tortured spiritually, emotionally, and physically that his victory in Christ seems ambiguous. Whatever the case, Sous le soleil de Satan is about suffering. Bernanos himself spelled out this theme when, after the novel’s enormous success, he wrote to Lefèvre that: “Le problème de la Vie est le problème de la Douleur” [The problem of Life is the problem of Pain] (Oe II 1049): Le réel, le positif de la vie, ce n’est pas quelques instants d’exaltation sensuelle ou intellectuelle, ou même de vague religiosité, c’est cette nappe profonde de la douleur qui tout à coup jaillit à la surface, comme l’eau d’un fleuve souterrain. (Oe II 1054) [The real, the concrete, in life is not a few seconds of intellectual or sensual elation, or even a vague religiosity; it is that deep deposit of pain which springs up suddenly to the surface like water from a subterranean river.]

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This “problem,” theologically at least, becomes accentuated in Donissan’s impassioned admonitions to fellow priest Father Sabiroux. Sabiroux was for Bernanos chiefly an object of satire. His represented a parody of the priestly vocation, for he was the sort of rationalist, unctuous cleric that the author despised. Bernanos summed up his antipathy to such types in his letter to Lefèvre: A vrai dire, je ne méprise pas moins l’incrédule satisfait ou le prêtre érudit capable de raisonner sur l’amour de Dieu, en vingt volumes, avec un sang-froid de collectioneur d’espèces rares. Parlons mieux: je méprise l’un, je haïs l’autre de tout le poids de ma forte vie. (Oe II 1054) [To tell the truth, I despise in equal measure the selfsatisfied skeptic and the scholarly priest capable of discoursing on the love of God, in twenty volumes, with the cold objectivity of a collector of rare species. Let me make myself clear: I despise the former; I hate the latter with all the strength of my being.] Sabiroux, at heart a functionary and a moralist who cherishes the progressive doctrines of his day, embodies the “scholarly” priest who confuses bourgeois optimism with hope and allows his belief in progress to usurp the rightful place of faith. He incites Donissan to an angry and lengthy retort when he alludes to “le drame du Calvaire” [the drama of Calvary] (SSS 243) as if it were a morality play staged in a remote past. Donissan laments the clerical, even episcopal, tendency to treat the “death of God” as a tale embellished from the pulpit for the edification of the faithful. It is again Bernanos himself who explained to Lefèvre exactly what vision of Calvary he brought to his novel: Le problème de la Vie, disais-je, est le problème de la Douleur. C’est encore mal parler. Tout le problème de

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la Vie tient à l’aise dans celui du Péché. Qu’est-ce donc que le Péché? Une transgression à la loi? Sans doute, mais que voilà une pauvre abstraction! Au lieu que vous aurez tout exprimé de lui quand vous l’aurez nommé de son nom: un déicide. (Oe II 1052) [I have said that the problem of Life was the problem of Pain. But that is not exactly true. The problem of Life is subsumed within the problem of Sin. What is Sin? A transgression of the law? Without doubt, but what a poor abstraction! All would be explained if one simply called it by its true name: deicide.] The language may seem excessive, but its purpose is to disturb the “reasoning animal” [“l’animal raisonneur”] (Oe II 1052), represented in the novel by Sabiroux, who has managed to “enfermer dans le même signe abstrait l’idée du déicide et celle d’une forte rage de dents” [include in the same abstract sign the idea of deicide and that of a very bad toothache] (Oe II 1052). When Donissan envisions the death of God, the scene that he imagines resonates with the unexpected appearance of another powerful invisible force. He tries to explain this malign presence to Sabiroux: La chair divine n’est pas seulement déchirée, elle est forcée, profanée, par un sacrilège absolu, jusque dans la majestie de l’agonie. La dérision de Satan, mon ami! Le rire, l’incompréhensible joie de Satan. (SSS 243) [The divine flesh is not just ripped apart, it is broken, profaned by an absolute sacrilege, even in the majesty of its agony … Satan’s derision, my friend! The laugh, the incomprehensible joy of Satan.] The emphasis on God’s “flesh” is pointed. Its purpose seems to be to impress upon Sabiroux that the Incarnation is real, although his insistence on the divine body, as we shall see, is strangely at odds with his attitude toward his own. At any rate, Satan’s laughter seems to affect him almost as much as

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the crucifixion itself, perhaps because he has personally experienced its mockery. In what must surely be one of the most remarkable scenes in twentieth-century literature, Donissan meets Satan face to face. It is night; the priest, exhausted after a long day of hearing confessions in a neighbouring village, loses his way in the woods on the return journey. He encounters a friendly horsetrader whose true identity is revealed when his false camaraderie turns to cruel derision: “Ho! Ho! Ho! quel embarras! quel silence! Hi! Hi! Hi! De tous ceux que j’ai vus marqués du même signe que toi, tu es le plus lourd, le plus obtus, le plus compact! Tu creuses ton sillon comme un bœuf, tu bourres sur l’ennemi comme un bouc. De haut en bas, une bonne cible.” (SSS 164–5) [“Ho! Ho! Ho! what a predicament! what silence! Hi! Hi! Hi! Of all those I’ve seen marked by the same sign as you, you’re the stupidest, the most dull-witted, the most dense! You plough your furrows like an ox, you butt the enemy like a billy goat. A good target from top to bottom.”] It is the same laughter that derides both Christ and Donissan, because the sacrifice is the same. Donissan tries to explain this similarity to Sabiroux: “Entre Satan et Lui, Dieu nous jette, comme son dernier rempart. C’est à travers nous que depuis des siècles et des siècles la même haine cherche à l’atteindre, c’est dans la pauvre chair humaine que l’ineffable meutre est consommé.” (SSS 244–5) [“God throws us between Satan and Himself as his last rampart. It is through us that, for centuries and centuries, the same hatred seeks to reach him; it is in poor human flesh that the ineffable murder is consummated.”]

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Two pages later he again tries, futilely, to communicate to Sabiroux the unity of human and divine suffering, the manifestation in human pain of the tortured deity: “C’est en nous qu’Il est saisi, dévoré. C’est de nous qu’Il est arraché. Depuis des siècles le peuple humain est mis sous le pressoir, notre sang exprimé à flots afin que la plus petite parcelle de la chair divine soit de l’affreux bourreau l’assouvissement et la risée.” (SSS 246) [“It is in us that He is seized, devoured. It is from us that He is torn. For centuries the human family has been under the press, our blood squeezed out so that the tiniest bit of divine flesh might be made a laughing stock to appease the hideous tormentor.”] It is not hard to identify the origins of this theology of pain. The vast suffering in the trenches constituted Bernanos’s own sojourn at the foot of the Cross, the utter senselessness of which must have resounded with Satan’s laughter. What saved Bernanos from complete despair, however, was his belief that, however absurd the suffering might have appeared, its deeper meaning lay in the redemptive power of sacrifice. Suffering, he wrote to Lefèvre in 1926, is the common experience of the Creator and the creature, the bread that God shares with humankind (Oe II 1053). Since Calvary, he wrote, the great battle between good and evil has taken place, no longer in the cold darkness of the infernal regions, but within the heart of the “God-Man” (Oe II 1054). Donissan’s painful life is the temporal manifestation of an invisible struggle; in other words, he incarnates the positive reality of life that stands against the intellectual vacuity of the age. The interplay between this incarnation and the Incarnation is so intimate as to make them indistinguishable. The narration, at key junctures, so seamlessly merges the saint with his God that the reader is almost unsure which is which. Often it is both at once. Consider, for example, a passage

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that describes the old priest in his last agony, besieged in his confessional by a troop of sinners: Comme ils se hâtent! Comme ils sont vite. Comme ils s’empressent autour de l’Homme sans défense, comme ils jettent à la Sainte-Face les crachats qui les étranglent! Mais sitôt le souffle revenu, vous les verrez – ah! vous les verrez ces affreux enfants! – chercher, tâter des lèvres la hideuse mamelle que Satan presse pour eux, gonflée du poison chéri!. Jusqu’à la mort, lève la main, pardonne, absous, homme de la Croix vaincu d’avance. (SSS 267–8) [Look at them hurry! How quickly they move. With what attention they surround this defenceless Man. How the spittle they spew in the Holy Face chokes them! But as soon as they catch their breath, you will see them – ah! you will see them, these terrible children! – seek out, grope with their lips the hideous teat that Satan squeezes for them, bloated with the cherished poison! Lift your hand, man of the Cross, defeated before you even begin, pardon, absolve.] If there was any doubt about Donissan’s identity, it is put to rest by his final prayer before dying: “Pater, dimitte illis, non enim sciunt quid facient” [Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do] (SSS 268). But we are being somewhat precipitate. The great scene, perhaps the central scene of Sous le soleil de Satan, takes place when Donissan is still a young man: his confrontation with Mouchette. Her story is told in the prologue. A girl of sixteen, Mouchette is the daughter of an anti-clerical villager and the lover of the local nobleman whose child she bears. During a quarrel, she murders her high-born inamorato with a hunting rifle at such close range that his death is mistaken for suicide. The child is later still-born and Mouchette, once recovered from a nervous breakdown, delights in the secret that she feels separates her from ordinary people. Donissan,

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gifted with sacerdotal clairvoyance, encounters her alone early one morning. He is able to tell her every detail of her past but makes no effort to reform her. It is not reformation that he offers her, but redemption; his role is to buy her back, to pay her ransom. Bernanos later elaborated upon his intention in an essay entitled “Satan et Nous” [“Satan and Us”]: A la limite d’un certain abaissement, d’une certaine dissipation sacrilège de l’âme humaine, s’impose à l’esprit l’idée du rachat. Non pas d’une réforme ni d’un retour en arrière, mais du rachat. Ainsi l’abbé Donissan n’est pas apparu par hasard: le cri du désespoir sauvage de Mouchette l’appelait, le rendait indispensable. (Oe II 1100) [At the furthest limit of a certain kind of degradation, of a certain sacrilegious dissipation of the human soul, the idea of redemption asserts itself. Not a reform or a starting over, but a buying back. Thus Father Donissan did not appear by chance: Mouchette’s wild cry of despair called him, made him indispensable.] In the end, she is redeemed, not by any power of Donissan’s, but by his participation in the one Redemptive act of Christ. Although this Incarnational view recurs throughout the novel, and although the priest’s role as alter Christus is indisputable, there is something disturbing and theologically underdeveloped in this work. It expresses a vision which, though valid, contradicts itself, a vision that seems uncomfortable with the idea of salvation it posits, in the end declaring war, as it were, on its own incarnational theme. Donissan, and with him we must include Bernanos, espouses a point of view and rejects it in the same breath. There is something unbalanced about Donissan’s piety. His lack of moderation may in part be due to Bernanos’s attempt to create a “human” saint, a prey to temptation, locked in combat with Satan, whose dark power insinuates itself even into the ascetic’s inner sanctum. That Bernanos was aware of an imperfection in his

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hero’s sanctity emerges in the reference made by Donissan’s superior to the “false note” (SSS 123) in his protegé’s zeal, as well as his disconcerting violence and bitterness (SSS 116). Bernanos seemed incapable of resolving this problem for, or through, this hero. The violence in Donissan’s personality does not focus, as one might expect, on an overzealous attention to the things of the spirit. There is, of course, a grim, determined, clenchedfisted, vigour in Donissan’s response to his call to holiness – his laboured reading and annotating of “Le Traité sur l’Incarnation” [“Treatise on the Incarnation”], for example – which at times seems to have an almost unholy ferocity. But his violence targets not the spirit but the flesh. In fact, the flesh, specifically his own body, is given a prominence that may seem surprising in a novel about a saint engaged in spiritual combat. When, near the beginning, Donissan is put in charge of parish visitations for the Lenten collection, the initial response of parishioners is a collective exclamation: “Quel drôle de corps!” [What a strange body!] (SSS 115). When Donissan later goes to a neighbouring parish to hear confessions, a passing peasant woman also remarks to herself: “What a strange body!” (SSS 138). If his body itself is remarkable, his neglect of it and of his personal appearance are even more so. His introduction in the novel commands attention because of the “sordid look” of his clothes, the filthy stockings and soutane covered in stains and splatters, the hands so dirty that they are the colour of the earth (SSS 101). Why such neglect? Does it express a holy disregard for the vanities of the world, the touching simplicity of an unsophisticated but earnest man? Donissan’s lack of grooming can bear this benign reading, and yet at the same time it suggests an attitude toward his body which is quite disturbing. The unwholesome side of Donissan’s slovenliness appears when he faints during a conversation with his superior in the novel’s second section. The older priest unbuttons Donissan’s soutane and discovers a hair shirt so tightly drawn that his curate’s burned skin has erupted in large boils that ooze blood

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and water. Again, such asceticism could be construed as an excessive but heroic form of piety. Donissan’s mortification, however, does not appear to be sanctifying. His self-mutilation does underscore an impatient longing for perfection, but, as the remarkable flagellation scene demonstrates, his violent impulses are more destructive than life-giving. In an effort to uproot a suspect joy of which he feels unworthy, he beats himself with a chain. His action is really suicidal, because only his collapse prevents him from beating himself to death as he would have wished: “Sa pensée, comme engourdie par l’excès de la douleur physique, ne se fixait plus et il ne formait aucun désir, sinon d’atteindre et de détruire, dans cette chair intolérable, le principe même de son mal” (SSS 127) [His mind, as if numbed by the excess of physical pain, no longer focused on anything or formulated any desire, except to destroy in this intolerable flesh the very principle of its evil] (SSS 127). The body is that miserable, heavy, detestable part of himself that he cannot drag into a purer realm (SSS 127–8). We are given no sense whatever that this self-destructive disposition is a reaction to the temptations of carnality or the urges of the senses. Characters at war with the body because of their Jansenistic guilt belong to the novels of François Mauriac and not to those of Bernanos. For Donissan, the body incarnates defeat because it is corruptible and weak, and it is weakness, which denotes the presence of failure, that Satan exploits so powerfully. However, these dark waters run deeper still. In the course of his frenzied flagellation, we learn the truth: “Il se haïssait tout entier. Ainsi l’homme qui ne peut survivre à son rêve, il se haïssait” [He hated himself completely. Like the man who cannot survive his dreams, he hated himself] (SSS 128). The punishment Donissan inflicts upon his body is a gruesome articulation of his self-hatred; what’s more, it reveals his inability to accept his own humanity. Thus, while his pathological need to contradict his own nature (SSS 139) takes various forms – his self-imposed reading of dense theological texts beyond his intellectual ability, for

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example – his torturing of the flesh remains his principal means of rooting out imperfection. Certainly the young Donissan’s mortifications are portrayed as excessive – his wise superior forbids them after discovering the hair shirt. They appear to abate once he enters his declining years. Yet, whatever his softening with age, his hostility toward the body remains. As a young priest he had referred to the body as “l’obstacle charnel” [the carnal obstacle] (SSS 199). In old age he has managed, we are told, to enslave (SSS 223) his own body, but he despairs of reaching souls “à travers l’abîme de la chair” [across the chasm of the flesh] (SSS 233). Little wonder that the “juste mépris” [righteous contempt] (SSS 108) that the young priest had felt for sinners develops in old age into a hatred (SSS 209) that focuses upon their animality. The aged Donissan contemplates with pity “le lamentable troupeau humain né pour paître et mourir” [the lamentable human flock, born to graze and die] (SSS 222). Later he gives way to despair while surveying forty futile years in the “stable” with the “la bête humaine” [human beast] (SSS 233). It is difficult to reconcile this hatred of the body with the worship of a God who ordained that His creatures be flesh and bone. The eloquent discourse he delivered to Father Sabiroux on the Incarnation and the “divine flesh” seems out of place; after all the divine flesh was human flesh. Donissan spends his life standing at the foot of the Cross gazing upon God’s tortured body, and yet he despises his own. Donissan’s attitude toward the Cross, or more exactly to the very human body that hung upon it, evolves as well. As a young priest, in moments of turmoil, his gaze had inevitably reached up to the same focal point on the wall, the crucifix. On the morning after the flagellation scene, barely walking and bleeding from open wounds, he mounts the sanctuary steps to begin Mass but can do little more than seek a communion in suffering: “Alors il regarde la Croix” [So he looks upon the Cross] (SSS 131). One page later this phrase is repeated as he “fixes” his gaze, without a word or a sigh,

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upon the corpus of an impassive Christ (SSS 132–3). Even at those moments, despite his desire to repress it, an ecstatic joy engulfs him, and his reaction seems instinctive: “Levant les yeux vers le Christ, bizarrement tordu sur la croix de cuire” [Raising his eyes toward Christ, grotesquely contorted on the leather cross] (SSS 142). Still, as his life nears its end, he undergoes a significant change.We notice a rather startling alteration in the image of Calvary – there is no corpus on the cross in his sitting room: “Et encore, sur le papier aux ramages pâlis (un vrai papier d’auberge), près de l’unique fenêtre, une grande croix de bois noir sans Christ, toute nue” [And still, on the faded foliage of the wall paper (real country-inn wallpaper), near the only window, was a large black wooden cross, totally bare without its Christ] (SSS 226). The emphasis on the “nakedness” of the cross is quite marked. What follows, though, is even more significant – old Donissan seems unable to bear the sight of it: “Et c’est elle que M. le curé a vue premièrement, et il a aussitôt détourné les yeux” [And that was what the priest saw first, and he immediately turned his eyes away] (SSS226). Where is the corpus of the Saviour whose outstretched arms had once offered a consoling, expiative embrace? And what has become of the once rapt contemplation before the image of divine surrender? It is significant that Donissan averts his eyes from the cross as he enters his parlour to meet the waiting Maître du Plouy, whose son is critically ill. This encounter marks the beginning of a débâcle that ends in an aborted attempt to resurrect the child, who dies before Donissan can reach his bedside. The catastrophe is the beginning of the priest’s most serious crisis of faith as he puts God to the test in his desire to know. When he enters the now dead child’s room, he seems to fancy himself more a hero than a saint (SSS 256). Significantly, he does look at the crucifix that lies on the bed. Though he does not turn his eyes quickly away, neither does he contemplate the icon with any devotion: “Le curé de Lumbres se tient debout, au pied du lit, et regarde, sans prier, le crucifix

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sur la toile nette” [The priest remains standing, at the foot of the bed, and gazes, without praying, upon the crucifix lying on the clean linen] (SSS 257). His lack of prayer suggests that such an effort, directed toward the crucified Christ who seems so defeated on His cross, would prove ineffective. Moments later, still unable to pray, he makes the sign of the Cross over the child’s body but with a curious lack of conviction: “La main, qui ébauchait en l’air le signe de la Croix, retombe” [The hand, which had begun to trace the sign of the Cross in the air, falls back down] (SSS 258). Donissan’s crisis reaches its climax when the child’s eyes open and the priest recognizes in this miraculous resurrection the power, not of God, but of his infernal adversary. It is as if the Evil One were indeed a god (SSS 259), and perhaps one more powerful than the Christ who is nailed powerless and immobile upon his cross. The priest holds the child up toward heaven, like an elevated host (SSS 260), and angrily demands justice: “Dieu lui doit, Dieu lui donnera, ou tout n’est qu’un songe. De lui ou de Vous, dites quel est le maître!” [God owes it to him, God will give it to him, otherwise everything is just a dream. Tell me if You are his master or if he is yours] (SSS 260). This furious demand to know, this defiance born of doubt, centres, like his faith, on the Cross: “A la bouche qui cherche la Croix, aux bras qui la pressent, donnera-t-on Cela seulement – ce mensonge?” [Is this all that will be given to the lips that seek the Cross, to the arms that clasp it – this lie?] (SSS 259). The old priest had earlier confessed his terrible suspicions to Sabiroux: “Nous sommes vaincus et Dieu avec nous! Vaincus! Vaincus!” [We are defeated and God along with us! Defeated! Defeated!] (SSS 253). It is almost as if the violent resentment he harbours toward wayward, feeble flesh contaminates the image he had of Christ Himself, who now appeared as weak as any other human, His redemptive act thereby rendered useless. The crucifix thus becomes the emblem of failure. While we know that in Donissan Bernanos was seeking to avoid the sugar-coated cleric of bourgeois hagiography, it is

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impossible not to feel that the fictional saint expressed much of his creator’s own spiritual angst. Donissan is an incomplete Bernanosian hero, who signals trouble in Bernanos’s personal spiritual journey, perhaps even an inability on the part of Bernanos to accept his own body. The incarnational theme in this first novel is, as we have demonstrated, ambiguous. Indeed, one can only speculate about the tension within Bernanos if, despite his lifelong belief in the importance of incarnation, he was at war with his own flesh. One wonders too whether the terrible years of war had tempted him to doubt the very omnipotence of God in the face of such puissant evil. But Bernanos’s own spirituality was evolving. His next effort to portray sanctity would represent a dramatic thematic shift. It would also bring him much further on his way as a pilgrim.

the mystical saint Chantal de Clergerie, heroine of the 1929 novel La Joie, demonstrates from the outset that Bernanos’s vision of holiness was far from static. Within three years of Donissan’s appearance, Bernanos invented a character so unlike him that she must, in certain respects at least, have been a response to him. In fact, Chantal occupies a curious place in Bernanos’s fiction, not so much because she is a lay person and an adolescent, although these characteristics do distinguish her from Bernanos’s other “saints.” She is perplexingly anomalous because she is a mystic whose intense ecstasies not only set her apart from her fellow Bernanosian saints but put her outside of Bernanos’s own spiritual and creative perspective as well. The problem becomes evident when one considers that, despite his rigorous Catholic orthodoxy and his proud adherence to the great intellectual and spiritual traditions of his Church, Bernanos remained largely uninspired by, indeed wary of, mystical ecstasy, which figures so prominently in the lives of many of the Church’s greatest saints. Thus, for example,

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although he meditated long and frequently on what he saw as the tragedy of Luther and the Reformation (see Les Prédestinés 104–23), he had a circumspect view of the influential Carmelite tradition of the Counter-Reformation. It was not that he lacked respect for such famous ecstatics as John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila; on the contrary, he seemed somewhat in awe of them. When Lefèvre had asked him in 1926 whether Father Donissan was inspired by some reallife saint, Bernanos immediately and particularly sought to distance his character from any such mystical model (Oe II 1043). Bernanos had had no intention of insulting his readers’ intelligence by allowing Donissan to transcend into a rapturous realm like a “beam of light” or an “angel” (Oe II 1043). Donissan’s sense of personal weakness had frequently made prayer impossible; and, despite the aid of a Sulpician manual, “Prayer Taught in Twenty Lessons,” the way of the contemplative soul was barred to him (SSS 141). These spiritual impasses anticipated those of the parish priest of Ambricourt, who was to appear in 1936 as Bernanos’s last saint-hero in Journal d’un curé de campagne. Not only is this priest unable to pray for weeks at a time, but he even wonders if he will ever be able to pray again (Oe I 1140). At one point in the novel the parish priest of Torcy, the hero’s down-to-earth mentor and Bernanos’s faithful mouthpiece (see Aaraas 39– 48), speaks of mysticism warily and with grudging admiration, the contemplative life being clearly at variance with his own belief in a more pragmatic demonstration of faith. The secular clergy, he emphasizes, do the housework, wash the dishes, peel the potatoes and set the table; contemplatives supply the “music” and a few pretty “flowers.” All well and good, he adds, except that contemplatives too often try to “palm off” paper flowers as real ones (Oe I 1039–40). He doesn’t deny the value of genuine flowers, that is, fruits of the mystical life, but he advises caution in determining their authenticity. Similarly, music, Torcy’s metaphor for mystical ecstasy, although an extraordinary grace sometimes granted to “real” saints, is seen as unnecessary to the Christian life, a spiritual luxury that

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can be dangerous when toyed with by dilettantes who substitute dramatic flair for genuine spirituality, and can even be deceptively comforting for those who authentically experience it (Oe I 1040–1). Although this discourse does not altogether repudiate ecstatic phenomena, neither is it simply a critique of the ersatz mysticism of the romantic. There is an undercurrent of uneasiness in these reflections, a lack of personal empathy with the beatific experiences of God’s “spoiled children” (Oe I 1041). Given Torcy’s role in the novel, these are undoubtedly Bernanos’s own sentiments. Yet, sandwiched between Father Donissan and the parish priest of Ambricourt is Chantal de Clergerie, whose ecstasies, the last of which Bernanos describes in great detail, last for hours. The fact that she enjoys this intense mystical union with God is strange, given that her spirituality is meant to mimic that of St Thérèse of Lisieux.4 Those acquainted with L’Histoire d’une âme (The Story of a Soul), the famous autobiography of this unknown nun in an obscure provincial Carmel who died at the age of twenty-four, will know that no saint could be further from the model of the traditional mystic. St Thérèse experienced neither ecstatic transports nor the contemplative “sleep” described, for example, in Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.5 St Thérèse chose the “Little Way,” and her spirituality was characterized by “the most absolute aridity” (Histoire d’une âme 187). In a very revealing letter

4 A number of studies over the years have dealt with the Theresian influence on Bernanos’s creative imagination (see von Balthazar, Gaucher, Raymond-Marie, and Tobin). An invaluable comprehensive look at the question has recently been published (see Dorschell). 5 St Thérèse did have one brief ecstatic experience, which she herself, a few months before she died, described as uncharacteristic. It is fair to say that, if she can be described as mystical, it is because sanctity itself is essentially a mystical reality, and not because she possessed the extraordinary gifts of a Teresa of Avila.

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written in 1934, Bernanos, quoting St Thérèse, made it quite clear which of these two quite different Carmelite women he preferred: “Je suis prête à tout accepter,” disait Sœur Thérèse (pas celle des “châteaux de l’âme,” l’autre, la plus vraie), à tout accepter, même la mort sans sacrements. Qu’est-ce que cela fait? Tout est grâce.” (Cor I 520) [“I am ready to accept everything,” said Sister Thérèse (not the Interior Castle one, the truer one), “to accept everything, even death without the sacraments. What difference does it make? All is grace.”] Why was St Thérèse the “truer one”? Surely, because she was not one of those saints who, like Teresa of Avila, “conceal themselves up above” in ecstatic unions not available to the masses and in spectacular virtues that no one could emulate, but rather one who found sanctity in the practice of the ordinary virtues. It is interesting that studies of St Thérèse’s influence on Bernanos make no mention of Chantal de Clergerie’s ecstasies. Even Yves Bridel, in his thorough study of Chantal, does not question the significance of her unusual spirituality, confining himself to a discussion of the Bernanosian theology and Theresian spirituality it articulates. This omission is perhaps not surprising, given that Chantal’s ecstasies are both un-Theresian and un-Bernanosian. Chantal’s precocious piety is not nurtured by her circumstances at home. She runs the large country house of her widowed father, a neurotic scholar consumed by a pathetic need to be taken seriously by academe. The ménage is otherwise made up of a remarkable collection of lunatic residents and scheming guests, including Chantal’s mad grandmother, a louche, drug-addicted Russian chauffeur, and M. de Clergerie’s parasitic psychiatrist, Dr La Pérouse. Prominent among them all is Father Cénabre, the intellectual priest and secret apostate whose story Bernanos had already begun in L’Imposture, a novel published in 1928, a year before La Joie, its sequel. For

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all of these characters, Chantal is an exasperating and impenetrable mystery of joy and serenity, untouched by the “sadness” that distinguishes them. She is nonetheless oppressed by her domestic responsibilities and the murky atmosphere of intrigue and jealousy that pervades her father’s house. Quite unlike Donissan, who sought out the privacy of his bedroom for torment and mortification, Chantal’s bedroom is a sanctuary where she retires to pray, an experience that is both immediate and overwhelming. Her gaze fixed upon the crucifix on the wall, she slips, then falls, into a contemplative “sleep” (Oe I 568). On a later occasion, when the chauffeur inadvertently discovers her in ecstatic prayer, touching her on the shoulder as she lies cruciform upon the bed, the ecstatic experience is again presented in the traditional terms of sleep, although, after several hours of this sublime suspension, she awakes deeply disconcerted (Oe I 571). Both her intense focus upon the crucifix during prayer and her simulation of Christ’s position on the Cross suggest a key theme that Bernanos fully explores only in the description of Chantal’s final ecstasy at the novel’s end. Chantal does not make a display of her unusual piety. Indeed, she goes to some lengths to conceal what she secretly fears to be evidence of a hereditary emotional instability. Nevertheless, her obvious sanctity makes her an object of curiosity for various members of the household. This is particularly true of two characters: Fiodor, the Russian chauffeur, and the sinister Father Cénabre. Fiodor is an émigré with a mysterious past whose presence in the household may be explained by M. de Clergerie’s taste for macabre personages. This unlikely chauffeur is captivated by Chantal’s aura of purity and piqued by her disdain for him. However, his essentially erotic imagination truly soars when, by chance, he discovers Chantal in a state of mystical ecstasy. He later tells her that if the words “saint” and “ecstasy” had any meaning, she was indeed that saint in ecstasy from whom miracles fall like “flowers” (Oe I 574). Repelled

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by his compliments, Chantal expresses her own suspicion that her ecstasies may be nothing more than symptoms of a nervous condition inherited from her mother. In reality Fiodor is interested neither in holiness nor in prayer, but only in her histrionic gestures of piety. He has developed a romantic attachment to the idea of the unblemished virgin transfigured in rapture, and one suspects that his motives are fundamentally sexual. Chantal recognizes in him a taste for spiritual exoticism, which he likes to imagine springs from the unchartered regions of his Russian soul, but which is in fact entirely devoid of love and as insubstantial as his morphine-induced fantasies. Significantly, though, this confrontation between Fiodor and Chantal gives us a glimpse of Bernanos’s attitude toward mystical ecstasy. Fiodor’s expressed desire to rediscover his lost soul (Oe I 546) through Chantal’s intercession is bogus, and he confuses mysticism with sentimental pietism. In clearly opposing his heroine’s unexalted view of her own mystical experiences to Fiodor’s romantic perception of them and later to Cénabre’s distorted understanding of them, Bernanos clarifies something of the role that her brand of mysticism is meant to play in this novel. Cénabre, a friend of her father and a house guest in the momentous last weekend of Chantal’s life, also accidentally discovers her in a state of ecstatic prayer. The spiritually precocious girl compels his attention because he is a famous hagiographer with a special interest in the history of mysticism. The author of The Florentine Mystics, Cénabre has just returned from Germany where he lectured on “Mysticism in the Lutheran Church” (Oe I 377); as well, he had written biographies of Jean Tauler, the fourteenth-century Alsacian mystic, and of his contemporary, the French mystic Gerou. As already mentioned, Cénabre’s story began in the novel L’Imposture, toward the end of which Chantal also appears. Bernanos there describes Cénabre as a young seminarian who applied himself, “non pas en apparence, mais réellement” [not just for appearances, but really] (Oe I 365), to the most

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exalted spiritual practices without deriving the least benefit from them. As we shall later discuss in greater detail, this sterility occurs because his religious application, though rigorous, is superficial, an attempt to reach exceptional states of the soul with his intellect alone (Oe I 366). L’Imposture leaves us with the cerebral Cénabre at the height of his renown, seeking more urgently than ever to wrest from the subjects of his scholarship the “secret” of holiness. In La Joie the object of twenty years of reflection stands incarnate, as it were, before him (Oe I 684). Cénabre studies Chantal as if she were a book (Oe I 703), assuring her that he knows “line for line” (Oe I 702) the essence of the spiritual drama she is living. In his anguished curiosity he begs her to open her conscience to him, but she scornfully dismisses his interest as she had done Fiodor’s. Yet Cénabre, who has spent his life ferreting out secrets, is right about at least one thing: Chantal does have a secret, although it has essentially nothing to do with her ecstasies, and its simplicity puts it utterly beyond his grasp. Despite these ecstasies and “miracles” Chantal is no more enclosed than Donissan in an esoteric realm, where she might recede from the seemingly prosaic rhythm of life around her. There is nothing otherworldly or disincarnate about her religious faith; on the contrary, it manifests itself in a firm commitment to the thankless daily tasks involved in running a large household of lunatics. She loves them despite themselves and in tangible ways. When her ambitious father informs her that her presence in his house will no longer be required because he intends to marry a woman of position who will further his career, Chantal responds sadly: “Oh! sans doute, papa, je ne vous serai pas moins chère demain ou après-demain: il n’y a pour vous rien de changé. Mais quand même! nous ne sommes pas de purs esprits! On a besoin d’occuper sa tête, ses bras, ses jambes, et aussi quelquefois son cœur. Parce que je n’en suis pas encore, hélas! à savoir aimer comme les anges.

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J’ai besoin de me donner de la peine, et quand j’ai bien travaillé tout le jour (il y a beaucoup de travail ici, vous savez, les domestiques sont si étourdis, si négligents!) je mesure ma tendresse à la fatigue de mes reins, de mes genoux, et même à ce rhumatisme de l’épaule gauche, qui ne veut pas guérir.” (Oe I 588) [“Oh, undoubtedly, Papa, I won’t be any less dear to you tomorrow or the day after: nothing has changed for you. But still! We’re not pure spirits! We need to use our head, our arms, our legs, and also our heart. I don’t yet know how to love like the angels. I need to put myself out, and when I’ve worked all day long (there’s a lot of work here, you know, the servants are so heedless and negligent!) I measure my tenderness by the fatigue in my back, in my knees, and even by this rheumatism in my left shoulder that just doesn’t want to heal.”] By emphasizing that Chantal’s charity exacts a physical toll, Bernanos rules out any gnostic detachment for his young saint, thereby underscoring a Christian spirituality that is at once mystical and fully incarnate. Bernanos is, however, at pains to show that Chantal’s spirituality has not always been so mature and is in fact the product of a painful metamorphosis. The catalyst for the transformation, “the decisive step” (Oe I 553), which divided her spiritual pilgrimage into a dramatic “before” and “after,” was the death of her spiritual director, the saintly Father Chevance. It was he who had gently guided her through the hazardous terrain of the spiritual life, protecting her from its pitfalls and yet carefully nurturing a mystical penchant fraught with potential dangers. In a series of flashback passages in La Joie which recall her relationship with Chevance, we discover a Chantal no less pious or prayerful, whose spiritual life was marked by a kind of insouciant naïveté. She seemed to inhabit an enclosed garden of “happy indifference” (Oe I 553) where contemplative prayer came easily, where life was “full and perfect”

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(Oe I 552), and where the powerful presence of God was always consoling. As the flashback continues, we see that Father Chevance has in fact deliberately moderated the speed of Chantal’s “powerful ascension” (Oe I 559) and, eschewing the Jesuitical finesse of more sophisticated spiritual directors, he turns to his peasant heritage and uses the rustic images of the land and the seasons to explain his decision. It is her springtime and, though frost sometimes comes in May, God generously and carefully allots the proper measure of sun and rain so that she might produce beautiful “flowers” (Oe I 556); Chantal needs only enjoy the benefits of this nurturing. But this stage is a preliminary one, and not an end in itself. Chevance warns Chantal that there can be no spiritual fruit without sorrow, and that, however gentle the hand that picks it, she will feel her harvest being wrenched from her (Oe I 556). Later, as the priest lay dying, he worried about Chantal, because he had deliberately kept her in a state of “sweet ignorance”(Oe I 560), a state which, he now realized, was about to change suddenly. Chantal did indeed feel this “wrenching” at the death of her beloved director, a death that thrust her from her “former paradise” (Oe I 560) into an “unknown country” (Oe I 56). What exactly was the nature of this transformation and in what foreign land did Chantal now find herself? Bernanos’s answer, on the surface at least, is very simple: in the wake of Chevance’s death and in a flash of revelation she encountered the “world”: Comme un homme endormi à l’aube, qui s’éveille dans la brutale lumière de midi avec encore dans ses yeux la sérénité de l’aurore, le monde, le monde, qui n’était jusqu’à ce moment pour elle qu’un mot mystérieux, se révélait, non à son expérience, mais à sa charité – par l’intuition, l’épanouissement, le rayonnement de la pitié. (Oe I 561) [Like a man who has fallen asleep at dawn and awakes in the brutal light of midday with the serenity of

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daybreak still in his eyes, the world, the world, which up to that moment was for her nothing more than a mysterious word, was revealed, not to her experience, but to her charity – by intuition, the blossoming, the radiance of pity.] As we have already noted, the term “world” has many connotations in Bernanos’s writing. Its use here may seem perplexing at first, since Chantal has never led a cloistered existence and has firmly resisted the temptation of a monastic life, believing it would be merely an escape rather than a vocation. Chantal is definitely not unworldly. Even Chevance suspected at times that his penitent was not indifferent to such worldly temptations as signed designer dresses and expensive hats (Oe I 554). She had even once challenged the old priest’s lack of urbanity: “Mais enfin, s’écriait-elle, que savez-vous du monde, vous, un vieil ermite?” [“But really, what do you know about the world, you, an old hermit?”] (Oe I 555). She had grown up, after all, in bourgeois luxury in the academicsalon atmosphere of her father’s house, and so her experience of the world, for an adolescent girl, was considerable. When Bernanos writes, therefore, of the “revelation” of the world to his heroine, he is alluding to something that runs far deeper than a mere acquaintance with the “ways” of the world. Hers is a spiritual revelation that, in Bernanos’s Christian vision, is reserved uniquely for the saints and which, bypassing experience, speaks directly to the heart. In this case, the “world” represents nothing less than the mystery of evil itself, the degradation of the human soul, with all its attendant misery. Through a miracle of grace merited by Chevance’s difficult last agony (Oe I 562), Chantal in effect beholds the essence of human suffering, the “tragic secret” of evil, the fundamental hypocrisy that transforms life into a living death, a “hideous drama” (Oe I 562). In Bernanos’s fictional world, this mystery of evil is never revealed to those caught in its grip – they are aware only of evil’s “rumination obscure et stérile” [obscure and sterile rumination] (Oe I 561). Only the heroic

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love of the saint can penetrate “d’un coup, d’un élan, comme par un jeu divin, si loin dans la douleur des hommes” [at a stroke, in a burst, like a divine gamble, so far into man’s pain] (Oe I 564). Like Pascal, Bernanos sees human misery as being at the root of the truth about the human experience (Oe I 561). In the light of this miraculous revelation, Chantal sees those around her as if for the first time: the lies, the vain ambition, the sterility and mediocrity, and most of all the sadness that envelops them. Even her father’s familiar features seem to melt away, indistinguishable from the other ghostly and loveless images of the household (Oe I 563). She nevertheless embraces their suffering and continues to measure the generosity of her service to them by the weariness of her body. What is particularly significant is that Chantal’s new experience of the world and her mysticism do not exist separate from each other like – to borrow an image from Bernanos – two liquids of different densities. There is no sense in which one is earthbound, and therefore tainted or insignificant, and the other is uniquely spiritual and therefore more pure and essential. On the contrary, Chantal’s involvement in the lives around her gives her unusual spirituality new life. Her prayer fuses the world with the spirit, her mundane service with the highest spirituality. Even when she feels too weary to surrender to the pity she feels for others, compassion and prayer well up irrepressibly together; or, more precisely, her compassion, vainly repressed, expresses itself in prayer. The result is a mystical union with God that engages the totality of her being (Oe I 564). In the wake of Chevance’s death, Chantal’s once selfcontained and cloistral spirituality blossoms to encompass the experience of God in the human drama. She now finds herself at that pivotal point where the human and the divine meet, and where their distinction is obliterated. In short, Bernanos places her at the centre of the mystery of the Incarnation: Et déjà la plaie mystérieuse était ouverte d’où ruisselait une charité plus humaine, plus charnelle, qui découvre

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Dieu dans l’homme, et les confond l’un et l’autre, par la même compassion surnaturelle. (Oe I 561–2) [And already the mysterious wound was opened from which flowed a more human, more incarnate charity, which discovered God in man and blended one with the other in the same supernatural compassion.] Bernanos waited until the novel’s end to reveal the full extent of Chantal’s participation in this drama. During a climactic ecstasy on the very eve of her death at the hands of Fiodor, she is about to accomplish “l’œuvre unique pour laquelle elle était née: le salut des faibles êtres dont elle se sentait comptable à Dieu” [the single work for which she was born: the salvation of the weak creatures for whom she felt herself accountable to God] (Oe I 680). In describing this final mystical experience, Bernanos achieved the most lyrical and effortless passages of La Joie, a sure indication that he was bringing to its fullness a theme very dear to him. The image of sleep, which up to now has characterized the highest state of contemplation, gives way to more prophetically sombre images: Chantal’s entry into prayer is now like dying (Oe I 681). In fact, the violence conveyed as she now “throws” herself into prayer, her lips tightly drawn back, depicts an experience that may more aptly be described as rapture. Images of death and violence are further reinfored by an intricate water metaphor. Whereas earlier she had entered the ecstatic state by “an imperceptible slope” (Oe I 681), she now flows “vertically” (Oe I 681) into it as if swept away on a waterfall over a steep precipice. The impression of suffocation is very strong, while a suggestion of drowning and a succession of adjectives expressing alarm create an experience of furious intensity: Littéralement, elle crut entendre se refermer sur elle une eau profonde, et aussitôt, en effet, son corps défaillit sous un poids immense, accru sans cesse et dont l’irrésistible poussée chassait la vie hors de ses veines. Ce fut comme un arrachement de l’être, si brutal, si douloureux,

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que l’âme violentée n’y put répondre que par un horrible silence. (Oe I 681) [Literally, she thought she heard deep water closing over her and indeed, just then, her body gave way under an immense weight which constantly increased, driving the life from her veins with its irresistible thrust. It was a tearing away of her very being, so brutal, so painful that her ravaged soul could only respond in horrible silence.] At the same time, despite this element of anguish in her prayer, like Christ’s in Gethsemane, “la Lumière jaillit de toutes parts, recouvrit tout” [light flashed out from all round, bathing everything] (Oe I 681). A further instance of this paradoxical interplay of shadow and light occurs when, for a moment, the penumbra of the deep waters is again dissipated as Chantal focuses upon the utter powerlessness at the centre of her joy, “le noyau de l’astre en flammes” [the core of the flaming star] (Oe I 681). Her weakness is almost simultaneously depicted as a single, thin beam of light concentrated inward in search of a gap through which she might slip into total mystical union with God. Or again, through her weakness Chantal “plunges” (Oe I 681) into the great “abyss” (Oe I 681) of God’s gentleness, and the certainty of her helplessness brings a joy that temporarily calms the rushing current. At this point the metaphor becomes more precisely maritime, as if Chantal had been propelled toward the immensity of the sea all along. The shadow comes to the fore: Puis la vague flamboyante commença de baisser doucement, insidieusement, jetant ça et là son écume. La douleur venait de reparaître, ainsi que la dent noire d’un récif entre deux colonnes d’embrun, mais dépouillée de tout autre sentiment, réduite à l’essentiel, lisse et nue, en effet, comme une roche usée par le flot. A ce signe, Mlle de Clergerie reconnut que la dernière étape était franchie, son humble sacrifice reçu, et que les angoisses des dernières heures, les doutes, et jusqu’à ses remords,

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venaient de s’abîmer dans la prodigieuse compassion de Dieu. (Oe I 681–2) [Then the flaming surge began to drop, insidiously, spewing its foam here and there. The pain re-emerged, like the black tooth of a reef between two columns of sea mist, but stripped of all other feeling, reduced to the essential, smooth and naked, like a rock worn by the tide. At this sign Mlle de Clergerie realized that the last step had been taken, her humble sacrifice accepted, and that the anguish of the last hours, the doubts, and even the remorse, had just sunk into the prodigious compassion of God.] The reef is a symbol of her self-offering, but more specifically it represents the salvific death that will be accomplished before morning. It is therefore only on the threshold of her death that Bernanos finally allows Chantal to reach what he considers to be the summit of the mystical experience: the union of prayer and suffering. We have seen Chantal progress from the insouciance of her flowering period through the deep “sleep” of prayer, where compassion wells up, to a mysticism that now embraces the “hideous drama” of the world. Bernanos only views this last stage as completely authentic, because it represents a fully incarnate spirituality that is immersed in both God and man. Chantal may now have completed her development as a Bernanosian mystic, but the revelations of this last ecstasy have not ended; there remains one essential one. With supernatural insight Chantal realizes that her suffering is no longer her own, but represents the outpouring from her flesh “du sang précieux d’un autre cœur” [of the precious blood of another heart] (Oe I 682). Her suffering has become “la souffrance même de Dieu” [the very suffering of God himself] (Oe I 685). Chantal has reached the heart of Bernanos’s Christian vision. Although he will not make specific reference to the eius divinitatis esse consortes text in the non-fiction until the

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mid-1930s, it is clear that its theological impact was already making itself felt during the writing of La Joie in 1927–28. The novel’s central theme is not really mysticism at all, but what the narrator calls “la bonne nouvelle de la Douleur divinisée” [the good news of divinized Pain] (Oe I 605]. Chantal discovers that good news during her last ecstasy: “L’Agonie divine venait de fondre sur son cœur mortel et l’emportait dans ses serres.” [The divine Agony had just swept down upon her mortal heart and carried it off in its talons] (Oe I 683). On the eve of her death, she experiences a fusion of the “mortal” and the “divine.” It is she who now weeps in Gethsemane “sous les noirs oliviers” [under the dark olive trees] (Oe I 683); it is she who “ira demain jusqu’à la Croix” [tomorrow will go to the Cross] (Oe I 683). Not just her pain, but she herself has been divinized. As the ecstasy ends, she experiences a vision of herself on Calvary, at the foot of the Cross, gazing upon “la grande ombre silencieuse” [the great silent shadow] (Oe I 683) of Christ’s, her face pressed against the cool earth that has soaked up his tears. While Chantal’s suffering and death may have redemptive value for the de Clergerie household in general, her “crucifixion” – her murder by Fiodor – is offered particularly for the salvation of Father Cénabre. At the end of La Joie, when Cénabre and the housekeeper discover Chantal’s body in her bedroom, the apostate priest can only say “d’une voix surhumaine” [in a superhuman voice] (Oe I 724]) “Pater noster,” before collapsing into insanity and later dying without regaining his reason. Clearly, however, it is not Chantal’s ecstasies but only her sanctity that is necessary to Cénabre’s salvation. Why, therefore, did Bernanos create an ecstatic as heroine of his novel? Certainly, a structural unity and a measure of poetic justice are established in having the priest who long sought in vain the secret of sanctity, particularly mystical sanctity, being redeemed by a genuine mystic. Yet, if Bernanos was interested only in the structural integrity of the novel, it seems unlikely that he would have bothered to explore his heroine’s mysticism so thoroughly, or have done so at such length in a

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key climactic scene at the novel’s end. The paradox is that it was not Bernanos’s interest in ecstatic mysticism as such, but rather his desire to denounce the sterile conceptualizations of an intellectual priest that led him to produce such lyrical descriptions of the most striking form of contemplative prayer. An aversion to a certain kind of intellectualism, which seeks power through knowledge and is propelled by an insatiable and loveless curiosity, runs through Bernanos’s work, but the intellectual priest is the worst villain of this kind because he transforms faith itself into a disincarnate abstraction. Chantal’s “miraculous” mysticism can only be understood in this context. Cénabre is himself a paradox, an unbelieving and pragmatic intellectual with a taste for the inexplicable and the mysterious, which he pursues with the dispassionate objectivity of the scientist in his laboratory. His curiosity is so intense as to be easily mistaken for love, and the more extraordinary the manifestations of sanctity, the more captivated he becomes. Where better to discover the secret of holiness than, as he saw it, among a spiritual elite; that is, in the closed circle of the ecstatic into which only the initiated may enter. The less exalted spiritual life of “ordinary” Christians must have seemed pale in comparison. After all, Cénabre is not interested in Chantal’s sanctity as it expresses itself in humble works of charity, but only in her extraordinary prayer. Bernanos, however, made no distinction at all between the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” in Chantal’s life, between her services to her father’s household and her remarkable spirituality. In fact, it was only during her last ecstasy, at the moment when the suffering of her daily service finally melded with contemplation, that her mysticism reached its apogee. As for secrets, it is true, as we have noted earlier, that Chantal, mystic and saint, did have a secret, the one which her spiritual director, Chevance, carried to his deathbed and bequeathed to her as his only gift: “Le suprême secret du vieux prêtre était un secret d’amour” [The old priest’s supreme secret was a secret of love] (Oe I 512). In La Joie

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Bernanos condemns Cénabre’s mistaken notion that Christian “phenomena,” including mysticism, can exist apart from Christ. Chantal’s role is to make it known that mysticism, as well as all other Christian practices and “ideals,” is valid only when one participates in the Incarnation. In the final analysis, however, there is something about Bernanos’s second saint that is conspicuous by its absence. What of her predecessor’s revulsion toward the physical and, particularly, his repugnance to his own body? That very serious problem is not resolved in Chantal; it is not even addressed. Is this perhaps the slightly false note that one detects in her character? Is this the reason that Bernanos, who at any rate does not seem to be in his element when describing ecstasies and raptures, was not happy with Chantal, later regretting that, as a character, she did not turn out as he wished (J-L 275). The positive role that the body plays in La Joie does indicate a development in Bernanos’s vision, but only in Bernanos’s next saint, the parish priest of Ambricourt, are Donissan’s contradictions finally resolved.

the beloved saint When Journal d’un curé de campagne was published in March 1936 its success outshone any previous novels of Bernanos, winning the Grand Prize of the French Academy. For Bernanos, it was a labour of love that set it apart from anything else he had written, and the strength of his emotion was evident whenever he spoke or wrote about it: Il m’est très pénible de parler de ce livre parce que je l’aime. En l’écrivant, j’ai rêvé plus d’une fois de le garder pour moi seul. Oh! sans doute, je ne me serais pas donné la fantaisie de jeter le manuscrit au feu, ce genre de néronisme est beaucoup trop élégant pour moi. Mais je l’aurais seulement glissé au fond d’un tiroir et il n’en serait sorti qu’après ma mort. Il eût réjoui mes amis.

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Je veux dire que nous nous serions réjouis ensemble – eux dans ce monde-ci, moi dans l’autre, et mon petit prêtre entre nous tous, à la limite du visible et de l’invisible-ô cher confident de ma joie! Hélas! On n’est plus maître de ses livres que de sa vie! Oui, j’aime ce livre. J’aime ce livre comme s’il n’était pas de moi. Je n’ai pas aimé les autres. S’il m’est présenté au jour du jugement, je n’oserai pas lui dire en face “je ne te connais pas,” car je sais bien qu’il a une part de mon secret. (J-L 275) [It is very difficult for me to talk about this book because I love it. While writing it, I dreamed more than once of keeping it just for myself. Oh! I did not fantasize about throwing the manuscript in the fire – such a Byronic gesture is much too elegant for me. But I would have pushed it to the back of a drawer where it would have been found after my death. My friends would have rejoiced. Or rather, we would have rejoiced together – they in this world, I in the other, and my little priest between us, at the very limit of the visible and the invisible – O beloved confidant of my joy! Alas! One is no more master of one’s books than of one’s life! Yes, I love this book. I love this book as if it had not come from me. I did not love the others. If I am confronted with it on Judgment Day, I will not dare say directly “I do not know you,” for I know very well that it shares a part of my secret.] Because of the special significance of the Journal, Bernanos was annoyed by Plon’s publicity; it seemed to leave the impression that he kept recycling the same character in book after book. He wrote an indignant letter to his editor a month after the novel appeared: C’est faux, d’ailleurs. Le Journal n’a rien à voir avec le Soleil. En quoi diable mon curé anonyme rappelle-t-il

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celui de Lumbres? Et quel bénéfice publicitaire espère-t-on en faisant croire au public que je lui donne un ersatz de mon premier livre? (Cor II 130) [Besides, it’s not true. The Journal has nothing to do with Soleil. How the devil does my anonymous parish priest call to mind the one from Lumbres? And what public relations benefit do they hope to achieve by trying to convince the public that I’m giving them an ersatz version of my first book?] In his effort to make the distinction between these two heroes Bernanos overstates his case. It cannot be said that Donissan had nothing to do with the parish priest of Ambricourt – they exist, after all, on the same theological plane. What he surely meant was that his most recent creation was such a profoundly transformed version of his first that the two could not be simplistically linked. In any case, he repeated his complaint – and added another – in a letter to his friend Robert Vallery-Radot: Je le trouve absurdement rédigé au point de vue de la publicité. A le lire, on croirait que le Journal ne se distingue pas de mes autres livres. De plus, à quoi bon parler “d’étau infernal” – nobles tentatives – cœur simple et naïf – ? … “De quelque côté qu’il se tourne, il ne rencontre que lâcheté, cupidité” – Ce n’est pas vrai! Il y a le curé de Torcy, le docteur Delbende, la comtesse, Chantal, la chère petite poule du défroqué, – jamais, dans aucun de mes livres je n’ai lâché tant d’enfants et de héros. (Cor II 125–6) [The publicity is totally absurd. Reading it, one would think that Journal is no different from my other books. Besides what’s the point of talking about “an infernal stranglehold” – noble efforts – simple and naive heart – ? … “Whichever way he turns he encounters nothing but cowardice, greed.” It’s not true! There are the parish priest of Torcy, Dr Delbende, the Countess, Chantal, and the poor little sweetheart of the defrocked priest,

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– never, in any of my books have I let loose so many children and heroes.] It is a mystery that so many readers, then and now, including Bernanos’s own publishers, it seems, saw a dark novel of defeat in a work composed to radiate light and victory. The novel is richly peopled with luminous secondary characters. None is more prominent, nor more vocal than the priest of Torcy. In some ways Torcy sets the novel’s tone, or at least his three long monologues spaced throughout the diary afford it a core motif. His instinctive loathing of the Renaissance and his devotion to the Middle Ages – an aversion and an attachment that were Bernanos’s own – rest upon a distrust of the abstract, and a preference, rooted in his peasant Flemish ancestry, for full-blooded tangibility. His nostalgia for Christendom, what it was and what it could have been, speaks of a yearning for a Christianity woven into the everyday fabric of the human experience: L’enfance et l’extrême vieillesse devraient être les deux grandes épreuves de l’homme. Mais c’est du sentiment de sa propre impuissance que l’enfant tire humblement le principe même de sa joie. Il s’en rapporte à sa mère, comprends-tu? Présent, passé, avenir, toute sa vie, la vie entière tient dans un regard, et ce regard est un sourire. Hé bien, mon garçon, si l’on nous avait laissés faire, nous autres, l’Eglise eût donné aux hommes cette espèce de sécurité souveraine. Retiens que chacun n’en aurait pas moins eu sa part d’embêtements. La faim, la soif, la pauvreté, la jalousie, nous ne serons jamais assez forts pour mettre le diable dans notre poche, tu penses! Mais l’homme se serait su le fils de Dieu, voilà le miracle! Il aurait vécu, il serait mort avec cette idée dans la caboche – et non pas une idée apprise seulement dans les livres – non. Parce qu’elle eût inspiré, grâce à nous, les mœurs, les coutumes, les distractions, les plaisirs et jusqu’aux plus humbles nécessités. (Oe I 1045)

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[Childhood and extreme old age are surely man’s two greatest trials. But it is from the feeling of his own powerlessness that the child humbly draws the very principle of his own joy. He relies on his mother, do you understand? Present, past, future, all his life, his entire life is contained within a look, and that look is a smile. And so, my boy, if they had let us have our way, the Church would have given this sort of sovereign security to mankind. Be assured that everyone would still have their share of annoyances. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy, we’ll never be strong enough to put the devil in our pocket, you know! But man would have known that he was the son of God, that’s the miracle! He would have lived, he would have died with that idea in his thick skull – and not just an idea learned from books, – no. Because, thanks to us, it would have inspired his habits, his customs, his distractions, his pleasures, all the way down to the most humble necessities.] But, of course, Torcy’s dream of this kind of incarnational Christianity is inseparable from the greater reality of the Incarnation itself. He makes this clear in a later discourse: Le Moyen Age a compris tout. Mais va donc empêcher les imbéciles de refaire à leur manière le “drame de l’Incarnation,” comme ils disent! Alors qu’ils croient devoir, pour le prestige, habiller en guignols de modestes juges de paix, ou coudre des galons sur la manche des contrôleurs de chemin de fer, ça leur ferait trop honte d’avouer aux incroyants que le seul, l’unique drame, le drame des drames – car il n’y en a pas d’autre – s’est joué sans décors et sans passementeries. Pense donc! Le Verbe s’est fait chair, et les journalistes de ce temps-là n’en ont rien su. (Oe I 1192) [The Middle Ages understood everything. But just try to stop the idiots from refashioning the “drama of the

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Incarnation,” as they call it, to suit themselves! Whereas, for the sake of prestige, they think it necessary to dress up the most insignificant justice of the peace like a burlesque player, or sew braid on the sleeves of a train conductor, they’re too ashamed to admit to unbelievers that the only, the unique drama, the drama of dramas – because there is no other – took place with neither set nor trimmings. Think about it! The Word became flesh, and the journalists of that time knew nothing about it.] The Incarnation is history’s only story because all others either herald it or derive from it. But Torcy’s expostulations carry a double meaning: it is also the central drama of this novel in which every single character, to one degree or another, plays a part. This is most true of the inexperienced young priest whose struggles, from the ordinary parish projects of his ministry – most naively begun in good faith only to end in disaster – to the great battles with Evil, bring the reader inevitably back to the same theme. When, for example, he begins a catechism class to prepare the young children for First Holy Communion, his one desire is to communicate in the language of childhood rather than in the circumlocutions of doctrinal formulae which fail to stir the heart: A nous entendre on croirait trop souvent que nous prêchons le Dieu des spiritualistes, l’Être suprême, je ne sais quoi, rien qui ressemble, en tout cas, à ce Seigneur que nous avons appris à connaître comme un merveilleux ami vivant, qui souffre de nos peines, s’émeut de nos joies, partagera notre agonie, nous recevra dans ses bras, sur son cœur. (Oe I 1050–1) [To hear us, one would too often think that we preach the God of spiritualists, the Supreme Being, or whatever…, nothing in any case that resembles the Lord we have come to know as a marvellous living friend,

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who suffers with us in our sorrow, rejoices in our joy, will share our last agony, receive us in his arms, hold us against his heart.] When the “good” atheist, Torcy’s friend Dr Delbende, challenges Ambricourt about the Church’s hypocrisy in dealing with the poor – ostensibly fêted as Christ’s chosen ones even as they are relegated to the back pews in church – Ambricourt reproaches himself for having thought of nothing to say in answer: Depuis deux jours, je me reproche de n’avoir pas répondu à cette espèce de réquisitoire et pourtant, tout au fond de moi-même, je ne puis me donner tort. D’ailleurs, qu’aurais-je dit? Je ne suis pas l’ambassadeur du Dieu des philosophes, je suis le serviteur de Jésus-Christ. (Oe I 1096) [For two days now I have been reproaching myself for not having answered this sort of indictment; yet, deep within myself, I feel blameless. After all, what would I have said? I am not the ambassador of the God of the philosophers, I am the servant of Jesus Christ.] Elsewhere, when he tries to adapt his priestly life minute by minute, as it were, to this need or to that crisis by launching a program of regular parish visitations, he proves administratively inept. He is distressed by this state of affairs but finds solace in one thought: “Car le Maître que nous servons ne juge pas notre vie seulement – il la partage, il l’assume. Nous aurions beaucoup moins de peine à contenter un Dieu géomètre et moraliste” [For the Master whom we serve does not simply judge our life – he shares it, he assumes it unto himself. We would have much less difficulty satisfying a moralistic God whose specialty is geometry] (Oe I 1097). It is not the idea of God’s existence in itself, but the certainty of his humanity, that consoles Ambricourt. By emphasizing God’s capacity for compassion, for “suffering with,” the priest offers an epitome of his own sacerdotal

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function; his response to the suffering of others, as in the case of Dr Delbende whose despair leads to suicide, is often wordless, but it is never helpless: Peut-être d’autres que moi sauraient alors trouver le mot qu’il faut pour convaincre, apaiser? J’ignore ces mots-là. Une douleur vraie qui sort de l’homme appartient d’abord à Dieu, il me semble. J’essaie de la recevoir humblement dans mon cœur, telle quelle, je m’efforce de l’y faire mienne, de l’aimer. Et je comprends tout le sens caché de l’expression devenue banale “communier avec,” car il est vrai que cette douleur, je la communie. (Oe I 1096) [Maybe others would be able to find the words to convince, to soothe. I don’t know those words. It seems to me that man’s true pain belongs first to God. I try to receive it humbly into my heart, just as it is; I strive to make it my own, to love it. And I understand completely the meaning of the expression that has become banal, “to commune with,” for I commune with that pain.] It is no accident that Bernanos describes Christ’s compassion and his hero’s compassion in the same terms, for this priest is the most Christological of all his saints.6 This common identity is apparent from the novel’s opening when the priest, travelling on foot back to his parish, suddenly sees the village breaking through the mist and the rain: Il tombait une de ces pluies fines qu’on avale à pleins poumons, qui vous descendent jusqu’au ventre. De la côte de Saint-Vaast, le village m’est apparu brusquement, si tassé, si misérable sous le ciel hideux de novembre. L’eau fumait sur lui de toutes parts, et il avait l’air de s’être couché là, dans l’herbe ruisselante, comme une

6 See Ernest Beaumont, “Le Sens christique de l’œuvre de Bernanos.”

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pauvre bête épuisée. Que c’est petit, un village! Et ce village était ma paroisse. C’était ma paroisse, mais je ne pouvais rien pour elle, je la regardais tristement s’enfoncer dans la nuit, disparaître. Quelques moments encore, et je ne la verrais plus. Jamais je n’avais senti si cruellement sa solitude et la mienne. (Oe I 1031) [One of those fine rains was falling that you inhale right down to your toes. From the Saint-Vaast hillside the village appeared suddenly before me, so shrunken, so miserable under the ugly November sky. The water rose up everywhere like steam, and it looked as if it was lying there in the dripping grass, like some poor exhausted beast. How small a village is! And this village was my parish. It was my parish, but I could do nothing for it; I watched it sink into the night, disappear. A few moments longer and I would see it no more. Never have I felt its solitude and mine so cruelly.] The scene strongly evokes the Gospel narrative of Christ weeping over Jerusalem, a reference that might have seemed gratuitous had Bernanos, some thirty pages later, not made the allusion explicit: Presque tous les jours, je m’arrange pour rentrer au presbytère par la route de Gesvres. Au haut de la côte, qu’il pleuve ou vente, je m’assois sur un tronc de peuplier oublié là on ne sait pourquoi depuis des hivers et qui commence à pourrir … Dans ce pays de bois et de pâturages coupés de haies vives, plantés de pommiers, je ne trouverais pas un autre observatoire d’où le village m’apparaisse ainsi tout entier comme ramassé dans le creux de la main. Je le regarde, et je n’ai jamais l’impression qu’il me regarde aussi. Je ne crois pas d’ailleurs non plus qu’il m’ignore. On dirait qu’il me tourne le dos et m’observe de biais, les yeux mi-clos, à la manière des chats. …

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Quoi que je fasse, lui aurais-je donné jusqu’à la dernière goutte de mon sang (et c’est vrai que parfois j’imagine qu’il m’a cloué là-haut sur une croix, qu’il me regarde au moins mourir), je ne le posséderais pas. (Oe I 1060–1) [Nearly every day I arrange it so that I return to the presbytery by the Gesvres road. At the top of the hillside, whether it’s raining or the wind is blowing, I sit on the trunk of a poplar tree forgotten there for some reason many winters ago, which has begun to rot. … In this countryside of woods and pastures divided by quickset hedges and planted with apple trees, I could find no better vantage point from which to observe the entire village as if gathered up in the palm of my hand. I watch it, but I never have the impression that it is watching me. Neither do I think it is unaware of me. I would say that it turns its back to me, eyes half closed, and observes me with a sidelong glance, the way cats do. … Whatever I did, even if I shed my last drop of blood for it (and it’s true that sometimes I imagine it has nailed me up on a cross, that, at the very least, it is watching me die), I would never possess it.] In the end the priest dies of cancer, but in a sense the cupidity and recusancy of his flock have already crucified him. His daily dwelling place is that same penumbral garden where Chantal de Clergerie had awaited death, and the same talons that had swept her away hold him prisoner as well: “La vérité est que depuis toujours c’est au jardin des Oliviers que je me retrouve” [The truth is that I have always dwelled within the Garden of Olives] (Oe I 1187). As an early entry in his diary indicates, he had always accepted “l’effrayante présence du divin à chaque instant de [sa] pauvre vie” [“the fearsome presence of the divine at each moment of his poor life”] (Oe I 1034). This divinization, as in the case of both Donissan and Chantal, takes the form of the Suffering Servant. The Garden of Olives is not,

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after all, an enclave of cloistral misery, but the antechamber of the Redemptive act. Our anonymous diarist takes the road that leads to Jerusalem, to the château, where he will save the countess from the infernal solitude of everlasting death. The château stands aloof from the village, home to the local nobility – the count, his wife, his daughter, Chantal, and the governess, Miss Louise, who doubles as his mistress. It looms like a hive of secrets that buzzes with deceit, betrayal, and especially hatred. It is also, ironically, a bastion of middle-class Christianity – the count’s own uncle describes him as a “a shameful bourgeois” (Oe I 1175), a modern remnant of greatness past. Of course, the priest has encountered the same bourgeois religious sentiment in the village as well, even among the working class which, over many generations, has assimilated a conventional middle-class disposition. There is old Arsène, for example, whose emotionless, conformist respect for religion’s cultural role is piqued when the priest raises the subject of “conversion”: “Un curé est comme un notaire. Il est là en cas de besoin. Faudrait pas tracasser personne – Mais voyons, Arsène, le notaire travaille pour lui, moi je travaille pour le bon Dieu. Les gens se convertissent rarement tout seuls.” Il avait ramassé sa canne, et appuyait le menton sur la poignée. On aurait pu croire qu’il dormait. “Convertir …, a-t-il repris enfin, convertir … J’ai septante et trois ans, j’ai jamais vu ça de mes yeux. Chacun naît tel ou tel, meurt de même. Nous autres dans la famille, nous sommes d’église. Mon grand-père était sonneur à Lyon, défunte ma mère servante chez M. le curé de Wilman, et il n’y a pas d’exemple qu’un des nôtres soit mort sans sacrements.” (Oe I 1182) [“A priest is like a solicitor. He’s there if you need him. No need to bother anybody. – But come now, Arsène, the solicitor works for himself, I work for the good Lord. People rarely convert on their own.” He had picked up his cane and rested his chin on the handle. One would

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have thought he was sleeping. “Convert,” he finally continued, “convert … I’m seventy-three years old and I’ve never seen such a thing in my life. Everybody’s born a certain way, and that’s the way they die. We’re church people in my family. My grandfather was a bell-ringer at Lyon, my late mother was housekeeper to the parish priest of Wilman, and not one of us has ever died without the sacraments.] The priest experiences this kind of pragmatism, albeit slightly more sophisticated, among fellow clergy like the Dean of Blangermont, who defends the bourgeois social order – “La société moderne est son œuvre” [modern society is its creation] (Oe I 1083) – against the unsettling influence of holiness: “Dieu nous préserve des saints aussi” [God preserve us from saints as well] (Oe I 1082). However, the château’s perception of religion stands out, partly because of its coalescence with an advanced standard of hypocrisy. The count himself gives his young priest an avuncular lesson in the social value of religion: “La religion a du bon, certes, et du meilleur. Mais la principale mission de l’Eglise est de protéger la famille, la société, elle réprouve tous les excès, elle est une puissance d’ordre, de mesure.” (Oe I 1181) [“Religion has its good points, of course, even excellent ones. But the Church’s principal mission is to protect the family and society; it disapproves of every excess; it is a powerful force for order, for moderation.”] Ambricourt himself represents this excess, the form of Christian intemperance that all of Bernanos’s saints exhibit. He had long since rejected the conservatism that the count presses upon him: “Que serais-je … si je me résignais au rôle où souhaiteraient volontiers me tenir beaucoup de

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catholiques préoccupés surtout de conservation sociale, c’est-à-dire en somme, de leur propre conservation? Oh! je n’accuse pas ces messieurs d’hypocrisie, je les crois sincères. Que de gens se prétendent attachés à l’ordre, qui ne défendent que des habitudes, parfois même un simple vocabulaire dont les termes sont si bien polis, rognés par l’usage, qu’ils justifient tout sans jamais rien remettre en question. C’est une des plus incompréhensibles disgrâces de l’homme, qu’il doive confier ce qu’il a de plus précieux à quelque chose d’aussi instable, d’aussi plastique, hélas, que le mot.” (Oe I 1061) [“What would become of me … if I resigned myself to the role that so many Catholics, in their preoccupation above all with social conservation (which in the final analysis means their own preservation) would willingly impose on me? Oh! I don’t accuse these gentlemen of hypocrisy; I believe them to be sincere. So many people who claim to be attached to order are really defending nothing more than habits, sometimes even merely a vocabulary whose terms are so well polished, so worn by use, that they justify everything without ever questioning anything. It is one of humanity’s most incomprehensible digraces that it must confide its most precious possession to something as unstable, as plastic, alas, as words.”] The countess does seem quite sincere when she indignantly assures the priest that her home is a “Christian” one. When challenged about the hatred that simmers within her, however, she responds with the exculpatory legalism of the bourgeois Catholic: “Je vais à la messe, je fais mes pâques” [I go to Mass, I perform my Easter duty] (Oe I 1160). It would be impossible, Ambricourt records in his diary, to assign the word “faith” to what is little more than an “abstract sign” (Oe I 1126). The count and countess, and the novel’s other “dévots,” would be very much at home among the congregation of Bernanos’s agnostic preacher from Les Grands cimetières sous

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la lune. In fact, the novel and the essay have much in common. The Journal was begun on the island of Majorca in December 1934 and finished there in January of 1936. Les Grands cimetières was also begun on Majorca in January 1937, although earlier sketches of Bernanos’s reflections on the Spanish Civil War began to appear by May 1936 (Oe II 1422). These two works, however, share more than the accident of geography and a general creative time frame. It becomes clear that, during these middle years of the troubled 1930s, Bernanos reached a heightened, even consummate plane of creative mastery on two fronts. In his fiction the long-awaited “Magnificat” was finally proclaimed in the parish priest of Ambricourt, who shared his creator’s “secret.” In his great non-fiction work of the period, and especially in its “Agnostic’s Sermon,” a defining dialectic emerged. “Ma paroisse est dévorée par l’ennui” [My parish is devoured by boredom] (Oe I 1031), Ambricourt had written in his diary’s first entry. He relates this boredom neither to the ordinary dullness of the quotidian, nor even to Baudelaire’s Satanic slumber, but to a completely new, thoroughly modern phenomenon: Mais je me demande si les hommes ont jamais connu cette contagion de l’ennui, cette lèpre? Un désespoir avorté, une forme turpide du désespoir, qui est sans doute comme la fermentation d’un christianisme décomposé. (Oe I 1032) [But I wonder if men have ever known this contagion of boredom, this leprosy? An aborted despair, a base form of despair, which is doubtless the fermentation of a decomposed Christianity.] But what is decomposed Christianity – that abstract sign that passes for faith – if not disincarnate Christianity? Bernanos here demonstrates an integration of thought, a sharpening of theological images, perhaps sparked by the increasing gravity of the world political crisis. The priest tries to capture the essence of evil in a significant metaphor that will surely

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resonate with readers familiar with the essays of the mid- to late 1930s: Je me dis parfois que Satan, qui cherche à s’emparer de la pensée de Dieu, non seulement la hait sans la comprendre, mais la comprend à rebours. Il remonte à son insu le courant de la vie au lieu de le descendre et s’épuise en tentatives absurdes, effrayantes, pour refaire, en sens contraire, tout l’effort de la Création. (Oe I 1087) [I have sometimes thought that Satan, who seeks to take hold of God’s thoughts, not only hates them without understanding them, but reads them in an inverse sense. Without realizing, he swims against life’s current instead of flowing with it and exhausts himself in absurd, frightful efforts to turn all the striving of Creation in the opposite direction.] This passage, on its own, is cryptic, but we already know that this important trope of turning something backward, “à rebours” (“in an inverse sense”) will be refined in Bernanos’s mind until, three years after the publication of Journal and on the eve of the war in the spring of 1939, its full significance appears to have dawned upon him. It is worth recalling the words that I have already cited from Nous autres Français: “The misfortune and the shame of the modern world … is that it disincarnates everything, that it is re-commencing the mystery of the Incarnation backwards” (Oe II 637). The “effort” (“striving”) is the same impulse of which Saint Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans: “From the beginning until now the entire Creation, as we know, has been groaning in a great act of giving birth” (8: 22). Creation suffered through the long gestation that brought the Word into the world, and it continues to endure the pangs of birth as it strives toward Incarnation. Satan, however, urges Creation “in the opposite direction.” When the priest writes of the fundamental thrust of evil as being “à rebours,” he means dis-Incarnational.

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Bernanos’s hero, himself at once divine and human, stands against Satan. The “divine” element emerges strongly from the novel’s beginning, but what of his humanity? What of his own incarnate dimension, and what of the body, which gave his predecessor, Father Donissan, so much anguish? The priest’s body is, itself, a key player in this drama of redemption. Although his salvific suffering is intensely spiritual, even emotional, it is also undeniably physical at key junctures of his priestly ministry. When he saves the suicidal adolescent Chantal from despair, for example, the agony from his yet undiagnosed stomach cancer intensifies sharply (Oe 1137). The role of the body in this spiritual struggle, far from being discounted, is portrayed as paramount, even equal in status to that of the soul. Thus, in a supernatural act of empathy, when the priest takes Chantal’s profound sadness unto himself, he wills it to become part, not only of his spirit, but of his body as well: “Je souhaitais de la partager, de l’assumer tout entière, qu’elle me pénétrât, remplît mon cœur, mon âme, mes os, mon être” [I wanted to share in it, to assume it in its entirety, so that it might penetrate me, fill my heart, my soul, my bones, my being] (Oe I 1135). What is more, it is not in redemptive suffering alone that the priest’s body is eminent; it also invades realms that might normally be reserved for the purely spiritual. In fact, Bernanos ascribes considerable import to the incarnate dimension of the human person. When the priest fears he has lost his faith, he is consoled to discover instead that, like the love that inspires his daily living, it too has become incarnate, coursing through his veins: Je n’ai pas perdu la foi … Je ne la retrouve ni dans ma pauvre cervelle … ni dans ma sensibilité, ni même dans ma conscience. Il me semble parfois qu’elle s’est retirée, qu’elle subsiste là où certes je ne l’eusse pas cherchée, dans ma chair, dans ma misérable chair, dans mon sang et dans ma chair, ma chair périssable, mais baptisée. (Oe I 1126)

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[I have not lost my faith … I have found it again, though not in my poor brain … nor in my feelings, nor even in my conscience. It sometimes seems to me that it has withdrawn, that it lives on in a place where I certainly would not have looked for it, in my flesh, in my miserable flesh, in my blood and in my flesh, in my perishable, but baptized, flesh.] Along with love and faith, the third theological virtue also takes flesh in one of the novel’s characters. When, in the central scene, the priest rescues the countess from her despair, she rediscovers hope not as an abstract entity but as “une espérance qui est comme la chair de ma chair” [a hope that is like the flesh of my flesh] (Oe I 1165–6). Given the very positive role of the body in Ambricourt’s spiritual drama, one is perhaps unprepared for the crisis that erupts when he is finally diagnosed with cancer. Struck dumb by the doctor’s announcement, he begins to weep: “Si on pouvait mourir de dégoût, je serais mort” [If one could die of disgust, I would be dead] (Oe I 1242). He confides to his diary that he was strongly tempted to hate himself at that moment, but it is more precisely his body, humiliated and exposed in all its vulnerability and weakness, that he hates. He slides has hand beneath his soutane, places it on the spot where the tumour is growing, and experiences again a “dégoût vis-à-vis de ma propre personne” [disgust toward my own person] (Oe I 1244). This scene brings us to what Bernanos himself saw as his novel’s great moment, its grand “finale.” By late November and through December of 1935 he was writing the closing scenes, a process he described in a letter to Pierre Belperron dated 23 November 1935: Je tiens la fin du Journal, et les événements vont se précipiter jusqu’au grand accord final – crescendo. Claudel a écrit que mes livres sont de grandes

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symphonies. Vous verrez la fin de celle-là, s’il plaît à Dieu. (Cor II 110) [I have the end of the Journal under control, and events are moving quickly toward the last great reconciliation – in a crescendo. Claudel has written that my books are like great symphonies. You will see the end of this one, God willing.] At the novel’s climax, harmony is restored when, on the threshold of death, the priest realizes that his first duty is to be reconciled with himself. The penultimate paragraph of his journal, entered on the day he dies, records this very resolution: “Je suis réconcilié avec moi-même, avec cette pauvre dépouille” [I am at peace with myself, with this poor carcass] (Oe I 1258). The pointed inclusion of “carcass” emphasizes that his last spiritual battle is not a struggle of mind over matter, but a final assent to that matter, the profound acceptance of being an incarnate human being. How was this harmony made possible? His last entry provides the answer: “Mais si tout orgueil était mort en nous, la grâce des grâces serait de s’aimer humblement soi-même, comme n’importe lequel des membres souffrants de Jésus-Christ” [But if all our pride were dead, the grace of graces would be to love oneself humbly, like any other of the suffering members of Jesus Christ] (Oe I 1258). In this theology, a vital reconciliation with oneself, including (and perhaps especially) one’s own body, comes about only by accepting one’s place within the Body of God Incarnate. In the priest of Ambricourt, Donissan, too, is finally reconciled with his “carcass.” But what of Bernanos himself? Did his hero’s deathbed self-acceptance signal an end to his own temptations to despise the weak and wayward flesh? A fragment of a letter written to an old friend just a few months after completing Journal suggests that the answer is yes: “C’est bien beau aussi de vieillir. C’est bien poignant de regarder dans la glace une face devenue étrangère, d’être tenté de la haïr, et de

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lui pardonner” [It is beautiful to grow old as well. It is poignant to look in the mirror at a face that has become a stranger, to be tempted to hate it, and to forgive it] (Cor II 141). Bernanos is most popularly known as the novelist of the “saint,” but this assessment fails to take into account some of his most powerful fiction. One might go as far as to say that his skill as an artist and the comprehensiveness of his vision are best displayed in a murky, phantasmagorical universe far distant from the lambent glow of a novel like Journal. The protagonist of L’Imposture (1927), for example, is the sinister Father Cénabre; in Un Mauvais rêve (begun in 1931 but not published until 1950, two years after Bernanos’s death), cynical literati and young drug addicts vie for honours among the living dead; in the great, largely unread masterpiece M. Ouine (1940), Western civilization gasps for air on the deathbed of a tubercular professor of languages. It is to that apocalyptic vision of shadows and corruption that we now turn our attention.

the apostate Since Bernanos finished L’Imposture (The Impostor) in 1927, only a year before beginning La Grande peur des bien-pensants, it is not surprising to discover in the novel many of the themes that predominate in that essay. L’Imposture’s entire second part is devoted to a scathing attack on the disincarnate idealism of the masses in the form of religious progressivism, an attitude reminiscent of almost all his youthful writing. It takes a sardonic look at the modernist faction in the Church, the intellectual rationalists whom he came to label the “gens d’église” (“church people”). The novel’s Catholic milieu is inhabited by an unsavoury bunch of literati determined to reconcile faith with the insights of modern psychiatry and positivist critique. Among them is the Viscount, who proposes a rationalized religion, and M. Gérou, whose solicitude masks a sadistic misogyny and for whom faith is little more than an imaginative sleight-of-hand with certain profitable political

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uses. The circle’s ranking cleric is Bishop Espellette, who fully espouses the doctrine of progress and, without a hint of irony, proudly declares himself to be a man of his times (Oe I 388). His confidence lies, not in divine Providence, but in the benign omnipotence of the state, which he proclaims to be “more powerful than ever” (Oe I 422). He also heralds the certain advent of the reconciliation of the Church and modern society. Another character who haunts this milieu is Pernichon, the harassed and pathetic Catholic journalist whose ambition bespeaks the ascent of mercenary political ambiguity over integrity: he writes the religion column in a radical newspaper with socialist goals funded by a conservative financier (Oe I 312). Pernichon is particularly important because he is the thread linking the “milieu Gérou” with the novel’s central character, Father Cénabre. Pernichon has chosen Cénabre, a famous and prolific hagiographer, as his confessor because of his own anxious aspiration rather than for the welfare of his soul. The novel opens during the journalist’s last visit to the priest-scholar, and it quickly becomes clear that Cénabre’s intellectual prowess rather than his sacerdotal acumen is what draws Pernichon to these sessions of putative spiritual direction. In one particularly sycophantic outburst, Pernichon declares: “La lutte pour les idées nous échauffe parfois, je l’avoue. Mais l’exemple de votre vie et de votre pensée est un grand réconfort pour moi” [“The struggle for ideas can sometimes become heated, I admit. But the example of your life and your thought is a great comfort to me”] (Oe I 311). It is not the priest’s sanctity that draws him, although Cénabre’s scholarship could be mistaken for a form of asceticism; his slightly heterodox scholarship is what has made him the darling of the progressive clique. Indeed, Cénabre is the quintessence of that recurring Bernanosian character, the intellectual priest, a detached observer of his fellow men, at once calm and avidly curious, who views the Christian life as “toute proportion, toute mesure: un équilibre” [complete proportion, complete moderation: a balance] (Oe I 311).

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Pernichon soon discovers, at the eventual cost of both his career and his life, just how much his confessor has subordinated all human attributes to the power of the intellect. In a candid moment of self-revelation, Cénabre admits that his priestly vocation itself has been subsumed into the glacial region of critical reasoning: “Pardonnez-moi ce mouvement d’humeur: je ne suis pas un apôtre, je ne saurais l’être. L’esprit critique l’emporte chez moi, ou plutôt il absorbe toutes les autres facultés. Une extrême attention finit par consumer la pitié.” (Oe I 319) [“Please forgive my mood: I am not an apostle, I wouldn’t know how to be one. My critical faculty has swept away any such capacity within me, or rather it has absorbed all my other faculties. In the end, intense concentration consumes pity.”] Cénabre’s intellect is not proof of a complex personality, as Pernichon mistakenly seems to believe, but rather a force that excludes all others, including the ability to love. The priest orbits within what he himself describes as the clear, frigid solitude of an intellectual cosmos. Although with intelligence he is able to pierce one’s innermost thoughts like a light passing through crystal, his thought cannot embrace the warmth of human flesh: “Elle est une contemplation stérile” [It is a sterile contemplation] (Oe I 354). Cénabre’s fiercely exclusive intellectualism is the product of a humiliatingly poor childhood. The hardships he endured at the hands of an alcoholic father and the austerities he and his mother were forced to undergo when, as a widow, she took in laundry to make ends meet, help explain his youthful consuming ambition to become a “man of learning” (Oe I 712). It does seem logical that a youth with considerable intellectual gifts would use them to escape a life of hardship, but Cénabre, the man of pure intellect, exposes his basic nature by the manner of his flight. Most people would seek

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a comfortable life as compensation for years of doing without, but he uses his intellect merely to escape into the intellect, the means thereby becoming the end. He shows no inclination to become wealthy or to use his fame to acquire luxuries. Even at the height of his renown, he lives in surroundings of self-imposed austerity: simple, even vulgar, straw chairs, and ugly whitewashed walls, a few stark bookshelves where he stores his only indulgence, a collection of antique missals (Oe I 314–15). That the poverty of his childhood inspired Cénabre to seek refuge in a sterile “intellectual universe” is not unexpected, given what aspects of his childhood poverty humiliated him the most: Jamais l’homme qui, à douze ans, implorait la faveur de passer ses vacances au séminaire, inventant pour l’obtenir des mensonges ingénieux qui édifiaient grandement ses maîtres, simplement par dégoût de la maison paternelle dont il ne pouvait retrouver sans rougir jusqu’aux oreilles, dès le seuil franchi, l’humble odeur, inoubliable, de gros velours et de lard fondu, n’avait réellement connu le pauvre. (Oe I 458–59) [This man who, at the age of twelve, begged permission to spend his holidays at the seminary, inventing ingenious lies that greatly edified his superiors, simply because his father’s house filled him with such disgust that, the moment he crossed the doorstep the unforgettable smell of melted lard and heavy velvet made him blush up to his ears, had never really known the poor.] In short, the stench and filth of life sent Cénabre scurrying into the walled sanctuary of the mind. He sought not to indulge the flesh, but to escape its pervasive smell. We might say that the intellect was his retreat, not from poverty as such, but from the vulnerability of the incarnate which poverty lays bare, “la chair qui flaire la mort” [the flesh that sniffs out the scent of death] (Oe I 348).

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As he hears Pernichon’s confession, Cénabre is repelled by precisely such an odour emanating from the penitent: La tête penchée, les yeux clos, ses minces lèvres un peu serrées par un douloureux sourire, l’abbé Cénabre semblait attentif au murmure familier, bien qu’il n’en perçût encore que l’odeur. Une odeur fade et comme fanée, moins atroce qu’écœurante, flotte en effet autour de cet homme chétif, dévoré d’une austère envie. (Oe I 315) [His head bent, his eyes closed, his thin lips slightly pursed in a painful smile, Father Cénabre seemed to be attentive to the familiar murmur, although he was aware only of a smell. An insipid, faded odour, less foul than sickening, in fact floated around this puny man devoured by an austere envy.] Pernichon’s physical presence, the effluvium of human weakness and desperation, offends the priest in the antiseptic enclosure of his “critical mind.” He smells the impending defeat of this pathetic man, whose ambitions are already turning to sand. In the novel’s third part, as Cénabre walks alone at night through the streets of Paris, we are reminded of his “terror” of the poor, in whom he sees a reflection of his own childhood. It is not their poverty he fears but they themselves, an attitude that explains his reaction when suddenly accosted by a ragged beggar: “son cœur se tordit de dégoût” [his heart writhed in disgust] (Oe I 451). He sees his own humanity verging on physical corruption, reflected in this beggar and, despite being intrigued by the vagrant’s mind and possible secrets, he is also offended by his corporality. This same revulsion is expressed in his scholarship. Countless dense pages of hagiography deliberately circumvent their actual, incarnate subjects. Cénabre, who seeks to penetrate the mystery of sanctity by an effort of intelligence alone – “le sacrilège d’une curiosité sans amour” [the sacrilege of a loveless curiosity]

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(Oe I 334) – conjures up creations of his own imagining to take the place of the real saints who elude his comprehension. He prefers his “phantoms” (Oe I 330) to historical reality, although there is always the risk that some fragment of an actual human being might briefly emerge through the sea of words to disturb his ethereal tranquillity: “La petite part accordée au faits est encore trop grande: un acte, une parole, même étouffée par un texte laborieux, suffit à rompre le charme” [The small part accorded the facts is still too great: an act, a word, even suffocated by a laborious text, is sufficient to break the spell] (Oe I 330). Cénabre resists giving his saints bodies, as it were; instead he absorbs them into the strangely disembodied space he prefers to inhabit. The result is a suspect and, in some Catholic circles, harshly criticized scholarship that balances delicately on the precipice of heterodoxy without taking the final plunge. His own personal life of religious devotion, the result of an assiduous practice of fraudulent piety, is ostensibly beyond reproach: he scrupulously recites his breviary daily and makes monthly visits to his confessor (Oe I 334). Yet, and Bernanos italicizes the adjective, his life is as “fanciful” as those of the saints in his books. His daily routine, so carefully scripted to conform to his own image of himself, lacks density, and every studied action is fleeting and porous: Ce qui semblait à d’autres son existence, sa personnalité véritable, était né des circonstances, éphémères, inconsistantes comme elles: à peine si la répétition des mêmes actes avait pu au cours des ans, à la longue, former quelque ombre, prêter une certaine réalité au fantôme. (Oe I 334) [What seemed to others to be his existence, his true personality, was born of ephemeral, insubstantial circumstances: the repetition of the same actions over the years had, in the end, scarcely formed a sort of shadow or lent a certain reality to the phantom.]

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It is revealing that Bernanos uses the same word “fantôme” to apply, not only to the subjects of Cénabre’s scholarship but also to the scholar himself. On a deeper level Cénabre’s dream world is symptomatic of an intense self-hatred. Bernanos stresses the point with block letters: “il ne s’aime pas” [he does not love himself] (Oe I 363). The particular form this hatred takes is made manifest on the momentous night when he realizes that he no longer believes in God. This revelation significantly causes him to study his features in a mirror, as if he fears the imminent collapse of his own quiddity. He sees a spectre whose sense of emptiness is suddenly revealed as nothingness (Oe I 334). He looks in the mirror, mesmerized like a predator that has finally cornered its elusive quarry, and recognizes the object of his hatred. He scrutinizes the reflection of his “misérable corps en déroute” [miserable defeated body] (Oe I 334), which is trembling and perspiring with fear. This “vision détestable” [hateful vision] (Oe I 334) gives him a secret, almost conspiratorial, pleasure. At this crucial moment, when he is indulging in a delectation of loathing for his own body, his inability to love himself is transparently nothing less than a contempt for his frail flesh: L’humiliation de la chair lui fut douce, si ce mot peut s’entendre d’une jouissance aussi trouble, car dans le désordre où il était comme englouti, le féroce mépris de lui-même donnait au moins l’illusion d’un reste de lucidité. (Oe I 334) [The humiliation of the flesh was sweet, if such turbid pleasure can be so described, because, in the disorder that had engulfed him, his ferocious contempt for himself lent him at least the illusion of lucidity.] The pale, trembling image that Cénabre contemplated that night manifested the beginning of an ironic dominance of the body in the spiritual drama that began to unfold. Unable to bear its agony, the mind passes it on to the flesh (Oe I 349);

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the flesh in turn becomes the concrete sign of the soul’s disintegration (Oe I 374). Cénabre lies on the floor weeping, but incapable of pitying himself: L’abandon du corps supplicié exprimait avec une effrayante vérité l’âme violentée, profanée. Car l’horreur fut à son comble lorsque ce corps robuste parut cesser d’opposer aucune résistance, subit la souffrance, la dévora comme on dévore la honte … Oui, un instant, l’humiliation fut parfaite. (Oe I 374–5) [The tortured body’s surrender expressed the violated, profaned soul with terrible truthfulness. For at the peak of this horror, the robust body seemed to abandon all resistance, gave in to the suffering, devoured it as one devours shame … Yes, for an instant the humiliation was complete.] Once Cénabre recognizes that he does not believe in God, the initial anguish subsides and is replaced by a studied impenetrability. He leaves for a speaking engagement in Germany, and when he returns, we learn that he has decided to bring pharisaism to perfection by continuing to practise his ministry. However, the “lie” that was to have been his escape route brings him full circle instead. The strong, ordered, industrious persona that he had painstakingly created over a lifetime has clearly been falling apart. This bizarre transformation marks the re-emergence of his own “brutale adolescence” [brutish adolescence] (Oe I 463). Countless painful images of childhood, which he had stoically repressed, resurfaced from the depths of a soul in full decomposition. The disorder he had pretended to despise in adult life now seemed perversely alluring, and his revulsion to the incarnate was refashioned as a delight in the intentional degradation of his own body: C’avait été d’abord de ces petits manquements volontaires qui ressemblent à des distractions et qui

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n’échappent jamais toutefois à l’œil d’un secrétaire ou d’une servante. L’abbé Cénabre laissait croître sa barbe, négligeait ses mains qu’il avait belles, prolongeait ses repas, sa sieste. Il lui arrivait de se jeter tout habillé sur son lit, que sa gouvernante s’étonnait de retrouver le soir en désordre, la courtepointe en satin grenat souillée de boue, gardant la marque de ses gros souliers. “Mon maître … devient sale, confiait-elle à ses amies. Un homme si soigneux!” (Oe I 460–1) [At first it had been nothing more than small deliberate acts of neglect resembling absent-mindedness but which, nonetheless, never escape the notice of a secretary or a servant. Father Cénabre allowed his beard to grow, neglected his hands, which had always been so well manicured, and prolonged his meals and his naps. He took to throwing himself, completely dressed, on his bed, which his housekeeper would discover in the evening in total disorder, the garnet satin quilt soiled with mud, still bearing the imprint of his boots. “My master is becoming dirty,” she confided to her friends.] Within Cénabre manifests both a horror of the body’s humiliation and a masochistic need to help debase it. While this deliberate neglect is a metaphor for spiritual ruination and signifies a demonic joy in the humiliation of the flesh, the problem of the body in L’Imposture runs much more deeply than is first apparent. Cénabre’s pathological distaste for the incarnate expresses a force of hatred whose origins are mysteriously supernatural and whose ultimate object is yet unknown to the priest himself. Having eliminated God from his being, while maintaining an impenetrable religious veneer, Cénabre is shocked by a loss of control. He had been determined not to share the fate of other apostates who liberate their minds but drag behind them the residue of a faith that slowly rots in the most secret recesses of their souls like a corpse (Oe I 460). Cénabre believed that, if he had not found peace, he had at least

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fabricated a made-to-measure equilibrium between the egregious nature of his lie and the seeming virtue of his hypocrisy. This self-deception increasingly renders him less monstrous and more pitiable. He has not succeeded in situating himself beyond the emotional confusion of lesser men; he has not, as he believes, stoically placed himself above the perturbative force of hatred – on the contrary, he is saturated by it. Although Bernanos describes him as having been born of a “supernatural” hatred (Oe I 365), Cénabre himself is curiously unaware of its power. He first directs the simmering, barely contained violence within him with sadistic finesse toward Pernichon, and then later allows it to explode before the saintly Father Chevance. Even after striking the old priest, Cénabre remains uncomprehending, asking himself “Pourquoi l’ai-je frappé?” [Why did I hit him?] (Oe I 359). Alone in his room after Chevance’s departure, he erupts in violent, cruel laughter, and is genuinely perplexed: “Mais qu’ai-je à rire?” [But what have I to laugh at?] (Oe I 358). He is astounded by the tone of his derisive howl; its malice and mockery are barely human. Cénabre’s incredulity may be explained by the fact that he harbours a hatred he cannot fully probe. Why indeed should he strike a saintly old man against whom he has no complaint and no grudge? The slap must have been directed at some real, yet unknown enemy. “Pourquoi l’ai-je frappé? répétait-il, parlant toujours à voix basse. Il fallait que je fusse hors de moi! Sa pensée choppait à ce seul obstacle. Il n’était attentif qu’à la recherche de ce qui l’avait porté en avant contre un ennemi désormais disparu, effacé, anéanti, et avec une telle haine au cœur toute vive … Contre qui? Contre quoi?” (Oe I 359) [“Why did I hit him?” he repeated, still speaking in a low voice. “I must have been out of my mind!” His thought kept coming up against this one obstacle. He was aware only of the need to discover what had compelled him to confront an enemy, henceforth annihilated, wiped out,

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and with such hatred burning in his heart … For whom? For what?] We, of course, have at least a partial answer to these questions. Cénabre is himself the object of his own hatred. But is there another? Oddly, Bernanos leaves clues strewn upon a trail of laughter – Cénabre’s bizarre guttural outbursts, which are as far from merriment as was the blow he delivered to Chevance. This laughter is mentioned no fewer than eight times within twelve pages of text and becomes a major theme toward the latter half of Part I. It progresses, beginning with apparently innocuous intervals of what is simply described as “a strange laugh” (Oe I 357) that punctuates Cénabre’s conversations with himself in the wake of the disastrous visit with Father Chevance. This “strange” expression of mirth develops into an “incomprehensible laugh” (Oe I 358) that “astonishes” the priest. Such irrepressible fits of laughter increase, revealing the ascendance of a malevolent power: “C’était moins un rire qu’un ricanement convulsif, involontaire, déclenché bizarrement, méconnaissable” [It was less laughter than a convulsive sniggering, involuntary, triggered in some bizarre way, unrecognizable] (Oe I 359). Another burst erupts and Cénabre “hears” it as if he were observing an impetus from the outside (Oe I 360). At this point the quick succession of hysterics is interrupted by a seven-page digression. This disruption of the narrative rhythm represents a lull before the storm, a dramatic respite before the climax which reveals Cénabre’s real adversary. During this interval, while Bernanos engages in a lengthy analysis of the priest’s hypocrisy, his self-loathing, his shallowness as a thinker, Cénabre attempts to reproduce the involuntary laughter but cannot, a further indication of its “otherness.” Suddenly, a terrible eruption of anger rumbles in his throat as he sweeps his precious manuscripts from his desk to the floor. Then, in a moment of pointed dramatic intensity, he lifts his gaze: “Et il aperçut, à l’extrémité de la

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pièce, dans le réduit plus sombre, contre la paroi blanchie à la chaux, la Croix” [At the far end of the room, in a darker recess, he caught a glimpse of the Cross set in relief on the white-washed wall] (Oe I 367). Suddenly his laughter bursts out again, but not as before. There has been a significant, climactic alteration in his attitude toward this power of derision: Cette fois, il ne songea point à l’éluder, l’étouffer: il l’écouta courageusement. Puis il le voulut tel qu’il était, non moins glapissant, non moins vil. De tout son être il l’accepta, le fit sien … Un soulagement immense, un immense allégement furent aussitôt sa récompense, et rien ne donnerait mieux l’idée de cette délivrance inattendue que l’éclatement d’un abcès. Il sentit, il sentit avec étonnement, puis avec certitude, enfin avec ivresse, que cela qui remuait en lui qu’il ne pouvait plus porter avait trouvé une issue, se déchargeait. (Oe I 367) [This time he didn’t try to elude it, to stifle it; he listened to it bravely. He wanted it to be just as it was, no less squealing, no less vile. With all his being he accepted it, made it his own … A great relief, an immense lightheartedness were his immediate reward; it could only be compared to the effect of the unexpected burst of an abscess. He felt, first with astonishment, and then with certainty, and finally with exhilaration that whatever was stirring within him, the thing he could no longer bear to carry, had found its way out, was being released.] Why does the sight of the Cross provoke this final release of spiritual putrescence, bringing a “deliverance” that is both the sign of some dark definitive surrender and a last, perhaps lost, moment of grace that pierces a long-festering wound (Oe I 368)? This scene contains a small but vital detail that could easily pass unnoticed: the Cross in question is precisely that, a bare cross without a corpus. No crucifix is to be found in Cénabre’s rooms. The absence of the image of the tortured,

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crucified body of Christ is not due to any aesthetic reticence about the sometimes mawkish nature of such representations. The preference for the bare cross dates from Cénabre’s adolescence and the emergence of a phobia that seems misplaced in a young seminarian: “Son horreur invincible de la Passion de Notre Seigneur, dont la pensée fut toujours si douloureuse à ses nerfs qu’il détournait involontairement le regard du crucifix” [His unconquerable horror of Our Lord’s Passion, the thought of which was so painful for his nerves that he would involuntarily turn his eyes away from the crucifix] (Oe I 369). Even a naked cross, however, can inspire uncontrollable contempt. What does this symbol, with or without the offending corpus, signify for Cénabre? Beyond theological concepts, which at any rate he has always been successful in exiling to the sanitized realm of the abstract, he recognizes the Cross as the sign of an act of love. It is impossible to distinguish his self-hatred from his revulsion at the notion of such a gift of self. In fact, no sooner does he mock the Cross with such sinister brutality than his next outburst of laughter turns against himself: “Son rire éclata, et le retentissement lui en fut rapidement intolérable. Il sentait bien que ce rire s’était à présent retourné contre lui, qu’il le déchirait” [His laughter exploded and its ringing quickly became intolerable to him. He felt sure that this laughter had now turned against him, was tearing him apart] (Oe I 369). Cénabre had always refused even “a single act of love” (Oe I 365) toward himself, toward another, or toward God. He refused in part because an act of love would put his “lie” at risk, the lie that had armoured him against his own humanity and its potential for humiliation. The body on the cross is a sign of human weakness, and of the ultimate degradation of a God who did not cling to his divinity. This is really the heart of the matter: Nul n’est abandonné qui n’ait d’abord commis le sacrilège essentiel, renié Dieu non pas dans sa justice mais dans son amour. Car la terrible croix de bois peut

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se dresser d’abord au premier croisement des routes, pour un rappel grave et sévère, mais la dernière image qui nous apparaisse, avant de nous éloigner à jamais, c’est cette autre croix de chair, les deux bras étendus de l’ami lamentable, lorsque le plus haut des anges se détourne avec terreur de la Face d’un Dieu déçu. (Oe I 381) [No one is abandoned who has not first committed the essential sacrilege of denying God, not in his justice, but in his love. For we may first see the terrible wooden cross at some crossroad along the highway, as a severe and grave reminder, but the last image that appears to us before we leave forever is that other cross of flesh, the two outstretched arms of the woeful friend, while the most exalted of angels turns away in terror from the Face of a God betrayed.] This is the Cross that Cénabre rejects, the cross of flesh subject to suffering, to the privation of poverty, to abasement and insult and, finally, to death – all for the sake of love. His disincarnational tendencies – a predilection for concepts and a repugnance for the human body – are rooted in his fear of love, its risk, its sacrifice, and the terrible vulnerability it creates. His dis-Incarnationalism draws from the same source, only it is transposed onto a supernatural plane.

the literati The motivation for Cénabre’s intellectualism is a detached, unengaged, almost scientific curiosity. The desire to unlock “secrets” fuels his scholarship as well as his relations with other characters, particularly Chantal de Clergerie, whose sanctity is a particularly enticing enigma. This loveless curiosity is a motif that resonates in Bernanos’s novels to varying degrees. His first novel drew its title from this short but crucial fragment of its last chapter: “Connaître pour détruire, et renouveler dans la destruction sa connaissance et son désir –

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ô Soleil de Satan! – Désir du néant recherché pour lui-même, abominable effusion du cœur” [To seek knowledge in order to destroy, and in destroying to renew one’s knowledge and one’s desire – Oh Satan’s Sun! – The desire for nothingness pursued for its own sake, abominable effusion of the heart] (SSS 223). Satan’s Sun is this insatiable desire to know, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a compulsive, mercenary self-gratification that eschews commitment or compassion. It is also, of course, the primordial sin of Adam and Eve, who hoped to know even as God does. Bernanos’s very personal reasons for being so wary of curiosity had to do with self-doubt, or at least a lingering mistrust of his own vocation and a suspicion about his own motives as a novelist. Both in a lecture he delivered in Brussels in 1926, entitled “Une vision catholique du réel,” and during his interview with Frédéric Lefèvre that same year, Bernanos explored the question of the value of literature and the importance of the poet-novelist. He recognized the danger of becoming a mere student of human nature, a literary psychologist who writes in the mistaken belief that human behaviour closely observed taps the mysterious source of human passion: “En littérature, la seule curiosité ne mène à rien” [In literature mere curiosity leads to nothing] (Oe II 1081). He questions Proust’s “sad and frenetic literature” (Oe II 1080) and concludes that his “dreadful” introspection is a moral cul-de-sac (Oe II 1045). He also condemns André Gide, whom he will later use as a partial model for creating the sinister M. Ouine (SSS 19). This self-questioning occurred in the period immediately following the First World War, when Bernanos was experiencing a deep distrust of words in general. As we know, the new, distinctly modern social order he discovered upon his return from the trenches gave the impetus for his decision to write a novel, to mint old words afresh in response to the empty abstractions of democratic idealism. It is ironic that his mistrust of words, of their plasticity and malleability, led him to choose to make his living with them. Within this

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tension lay his ambiguous feelings about his own craft. As well, his doubts about the authenticity of his vocation and his disdain of modern society in general are of a piece. In an effort to express his reservations about the “temptation” of literature, he created two characters who are novelists: Antoine Saint-Marin and Emmanuel Ganse in Un Mauvais rêve. Antoine Saint-Marin in Sous le soleil de Satan appears in the last five climactic chapters of the novel in the wake of Donissan’s disastrous attempt to resurrect the dead child. His coming to the parish of Lumbres to meet the aged Donissan, now a famous ascetic and confessor, is motivated by the same pitiless curiosity that powers his creative impulse. His presence, however unwitting, at that last terrible confrontation between the “saint of Lumbres” and Satan is not a misplaced, gratuitous critique of modern literature. Bernanos places him in the darkened church of Lumbres at the very moment when Donissan, dying as he sits alone and undetected in his confessional, issues his final challenge to the “Prince of this world,” because the novelist has been the champion, chronicler and exemplar of that prince’s world. Saint-Marin’s expertise lies in juggling and reshaping the abstractions of language with a self-serving disregard for the truth: “L’illustre vieillard exerce, depuis un demi-siècle, la magistrature de l’ironie […] Dans la bouche artificieuse, les mots les plus sûrs sont pipés, la vérité même est servile” [The illustrious old man has for half a century exercised the supreme office of irony. In his deceitful mouth trustworthy words are gutted and stuffed, and truth itself is enslaved] (SSS 274). The fact that Bernanos had used an almost identical phrasing in the 1926 interview with Lefèvre when describing the deceit of postwar democratic idealism (Oe II 1040) underscores the scope of this character. If we understand SaintMarin, not simply as a portrait of what a novelist must not be, but as a microcosmic image of the modern world itself, then his status as “the patriarch of nothingness” [le patriarche du néant] (SSS 281) and his devotion to “an affectionate nihilism” [un nihilisme caressant] (SSS 281) brings us far in

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understanding Bernanos’s assessment of the world in which he lived. Saint-Marin comes to Lumbres to see a saint at firsthand. Whereas Bernanos had explained to Lefèvre that sanctity is the highest good which man, aided by grace, can achieve, Saint-Marin describes it as a phenomenon fed on the “bread of illusion” [pain de l’illusion] (SSS 275). Given this attitude, it seems odd that he should venture so far from his sophisticated but fawning disciples. The answer lies in SaintMarin’s propensity for the world of dreams, perhaps even in his inability to distinguish the dream from the real, and his conviction that his own dreams are distinct only in degree and not in kind from those of the saint. In other words, the dreamer-novelist is communing with the master dreamer (SSS 275). Saint-Marin is a very subtle character chiefly because of the half-truths he propounds. We earlier find him, for example, vigorously defending the supernatural and the miraculous against the pseudo-sophisticated reservations of the imbecilic, positivist priest of Luzarnes. However, the weakness of his apologia for the reality of the invisible is apparent in his use of the word “dream”: “De quel droit la brute polytechnique viendrait-elle m’éveiller de mon rêve? Surnaturel et miraculeux sont des adjectifs pleins de sens, monsieur, et qu’un honnête homme ne prononce qu’avec envie.” (SSS 279) [“By what right does the polytechnical brute try to wake me from my dream? Supernatural and miraculous are adjectives, sir, which are filled with meaning and which an honest man can only utter with envy.”] Bernanos would make a distinction between dream meant as a vision of greatness, especially in childhood, and illusion, that is, the insidious denial of reality. In Saint-Marin the dream is a mirage that betrays a fear of the real in general, and of death in particular. He therefore creates in his fictional world an elaborate mythology of death, replete with empty,

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consoling metaphors: death is the last step on the gentle slope of old age, or the sleep of contentment at the journey’s end (SSS 276). Now, suddenly in old age, death rises up before him as an implacable stranger: “cent fois rêvée, savourée, il ne la reconnut pas” [savoured, dreamed of a hundred times, he did not recognize it] (SSS 276). It is his desperation to placate the old enemy, to surrender serenely to the inevitable, that has led him to the saint of Lumbres. As he sits tranquilly in the church, unable to distinguish fleeting contentment from prayer and, oblivious to Donissan agonizing in the darkness behind him, he imagines that he has at last sealed a pact of non-aggression with his own mortality: he will imitate the old priest’s asceticism by withdrawing gracefully from life while he still possesses it, so that its encroaching end will seem like a gentle dénouement (SSS 298). He will practise abstinence and chastity, growing ever more acquainted with death’s poverty, so as to transform the long-feared darkness into an innocuous, fading, autumnal twilight (SSS 298). But the old “dispensateur d’illusion” [dispenser of illusion] (SSS 298) is simply engaged in exchanging one dream for another, one game for another, the worn abstractions of youth for new ones tailored to the exigencies of old age. The new resolutions represent a facsimile of life: a suppressed yawn is like a prayer; a new sense of well-being is almost religious; a sensation of conversion resembles repentance (SSS 293). He boxes with shadows because the one sacrifice that would allow him to embrace something of substance, “the precious gift of self” [ce don précieux de lui-même] (SSS 299), is also the one gesture he will never make. The last three chapters of Sous le soleil de Satan centre on Saint Marin as he sits musing in the church, even as the principal spiritual drama is being played out within the curtained obscurity of the confessor’s box. Bernanos creates a penumbral, eerie, funereal atmosphere wherever evil is at work. In the airless, claustrophobic confessional, a cosmic struggle has been engaged which is reflected in the marvellous interplay between light and darkness inside the church:

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Au bout du fil de fer, la lampe de cuivre oscille doucement, passe et repasse. A chaque retour l’ombre se déploie jusqu’aux voûtes, puis, chassée de nouveau, s’embusque au noir des piliers, s’y replie, pour se déployer encore. (SSS 296–7) [Hanging at the end of a steel wire, the copper lamp oscillated gently back and forth. On each swing back, the shadow spread up to the very vaults, then, driven down again, took up its position amid the darkness of the pillars, and coiled up there, only to deploy itself upward yet again.] The military expressions certainly underscore Donissan’s final battle with Satan – one that will soon reach its, to some, ambiguous resolution – but the metaphor of the swinging lamp also suggests a desperate contest between life and death which has brought the famous novelist to this little country oasis of shadowy tranquillity. The oscillating light, punctuating the darkness in rhythmic intervals, hints at the relentless, but vain, efforts of divine grace to exorcise the demon of illusion bewitching Saint Marin’s soul. One might imagine that, because of the spiritual warfare being waged at that very moment between the saint of Lumbres and his tormentor, the grace of God would abound within the little church, offering the old novelist perhaps his last chance for salvation. Ironically, though, the very reason he has chosen to seek out the building’s damp and silent solitude is its capacity to induce the dream-world, and he indulges freely in “illusion volontaire” [voluntary illusion] (SSS 295). The hypnotic swaying of the lamp and the gloom that seems to crouch defensively against the light create a phantasmagorical setting. Bernanos emphasizes the sense of unreality by using the words “rêve,” “songe,” “illusion,” or their derivations, at least ten times within five pages of the penultimate chapter alone. The outside world retreats with the setting sun as the church becomes “un fond de velours noir” [a background of black velvet] (SSS 293). The murky interior

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of oscillating shadows and the swaying alternation of dream and reality draw the reader into this “demi-délire de la délectation morose” [semi-delirium of morose pleasure] (SSS 297). However, the reader is not meant to doubt the scene’s actuality, as if by a narrative sleight-of-hand Bernanos deliberately confuses the imagined and the real (a technique he will later use in M. Ouine). We are not invited to participate in Saint Marin’s dreams but to witness his wilful, lucid surrender to an inner state of non-existence. His very life is evaporating in the shadows, a past and present game of mirrors in which the reflected image, forever altering form, displaces the incarnate creature: Une curiosité, dont l’âge n’a pas encore émoussé la pointe, et qui est l’espèce de vertu de ce vieux jongleur, l’entraîne à se renouveler sans cesse, à se travailler devant le mirroir … Aussi bien qu’une fille instruite et polie par l’âpre expérience du vice, il sait que la manière de donner vaut mieux que ce qu’on donne et, dans sa rage à se contredire et à se renier, il arrive à prêter chaque fois au lecteur un homme tout neuf. (SSS 274) [A curiosity, which passes as virtue for the old minstrel and whose sharp tip age has not yet dulled, leads him to recreate himself endlessly, to rework himself before the mirror … Like a young girl formed and refined by the bitter experience of vice, he knows that the manner of giving is worth more than the gift, and, in his mania for contradicting and denying himself, he manages each time to present his reader with a new man.] He himself is a creation of his own imagination: sitting before the altar, he plans the last scene of his life, his last masterpiece, in which he will play both actor and audience. Antoine Saint Marin is less a writer of fiction than a work of fiction, and one of no real substance. Saint Marin is an appendage to Sous le soleil de Satan, an afterthought perhaps, the adumbration of a character still

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waiting in the wings of Bernanos’s imagination. It would be several years before he emerged in a novel of complex genesis that was published posthumously in 1950. The viper at the centre of the tangle of Un Mauvais rêve is the prolific novelist Emmanuel Ganse, who holds court before an entourage of assistants, secretaries, and sycophants. Where the novelist Saint Marin had seemed gratuitously introduced into a book whose principal theme had nothing to do with literature, Ganse heads up a literary group whose precarious balance between form and essence provides the narrative thrust of Un Mauvais rêve. Assuring his notoriety by producing a glut of pages, Ganse haunts an underworld of letters that envelops him like an obfuscatory moral and intellectual fog through which the actual order of things is only dimly perceived. He has fallen into literature, his nephew Philippe points out, like a rat splashing helplessly in a bowl of birdlime (Oe I 894). Simone Alfieri, Ganse’s enigmatic assistant who enjoys a perverse intellectual intimacy with her employer, has as her primary function the task of daily sustaining for him the deception that his characters really exist outside himself (Oe I 894). She knows best the chaotic manœuvres of his mind and the tortured curiosity that consumes him. But her role as muse coexists uneasily with this knowlege, and even more uneasily with her gift for astute, often cruel observation. She goes so far as to tell Ganse the wretched truth about himself: “Vous ne sortirez jamais de la littérature” [You will never emerge from literature] (Oe I 928). This accusation – and that is what it is – does not pay Ganse the compliment that he is enthralled by the power of great literature, or that his obsessive drive represents a high-minded creative odyssey. Simone means that he has been entirely absorbed into a world of make-believe. This critique is verified by his plans to make himself the subject of his next work: “Souvenirs d’enfance d’Emmanuel Ganse” [“Childhood Recollections of Emmanuel Ganse”] (Oe I 919). Bernanos here touches once again on the perils of authorship, although only fleetingly. It is Ganse’s ever-accelerating flight from human substance into a void of

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fitful reverie that is of primary importance, as he explains to his secretary, Olivier Mainville: “On échange bien des idées … les idées ne m’intéressent pas. Pourquoi n’échangerait-on pas des rêves et surtout de mauvais rêves? On peut bien porter à deux les mauvais rêves, les mauvais rêves sont lourds. Et remarquez que trop souvent les idées s’additionnent comme des chiffres. Au lieu que les rêves, ça se combine ou ça ne se combine pas – une vraie chimie.” (Oe I 911) [Ideas are easily exchanged … ideas don’t interest me. Why not exchange dreams, especially bad dreams? Bad dreams are better carried by two, bad dreams are heavy. And notice that ideas very often add up like numbers. Whereas dreams either mix together or not – real chemistry.] The articulation of these dreams is Ganse’s full-time occupation, and the resulting plethora of words swallows him up like a character in an Ionesco play. He measures his worth, as a person and not just as a novelist, by the vast numbers of dreams he has expressed and multiplied tirelessly. He boasts to Simone that during the previous year alone he had produced 900 pages – thirty-five short stories, as well as numerous lectures, scenarios, and other texts (Oe I 916). Yet, despite his glib productivity, he is incapable of controlling his own words. At moments when he is especially vulnerable, they seem to usurp his dominion. For instance, during a pivotal conversation with Simone, indeed the last he will have with this indispensable confidante, he finds himself helplessly mired in them: Son regard évita brusquement celui de son interlocutrice impassible, car la répétition involontaire des mots était un signe qu’il connaissait bien – trop bien. Il avala péniblement sa salive. (Oe I 914) [His eyes turned suddenly away from the impassible gaze of his interlocutor, for the involuntary repetition of

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words was a sign that he knew well – only too well. He swallowed his saliva with difficulty.] Ganse is compulsively loquacious and, at the same time, frightened by the amorphous, ephemeral nature of his verbal constructs. He has evolved into a literary automaton or, as Simone puts it, “a dream machine” [une machine à rêves] (Oe I 925). Even so, he is too intelligent, too wickedly perspicacious, to be unaware that he is falling apart. Each new novel, each bad dream put to paper, represents an ironic effort of will, and he proves impotent, in the final analysis, to reconstruct himself and exit at last into the exterior world of incarnate substance. His latest novel, Evangéline, represents just such a fruitless effort: Mais une fois de plus, il n’a pu réussir à sortir de luimême, sa nouvelle création ressemble aux autres – elle est sa propre ressemblance, son miroir – et le miroir du vieux Ganse ne reflète plus qu’une obscure et indistincte image. (Oe I 932) [But once again he did not succeed in coming out of himself; his new creation resembled all the others – it was his own likeness, his mirror – and the mirror of old Ganse no longer reflected anything but an obscure and indistinct image.] The mirror image, the same one Bernanos had used to describe Saint Marin’s literary experience, signifies more than a mere crisis of identity occasioned by a fatal degree of selfabsorption. As he makes clear through his portrayal of Un Mauvais rêve’s demonic psychiatrist, Dr Lipote, Bernanos was contemptuous of modern psychoanalytical interpretations. The metaphor’s significance lies neither with psychiatry, nor even with the novelists’s forays into psychology (observations that even Bernanos would have deemed proper) but, as we shall see, with theology.

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At one level, this novel is about two generations. It evokes the opposition Bernanos so often created in his entre-deuxguerres polemical writings between, on the one hand, the “Arrière,” the Great War’s politicians, men of letters, journalists and social elite whose rhetoric justified the slaughter, and, on the other, the returning poilus, who discovered at the war’s end that there was nothing to return to. In Un Mauvais rêve, the “Arrière,” now personified by Ganse, is old and wheezy, pathetic even, as its verbal formulations shift ominously on the sands of cultural decline; the new generation, represented by Ganse’s young assistants, though not immediately acquainted with war, seems exhausted just the same. The old novelist is obsessed with the progeny of the trench-fighters, ostensibly for creative reasons. He cultivates the company of the youthful members of his entourage hoping to tap into their apparent vigour and their ruthless curiosity (Oe I 907). His own lustful inquisitiveness has been worn smooth by the passage of time, and there seems to him to be nothing new under the sun; an element of desperation has crept into his restless quest for new titles and new plots. In the end, though, what he discovers is a human landscape as flat and barren and outmoded as his own, a landscape in which life is not so much experienced as contemptuously accommodated. He quite rightly perceives that the young lack the vitality expected of youth and that they seem somehow ghostly, mere shadowy reflections of real creatures. He tries to describe this wraith-like generation to young Olivier: “La Vie … Naturellement, vous ne savez même plus le sens de ce mot-là, non? Et l’ennui? Ah! l’ennui! Savezvous ce que c’est? Il n’y a pas besoin de vous voir longtemps pour se dire: ce garçon-là ne s’ennuie jamais. Votre génération – oui le mot vous embête, tant pis! – votre génération s’arrange avec l’ennui, bien entendu. Nous ne nous ennuierons jamais ensemble, comprenez-

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vous? Votre ennui est stérile – un ennui limpide et fade, comme l’eau.” (Oe I 909) [“Life … Naturally you no longer even know the meaning of that word, am I right? And boredom? Ah! boredom! Do you know what it is? One doesn’t need to observe you for very long before concluding: this young man doesn’t get bored. Your generation – yes, the word annoys you, too bad! – your generation has come to an arrangement with boredom, just like everything else – a made-to-measure boredom, of course. We will never be bored together, do you understand? Your boredom is sterile – a limpid, insipid boredom, like water.”] It is not so much a retreat from life, or a withdrawal into vice, or a sinking into the mesmerizing rhythms of addiction that Ganse sees his young acquaintances practising; it is something far more insidious than any such mal du siècle – a process of vaporization. As he himself approaches mental collapse, he confesses to Dr Lipote that he no longer believes in the young or in youth, but in literature alone. At any rate, as he states, succeeding generations are made for literature, not literature for them in the sense that it “devours” them and then reconstitutes them as characters on the printed page (Oe I 937). Alhough these remarks to his psychiatrist indicate Ganse’s own belletrist withdrawal, they also point out Bernanos’s belief that modern youth are inflicted with a disorder much harder to detect than the ennui that Baudelaire imagined would swallow the world in a yawn. What this novel envisions is a generational evolution toward disincarnation: whereas Ganse’s generation had undergone its own process of disintegration, Olivier and his friends inhabit an existential limbo in which nothing can be taken at face value, and where reality is little more than a game of mirrors, like Ganse’s own, which reflect little or nothing. And to portray “nothing” is really the creative challenge that Bernanos took upon himself in writing Un Mauvais rêve: to create characters of great pathos like Olivier, Philippe, and Simone, who involve

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the reader in their dreams while remaining fundamentally diaphanous. Olivier, whom we meet as the novel opens, diffuses an atmosphere of illusion. To him Bernanos applies images that might seem more apt in a tale of the supernatural. He habitually surrenders himself to “phantoms” that are scarcely more substantial than the “images of his dreams” [les images de ses rêves] (Oe I 897). Even the immorality he likes to boast of is exposed as a legerdemain on a rather grand scale: “Il feint excellemment les vices qu’il ignore” [He excells at feigning vices that he knows nothing about] (Oe I 900). Little wonder, then, that, in one of the many pointless and deceitful conversations among the novel’s protagonists, he despairs of a life appropriated by a pantomime of stock characters: “Nous ne sortons jamais de la littérature” [We never emerge from literature] (Oe I 965). His friend Philippe is another Pirandellian character in search of an author. Despite a trenchant cynicism tinged with the affectation of world-weary wisdom, he is less incisive than Olivier, although their emotional and intellectual postures are essentially the same. He is young, yet his youth itself is a projection of shadows on a screen: “Voilà des années et des années … que j’ai l’impression de me jouer à moi-même la comédie de la jeunesse, exactement comme un fou se donne l’illusion de raisonner juste en alignant des syllogismes irréprochables, sur une donnée absurde.” (Oe I 888) [“For years and years now I’ve had the impression of play-acting youth, exactly as a madman deludes himself that he is rational simply by creating impeccable syllogisms predicated upon an absurd premise.”] Philippe’s private life is a surrealist drama that eschews the traditional decor of “profession, motherland, family” (Oe I 890). He plays his role – the young Party intellectual who haunts Parisian cellars frequented by obscure dissidents and

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terrorists – faithfully to its tragic, if somewhat burlesque, end. Despite, or perhaps because of, his own thespian penchant, Olivier recognizes that Philippe has taken his sublimation into high drama a step too far; his suicide then becomes simply the last logical step in a pathological dissolution of personality. Appropriately, the backdrop that Bernanos conjures up for these two quasi-spectral characters, especially at the end of Part I during Olivier’s nocturnal ramblings through the streets of Paris, is hallucinatory. Dream and reality float like parallel air currents, occasionally clashing in moments of terrifying intensity. His remembrance of his childhood home at Souville, particularly the old grey house, looms up like an apparition multiplied infinitely as if caught between two mirrors. The same phantasmagoric ambiance characterizes the second part of the novel, which is devoted to Simone and her train voyage to Souville, where she intends to murder Olivier’s aged aunt in order to secure an inheritance for him. The rhythm of her mind’s images, interrupted periodically by the station lights as the train speeds through the darkened countryside, blends hypnotically with the pulse of the train itself.7 The staccato syntax magnifies her sense of delirium: Elle pressait ses tempes des doigts glacés pour réussir à mettre en ordre les images qui se succédaient avec une rapidité extraordinaire dans sa cervelle, mêlées à des chiffres, toujours les mêmes. De Léniers à Durançon, douze kilomètres, de Durançon à Ternier, vingt-cinq. Le col de Sermoise, sept. Total: quarante-quatre. Trois heures, quatre peut-être à cause des côtes. (Oe I 992–3)

7 Here, as elsewhere throughout his work, Bernanos’s technique is prophetic of the “New Novel,” which became popular in France the decade after his death. This scene brings to mind, for example, Michel Butor’s La Modification.

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[She pressed her cold fingers against her temples in an effort to lend some order to the images in her brain which appeared in rapid succession, mixed up with figures, always the same ones. Twelve kilometres from Léniers to Durançon, from Durançon to Ternier, twentyfive. The Sermoise pass, seven, Total: forty-four. Three hours, maybe four because of the hills]. The motives and the circumstances that have brought her to this journey are interwoven, not by any rational sequence of thought but by the “logique délirante du rêve” [delirious logic of the dream] (Oe I 1014). This dream, her fantasyworld, is really a less noxious form of “the lie,” which, as a source of escape, is an even stranger compulsion than her attachment to cocaine (Oe I 988). Drugs and dreams are both components of the same lie, although, if her addiction represents a loss of will, her skillful and nuanced mendacity expresses great deliberation. Yet her love of lying in and for itself, quite separate from the end achieved, creates a monster with a life of its own (Oe I 989). She finds herself unable to control the dreams that have invaded her, snuffing out her soul and her willpower (Oe I 1020). She wonders if she has ever truly lived at all, or whether she has simply been a ghostly actress performing a role less vital than that of a character in one of Ganse’s novels (Oe I 1021). Simone’s compulsion to murder Olivier’s aunt is, in part, an effort to master the lie, to reach its farthest limit (Oe I 987). The enterprise is ultimately futile, however, because all words become lost in “a sort of vain, echoless murmur” [vain murmure, sans aucun écho] (Oe I 991). The act of murdering someone will, she feels, help her to break out of her dreamstate: “Elle sentit renaître en elle cette impatience passionnée de l’acte à accomplir” [She felt reborn within herself the passionate impatience to accomplish an act] (Oe I 994), as if such a perversely authentic gesture might prove redemptive. Yet as she draws near to her quarry, her goal threatens to elude her. She arrives at the old woman’s house, but nothing

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seems the way it should be: “La scène tant de fois vécue par la pensée n’est plus qu’une sorte de mêlée confuse où elle ne parvient pas à distinguer, à surprendre le geste fatal” [The scene she had so often lived out in her mind is nothing more that a sort of confused jumble in which she could neither distinguish nor detect the fatal gesture] (Oe1004). She concentrates her mind and then, in the confusion and darkness, she commits the murder … or does she? “Dieu! est-il vrai que la chose est faite, accomplie, oubliée?” [God! is it true that the deed is done, accomplished, forgotten?] (Oe I 1004). But Simone – and the reader – have been tricked; she is still on the train, lulled by the hypnotic periodicity of the sputtering light bulb and the hum of the steam. More than a narrative device to give the reader access to the troubled recesses of Simone’s psyche, this seething half-sleep of hallucination allows submerged motives and intentions to float to the surface. By the time she does actually achieve her purpose, it is evident that, beyond her longing for action and her contemptuous desire to break definitively with social convention, the murder is a gesture of self-annihilation, “une manière de suicide, moins la chute immédiate, le vertigineux glissement vers le néant” [a kind of suicide, less a direct fall than a vertiginous sliding toward nothingness] (Oe I 1021): “C’était contre elle-même et non contre la ridicule petite vieille qu’elle avait commis ce crime, elle en était la véritable victime” [It was against herself and not against the ridiculous old woman that she had committed this crime; she was its true victim] (Oe I 1005). In this context, while Simone creeps through the dimly lit corridors of her victim’s house, the mirror image reappears. Finding an old looking-glass, she searches its worn surface for her reflection; it emerges only indistinctly, as if from disturbed waters. She can only discern hands, but they appear barely human, like two pale flowers (Oe I 1017). Her body has, as it were, vaporized, its perimeters having melted in the evening twilight. This moment, in which Simone realizes she

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has lost contact not only with the world around her but also with her own incarnate self, is more chilling than the murder. A madness invades the core of her being: Toute folie, à son paroxysme, finit par découvrir dans l’homme, ainsi que la dernière assise de l’âme, cette haine secrète de soi-même qui est au plus profond de sa vie – probablement de toute vie. (Oe I 1017) [All madness, at its climax, exposes within man, at the very bottom stratum of his soul, this secret hatred of self buried in the very depths of his life – probably of all life.] Bernanos’s theology is plain: hatred, especially self-hatred, is disincarnational. Its significance is best appreciated if we retrace our steps to Olivier and Philippe for a moment. In Simone’s misdirected, though instinctive, yearning to act, she clings tenaciously to a vague belief that genuine action requires self-sacrifice. Her mistake is to confuse self-sacrifice with self-destruction. Philippe, for his part, understands quite well that authentic human action is always self-denying, but not to the point of suicide. In his view, however, the modern world has made authentic action impossible for him: “J’ignorerai toujours si, en d’autres temps, j’eusse été un héros ou un saint. Je déclare simplement que celui où j’ai la disgrâce de vivre ne me fournit pas la moindre occasion de tenter l’expérience avec la plus petite chance de succès.” (Oe I 954) [“I’ll never know whether, in some other age, I would have been a saint or a hero. What I do know is that the one in which I have the dishonour to live provides me with no chance of attempting such a venture with the least likelihood of success.”] Olivier echoes this complaint. What, he asks, has heroism become in the shadow of the Great War?

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“Un héros maintenant, nous savons ce que c’est! C’est un grotesque en zinc, avec un casque de zinc, un fusil en zinc, une capote et une culotte de zinc, des molletières de zinc, et une femme nue, elle-même en zinc, couchée à ses godillots de zinc ou lui posant sur la tête une couronne de zinc. Voilà ce que nous pouvons voir, nous autres, depuis 1920, sur la plus minuscule place du plus pouilleux des villages français. Lâche? Je vous crois que je suis lâche! Et si vous n’aimez pas ça, tant pis!.” (Oe I 959) [“We know what a hero is now! A grotesque character in zinc, with a zinc helmet, a zinc rifle, a zinc greatcoat and zinc pants, zinc leggings, and a naked woman, herself made of zinc, lying upon his zinc boots or offering him a zinc crown. Since 1920 that’s what you can see in the smallest square of every flea-ridden village in France. A coward? You bet I’m a coward! And if you don’t like it, too bad!”] Both men are overwhelmed by a sense of futility. Philippe asks Olivier to give him one good reason why he should not commit suicide. Despite his best efforts, Olivier is unable to provide him with one (Oe I 895). When Olivier later asks Simone if he has any reason to live, she responds with chilling assurance: “Non, dit-elle simplement. Aucune” [“No,” she simply said. “None”] (Oe I 904). This moral paralysis is rooted in an inability to love anything or anyone. Even the intense attraction between Olivier and Simone is not love but a common desperation. Olivier admits more than once that he loves nothing. Moreover, he recognizes in himself the same “paroxysm of madness” that Bernanos will later reveal in Simone: “Je ne m’aime plus. Je ne peux pas vivre sans m’aimer” [“I don’t love myself anymore. I don’t want to live without loving myself”] (Oe I 966). These three characters share a common death-wish: Simone will murder in order to destroy herself; Olivier embraces humiliation because “c’est une autre manière de me tuer” [“it’s another way of killing

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myself”] (Oe I 967), and Philippe chooses a more efficient means of ending his life, with a revolver. That a generation in the full bloom of youth, which has emancipated itself from all moral and religious constraints, making a god of pleasure instead, should be so mired in unhappiness is an irony that Bernanos grimly drives home. In one of those twists whereby the author allows a malevolent character to enjoy a glimpse of the truth, the parasitic psychiatrist, Dr Lipote, correctly identifies the problem besetting youth. For one perceptive moment, Lipote sees that the modern world, although in one way post-Christian, has never succeeded in divesting itself of the residual “poisons” of Christianity: “Tous ces gens n’ont l’air empressés que de jouir, mais ils ont quelque part, dans un coin secret de leur vie, un autel dédié à la souffrance. Et s’ils courent après l’or – qui n’est en somme que le signe matériel de la jouissance – c’est avec un reste de honte, parce que la Pauvreté – la sainte Pauvreté – leur en impose toujours.” (Oe I 941) [“All these people look as if they have nothing else to do but hurry off to enjoy themselves, but somewhere, in some secret corner of their lives, they have erected an altar dedicated to suffering. And if they pursue money – which is really nothing more than a concrete sign of pleasure – they do it with a residue of shame, because Poverty – holy Poverty – never ceases to impress them.”] However trenchant this observation may be, Lipote’s subsequent analysis of Olivier as one who has escaped the effects of this lingering Christian noxiousness is quite mistaken. In fact, it is Olivier who takes up Lipote’s argument in a monologue addressed to Simone. There is something suspicious, he declares, about a generation that tries too hard to disobey the commandments of a God they profess not to believe in. It is further clear to him that their youthful vice exasperates rather than satisfies. It is, he says, the “old Christian blood” [“ce vieux sang chrétien”] (Oe I 969) still flowing in their

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veins that turns their pleasure into a kind of torture. He then expounds upon his generation’s self-hatred which, in his view, has a very particular focus. Again he addresses Simone: “Vous vous haïssez tous …. Vous haïssez votre plaisir. Oui, vous haïssez votre corps d’une haine sournoise, amère. Vous le haïssez dès l’enfance – une haine d’enfant a seule ce caractère de férocité trouble, ingénue, ce rictus cruel … Allez! Allez! le christianisme est bien dans vos moelles, et votre fameuse démoralisation d’après guerre, savez-vous ce qu’elle a fait? Elle a restauré la notion du péché. La notion de péché sans la grâce, imbéciles! Vous méprisez votre corps parce qu’il est l’instrument du péché.” (Oe I 969) [“You hate yourselves, all of you … You hate your pleasure. Yes, you hate your bodies in a bitter, deceitful way. You have hated them since childhood – only a child’s hatred has that artless ferocity, that cruel grin. … Come on! Christianity is in your bones, and as for your famous postwar demoralization, do you know what it produced? It restored the notion of sin. The notion of sin, but without grace, you idiots! You despise your bodies because they are the instruments of sin.”] Modern European angst is therefore seen as springing from a lethal conjunction of a Christian consciousness, or subconsciousness, and a language stripped of Christian concepts of forgiveness. Guilt has no outlet, no means of resolution, and so turns against the body, which is both the field of pleasure and the metaphor for despair. The body is sin without redemption and decay without resurrection. In the end, asserts Olivier, Bernanos’s faithful spokesman in this passage at least, a dispossession, a strange alienation of mind and body, develops: “Car vous ne possédez pas votre corps, ou vous ne croyez le posséder qu’à de rares minutes, lorsque, ayant

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épuisé toutes les ressources de votre horrible lucidité, vous semblez gésir côte à côte, ainsi que deux bêtes farouches.” (Oe I 969) [“For you do not own your bodies, or you do not think you own them, except during those rare moments when, having exhausted all the resources of your horrible lucidity, you seem to lie down together side by side like two savage beasts.”] The phantasmagoric atmosphere that Bernanos creates in Un Mauvais rêve – the blurring of dream and reality, the tension between impotence and act, and particularly the mirrors that fail to reflect – are all brilliantly summed up in Olivier’s monologue. The Word Made Flesh is absent from this novel, just as it seems absent from a world whose fundamental disincarnational thrust is fuelled by hatred and shame.

the dead The adolescent Philippe (no relation to his namesake in Un Mauvais rêve), known by his nickname Steeny, dominates the first six chapters of M. Ouine, Bernanos’s “great novel” (Bush, L’Angoisse du mystère 19). He longs for “La route! La route!” (Oe I 1375), the open, infinite road that would deliver him from the suffocating, contrived femininity of the house of his apparently widowed mother. He dreams of this path to liberty and, perhaps, to a hero worthy of his esteem. When he finally sets out on his journey, his unlikely destination is a decaying château inhabited by, among others, a tubercular retired professor of languages, M. Ouine. There, Philippe will lose his childhood innocence when he is made to taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He sets out with the mad châtelaine, Madame de Néréis, whom the villagers derisively call “Jambe-de-Laine” (“WoollyLeg”), who rides a carriage drawn by an enormous mare throughout the countryside as if pursued by ghosts (OE I 1359). Steeny is not afraid of her, although the ghosts are

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surely real and the madness palpable. Perhaps he is as anaesthetized by the exhilarating grotesqueness of the moment as Jambe-de-Laine is by ether, a drug whose odour hangs about her. The short voyage to her château and to M. Ouine has a pulse that seems both to beat wildly with the châtelaine’s frenetic lunacy and to pound with the cadence of the wild mare. Steeny is caught up in this galloping nightmare, speeding along to the “rythme accéléré, farouche, d’un rêve probablement insensé” [fierce, accelerated rhythm of a demented dream] (Oe I 1360). When Steeny finally arrives at the château he is escorted to the bedroom of the eponymous professor where, no longer swept along by Jambe-de-Laine’s frenzied delusions, he finds himself “submerged” – the water imagery is pointed – in a dream of another sort: M. Ouine’s dream. The room is as quiet as can be; not a single sound disturbs “l’illusion d’une espèce de transparence sonore” [the illusion of a kind of sonorous transparency] (Oe I 1367). M. Ouine, Steeny later tells his crippled friend, Guillaume, is receptive to every kind of dream (Oe I 1384); and even the room itself, whose very walls seem to ooze a sleep-inducing narcotic, is “rich in dreams” [riche en rêves] (Oe I 1362). In this womb-like recess, the shadows seem solidly real. Why else, after Steeny delivers a long monologue to M. Ouine, would the professor’s answer come from the opposite side of the room? “Vous venez de tenir un discours à mon ombre, remarque tranquillement le professeur de langues. C’est bien curieux” [“You just made a speech to my shadow,” the professor of languages remarked softly. “It’s very strange”] (Oe I 1374). But this remark in disingenuous: there is nothing at all strange about Steeny’s error, which is an understandable result of M. Ouine’s deliberate cultivation of the disincarnate. Steeny’s later account of his visit to the bedroom is, therefore, imbued with uncertainty: “Et puis j’ai bu comme je n’avais jamais bu, mon cher. Alors, il a dû me coucher dans son lit. Peut-être l’ai-je vu après, un peu plus tard … Peut-être l’ai-je vu, peut-être

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ne l’ai-je pas vu, peut-être n’était-ce qu’un rêve?” (Oe I 1383) [“And then, my friend, I drank as I’ve never drunk before. So he must have put me into his bed. Maybe I saw him after, a little later. Maybe I saw him, maybe I didn’t see him, maybe it was just a dream?”] The ether, the drink, the shadows, the silence, the very physical structure of the room all work together, enveloping and lulling until the order of reality seems inverted. Steeny dreams of the eternal miracle of water that is limpid and all-enfolding (Oe 1367). This image connotes death, a demonic force within the old château and within M. Ouine himself: Il a dressé brusquement la tête et le temps d’un éclair – ô rêve absurde! – Steeny a cru reconnaître le compagnon prédestiné de sa vie, l’initiateur, le héros poursuivi à travers tant de livres … Il jette lui aussi la tête en arrière, affronte il ne sait quel défi porté par cette maison même et ses puissances secrètes, servantes diligentes de la plus secrète de toutes, la Mort – la Mort à l’ouvrage si près d’eux, sous leurs pieds – M. Ouine caresse toujours son chapeau. (Oe I 1363) [He suddenly lifted up his head and, in a flash – oh ridiculous dream! – Steeny thought he recognized the predestined companion of his life, the pioneer, the hero he had pursued through so many books … He threw his head back to meet the mysterious challenge issued by this house and its powerful secrets, the diligent servants of the most secret of them all, Death – Death at work so close to them, under their very feet – M. Ouine was still caressing his hat.] M. Ouine promises Steeny that he will teach him to “love” death (Oe I 1365). Yet what kind of death is the professor seeking to seduce the boy with? Certainly the château itself, a powerful symbol of decay, is putrescent – its odour emanates

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from the gangrenous body of the châtelaine, its rattle resonates in the tubercular vibrations of M. Ouine’s wheezing lungs. This is the very corruption that Steeny, poised upon the threshold of manhood, fears. It is a black hole into which he is willing to throw himself for fear of falling in by accident. On a theological level, there is no doubt that the real death the old man invites Steeny to love is the death of innocence, made concrete in his sexual molestation of the boy at the night’s end. The forbidden fruit M. Ouine proffers is the knowledge of good and evil, the omnipotence of God himself. This is the quintessential bad dream, the primordial delusion that opens the way to alienation and corruption. Steeny’s dreams, which seem so fecund in M. Ouine’s little room, are actually vehicles of self-destruction, a delusion exposed by his friend Guillaume, who warns Steeny that he is using M. Ouine against himself: “Votre avidité, votre dureté, votre passion de revanche – cette rage à vous contredire, à vous renier … Tenez votre admiration pour M. Ouine, votre idée d’un héroisme à rebours – Hélas! Philippe, lorsque vous serez las des luttes contre vous-même, il sera trop tard, je serai mort.” (Oe I 1389) [“Your greed, your hardness, your passion for revenge – this furious need to contradict yourself, to deny yourself … Take your admiration for M. Ouine, your idea of heroism turned inside out – Alas! Philippe, when you have grown tired of these struggles against yourself, it will be too late, I will be dead.”] Steeny’s taste for what is “à rebours” – a term that appears so often in Bernanos – explains his attraction to the small insular world of M. Ouine’s bedroom where darkness is favoured over light, death over life, and bad dreams over things of substance, the inverted order of the demonic. Before making his second trip to the château, Steeny professes his persisting faith in “la route”: “Je n’ai jamais aimé

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que les routes” [“I have never loved anything but the roadway”] (Oe I 1408). The irony of this creed is that the quiddity of the “route” seems to dissolve at a touch. Even before arriving at the house of shadows, again in the company of the mad Châtelaine, the voyage itself assumes an aspect of unreality: “Un moment plus tard, ils roulent ensemble vers la maison ténébreuse. Comme tout cela ressemble à un rêve” [A moment later they were racing along toward the gloomy house. How it all seemed like a dream] (Oe I 1417). Whipping her horse to a galloping fury, Jambe-de-Laine is the conjuror of this enveloping dream. Although she appears in relatively few scenes, she exerts a powerful influence upon Steeny and ultimately upon the villagers as a whole who, in a frenzy of rage, will collectively murder her. Yet, despite the force of her wild personality, she is ironically so ethereal as to be almost spectral. In fact, when describing her physical makeup, Bernanos consistently underscores the tenuousness of her bodily presence, as if it were threatened by imminent sublimation. Her own descriptions of her body, for example, draw attention to its translucent ephemerality: “Dieu! je n’ai jamais senti mon corps si fragile, une membrane, une simple membrane de peau – on doit voir au travers – une membrane de peau qu’une piqûre d’épingle eût fait éclater – plouf!” (Oe I 1416) [“My God! My body has never felt so fragile, nothing but a membrane of skin – you must be able to see right through me – a membrane of skin that a pin-prick could burst – poof!”] Her gestures, Steeny remarks, seem vague and incomplete, like those of an exhausted swimmer being swept away by the current. Perhaps her body is being consumed by the bad dream. How else can her increasing lack of substance be accounted for? At one point, for instance, she looks like an almost disembodied creature unnaturally suspended in the air (Oe I 1421). As with the dream-walkers of Un Mauvais rêve, the

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châtelaine’s physical disintegration signifies, not something passive, but an active, smouldering self-hatred that focuses with deliberate intention upon her own corporality. Her response to Steeny’s queries about her feelings for M. Ouine is a case in point: “Je le déteste autant que mon propre corps, telle est la vérité. Regarde: je le couvre de vieux chiffons ridicules, je ne prends nul soin de lui, mon plaisir est de l’humilier” [“I hate him just as much as I hate my own body, that’s the truth. Look: I cover it with these ridiculous old rags, I don’t look after it at all, I take pleasure in humiliating it” (Oe I 1424). Bernanos thus sets up the pretext for an anti-incarnational diatribe. The problem of the body, however, is nowhere more acute than in the case of Arsène, the village mayor, who declines pitifully into insanity. Unlike Jambe-de-Laine, he makes no attempt deliberately to humiliate his body, since it has itself become the very sign of his humiliation. Instead the mayor washes his corpulent form obsessively, scrubbing so vigorously that his skin turns as red as a tomato (Oe I 1436). It is not some invisible impurity that he is trying to eradicate, but the flesh itself. The contamination is too pervasive – he believes that even the water is impure – for any other solution. His later suicide is the final cleansing gesture. Unlike those of other characters, Arsène’s attitude toward his body is not linked to dreams as such but to the ideas that haunt him, although, from a Bernanosian point of view, it would be pointless to quibble over the distinction. As Vandomme, another tortured character, puts it, evil comes from a brain that is always at work: “l’animal monstrueux, informe et mou dans sa gaine comme un ver, pompeur infatigable” [“the monstrous animal, formless and soft in its cocoon like a worm, tirelessly pumping sewage] (Oe I 1461).” The parasite that gnaws at Arsène’s mind is the memory of a life of sexual excess and a terrible obsession with decay. During his constant, frustrated attempts to convey the depth and significance of his state to his uncomprehending wife, he uses the innocuous metaphor of a pipe to describe the evil that is destroying him:

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“On est jeune, on a des idées, c’est le sang qui veut ça, personne n’y peut rien. Mais alors t’as le droit de choisir, tu prends une idée comme ta pipe, la pipe finie tu craches, et adieu! Seulement un jour, voilà que t’as beau mettre la pipe dans le tiroir, bernique! le tabac n’est plus dans ta pipe, il est dans ton nez, dans ta gorge, dans ton ventre, il te sort par la peau jour et nuit, tu es tombé dans le jus, quoi! comme une mouche.” (Oe I 1439) [“When you’re young, you’ve got ideas. It’s in the blood, nobody can do anything about it. But then you have the right to choose, you take up an idea like your pipe; when the pipe’s finished you spit, and Goodbye! Then one day you try to put your pipe away in a drawer, but there’s no way! The tobacco isn’t just in your pipe any more, it’s in your nose, in your throat, in your gut, it comes out through your skin day and night. You’ve fallen into the soup, like a fly.”] Body imagery is conspicuous in Arsène’s attempt to identify the essence of his suffering. Even though he may be speaking of something that exists in the mind, he evokes it in physical terms as if his ideas had acquired a perverse incarnation. Having invaded the flesh, as it were, they give off a foul odour. Therefore, from Arsène’s perspective, it is not the mind that must be liberated from the tormenting goblins, but the body, which must be scrubbed into a purer state or, failing that, destroyed. This is not to say that he cannot understand that his malaise transcends mere physical considerations. As he puts it, men, women, beasts, water, earth, and even the very air, may “stink” but he knows intuitively that if there is a disinfectant powerful enough to eliminate the odour, it is a spiritual one. This is a truth that his doctor-cum-psychiatrist cannot understand. Like other Bernanosian characters who are interested in modern psychiatry, the village doctor does more to irritate than to heal. To him, Arsène is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill sex maniac (Oe I 1525). The village priest knows better: Arsène’s crisis is one of compassion; he

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has made himself his own enemy (Oe I 1517), and his real sin is not promiscuity but the deliberate refusal to take pity upon himself. Is self-hatred, then, the mysterious and unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit of which Christ spoke? Bernanos certainly seems to think so, as he shows in the exasperated priest’s vain pleas to the now suicidal mayor: “La haine qu’on se porte à soi-même est probablement celle entre toutes pour laquelle il n’est pas de pardon” [“The hatred one directs toward oneself is probably the one among all others for which there is no forgiveness”] (Oe I 1521). But Arsène immediately exclaims: “There is no forgiveness!” [“Point de pardon”] (Oe I 1521). The concept of self-forgiveness is unacceptable to him, and the notion of being forgiven is inconceivable. The absolute forgiveness that only God can offer, the priest tells the doctor, is unintelligible to a society that has been deprived by scientific positivism of the very words “repentance” and “redemption” (Oe I 1509). Arsène is thus left with a feeling of self-loathing that characteristically fixes on the flesh in a punishing way. During his disputes with the doctor over the nature of Arsène’s illness, the priest makes two central, though abstruse, prophecies, both of which concern the body. The first, made before the mayor’s suicide, deserves to be quoted at some length: “Le blasphème, monsieur, engage dangereusement l’âme, mais il l’engage. L’expérience même prouve que la révolte de l’homme reste un acte mytérieux dont le démon n’a peut-être pas tout le secret. Au lieu que le silence … Oui, monsieur, l’heure vient (peut-être est-elle déjà venue?) où le désir qu’on croit avoir muré au fond de la conscience et qui y a perdu jusqu’à son nom va éclater son sépulcre. Et si toute autre issue lui est fermée, il en trouvera une dans la chair et le sang – oui, monsieur – vous la verrez paraître sous des formes inattendues et, j’ose le dire, hideuses, horribles. Il empoisonnera les intelligences, il pervertira les instincts et … qui sait? pourquoi le corps, notre misérable corps sans défense, ne paierait-il pas

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une fois de plus la rançon de … l’autre? une nouvelle rançon?” (Oe I 1509–10) [“Blasphemy, sir, engages the soul in a dangerous way, but it engages it. Experience itself proves that man’s revolt remains a mysterious act whose secret even the demon cannot fully comprehend. But as for silence … Yes the hour is coming (perhaps it has already come?) when the desire we think we have walled up in the the depths of consciousness, where even its very name was lost, is going to break out of its sepulchre. And if every other way out is closed to it, it will find another way through flesh and blood – yes – you will see it appear in unexpected forms, hideous, horrible. It will poison the intelligence, pervert the instinct and … who knows? why should not our body, our miserable, defenceless body, pay yet again the ransom of the … of the other? a new ransom?”] What is the priest really speaking about? At one level he is alluding to the Incarnation. The prophecy itself rests upon a sound theological base – that in Christ, the supernatural inserted itself into the physical realm in such a way that the two can no longer be distinguished. If the Incarnation provides the context for the prophecy, its meaning lies in Bernanos’s belief that as the Incarnation of Christ in his Church, the “Body of Christ,” is diminished in a world hostile to it, some new incarnation will emerge irrepressibly. The flesh itself will once again, as it did on the Cross, suffer to redeem the life of the spirit. All this is unfathomable to the positivist doctor, whose reaction is understandable to many readers. In the second prophecy, spoken to the same representative of science after Arsène’s suicide, the priest again explores the mystical idea that the flesh must somehow pay a price for the repressing of the spirit: “Vous aurez un jour la preuve qu’on ne fait pas au surnaturel sa part. Oui … lorsque vous aurez tari

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chez les êtres non seulement le langage mais jusqu’au sentiment de la pureté, jusqu’à la faculté de discernement du pur et de l’impur, il restera l’instinct. L’instinct sera plus fort que vos lois, vos mœurs. Et si l’instinct même est détruit, la souffrance subsistera encore, une souffrance à laquelle personne ne saura plus donner de nom, une épine empoisonnée au cœur des hommes. Supposons qu’un jour soit consommée l’espèce de révolution qu’appellent de leurs vœux les ingénieurs et les biologistes, que soit abolie toute hiérarchie des besoins, que la luxure apparaisse ainsi qu’un appétit des entrailles analogue aux autres et dont une stricte hygiène règle seule l’assouvissement, vous verrez! – oui, vous verrez! – surgir de toutes parts des maires de Fenouille qui tourneront contre eux, contre leur propre chair, une haine désormais aveugle.” (Oe I 1525) [“One day you will have proof that you have not given the supernatural its due. Yes … when you have deprived human beings not only of the language, but of the very sense of purity, of the ability to discern between the pure and the impure, there will still remain the instinct. The instinct will be stronger than your laws, your customs. And if the instinct itself is destroyed, then suffering will remain, a suffering that no one will be able to name, a poisoned thorn in the hearts of men. Let’s suppose that one day the revolution that engineers and biologists long for actually arrives, that any hierarchy of needs is abolished, that lust is seen as nothing more than a physical appetite analogous to any other, controlled solely by the requirements of a strict hygiene, you will see! – yes, you will see! – rising up from the four corners of the earth other mayors of Fenouille, who will turn against themselves, against their own flesh, a blind hatred.”] Later, the priest’s oration at the murdered boy’s funeral moves the issue of the body from the particular to the universal by

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placing it in a purely theological context. This sermon makes clear that the whole village is afflicted with the malaise that the main characters suffer from. The entire parish, he declares to an increasingly hostile congregation, is devoured by its dreams, its soul akin to that of a beast: “lente, rêveuse, toute travaillée d’une curiosité sans objet, pleine d’images à peine distinctes et dont le déroulement presque insensible s’accélère tout à coup, affole et martyrise le cerveau” [“slow, dreamy, tormented by idle curiosity, full of barely distinct images whose imperceptible development accelerates suddenly, maddens and tortures the mind”] (Oe I 1483). The parish, he continues, is consumed by boredom and reacts like a sleeping man enshrouded by his dreams (Oe I 1483). Its collective body does function, but only as a shadow of itself.8 The priest sees himself as the heart of this body, but however furiously it beats, it can pump nothing but air through veins created to channel God’s grace. The parish is a microcosm of the Church, a body that, like M. Ouine’s, is decomposing even as it draws its last shallow breaths: “Et la paroisse est une petite église dans la grande. Pas de paroisse sans la grande Eglise. Mais si la dernière paroisse mourrait par impossible, il n’y aurait plus d’Église, ni grande, ni petite, plus de rédemption, plus rien – Satan aurait visité son peuple.” (Oe I 1488) [“And a parish is a little church within the larger one. There can be no parish without the larger Church. But if by some remote chance the last parish should die, there would be no more Church, neither big nor small, no more redemption, no more anything – Satan would have visited his people.”]

8 Bernanos had initially entitled the novel La Paroisse morte (The Dead Parish).

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The priest may indict modern science for robbing humanity of the language of purity and forgiveness but the main culprits are Christians themselves. Bernanos’s polemical writings make this same point; namely, that each authentic member of the Body of Christ must be Christ’s flesh, and in this way Christ’s presence made visible. The parish is guilty of not being the Word-made-Flesh for those who, like the mayor, so desperately and blindly seek this presence. Although it follows logically that, as each small body becomes corrupt the larger Body is endangered – “no more Redemption, no more anything” – Bernanos’s faith in Christ’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail rules out any such apocalypse; the priest therefore adds the important qualification “par impossible” to his dark vision. Nevertheless, the sermon’s main theme is dis-Incarnation, the corollary of which is the advent of the anti-Christ. It seems likely that this Demon in the flesh, aping the Incarnation whose presence has already been diminished by unfaithful Christians, is another instance of the priest’s prophecy of the flesh erupting in new “hideous” forms. It is a vision of an apostate people, lost in bad dreams, obsessed and yet repelled by the flesh, as members of a joyless and malignant Body. We now come to the last chapter of M. Ouine, which is best treated as a separate entity. It was written in 1940, four years after the penultimate chapter and eight years after Bernanos had begun the novel. Except for these final pages, Bernanos abandoned the novel after 1936, never to write another. The explanations for this decision are varied. But certainly the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which inspired Bernanos to become an anti-fascist pamphleteer, played a significant role. But there is another reason: for four years after completing the penultimate chapter (chapter 18, written in Majorca between April and May of 1936), Bernanos contemplated the eponymous hero of his novel with agonizing indecision, quite unable to resolve the great creative dream begun in 1932. In short, he did not know what to do with M. Ouine.

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The disastrous events of 1940, which included the fall of France, freed him from this creative paralysis. This last chapter, which brings us back to Steeny and M. Ouine, contains a defining image on its first page. Of the dying professor, Mme Marchal, the housekeeper, says to Steeny: “Il est plein de vent comme une outre” [“He’s full of wind, like a goatskin”] (Oe I 1545). In one sense, she is simply describing the cavernous whistling of diseased lungs. Yet the power of the simile transcends mere pathology. The goatskin is bloated, not with wine, but with nothing at all. It is an image of emptiness, the principal motif of this beginning of the end. In chapter 19 Bernanos ingeniously uses such poetic images to make the void tangible. The bottle of port sitting between Steeny and M. Ouine, for example, is also empty. It assumes inflated proportions in Steeny’s imagination and inspires him to create a cynical parable in response to M. Ouine’s offer of a “secret.” Sailors rocked upon a stormy sea retrieve a bottle that presumably contains a message; but the bottle smashes and is lost before they can determine what, if anything, it contained, and they are all drowned. Steeny points out the moral: “Voilà ce que sont les secrets, monsieur Ouine. Il n’y a pas de secrets, la bouteille est toujours vide, ah! ah! …” [“So much for secrets, monsieur Ouine. There are no secrets, the bottle is always empty, ah! ah! …”] (Oe I 1552). There are several kinds of emptiness. And what of M. Ouine himself? He recalls his years of ravenous curiosity, his desire to know people’s secrets and the futility of it all. He returns to Mme Marchal’s image: “Je désirais, je m’enflais de désir au lieu de rassasier ma faim, je ne m’incorporais nulle substance, ni bien, ni mal, mon âme n’est qu’une outre pleine de vent” [“I lusted, I puffed myself up with desire instead of satisfying my hunger, I didn’t absorb anything substantial, neither good nor bad; my soul is nothing but a goatskin filled with air”] (Oe I 1552). In an unusual burst of sincerity, he concludes: “Je suis vide, moi aussi” [“I too am empty”] (Oe I 1550).

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Still, this is only a fragment of the truth, and the wineskin metaphor is only partially apt. If M. Ouine were truly empty, he would be capable of being filled. But his life has spiralled down into a nether world where the notion of emptiness itself has no meaning. When Steeny reflects aloud on the void that perhaps awaits us after death, M. Ouine bursts forth with the whole truth: “Imbécile! … S’il n’y a rien, je serais quelque chose, bonne ou mauvaise. C’est moi qui ne suis rien” [“Idiot! If there were nothing, I would be something, good or bad. It is I who am nothing”] (Oe I 1557). As if it were a random realignment of atoms, his imminent death holds no interest for him; as for life after death, what significance could survival have for one who, in the moral sense, had already ceased to exist? The concept of Final Judgment is nonsense for this dispassionate observer of the human drama, who himself eschews all action, both good and evil (Oe I 1557). If M. Ouine is nothing, it is precisely because he is loveless. On his deathbed he contemplates even the precious secrets of a lifetime with indifference: “Je voudrais maintenant les haïr, mais je ne les hais ni ne les aime” [“Now I would like to hate them, but I neither hate them nor love them”] (Oe I 1553). As for the victims of his past manipulation, “the playthings of a God” [“les amusements d’un Dieu”] (Oe I 1558), they were merely the prisoners of his curiosity. He may have mimed their Creator’s omnipotence, but never His love (Oe I 1559). Moribund, M. Ouine realizes that there remains not a modicum of compassion or of love, even for himself. He confesses to Steeny that he craves one last secret, but it is clear that he no longer truly believes in the power of secrets: “Cela me sauverait,” fit M. Ouine, d’une voix presque indifférente qui n’exprimait nullement le désir d’être sauvé en effet, mais plutôt un détachement haineux de son propre sort, une conviction glacée. (Oe I 1555) [“That would save me,” said M. Ouine, in an indifferent voice that expressed not the slightest desire to be really

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saved, but rather a hate-filled detachment from his own fate, an icy conviction.] As with other characters in both Un Mauvais rêve and M. Ouine, this lack of love, particularly love of self, condemns the individual to an attenuated existence. For M. Ouine, the fruit of so many years of hate, and even the pitiless governance of “souls,”which he considers the great achievement of his life, can no longer be considered real: “Ai-je fait réellement ce que je viens de dire? gémit M. Ouine. L’ai-je seulement voulu? L’ai-je rêvé? N’ai-je été qu’un regard, un œil ouvert et fixe, une convoitise impuissante?” [“Did I really do what I just said I did?” moaned M. Ouine. “Or did I just want to do it? Did I dream it? Was I merely an observer, a fixed eye, an impotent lust?”] (Oe I 1559). Past and present actuality are put in doubt. Has M. Ouine floated noiselessly, and perhaps unnoticed, through life, in the mistaken belief that he has truly engaged his victims while only passing among them like a spectre? Is he, as he says, “empty” or “nothing,” or is he indeed some sort of ghost? The possibility of his spectral circumstance seems, even to him, conceivable: “J’espère n’être pas encore un fantôme … Mais il m’est difficile de rien affirmer sur ce point” [“I hope I’m not yet a ghost … but it’s hard for me to be sure about that”] (Oe I 1547). At times, when M. Ouine seems little more than a blackened form outlined by the moonlight streaming through his bedroom window, Steeny cannot discern whether the consumptive is facing him or has turned his back. Yet, while M. Ouine’s physical form retreats into the penumbra, decomposing, literally and figuratively, before the boy’s very eyes, another dimension of the old professor assumes greater vigour, seemingly at the expense of his corrupting flesh. It is worth quoting in full a short but important conversation between M. Ouine and Mme Marchal, from the beginning of the chapter. The dying man emits an apparent death rattle which, premature, is transmuted into a deep cough. The housekeeper speaks first to Steeny and then directly to M. Ouine:

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“La poitrine se dégage, il va sûrement encore parler … A quoi donc ça va vous servir? demande-t-elle d’une voix plus douce. Tout ce qu’on dit ne se trouve-t-il pas déjà dans les livres? Aurez-vous jamais fini de faire la classe? – Je… suis… professeur, madame Marchal,” observe M. Ouine entre deux quintes. Il se soulève péniblement, penche la tête hors du lit. D’un geste rituel, la sage-femme lui tend le crachoir. “Professeur… de… langues,” continue M. Ouine avec un soulagement indicible. Il reprend de nouveau son souffle. “De langues vivantes, madame Marchal.” – C’est ce que je pensais, murmure la vieille en gagnant la porte, mais si bas que le malade n’a pas dû l’entendre. Vivantes! Hé! Hé! vivantes!…” Elle se retourne sur le seuil, et déjà dans l’ombre du couloir: “Vivantes!” jeta-t-elle d’une voix stridente, exaspérée, puis disparut. (Oe I 1545–46). [“The chest is loosening up, he’s going to talk again for sure … What good is it going to do you?” she asked in a gentler voice. “You can already find anything you have to say in books. Will you never stop playing the teacher?” “I… am… a professor, madame Marchal,” observed M. Ouine between two fits of coughing. With difficulty he raised himself up, leaned his head over the bed. In a ritual gesture, his nurse handed him the spittoon. “Professor… of… languages,” continued M. Ouine with inexpressible relief. He caught his breath again. “Of living languages, madame Marchal.” “That’s what I thought,” murmured the old woman as she reached the door, but so quietly that the sick man must not have heard her. “Living! Ha! Ha! living!…”

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She turned around in the doorway and from the shadows of the hallway: “Living!” she spat out in a strident, exasperated voice, then disappeared.] The dialogue moves inexorably toward the word “living.” M. Ouine is not just a professor; nor is he just a professor of languages; he is a professor of living languages. Why does Mme Marchal laugh so derisively as she repeats this significant adjective, not twice but three times? Is she, an untutored woman, simply amused by the unfamiliar notion of a “living” language, or is she a shrewd harridan who can see the irony of a dying man’s affirmation of living words? While M. Ouine lies in extremis, his words, the words he so loves, remain vibrant and perversely fecund. Often purposeless and always multitudinous, they are the stuff of his life: “Ainsi, d’ailleurs, ai-je discouru tout au long de ma vie solitaire, non pas que je me sois jamais beaucoup parlé à moi-même, au sens exact du mot, j’ai plutôt parlé pour éviter de m’entendre, je me disais n’importe quoi, cela m’était devenu aussi naturel qu’au ruminant la régurgitation du bol alimentaire.” (Oe I 1547) [“I might add as well that I have chattered away throughout my solitary life, not that I ever talked to myself very much, in the exact sense of that word, rather I talked so as to avoid hearing myself, I told myself anything at all, which became as natural to me as the regurgitation of the bolus to a ruminant.”] As M. Ouine succumbs to death, his words become ever more irrepressible, assuming, as it were, a life of their own. When Steeny accuses him of talking for nothing, the professor offers a trenchant explanation: “J’ai bien d’autres choses à dire, en effet, réplique posément M. Ouine. En vain ai-je, cette nuit, tâché de les mettre en ordre, elles s’échappent de moi toutes

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ensemble, je suis hors d’état de les retenir, tel est sans doute le premier symptôme de la corruption.” (Oe I 1546) [“I do have many other things to say,” replied M. Ouine calmly. “I’ve tried to put them all in order tonight, but in vain. They come out of me in bunches. I’m beyond holding onto them, which is undoubtedly the first sign of corruption.”] From his body, words emerge like devouring maggots; in death the old master of words becomes mastered by them. The significance of Steeny’s “héroïsme à rebours” has already been pointed out, and here the same depraved thrust is made manifest in what William Bush has termed M. Ouine’s “vie à rebours” (L’Angoisse du Mystère 184). M. Ouine’s deathbed declaration that he is being devoured by his soul transforms the substance of life into the principle of its destruction, and he dies with the very image on his lips: “Je me suis retourné, positivement, j’ai fait de mon envers l’endroit, je me suis retourné comme un gant” [“I positively turned myself inside-out, I made my inside the outside, I turned myself inside-out like a glove”] (Oe I 1560). M. Ouine is the image of our civilization, specifically in this ascendancy of words over presence in the flesh. The modern power of knowledge, science, and ideology over the human person is summed up both in M. Ouine’s appalling life, one devoted to intellectual manipulation, and in his death, where the body surrenders to the cruel authority of empty secrets and compulsive loquacity. But to decode the full meaning of this “à rebours” image, we must look beyond the novel itself. Recall that Bernanos wrote the final chapter of M. Ouine in February and May of 1940 immediately after completing the first volume of his war writings, Les Enfants humiliés, penned between September 1939 and January 1940. As already mentioned in chapter I, it is in that essay that he made the radical statement that the modern world “recommence à rebours le mystère de l’Incarnation” [is recommencing the mystery of the Incarnation backwards”] (Oe II

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673). Not only does that assertion confirm that the “insideout” image was much on Bernanos’s mind during this troubled time but its simultaneity with this scene of M. Ouine reveals its most profound significance. M. Ouine is not just about the revolt against the flesh and the malevolent power of bad dreams and anti-human ideology; its vision of cultural perversity reaches into Christianity’s core and pulls it inside out: “And the Flesh became Words.” Bernanos would have been appalled in 1940 to know just how much human flesh would be sacrificed to the gods of ideology over the next five years. But the wellspring of this intense eruption of his creative energy lies deeper than his understanding of the tragedy of human folly and cruelty. M. Ouine is an allegory of the victory of darkness; a tale of dis-Incarnation. When France, his beloved “jewel” of Christendom, succumbed to the blitzkrieg in 1940 Bernanos was finally able to dispatch his eponymous hero. Only his faith in the final victory of Truth kept him from despair.

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part two

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3 A Prophetic Essayist: The Source (1940–1948)

Once Bernanos had written the last chapter of M. Ouine in 1940, he abandoned fiction. With the exception of his spiritual testament, Dialogues des Carmélites (Dialogues of the Carmelites), he spent his remaining years as an essayist of dazzling virtuosity. Two themes dominate these many hundreds of pages: the war, of course, and then, as early as 1942, the peace. His polemical focus is spiritual, his perspective consistently Christian. Bernanos’s role as an essayist is prophetic, in the Biblical sense of that word, and while he was never much interested in the historic and economic forces that brought about the century’s second European débâcle, he explored the invisible battle of good and evil of which Nazi aggression was merely symptomatic. For Bernanos, the Second World War was really about the de-Christianization of Europe. This is not to say that he blamed Hitlerism, however pagan its doctrines, for that process. Readers of Les Grands cimetières sous la lune might have predicted that Bernanos would turn conventional bourgeois wisdom on its head and blame Europe’s Christians for producing Hitler. He rejected out of hand as a “betrayal” of the truth the idea that European civilization – by which he meant Christian civilization, or what remained of it – was menaced from without “par quelques brigands qui trompent les peuples” [by a few outlaws who have duped the masses] (Oe III 411). The dictators had not, he felt, seduced the public

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by means of subterfuge, for they were plainly wolves in wolves’ clothing whose only law was force. Weak and frightened but not deceived, the Catholic middle class – for it was mainly they to whom he referred as “the public” – cringed before the demigods. What could have made such a travesty possible? Bernanos’s explanation is characteristic: “Une société qui n’ayant gardé du christianisme que le vocabulaire et certaines habitudes morales, incapables de résoudre ses propres contradictions, se trouve ainsi disponible pour n’importe quel ordre et pour n’importe quel maître” [A society that has kept nothing of Christianity except its vocabulary and certain moral habits, and is incapable of resolving its own contradictions, is ripe for any order and any master (Oe III 435). Hitler’s “new” order, which Bernanos understood as really an old order rejuvenated by German discipline and neo-pagan pseudo-philosophy, was built, as he saw it, on the ruins of Christianity. In his view, although Nazism boasted of a creating a new man in opposition to the Christian man, the monster had been fashioned long before the author of Mein Kampf had ever conceived of him. Hitler and his subordinates, Bernanos writes, had no more invented fascism than Lamartine and Hugo had created romanticism; that literary movement was the manifestation of a crisis of the Christian European consciousness, while fascism disclosed a crisis of the de-Christianized European consciousness (Oe III 465). The Nazi is not new; he was the old de-Christianized man, albeit now sporting Teutonic airs, a garish costume, and an arrogant strut. Yet this Nazi inspired in millions of Christians, some devout and some not, a common reaction, according to Bernanos: “Ils désespéraient de la justice et de la liberté, je veux dire qu’ils désespéraient de l’homme” [They despaired of justice and of liberty, by which I mean they despaired of man] (Oe III 465). “Despair” is an important word in Bernanos’s war lexicon. It appears with great frequency in the essays of the period, which betray a deep spiritual and emotional torment. He was making a heroic effort to find meaning in chaos and to discern truth in the whirlwind of

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lies. And his solid integrity required him to point an accusing finger even at the Church he loved so well. As for Hitler, whom Bernanos saw as a “désespéré” [despairing man] (Oe II 852), his primary role in this danse macabre was not to conquer the world, but to reduce it to a state of hopelessness (Oe III 363). He was a version of Bernanos’s humiliated adolescent, indelibly marked by the German shame of 1918: “M. Hitler a incarné le désespoir de l’Allemagne vaincue” [Mr Hitler is the incarnation of a conquered Germany’s despair] (Oe III 263). The verb “incarner” to describe this understanding of Hitler’s significance deserves particular notice. It could perhaps refer to nothing more than the dictator’s embodiment of the nation’s mood, but it does not. Its meaning is theological, and takes us into the deepest recesses of Bernanos’s analysis of the war years. Bernanos viewed Hitler as having done much more than put his seal upon European despair: “Les peuples ont fait de leur désespoir un dieu et ils l’adorent. Nous avons assez vécu pour voir le désespoir prendre chair – et incarnatus est” [The masses have fashioned their despair into a god they adore. We have lived long enough to see despair take flesh – et incarnatus est (Oe II 706). The Latin phrase is, of course, taken from the Nicene Creed, where it properly refers to Christ: “and he became Man.” On the surface, this blasphemous ascription might be simply another instance of how Bernanos liked to disturb pious sensibilities. It is far more than that. The credal phrase as used here reveals an essentially Bernanosian understanding of the Satanic. Hitler was an incarnation of evil and, as such, his power lay in the gift for mimicry, a perverse and terrible aping of the saving act of Christ’s Redemption: “Nous le verrons peut-être mourir et ressusciter le troisième jour, car le diable est un habile singe de Dieu. Nous le verrons revenir pour juger le monde” [We shall perhaps see him die and rise again on the third day, for the devil is a skilled mimic of God. We shall see him return to pass judgment on the world] (Oe II 706–7). Bernanos elaborates the image further by envisioning

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a new liturgy of despair in which bombs replace the elements of the Mass. The instruments of destruction, he writes, have become man’s bread and wine: “Si j’étais le diable, je ne voudrais pas comprendre autrement le mystère de la Transsubstantiation” [If I were the devil, I would not wish to understand the mystery of Transubstantiation in any other way] (Oe II 707). The War is an enormous destructive act, a diabolical “uncreation,” and the force of this dis-Incarnation is Hitler. This notion of inversion, that is, of undoing things, or redoing them backwards, is a theme as vital for Bernanos after 1940 as it was before. He sees Hitler, for example, not as creating a new order to Europe, but as bringing a new disorder, because his authority is incapable of creativity: “Il ne l’organise pas, et chacune de ses victoires, au contraire, le désorganise un peu plus” [He is not organizing it, and each of his victories, on the contrary, disorganizes it a little more] (Oe II 710). Even the spirit of childhood, that virtue so precious to Bernanos, is envisioned as rising up in a regressive form, a monstrous creature with the heart of a bull (Oe II 817–18), a degenerate image of the real thing. To Bernanos the modern divinization of force is a grotesque parody of the divinization of man in Christ (Oe III 299). The “à rebours” character of the war is more pointedly underscored in an essay dated January 1941, in which Bernanos writes of the “counter-Gospel of M. Rosenberg” (Oe III 280).1 What does this term “Counter-Gospel” signify? Perhaps Bernanos simply meant that an ethic of hate was supplanting that of love, or that a cult of despair was displacing evangelical hope. It certainly does mean these things, but we must presume that it has a more subtle meaning as well. In essence, the Gospel is the Good News of God-made-man and the principal message of a counter-Gospel would in all

1 The Rosenberg in question is of course Alfred Rosenberg, the principal Nazi theoretician.

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likelihood contradict this doctrine. This particular essay expounds the term no further, but in a letter written to his friend Jorge de Lima in the same month Bernanos clarifies his ideas on the subject. This letter gives the most succinct and definitive summary of his view of the war: “Il faut dinstinguer dans toutes les formes des guerres actuelles le but principal des puissances du mal – le Christ incarné” [Among all the various forms of warfare that are currently being waged it is important to distinguish the principal target of the power of evil – the incarnate Christ] (Cor II 375). This statement is a typical Bernanosian effort to dispose of conventional interpretations of the war as merely a clash of ideologies, or even as an act of lunacy. Such explanations, he tells de Lima, merely camouflage the true nature of the tragedy. It is not the huge bombs capable of destroying entire neighbourhoods which represent the real horror of war, but the rupture of the Christian world, the betrayal and corruption of Christian Europe. The devastation of consciences is “plus déplorable que la dévastation des corps” [more deplorable than the devastation of bodies] (Cor II 375). In other words, Bernanos saw the Second World War as evil’s bloody assault upon the Incarnation. Whatever the battle plan, the goal was always to reduce Christian faith to an abstraction. Although Bernanos’s frame of mind during these years was bleak, and his essays darkly prophetic, the divine hope that he always opposed to the banality of bourgeois optimism was never absent. Those who find his socio-political analysis, like his novels, to be sombre and depressing have missed the luminous theological thread that runs through them all. Bernanos could hardly claim to be as Catholic as he did if he believed evil would win in the end. He does, however, admit to despairing of the world, and had never placed his hope in it. He confessed in January 1941 that he had travelled through hell in the previous months, although he declared that “impenetrable darkness” [épaisse nuit] (Oe III 286) to be already behind him with the coming of the new year. France’s abdication and humiliation of 1940, which he pondered in

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the remote regions of his Brazilian exile, had brought him low, but his staunch belief in her spiritual vocation buoyed him anew. France, he assured his readers, was the “incarnation” (Oe III 286–7) of liberty, and nothing, neither the hollow piety of the French middle class, nor the collapse of the great French army, nor even the odium of Vichy, could alter that truth. By the end of 1941, he was able to see even the dictators as ironic agents in the renewal of France’s redemptive power: Les tyrans de l’Europe sont des tyrans de chair et de sang, la révolte de l’Europe aura, elle aussi, son poids de chair et de sang. Ainsi la Liberté se dégage peu à peu de ses définitions juridiques, elle redevient humaine, incarnée, elle redevient la compagne de l’homme. Dieu veuille qu’il réapprenne à la défendre, non comme un privilège gratuit, mais comme la chair de sa chair. (Oe III 350) [The tyrants of Europe are flesh and blood tyrants. Europe’s revolt will also be composed of flesh and blood. Thus, little by little, liberty is freeing itself from its juridical definitions; it is once more becoming human, incarnate; it is once more becoming man’s companion. May God grant that he will again learn to defend it, not as a gratuitous privilege, but as the flesh of his flesh.] Of course, whenever Bernanos writes of incarnation, the Incarnation looms constant in the background, the two inseparably linked. France’s vocation as an incarnation of liberty, he reminds his subjugated compatriots, is rooted in her Christian baptism by virtue of which the French are a divinized people: “Nous appartenons à un peuple baptisé – divinitatis consortes” [We belong to a baptised people – divinitatis consortes] (Oe III 570–1). As Allied success against Germany became ever more certain, Bernanos, in the contrary manner that infuriated both friend and foe, pronounced the war a disastrous failure. Yet, whatever

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his critics might have believed, such statements were not empty rhetoric devised merely to be contrary. When victory seemed inevitable and he wrote that the opposite was true, his thoughts were far from any battlefied other than the spiritual one from which he refused to retreat. It was 1944, but his mind drifted back to 1918 and another “guerre manqué,” another failed peace in the making (Oe III 648). His own membership in the lost generation of the Great War had inspired in him, not bitterness or pessimism, but a growing apprehension about the postwar world. The same “imbeciles” and the same economic-military alliance that had prepared the peace of Versailles were, he was certain, already serving up a pre-packaged peace with all the trimmings of the Atlantic Charter (Oe III 467–8). The Treaty of Versailles, he wrote in October 1944, had smoothed the way of the dictators in the same manner that alcoholism and syphilis lead to tuberculosis and cancer: “Les paix médiocres font les guerres totales” [A mediocre peace leads to total war] (Oe III 648). It is perhaps more accurate to say that for Bernanos it was not the war that was lost, but the peace. This war, like its predecessor, was a violent burlesque with a tragic dénouement. What exactly did Bernanos find so wrong with peace when it finally came? Surely the cessation of hostilities was, in itself, a good thing, not to mention the victory of the Western democracies over totalitarian tyranny. He was perfectly aware that by criticizing the outcome of the greatest conflict in human history and by calling for the overthrow of the immense politicaleconomic forces that had made victory possible, he was laying himself open to accusations of petulant troublemaking and recalcitrance: Si je croyais à la Charte de l’Atlantique, c’est-à-dire à une vraie paix, une paix vraiment généreuse, humaine, marquant la fin d’un régime inhumain, je souhaiterais que mon pays entrât dans cette paix avec confiance, sans arrière-pensée, n’y êut-il d’abord qu’une place modeste. Mais je ne crois pas qu’une telle paix soit proche. Qui le

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croit? La presse américaine elle-même discute chaque jour ouvertement de la guerre future sur un ton et avec des précisions que le public n’aurait certainement pas supporté en 1918, à la fin d’une épreuve pourtant beaucoup moins cruelle que celle-ci. On me reproche de parler de révolution, lorsque le monde a tant besoin de tranquilité, d’ordre. Mais il s’agit précisément de savoir si la paix qui se prépare donnera au monde cet ordre auquel il aspire, ou si elle n’aura d’autre but que de consolider, pour quelques années encore, un système générateur de catastrophes. (Oe III 647) [If I believed that the Atlantic Charter heralded a true peace, a truly generous, human peace that marked the end of an inhuman régime, I would want my country to enter into such a peace with confidence and without a second thought, even if at first its role were a modest one. But I do not believe that such a peace is at hand. Who does? Even the American press daily discusses the next war quite openly, in detail, and in a tone that certainly would not have been tolerated by the public in 1918, after a much less cruel trial than this one. I am reproached for speaking of revolution when the world is in such need of tranquillity and order. But what we should be asking ourselves is whether this peace that they are preparing will give the world the order that it seeks, or if its true aim is to consolidate, for a few more years, a system that generates nothing but catastrophe.] It might be supposed that, had Bernanos restricted himself to the targets of Stalinism and the sorry prospects for an eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union, he might have found voices of support. Or if he had been content to condemn the forces of American capitalism, he would perhaps have received a measure of adulation from the rising socialist and communist powers in France. As it was, he was vociferous in his belief that the capitalist state and the Marxist state were simply variations on a theme: the former was dominated

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by “the trusts,” while the latter was the state become the only trust, “le trust des trusts” [the trust of all trusts] (Oe III 652). By early 1945, he had the audacity to throw the fascists into the same stew: “Capitalistes, fascistes, marxistes, tous ces gens là se ressemblent” [Capitalists, fascists, marxists, those people are all alike] (Oe III 989–90). His point was simply that, if millions had died in 1914–18 and many millions more in 1939–45, it was not the fault of Hitler’s militarism or of Communism. If the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, and to a some degree the French, had given way to totalitarianism – aided, Bernanos wrote toward the end of 1944, by the gold of the Yankees, the cowardice of the middle-class, the venality of the press, and the corruption of the political establishment – it was because the real foundation upon which the ideologies of Left and Right alike were constructed was the demonic order of the modern world: Les institutions valent ce que vaut l’ordre qui les porte, et cet ordre, aujourd’hui, ne vaut rien. L’ordre actuel – ou du moins ce qu’on appelle de ce nom – est fondé sur une erreur absolue: la primauté de l’économique. (Oe III 656) [Institutions carry the same value as the order which sustains them, and today that order is worth nothing. The current order – at least that is what they call it – is founded upon an essential error: the primacy of the economic.] Writing not from the economist’s narrow perch but from the visionary’s wider perspective, Bernanos argued that this primacy requires the sacrifice of millions of human beings from time to time in order to balance unstable markets or to expropriate oil fields or coal mines (Oe III 656). In this process he saw a fundamental evil of modern civilization: the demonic inversion of the proper order of creation – man at the service of a system, the incarnate made subject to the disincarnate. His renunciation of all postwar optimism made him nostalgic, as in his youthful days, for the monarchy:

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Un roi n’est pas pour moi que le premier serviteur du peuple, le protecteur naturel du peuple contre les puissances oligarchies – hier les féodaux, à présent les trusts – il est le droit du peuple incarné, le droit et l’honneur du peuple. (Oe III 654) [For me a king is simply the principal servant of his people, the natural protector of the people against the forces of oligarchy – in the past they were the feudal lords, today they are the trusts – he is the incarnation of the people’s rights, their rights and their honour.] This reverence for kingship may seem politically unsophisticated, just as his assessment of the global economy may seem naive, but these views underscore all the same his passionate defence of humanity. Exactly against what, however, was he defending it? Perhaps the very complexities of world politics and economics compelled him to endow this abstract foe with distinct, concrete features. A honed perception of the peril to civilization emerges in his last war essay of 1944, the final sentence of which is especially trenchant: Mais les politiques n’osent pas avouer qu’après avoir subi la guerre, ils sont déjà résignés à subir aussi la paix, que la guerre ou la paix ne sont plus maintenant des œuvres humaines, voulues par l’homme, mais deux aspects de la même fatalité qui entraîne vers d’autres catastrophes une humanité qui ne veut plus ni le mal ni le bien, ni la vie ni la mort, et dont le rêve inavouable, inavoué, serait qu’on inventât pour elle des machines qui la dispensent de penser, de vouloir, de prévoir, des machines si parfaites, qu’elle pourrait les caresser comme des femmes, et les adorer comme des dieux. (Oe III 660) [But politicians dare not admit that, after having endured the war, they are already resigned to endure the peace as well, that war and peace are no longer human creations but two aspects of the same fate that drags humanity into further catastrophes – a humanity that no longer

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wishes for good or evil, for life or death, and whose shameful, secret longing is for a machine that would spare humans the need to think, to desire, to anticipate … machines so perfect that it could caress them like a woman and worship them as a god.] In May 1945, days after the collapse of Germany, upon leaving Brazil, he sounded the same warning, this time more epigrammatically: “Je ne veux pas que le monde ait à choisir demain entre la dictature des faux dieux et la démocratie des robots” [I would not like to see the world having to choose between a dictatorship of false gods and a democracy of robots (Oe III 687). The image of the robot encapsulated the menace of technology for him to the extent that he entitled his last completed volume of essays La France contre les robots. In it he sketched a brief history of what he termed the “invasion” of the Machine. What, he asked rhetorically, would a Frenchman of the thirteenth or fifteenth or seventeenth century have said if asked to imagine the future? They would have envisioned a civilization “près de la nature et prodigieusement raffinée” [close to nature and extraordinarilly refined] (Oe III 1023), a civilization attuned to the tradition of France’s long history. They would never have pictured the industrial society of the day because it is fundamentally alien, especially in its surprise attack upon the ancient order. The Machine does not represent progress or social evolution, but remains a foreign body, a virus, a rupture. Bernanos indignantly rejected any accusation of repining nostalgia, of reactionary lamentation for the “good old days,” which he never knew. It is not simply a question for him of the old versus the new; nor did he, in fact, object to the invention of the Machine as such. His objection was that the “multiplication prodigieuse” [prodigious multiplication] (Oe III 1025) of the Machine-Robot had created a new kind of man, a plastic aberration whose appetites are both satisfied and engineered by the whirling wheels and pounding pistons of industry: “Car la Machinerie ne crée pas seulement les

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machines, elle a aussi les moyens de créer artificiellement de nouveaux besoins qui assureront la vente de nouvelles machines” [For technology does not just create machines, it also has the means of artificially creating new appetites which in turn assure the sale of new machines] (Oe III 1025). Science did not invent technology’s vast factory, Bernanos insisted; it was “les Puissances de l’Argent” [the Power of Money] (Oe III 1043). The system was created by the disciples of greed, who took to heart the advice proffered by the liberal economists of the nineteenth century: “Make money!” [“Enrichissezvous!”] (Oe III 1045). Technology is a cancer, but Bernanos had the modesty and good sense to admit that, while radical surgery was urgently required, he himself had little practical advice to offer on how exactly it might be performed. But while the mechanics of the excision were beyond him, the conviction of his vision remained strong: “Je vous dénonce ce cancer” [Before you I denounce this cancer] (Oe III 1046). The Machine has many guises in Bernanos’s essays of the period. The term connotes an entire system as well as its constituent parts. Technological society is itself a machine, rotating at a dizzying speed, a society for which he coins a slogan: “Technique d’abord! technique partout!” [The system above all! The system everywhere!] (Oe III 1047). Within this vast mechanism, “Number” also reigns, in a civilization of quantity rather than quality that recreates society in its own image: “une société d’êtres non pas égaux, mais pareils, seulement reconnaissables à leurs empreintes digitales” [a society of beings not equal, but alike, distinguishable only by their fingerprints] (Oe III 1042). While the masses await the paradise of the five-hour work week and the twenty-four-hour amusement arcade, the Number Machine demands total obedience (Oe III 1047), exacting from them just as much labour as they are able to provide to serve technocracy. Its only enemy will be: “l’homme qui ne fait pas comme tout le monde” – ou encore: “l’homme qui a du temps à perdre” – ou simplement si vous voulez: “l’homme qui croit à autre chose qu’à la Technique” [the man who doesn’t behave

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like everybody else – or again: the man who has time to waste – or, if you like: the man who believes in something other than the System] (Oe III 1049). Bernanos also identifies another machine – the Brainwashing Machine, which makes it possible for any “imbécile” who controls “une radio, deux ou trois cinémas, et quelques journaux” [a radio, two or three cinemas and a few newspapers] (Oe III 1043) to make a mockery of universal suffrage. This machine has created that modern anomaly of a well-informed but essentially ignorant public. Individuals have become idiots, irresponsible, obedient servants of the collective will, professing belief in peace while in fact preparing to make war when the Machine requires it. What the imbecile does not understand is that the technocracy of peace and the technocracy of war are two heads of the same voracious hydra: Imbéciles! n’êtes-vous pas les fils ou les petits fils d’autres imbéciles qui, au temps de ma jeunesse, face à ce colossal Bazar qui fut la prétendue Exposition universelle de 1900, s’attendrissaient sur la noble émulation des concurrences commerciales, sur les luttes pacifiques de l’Industrie? … A quoi bon, puisque l’expérience de 1914 ne vous a pas suffi? Celle de 1940 ne vous servira d’ailleurs pas davantage … Trente, soixante, cent millions de morts ne vous détourneraient pas de votre idée fixe: “Aller plus vite, par n’importe quel moyen.” Aller vite? Mais aller où? … “Le café au lait à Paris, l’apéritif à Chandernagor et le dîner à San Francisco,” vous vous rendez compte! … Oh! dans la prochaine inévitable guerre, les tanks lance-flammes pourront cracher leur jet à deux mille mètres au lieu de cinquante, le visage de vos fils bouillir instantanément et leurs yeux sauter hors de l’orbite, chiens que vous êtes. (Oe III 1024–5) [Idiots! Are you not the sons and grandsons of those other idiots who, in my youth, got all choked up over the the nobility of commercial competition and Industry’s benign clashes of interest at that enormous Bazaar they

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called the World’s Fair of 1900? …What is the use, since the experience of 1914 seems to have had no effect on you? The experience of 1940 won’t do you much more good. … Thirty, sixty, a hundred million dead will never distract you from your obsession: “Go faster, whatever it takes.” Go faster? But go where? … “Café au lait in Paris, aperitif in Chandernagor, and dinner in San Francisco.” Can you imagine! … Oh! in the next inevitable war the flame-throwing tanks will be able to spit out their streams for two thousand metres instead of fifty, your sons’ faces will melt in seconds and their eyes will burst from their sockets, dogs that you are.] Bernanos believed that the “Civilization of Machines” would inevitably produce the War Machine (Oe III 1054). When over-production threatens to kill speculation with unsaleable merchandise, producing machines become killing machines (Oe III 1029). In short, the Machine compensates for overproduction by consuming the consumer. When this occurs, as Bernanos believed it did in 1914 and again in 1939, a disturbing and uniquely modern phenomenon is born: the gentleman killer. To illustrate, Bernanos sketches the portrait of the bomber pilot, the quintessence of the modern warrior: before reducing a city to ashes he has dinner with his wife and children. After a night of killing scores of women and children whom he never sees, he would take offence at being considered a savage medieval pillager and not a gentleman: “Je suis bon comme le pain, dirait-il volontiers, bon comme le pain et même, si vous y tenez, comme la lune. Le grincement de la roulette du dentiste me donne des attaques de nerfs et je m’arrêterais sans respect humain dans la rue pour aider les petits enfants à faire pipi. Mais ce que je fais, ou ne fais pas, lorsque je suis revêtu d’un uniforme, c’est-à-dire au cours de mon activité comme fonctionnaire de l’État, ne regarde personne.” (Oe III 1055)

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[“I’m as wholesome as apple pie,” he would readily declare, “as wholesome as apple pie and as gentle as a lamb. The grinding of the dentist’s drill scares the dickens out of me and I’d stop anywhere in the street to help little kids have a pee, regardless of what people might think. But what I do, or don’t do, when I’m in uniform, which is to say, in the course of my duties as a servant of the State, is nobody’s business.] The primitive weapons of old have given way to a prodigious modern assortment. Bernanos ironically claimed that it was often difficult to recognize the most inefficient of these machines, the one equipped with a brain (Oe III 1036). With this observation we reach the crux of Bernanos’s discourse on the evils of contemporary technology: in modern warfare, man and his killing machines are indistinguishable. And the truly demonic nature of the Civilization of Machines lies in the sacrilege of man being recreated in the image of his own creations. These views shed important light on the seemingly innocuous way in which Bernanos describes the new world order he saw emerging from the Second World War. Take, for example, the following passage from La France contre les robots: Nous n’assistons pas à la fin naturelle d’une grande civilisation humaine, mais à la naissance d’une civilisation inhumaine qui ne saurait s’établir que grâce à une vaste, à une immense, à une universelle stérilisation des hautes valeurs de la vie. (Oe III 1040) [We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of an inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilization of life’s highest values.] “Inhuman?” Does he mean “insensitive” or “barbarous” here? The word does have those connotations, but it also indicts a civilization for being anti-human, or “anti-man,” as

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he writes elsewhere. In Bernanos’s view, modern civilization works in a very hostile way against the humanity of mankind. Near the war’s end, when the liberation of Europe was on everyone’s mind, the human value that he believed most imperilled was, ironically, liberty. Deliverance from enemy occupation or from the shackles of dictatorship did not in itself equal freedom. Bernanos was quite certain that human liberty had been lost long before the advent of the dictators, and that it would not be restored with their downfall. Totalitarianism, he wrote in 1944, was not an invention of Hitler or of Mussolini – these men were no more than local manifestations of a general crisis, a puss-filled sore that was a symptom of a more widespread infection. Before the Nazis and the fascists were on the march, “millions and millions” had ceased to believe that liberty was essential and worst of all, had ceased to love it. The language of freedom reached a jubilant climax by 1944. When the United Nations was proclaiming the enduring resilience of Western democracy, Bernanos had the audacity to write of the “powerlessness of the Democracies” (Oe III 1005). He believed that they had waged war using totalitarian methods; that is, they had allowed the end to justify the means – and would now create a peace according to the “principles of dictatorship” [les principes de la dictature] (Oe III 1006). Bernanos viewed the Civilization of Machines – most painfully embodied in the atomic bomb, the machine to end all machines – as an Orwellian conspiracy against the inner person in favour of ceaseless, mindless activity, both psychical and physical. The nub of his concern was that liberty resides not in words or action, but within the human soul: On ne comprend absolument rien à la civilisation moderne si l’on n’admet pas d’abord qu’elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure. Hélas! la liberté n’est pourtant qu’en vous, imbéciles. (Oe III 1025) [We understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization if we do not first admit that it is a universal

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conspiracy against any sort of inner life. Alas! liberty is nowhere if it is not within you, idiots.] This assertion, which surely takes its inspiration from Pascal, is given a particularly Bernanosian flavour by his rejection of liberty as anything other than a living, breathing dimension of the human person at the most profound level. Three years later in 1947, in a lecture given to the Little Sisters of Charles de Foucauld in Tunisia, he clarified that this inner life is where human liberty either takes root or dies: La foi que quelques-uns d’entre vous se plaignent de ne pas connaître, elle est en eux, elle remplit leur vie intérieure, elle est cette vie intérieure même par quoi tout homme, riche ou pauvre, ignorant ou savant, peut prendre contact avec le divin, c’est-à-dire avec l’amour universel, dont la création tout entière n’est que le jaillissement inépuisable. Cette vie intérieure contre laquelle conspire notre civilisation inhumaine avec son activité délirante, son furieux besoin de distraction et cette abominable dissipation d’énergies spirituelles dégradées, par quoi s’écoule la substance même de l’humanité. (Oe III 1382) [That faith, which some complain about never having experienced, it is within them; it fills their inner life … it is that inner life itself through which every man, rich or poor, ignorant or learned, is able to make contact with the divine, that is to say with that universal love which is the inexhaustible wellspring of creation. The inner life: our inhuman civilization conspires against it with its frenzied activity, its prodigious need of distraction and its abominable dissipation of spiritual energy that saps the very substance of humanity.] Liberty, then, by its nature, is also part of the “substance” of humanity. It either becomes incarnate in communion with the divine or it dies. As always, though, this Bernanosian emphasis upon the incarnate is shown to be linked in his

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mind to the Incarnation, a connection that La France contre les robots makes unambiguous: J’affirme une fois de plus que l’avilissement de l’homme se marque à ce signe que les idées ne sont plus pour lui que des formules abstraites et conventionnelles, une espèce d’algèbre, comme si le Verbe ne se faisait plus chair, comme si l’Humanité reprenait en sens inverse, le chemin de l’Incarnation. (Oe III 1037) [I continue to maintain that the surest indication of man’s abasement is that ideas have become for him nothing more than conventional, abstract formulae, a sort of algebra, as if the Word were no longer becoming flesh, as if Humanity were walking backward along the path of the Incarnation.] Humanity is not the real target of the assault; the mechanization of humanity, the creation of the human robot, is part of the demonic strategy to conquer the Incarnate Word by eviscerating it of human substance. Note that Bernanos wrote “were no longer taking flesh,” and not “had not taken flesh,” because in the present moment the flesh emerges still-born from the robot’s steel belly. One suspects that Bernanos’s favourite liturgical prayer was close at hand, and so it was. In January 1945 Bernanos told a group of Brazilian students precisely why liberty is so precious: Il ne s’agit pas de savoir si cette liberté rend les hommes heureux, ou si même elle les rend moraux. Il ne s’agit pas de savoir si elle favorise plutôt le mal que le bien, car Dieu est le maître du mal comme du bien. Il me suffit qu’elle rende l’homme plus homme, plus digne de sa redoutable vocation d’homme, de sa vocation selon la nature, mais aussi de sa vocation surnaturelle, car celui que la liturgie de la messe invite à la participation de la divinité – divinitatis consortes – ne saurait rien renoncer de son risque sublime (“Conférence à l’Association

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Générale des Étudiants à Rio de Janeiro”) (In La France contre les robots 265). [It doesn’t matter whether this liberty makes men happier, or even more moral. It doesn’t matter whether it favours evil over good, for God is the master of both good and evil. For me it is sufficient that it makes man more man, more worthy of his honourable human vocation, of his natural vocation, but also of his supernatural vocation. For he whom the liturgy invites to participate in God’s divinity – divinitatis consortes – could never renounce this sublime risk.] In July 1945 Bernanos returned to France after seven years in South America. Once home, he set his sights on another threat to liberty. This time it was Marxism, “l’énorme Machine à faire le Bonheur Universel” [the enormous Machine for producing Universal Happiness] (Cor II 631). Affronted after the war by the prestige enjoyed by the Left, Bernanos condemned Marxism and its cherished robot, the homo economicus (Cor II 632), for being as inhuman as American-style capitalism. Yet, whatever Bernanos discussed with his usual journalistic vigour, whether it was the Marxist or the Capitalist Machine – or any other subject, for that matter – he always put it in the same theological context. When, for example, he ridiculed the irony of the Marxist’s atheistic dogmatism, he did so by setting it in opposition to what he saw as history’s defining moment: “Dieu s’est incarné dans l’homme, et Marx s’est incarné en Dieu” [God became incarnate as Man, and Marx became incarnate as God] (Oe III 1132). Of course, Bernanos did not expect to dissuade the Marxist intelligentsia from their idolatry, but he did hope to shock into awareness the increasing number of Catholic intellectuals and writers, like François Mauriac, who were gravitating to the Left. Catholic socialists, even Catholic Communists who had adopted the insoluble problem of a Christianized Marxism, were nothing more to Bernanos than a rag-tag band straggling behind the Marxist parade. They postured about social

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justice and were fraught with anxiety that they might be left behind in the surge toward the new tomorrow. Communists were simply deluded; Catholic Leftists were “imbéciles.” They surely knew, or should have known, that since the expulsion from Eden, machines that promised to fabricate universal happiness or universal justice were as doomed as the Tower of Babel; they knew – or should have known – that because of Original Sin the world was not reformable. The call for social justice from Catholic socialists, which Bernanos saw as an effort to make men alike rather than equal, was simply incompatible with Christianity. Certainly he was as scandalized by injustice as anyone, perhaps more; but, as he indicated in a letter dated April 1946, he put his faith, rather, in God’s Kingdom and God’s justice. After all, he wrote, a God who is whipped and crucified, and invites us to be whipped and crucified with Him, cannot possibly share the vision of those who have set out to make creation an egalitarian Arcadia (Cor II 631). In a world without heroism, without love or hate, where the “human dough” lacks yeast, the only justice that can triumph is Justice Incarnate: “La seule justice qui puisse vivre là-dedans sans pourrir, c’est la divine Justice des Béatitudes, la Justice incorruptible, le corps glorieux de la Justice ressuscitée” [The only justice that can survive here without rotting is the divine Justice of the Beatitudes, incorruptible Justice, the glorious body of resurrected Justice] (Oe III 1176). Creation cannot be reformed, but it has been redeemed, and Bernanos invites his countrymen to participate in that redemption. Divinization was, in fact, much on his mind during this period. In an article in La Bataille in April 1946, he asked his readers if injustice could possibly mean the same thing for a Marxist (a person emerging from the void only to return to it) and a Christian, a human being “qui croit à l’incarnation du Fils de Dieu et à la divinisation de l’humanité sur la croix” [who believes in the Incarnation of the Son of God and the divinization of humanity on the Cross]

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(Oe III 1131–2). In the same month he wrote a letter that ends in the following way: L’homme est-il tel que le christianisme le définit, c’est-à-dire un être déchu par le Péché, mais divinisé par la Grâce, un être dont la propre contradiction donne un sens à l’Univers, car l’Univers est cette contradiction même, qui ne peut être résolue que dans l’homme? Ou un simple animal, industrieux mais irresponsable? (Cor III 436) [Is man as Christianity defines him, that is, a being fallen because of sin but divinized by grace, a being whose own contradiction gives meaning to the universe, for the Universe is itself a contradiction that can only be resolved in man? Or is he simply an industrious but irresponsible animal? When Marxists spoke of the “problem of poverty” and its elimination in the new world order, Bernanos dismissed such talk as naive, albeit dangerous, self-deception. But when his fellow Catholics spoke in a similar vein, he denounced them with such virulence that well-intentioned and devout Christians, like Mauriac, were deeply grieved. However, the angry prophet was not deterred by a few wounded sensibilities. In the first place, as Bernanos made clear in a letter to Stanislas Fumet in March 1946, the best – in fact the only – way to free the poor was to voluntarily become poor oneself and to serve them (Cor III 429). Moreover, the Christian should see in the poor, not a socioeconomic conundrum to be solved but an icon to be venerated. It was not intellectual solidarity that was demanded, but a sincere desire to serve Jesus Christ in the poor, and the poor in Jesus Christ (Cor III 429). However odd, even scandalous, it may seem to the contemporary reader, Bernanos sincerely felt that the basic thrust of the Social Justice movement was anti-Incarnational. The suppression of poverty, he explained, subverts the Body of Christ:

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Mais si l’homme est réellement ce que je pense, je me permets de n’augurer rien de bon de cette sollicitude universelle pour le pauvre, qui coïncide mystérieusement, dangereusement – ou trop clairement – avec un reniement non moins universel du Pauvre des pauvres, en qui toute pauvreté se divinise. (Cor III 430) [But if man is really what I believe him to be, allow me to say that I see nothing good coming from this universal solicitude for the poor, which happens mysteriously to coincide with an equally universal rejection of the Poorest One of all the poor, in whom all poverty is divinized.] One would be quite wrong to deduce from this that Bernanos was in favour of human misery because it was good for the soul and guaranteed one a special place in Paradise. Rather, he adopted Charles Péguy’s distinction between “les pauvres” and “les misérables.” Le misérable dégradé, déshumanisé par la misère, ne peut plus porter témoignage que de l’effroyable injustice qui lui est faite, mais le Pauvre est le témoin de Jésus-Christ. (“Dans l’amitié de Léon Bloy” in Le Lendemain c’est vous 245) [The degraded wretch, dehumanized by misery, can bear witness to nothing other than to the terrible injustice that is done to him, but the Poor Man is a witness to Jesus Christ.] That a prominent Catholic writer could brazenly declare that, from a Christian point of view, a society without the poor was inconceivable, must have embarrassed the Catholic intelligentsia before their Marxist brothers-in-arms. Bernanos may well have been thinking of his own peripatetic and impecunious life, lived without many creature comforts. His existence was reduced to the essentials and free of all superfluous baggage. “Free” is the key word here, because Bernanos’s

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defense of poverty as a state blessed by Christ himself is very much linked to his postwar apologia for liberty: Cette société ne veut pas de pauvres, et il serait vraiment trop niais de croire que ce soit par sensibilité de cœur ou même d’entrailles, car nous la regardons agir, nous faisons le compte de ses charniers, de ses prisons, de ses camps de torture, de ses laboratoires de mort, et nous savons parfaitement que si l’Histoire nous en présente peut-être d’aussi féroces qu’elle, du moins n’en a-t-on jamais connu d’aussi volontaires et d’aussi lucides dans la férocité. La Société moderne ne veut pas de pauvres pour la même raison qu’elle ne voudrait pas de nobles, s’il lui restait assez d’honneur ou seulement de prestige pour faire des nobles. Elle ne peut comprendre, elle ne saurait comprendre que la pauvreté est aussi une libération, que le sort de la liberté des hommes est mystérieusement lié dans le monde à celui de la pauvreté. La Pauvreté fait des hommes libres, d’une certaine liberté innocente qui n’est évidemment pas celle des saints, c’est-à-dire des pauvres en esprit, des pauvres volontaires, des victimes volontaires de la pauvreté, mais qui suffisent à entretenir parmi nous ce feu couvant sous la cendre où, de génération en génération, s’élève tout à coup la haute flamme du pur amour. Car la liberté du saint n’est sans doute pas autre chose que la liberté du pauvre entièrement surnaturalisée, comme le fer dans la forge qui du rouge sombre passe au blanc. (Le Lendemain c’est vous 244–5) [This society doesn’t want any poor people, and it would be truly too imbecilic to believe that its apparent solicitude is due to any heartfelt, or even gut-felt, sensitivity. I have watched this society in action, I have counted its mass graves, its prisons, its torture camps, its laboratories of death, and I know perfectly well that, if there have been societies more savage than this one in the past, there has never been one so willingly and

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knowingly savage. Modern society doesn’t want poor people for the same reason that it doesn’t want nobility – even if it still possessed enough honour, or even prestige, to produce nobility. This society cannot understand, could never understand, that poverty is a liberation and that the fate of human freedom in this world is inextricably linked to poverty. Poverty makes men free, it grants them a kind of innocent freedom – not the freedom of the saints who are poor in spirit, voluntarily poor, willing victims of poverty, whose lives serve to keep the fire smouldering beneath the ashes, which, from generation to generation suddenly leaps up in a tall flame of pure love. For the freedom of a saint is really nothing other than a completely supernaturalized form of the freedom of the poor, in the same way that the iron in the forge progresses from deep red to white.] The postwar themes of honour, liberty, and poverty coalesce in this passage and, together, point to the saint who is the antithesis of the programmed, insensible robot. The saint’s free acceptance of the mystery of human suffering is, in itself, an act of love, the still point where the human and divine are one. During the winter of 1947–48 Bernanos returned briefly to fiction, for the first time since 1940, to compose Dialogues of the Carmelites. After this last work, he became bed-ridden in his final illness.

4 A Spiritual Testament: The Art (1940–1948)

Bernanos’s patriotism had a chauvinistic edge. In 1942, for example, he publicly addressed his countrymen with the words: “Europe is you – you are Europe” (Oe III 390). Even after the rout of 1940 and the stigma of the Vichy collaboration, he partially exonerated his homeland, as he did in 1947 during a lecture in Switzerland, by declaring that France had been betrayed by her intellectual elite. He felt sure that the singular destiny of the French people was nonetheless intact. France’s travails had caused him terrible anguish, of course, but his faith in his country remained steadfast because his patriotism was essentially an article of faith, an unwavering religious conviction: “Oui l’idée de patrie est une idée religieuse, que le christianisme a surnaturalisée tout entière” [Yes, the idea of the motherland is a religious idea that Christianity has completely supernaturalized] (Oe III 1275). During the immediate postwar years, this credal patriotism would allow him frequently to declare, however great the evidence to the contrary, that France would stand alone against the culture of technology and “la production sans limite pour la destruction sans mesure” [the infernal cycle of production without limit for destruction without measure] (Oe III 1283). French people would never seek their salvation in Robot Heaven. What was needed, he felt, was a total restoration of honour, to expunge the “spirit of Munich,” forever, first from among

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the French, and then, through them, from Western culture at large. Bernanos knew that such a renaissance was not imminent, and was certain that he would never live to see it (Oe III 4), but the seeds would surely be sown, as the painful time of deterioration would then give way to a new harvest in the hearts of Europeans. Such was the ineluctable destiny of France. In his mind, it had been called as a nation to save Christendom: “L’honneur français est un honneur chrétien, notre honneur est un honneur baptisé” [French honour is a Christian honour, our honour is a baptised honour] (Oe III 26). But how was all this to come about? In 1962 the distinguished scholar William Bush mentioned in passing that Bernanos’s polemical writings, particularly those that date from later than 1940, must be understood in the light of a close reading of Dialogues of the Carmelites1 (Souffrance 199). I would add to this lucid insight that the obverse is also true; that is, the Dialogues only become intelligible after one has pored over the several thousand pages of wartime and postwar journalistic prose. When, for example, the heroine of Dialogues, Blanche de la Force, humiliated by her cowardice, avows her proposed bargain with God: “Je lui sacrifie tout, j’abandonne tout, je renonce à tout pour qu’il me rende l’honneur” [I sacrifice everything to him, I renounce everything so that he might restore my honour] (Oe I 1583), one hears the unmistakable echo of the polemicist’s rallying call. The restoration of honour? Again, by what means? Certainly, none that Blanche, privileged daughter of the Marquis de la Force, could imagine as the play’s first scenes unfold.

1 In 1947 Bernanos’s Dominican friend, Father Bruckberger, asked him to write the script for a film based upon Gertrude von le Fort’s novel Die Letzte am Shaffot, which was inspired by an actual historical event, the guillotining of sixteen Carmelite nuns on 17 July 1794. The script that Bernanos produced was not what the producers wanted, and it ended up in the bottom of a trunk, where it was discovered by Albert Béguin after Bernanos’s death.

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Dialogues is about honour, but, a very Bernanosian kind of honour. The work takes place during the dark days of the Reign of Terror, a mirror image of Bernanos’s own world in its mass destruction, violence, and ruthless depreciation of the human person. When the Revolution’s “Representative” and his soldiers invade the cloistered sanctum of the Carmelite nuns at Compiègne, the exchange between the revolutionary fanatic and the prioress is reminiscent of Bernanos’s attack upon modern systems, whose agents assume a double role as middle-class gentlemen and killing machines: le commissaire: Le peuple n’a pas besoin de servantes. mère marie: Mais il a grand besoin de martyrs, et c’est là un sacrifice que nous pouvons assumer. le commissaire: Peuh! En des temps comme celui-ci, mourir n’est rien. mère marie: Vivre n’est rien, c’est cela que vous voulez dire. Car il n’est plus que la mort qui compte lorsque la vie est dévaluée jusqu’au ridicule, n’a plus de prix que vos assignats. (Oe I 1681) [the representative: The people don’t need servants. mother marie: But they have a great need of martyrs, and that is one service we can render them. the representative: Pah! In times like these, dying is nothing. mother marie: Living is nothing, that is what you mean. Because only death matters when life has been so thoroughly cheapened that it has no more value than your revolutionary bank notes.] Life is deprived of its value precisely at a time when such “values” as the Rights of Man, the Social Contract, Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty are acclaimed in ringing tones. It is not difficult to see the correlation between this fictional portrayal and Bernanos’s actual world where democracies had emerged from the war sanguine about the prospects for the United Nations, and while socialists and communists waxed

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lyrical about equality and justice. Bernanos clearly perceived a relationship of inverse proportions between the grounds for optimistic rhetoric and the circumstances that imperilled its ideals. It is during the very periods of history when civilization waxes the most lyrical about high ideals that the killing Machine is most likely to begin operating. Had Bernanos not pointed out the irony of the democratic allies formulating the ideals of the Atlantic Charter while their planes were obliterating German cities? Now, in Dialogues, the revolutionaries arrive at the convent, first to inspect this house of “superstition,” and then to expel the nuns and demolish it. Determined to advance the egalitarianism decreed by their political masters, they raise the spectre of the killing Machine. Mother Marie, however, exasperates the government agents: mère marie: Vous avez le pouvoir de me contraindre au silence, mais non pas celui de m’en faire une obligation. Je représente ici la Révérende Mère Prieure et je ne recevrai pas d’ordre de vous. un commissaire: Sacrée mâtine! On ne lui fera pas fermer son bec, citoyen, mais rappelez-lui que la République dispose d’une machine à couper le sifflet. (Oe I 1639) [mother marie: You have the power to force me to keep silent, but you cannot compel me to be morally obliged to do so. I represent the Reverend Mother Prioress and I take orders from her alone. a representative: Sly bitch! We won’t muzzle her, citizen, but remind her that the Republic has at its disposal a machine for shutting people’s traps.] Since the modern world approves of force, the reference to the guillotine is not surprising. However, the apparent sincerity of the “citizens,” their romantic idealism, seems to conflict with such a ready threat of violence. The nuns’ chaplain observes: “Dans les affaires de ce monde, vous le savez,

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lorsque tout espoir de conciliation est perdu, la force est le suprême recours” [“You know that, in the affairs of this world, when all hope of conciliation is lost, force is the ultimate recourse”] (Oe I 1643). Bernanos’s sketch in La France contre les robots of the decent pilot-cum-family man had already touched on this moral schizophrenia, the conclusion of which was that human beings cannot live with such discrepancies; only robots can. And indeed, the revolutionary Representatives seem drawn from Bernanos’s non-fiction depictions of creatures of the modern age who are programmed to be obedient and submissive to the collective will. Without a hint of irony, the Representative lays claim to the moral high ground: “Nous ne connaissons d’autre règle que la Loi. Nous sommes représentants de la Loi” [“We know no other rule than Law. We are the representatives of the Law”] (Oe I 1636). Like the imbecile robots of Bernanos’s postwar essays, they speak in slogans approved either by the state or by the party. One of them, for examle, imagining that young Sister Blanche’s terror results from her being held in the convent against her will, poses as her saviour, spouting all the requisite jargon: “Assez! je réitère d’avoir à observer la contenance d’un véritable représantant du peuple. (Il se tourne vers Blanche.) Jeune citoyenne, ne craignez rien de nous qui sommes vos libérateurs. Dites un seul mot, et vous vous trouverez hors du pouvoir de ceux qui pour mieux vous assujettir n’ont pas craint d’offenser la nature en usurpant jusqu’au nom sacré de Mère. Sachez que vous vous trouvez dès maintenant sous la protection de la Loi.” (Oe I 1640) [“Enough! I see before me the countenance of a true image of the people. (He turns toward Blanche.) Young citizen, you have nothing to fear from us, we are your liberators. Say but the word and you will be delivered from the power of those who, to better constrain you, have dared to offend nature itself by usurping the sacred

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name of Mother. Know that you are, from this moment on, under the protection of the Law.”] Later, when Blanche appears before the Revolutionary Tribunal to plead for her condemned father’s life, a former servant addresses the judges on her behalf, employing the same officially sanctioned language: “Citoyens juges, la jeune et intéressante personne qui m’accompagne est la fille du ci-devant. La République vient de la tirer de la main des prêtres qui l’avaient arrachée à son vieux père, pour l’enfouir à jamais dans les geôles du fanatisme et de la superstition … La petite citoyenne vient remercier ses protecteurs et ses libérateurs.” (Oe I 1697) [“Citizen judges, the young interested party with me is the daughter of the accused. The Republic has just liberated her from the priests who had snatched her from her father in order to bury her forever in the dungeons of fanaticism and superstition. The young citizen has come to thank her liberators and protectors.”] Two principal themes emerge from this authorized jargon; the first is that a “house of prayer,” as Mother Marie calls their convent, poses a danger to the state; the second is the mantra of “Liberty.” Hostility toward the inner life is incompatible with the championing of freedom, recalling Bernanos’s caveat against a civilization that threatens the spiritual life, without which liberty itself is meaningless. On one level, at least, the Representatives and the nuns enact the conflict between liberty as a mental abstraction and liberty lived as an actual force proceeding from deep within the human spirit. The verbal sparring between Mother Marie and the chief Representative brings this dimension plainly forward: le commissaire: Il n’y a pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la Liberté.

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mère marie: La nôtre est hors de vos atteintes. (Oe I 1642) [the representative: There is no liberty for the enemies of Liberty. mother marie: Ours is beyond your reach.] Later, the prioress assures the imprisoned nuns that their confinement deprives them only of a superficial freedom, which is in any case of little importance: “Nul ne saurait nous ravir une liberté dont nous nous sommes dépouillées depuis longtemps” [“No one could deprive us of a liberty of which we have, long since, stripped ourselves”] (Oe I 1710). Only a few months before beginning to writing Dialogues during the winter of 1947–48, Bernanos had defined the inner life as that deep point of contact with the divine from which true freedom flows. A brief meditation by Sister Marthe, one of the play’s characters, resumes this theme: Au jardin des Oliviers, le Christ n’était plus maître de rien. L’angoisse humaine n’était jamais montée plus haute, elle n’atteindra plus jamais ce niveau. Elle avait tout recouvert en Lui, sauf cette extrême pointe de l’âme où est consommée la divine acceptation. (Oe I 1668) [In the Garden of Olives, Christ was no longer master of anything. Anguish had never before risen to such heights, nor will it ever again. It had overtaken his very being, except for that farthest point of the soul where divine acceptance was consummated.] Bernanos envisages Christ’s encounter with his divinity, deep within his own human heart, as an experience of the freedom to say “yes” to an expiative death. In larger terms, He fully accepted his weakness, that is, the the full human experience – in short – his own poverty. Any pretense of invulnerability is stripped away with brutal realism from the very outset of the Dialogues. The death of the old Prioress in the second “tableau,” for example, is an

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occasion of scandal for her community. She has been the mother superior for many years, wise, strong, and a model of religious probity; and yet as death approaches, thirty years of mortification and prayer seem to count for little. Her fear of death prompts an almost pouting, desperate appeal for reassurance – had she not eaten all her soup that day, and hadn’t the worst passed? (Oe I 1589). Nature is intent on depriving her of her dignity, and yet she clings to her selfimage. A pathetic amour propre recoils at the prospect of the other sisters seeing her as limp as a drowned man pulled from the water, as she puts it, but even her wish to be seated in a chair when she receives her community is denied. The old woman tries to console herself with religious thoughts, but the articles of faith nurtured over a lifetime seem ineffectual, and God Himself assumes an unfamiliar form: “Dieu s’est fait lui-même une ombre” [“God Himself has become a shadow”] (Oe I 1598). Acutely aware that she is presenting no ideal model of a good death, she expresses her trust that, in the end, God will stand by her: “J’ai confiance que Dieu ne m’abandonnera pas” [“I am confident that God will not abandon me”] (Oe I 1602). Like Jesus Himself, however, she seems forsaken in a lonely darkness. Her final vision of desolation proves to be prophetic for the community as a whole, and, believing that God has renounced her, she dies in fear and humiliation. The consolation of faith, the fruits of a lifetime of self-discipline and prayer, even simple human dignity, are wrested from her. Yet she is granted a moment of spiritual lucidity that pierces the cloud of fear and permits her to see the glory of her abasement: “Je ne puis donner maintenant que ma mort, une très pauvre mort… (Silence.) Dieu se glorifie dans ses saints, ses héros et ses martyrs. Il se glorifie aussi dans ses pauvres” [“I have nothing left to give now save my death, a very poor death… God glorifies himself in his saints, his heroes and his martyrs. He also glorifies himself in his poor”] (Oe I 1601). The full weight of poverty crushes the play’s young heroine, Blanche de la Force, however. Suffering from a pathological

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fear of the world beyond her privileged enclave, Blanche has entered the Carmel seeking a refuge. She is shamed by a timidity that earns her the disapprobation, for the most part unspoken, of her religious sisters. Like so many of Bernanos’s characters, she suffers the temptation to self-hatred, which her superiors warn her against on at least three occasions: “Le malheur, ma fille, n’est pas d’être méprisée, mais seulement de se mépriser soi-même” [“The tragedy, my daughter, is not in being despised, but only in despising oneself”] (Oe I 1702). Despite, or perhaps because of, her fragile emotional state, Blance seeks admittance to the Carmel by telling the old prioress she comes in search of a “heroic life.” The prioress seems not to doubt the ultimate success of such an enterprise, but is prescient and wise enough to understand that God’s idea of heroism may well be different from the world’s, or indeed from Blanche’s: “Ce qu’il veut éprouver en vous n’est pas votre force, mais votre faiblesse” [“What he wishes to put to the test is not your stength, but your weakness”] (Oe I 1585). Blanche herself views her emotional paralysis not as a form of poverty, but as something to be overcome. Because her understanding of poverty is limited to her acquaintance with the privations and mortifications of Carmelite life, she naively declares to the prioress: “Je n’ai pas peur de la pauvreté” [“I have no fear of poverty”] (Oe I 1601). The aged superior responds with a wisdom that Blanche will come to share only in the nick of time: “Oh! il y a bien des sortes de pauvreté, jusqu’à la plus misérable, et c’est de celle-là que vous serez rassasiée [“Oh! there are many kinds of poverty, including the most wretched, and that’s the kind you’ll have your share of”] (Oe I 1601). When the nuns are expelled from their convent by order of the Republic, putting their lives in mortal peril, their chaplain, a fugitive and clandestine visitor, expands on the mystery of poverty in his Good Friday sermon: “Le Seigneur a vécu et vit toujours parmi nous comme un pauvre. Le moment vient toujours où Il décide de

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nous faire pauvres comme Lui, afin d’être reçu et honoré par les pauvres, à la manière des pauvres, de retrouver ainsi ce qu’Il a connu jadis tant de fois sur les routes de Galilée, l’hospitalité des misérables, leur simple accueil. Il a voulu vivre parmi les pauvres, Il a aussi voulu mourir avec eux. Car ce n’est pas comme un Comte à la tête des hommes de sa ménie qu’Il a marché vers la mort, c’est-à-dire vers Jérusalem, le lieu de Son sacrifice, dans ces sinistres jours qui précédèrent la pâque. C’était parmi de pauvres gens qui, bien loin de songer à défier personne, se faisaient tout petits, afin de passer inaperçus le plus longtemps possible… Faisons-nous donc aussi maintenant tout petits, non pas, comme eux, pour échapper à la mort, mais pour la souffrir, le cas échéant, comme Il l’a soufferte Lui-même.” (Oe I 1659) [“Our Lord lived, and continues to live among us, as one of the poor. The time always comes when He decides to make us poor like Himself, so that He might be received and honoured by the poor as one of them, so that He might thereby rediscover what, long ago, He so often experienced on the roads of Galilee – the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome. He wanted to live among the poor, and He wanted to die among them too. For it was not as a nobleman at the head of his troops that He marched toward death, that is toward Jerusalem, the place of His sacrifice, during those sinister days that preceded Easter. He walked with the poor who, far from wanting to stand up to anyone, made themselves little, so as to pass unnoticed for as long as possible … Let us now make ourselves very little, not like them, to escape death, but, if necessary, to suffer it as He Himself suffered it.”] The poverty the priest speaks of is not, of course, material, since the Republic could no more deprive the nuns of their riches than of their liberty. He is inviting them to surrender to human weakness by joining it to Christ’s own. Even before

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their expulsion from the Carmel, during the uneasy days when some still dared hope that the state might leave them in peace, the nature of such a mystical union is pondered and clarified. When, for example, the old prioress lies moribund, her words of disconsolation cannot but evoke the image of Jesus in Gethsemane, in the company of his disciples yet all the more alone: “Hé bien, ma Mère, il est vrai que je me vois mourir. Rien ne me distrait de cette vue. Certes, je me sens touchée de vos soins, j’y voudrais répondre, mais ils ne m’apportent aucune aide, vous n’êtes pour moi que des ombres, à peine distinctes des images et des souvenirs du passé. Je suis seule, ma Mère, absolument seule, sans aucune consolation.” (Oe I 1597) [“Ah yes, Mother, it is true that I am watching myself die. Nothing can distract me. Of course, I’m touched by your care, and I would like to return it, but it doesn’t bring me any solace. You are now nothing more than shadows for me, barely distinct images, like past memories. I am alone, Mother, absolutely alone, without any consolation at all.”] When she expresses her reluctance to let her contorted face be seen by her “daughters,” the two solitudes, human and divine, converge in Mother Marie’s response: “C’est peut-être celui de notre doux Seigneur à Gethsémani” [“Perhaps it is our gentle Lord’s at Gethsemane”] (Oe I 1603). A sublime irony is not lost on the dying woman. We learn that she had entered the convent as a young girl with the intention of being consecrated under the name of “Holy Agony.” Only the warnings of her superior had dissuaded her: “Qui entre à Gethsémani n’en sort plus. Vous sentez-vous le courage de rester jusqu’au but prisonnière de la Très Sainte Agonie?” [“Whoever enters Gethsemane never leaves it. Do you have the courage to remain a prisoner of the Most Holy Agony right to the end?”] (Oe I 1598).

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The same irony betrays the mark of Providence when, many years later, Blanche de la Force requests permission of the now mortally ill prioress to take the religious name “Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ.” For the old prioress, the name signifies a solitary confrontation with death in the dark abandonment of the Garden of Olives; for Blanche, it is the summation of a young life’s experience, something she reflects upon in a conversation with her brother, the Chevalier de la Force, at the beginning of the play: le chevalier: Puisque vous vous retirez dans votre appartement, demandez tout de suite des flambeaux, et n’y restez pas sans compagnie. Je sais que le crépuscule vous rend toujours mélancolique. Vous me disiez quand vous étiez petite: “Je meurs chaque nuit pour ressusciter chaque matin.” blanche: C’est qu’il n’y a jamais eu qu’un seul matin, Monsieur le Chevalier: celui de Pâques. Mais chaque nuit où l’on entre est celle de la Très Sainte Agonie. (Oe I 1575) [the chevalier: Since you are retiring to your rooms, ask for some torches right away, and don’t stay there without company. I know that twilight always makes you melancholie. You used to say to me when you were little: “I die each night so as to rise again each morning.” blanche: There has only ever been one morning, Monsieur le Chevalier: Easter morning. But each night I enter is the darkness of the Holy Agony.] Bernanos allows the inscrutable wisdom of God to lead this frightened girl to a religious refuge where she is soon visited by the Terror. The last recourse of the world is force, but God’s last recourse is the sacrifice of consecrated souls (Oe I 1643). When it becomes apparent that all is lost, Mother Marie leads her community in taking a vow of martyrdom for the salvation

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of France and the Carmel. Blanche is especially on her mind, not because she fears that the youngest member of the community will fail in her duty, but because she too perceives in Blanche’s religious name the working of Providence: “Dans la bataille, c’est aux plus braves que revient l’honneur de porter l’étendard. Il semble que Dieu ait voulu remettre le nôtre entre les mains de la plus faible et peut-être de la plus misérable. N’est-ce pas là comme un signe du Ciel?” (Oe I 1648–9). [“In battle, the honour of carrying the standard goes to the bravest. It seems to me that God has willed that ours be put in the hands of the weakest and perhaps the most wretched. Is it not a sign from heaven?”] God, who chooses the weak, eschews the wisdom of the world. Of course, Blanche’s road to martyrdom is not smooth. Her terror doubles, and in panic she flees the convent disguised as a servant girl and hides in her father’s château, while her religious sisters, with the exception of Mother Marie, languish in prison. But in the last scene, as the nuns file solemnly toward the guillotine chanting a Latin hymn, Blanche suddenly emerges from the crowd and joins the doomed procession, the last to die. When the nuns had taken their vow of martyrdom, Mother Marie had spoken to them about their poverty: they were to be under no illusion that their “poor” lives were of any great price, and it was the giving, not the gift, that counted (Oe I 1684). Because Blanche’s life is the poorest of all, her oblation is the most pleasing to God. It is another divine irony that when she tries to hide from her weakness, it cripples her. When she surrenders to it, she encounters, as Bernanos had written in 1946, the “Pauvre des pauvres, en qui toute pauvreté se divinise” [Poorest of the poor, in whom all poverty is divinized] (Cor III 430), and discovers the courage to resume the terrible pilgrimage from Gethsemane to Calvary.

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The very structure of Dialogues carries Blanche along in this process of divinization which, as the new prioress affirms, is the play’s theological axis: “Lorsqu’on les considère de ce jardin de Gethsémani où fut divinisée, en le Cœur Adorable du Seigneur, toute l’angoisse humaine, la distinction entre la peur et le courage ne me paraît pas loin d’être superflue.” (OR 1653) [“When one reflects upon them from the point of view of the Garden of Gethsemane, where all human anguish was divinized in the Sacred Heart, the distinction between fear and courage seems almost superfluous to me.”] These dialogues are Bernanos’s response to the postwar obsession with justice. By no stretch of the imagination does the world applaud the execution of the innocent as just. Yet, as he had written after the war, justice and injustice mean radically different things to the unbeliever and to the one who places his faith in the Incarnation and the divinization of humanity upon the Cross. The nuns’ chaplain points out to them the paradoxical nature of the spiritual economy: “Dans les grands troubles comme celui-ci, le pire risque n’est pas d’être criminel, mais innocent, ou seulement suspect de l’être. L’innocent va payer bientôt pour tout le monde” [“In troubled times like these, the greatest danger is not being guilty, but being innocent, or even suspected of being so. The innocent will soon pay the price for everybody else”] (Oe I 1675). Sister Catherine reminds the others that the Christian perception of justice and injustice springs from Christ Himself: “Le plus innocent et le plus criminel, n’ayant commis aucune faute et répondant de toutes, dévoré par la Justice et l’injustice à la fois, comme deux bêtes enragées” [“The most innocent and the most guilty, sinless yet bearing the burden of all sin, devoured both by Justice and injustice, like two enraged beasts”] (Oe I 1669). Christ assumed human culpability as a free act of love, and the theological optique of the Dialogues

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presents God’s justice and His love as indistinguishable, the latter informing the former. The nuns enter the mystery of the Incarnation by raising justice to the level of sacrifice, a spiritual sublimation that Mother Marie elucidates for Blanche near the play’s end: “Il n’est d’horreur que dans le crime, ma fille, et c’est par le sacrifice des vies innocentes que cette horreur est effacée, le crime lui-même restitué à l’ordre de la divine charité” [“The only truly loathsome thing is murder, my daughter, and it is by the sacrifice of innocent lives that this abomination is wiped away, so that even murder is enfolded by the very love of God”] (Oe I 1707). Dialogues was a fictional expression of Bernanos’s mourning for his country after the debacle of 1940, a grief that compelled him to leave aside fiction until the eve of his death. It embraces all the themes of his wartime and postwar essays: liberty, justice, and, most of all, honour. Blanche plausibly represents the France of 1940, debased and an object of scorn. Even Mother Marie, who could well be Bernanos contemplating his country’s indignity, is filled with contempt and anger at her own cowardice. Nor is it difficult to see in the old prioress a metaphor for the Motherland, humiliated but still called to spiritual greatness. When Blanche had declared, at the beginning of Dialogues, that she would sacrifice anything for the sake of honour, Bernanos had allowed her to pronounce a truth the profundity of which escaped her. The essence of honour is sacrifice. Only months before beginning this last great literary effort, Bernanos had written: “L’amour de la patrie comme l’amour de Dieu est fondé sur le don volontaire de soi” [The love of country, like the love of God, is founded upon the voluntary gift of self] (Oe III 1275). Blanche’s honour, as the old prioress tells her, is in the care of God (Oe I 1601). So too with France, whose glory, Bernanos was sure, lay not in technological triumph, but in sacrifice; not in power, but in an abandonment to its poverty. The Carmelite tragedy enacted in miniature what happened on a larger scale to France as a whole, with both dramas culminating in self-sacrifice.

Conclusion

That the heart of Bernanos’s creative vision was the “word” may seem self-evident. He was, after all, a novelist who earned a living, albeit a precarious one, by his pen. Yet he also mistrusted words. Indeed his misgivings about them gave rise to doubts about his vocation and even to suspicions about his own motives as a writer. In his precocious correspondence as a young boy with Abbé Lagrange, the aggressively idealistic Bernanos attacked the empty verbiage of the utopianists on the Left. All theoretical language was profoundly suspect to this youth, who itched to slay real dragons rather than speculate on futile approaches to human perfectibility. He longed for heroes, not theorists – or, at the very least, for a hero-theorist who would dare to realize his hypotheses. This desire largely explains Bernanos’s monarchism: better a living prince than bloated republican shibboleths. His search for a hero-theorist led him briefly to support the chauvinistic Charles Maurras and others like him on the Right. This misplaced adulation appeared in a panegyric article in L’AvantGarde de Normandie, the provincial newspaper he edited briefly before the First World War, about Maurras’s lieutenant in the Action Française, Léon Daudet, who seemed to embody for Bernanos the synthesis of a man and his words: Il est le premier de ceux qui entretiennent le feu sacré. Nos travaux monotones s’en trouvent ennoblis: il les

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oriente chaque jour dans le sens de l’héroisme. Comme il peut être fier d’agiter ainsi les cœurs! Quand nous courons le risque de nous endormir sur nos textes, l’écho de sa parole, pareil au reflet du sabre, nous rappelle que la meilleure doctrine est encore tributaire des bras qui la défendent, et que le don de soi-même peut seul rendre le mot vivant. (Oe II 1014) [He is first among those who keep the sacred fire burning. He ennobles our daily grind: each day he directs us along the way of heroism. How proud he should be of stirring our hearts! When we are in danger of falling asleep over our books, the echo of his words, like the flash of a sabre, reminds us that true doctrine is one substance with the arm that defends it, and that only the gift of self can breathe life into words.] This nascent political view is founded on the evangelical certainty that love alone, that is, heroic self-sacrifice, incarnates noble doctrine. Little imagination is needed to understand why Bernanos’s own quixotic ideals received such a brutal shock in the postwar political climate of France during the 1920s. His reaction to the “mad” abstractions of the period was, as we have seen, to write a novel, a solution that gave rise to a new problem: how to use words to reclaim their vitality without oneself becoming ensnared by them? Bernanos was well aware of the danger of confusing the adroit manipulation of language with the legitimate use of art to establish truth. Almost as a talisman against barren verbal wizardry, he created Antoine SaintMarin, a caricature of the celebrated Anatole France. Here is what Bernanos had to say about the real Nobel Prize– winning novelist in 1926: Son œuvre est vile. Ce n’était qu’un jeu, dit-on. Mais quel jeu? Jouer avec l’espérance des hommes, c’est duper la faim et la soif du pauvre. Il y a peut-être aujourd’hui dans le monde tel ou tel misérable, fait pour se rassasier

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de certitude et qui meurt désespéré parce que l’auteur de Thaïs avait de l’esprit, savait sa langue. Cela, c’est la faute que rien ne rédime; c’est le crime essentiel, absolu. (Oe II 1044) [His work is vile. They say that it is little more than a game. But what game? Toying with man’s hope, playing with the poor man’s hunger and thirst. Perhaps today, somewhere in the world, some wretched soul, longing to nourish himself with the bread of certitude, is dying in despair because the author of Thaïs was quick-witted, clever with words. That is the sin that can never be redeemed, it is the essential, absolute crime.] The “game” connotes a superficial literature, so abjectly indifferent to the spiritual welfare of its readers that it constitutes malfeasance on an eternal scale. Bernanos abhorred in Anatole France what he perceived to be the pernicious alliance of moral aloofness and the deft employment of words. Then there is the fictional Emmanuel Ganse, the artifice of the detached literary chronicler of human psychology who, in the end, sinks into the quicksand of his own indifferent dreaming, unable to “emerge from literature” (Oe I 928). Words in their multiplicity are both his métier and his prison; his involuntary repetition of them is akin to a psychiatric disorder. Indeed, Ganse is the very embodiment of a hollow loquacity that fails to signify, a peculiarly modern phenomenon. For an entire generation, words had become the bare, flimsy scaffolding of failed social projects. Within this framework Ganse’s young, cynical protégés shadow box until they meld wearily with these meaningless symbols. Like their mentor, Olivier, Philippe, and Simone never escape the incubus of literature that has stolen their youth. The tragedy that they reflect to each other is the seemingly infinite multiplication of worthless words, incomplete gestures, and the icy amorality of pure abstraction. Their words are meaningless because they are disincarnate and, in a mysterious way, so are they as people. In the end, they are all done in by their own self-hatred.

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The demon that tempts Bernanos’s literary characters is equivocation. And of this evil Bernanos accused the other Nobel Prize–winning novelist whom he despised, André Gide: “Le goût de l’immoraliste dévot ne fut jamais que de troubler les âmes par une équivoque savante” [The pious repbrobate has always had a taste for troubling souls with skilful equivocation] (Oe II 1135). Bernanos expressed the problem clearly in a letter to “a friend” in February of 1926: “L’équivoque empoisonne les âmes. Elle stérilise l’art même. Sincèrement, que viennent faire ici la Résurrection de la Chair et l’Incarnation?” [Equivocation poisons souls. It sterilizes art itself. Really, where is the Resurrection of the Flesh and the Incarnation in all of this?] (Cor I 233). Thus Bernanos’s qualms about words, specifically the ease with which they can be proliferated at the same time as they are deprived of meaning, were deeply felt. The key issue for him, however, was not merely the disincarnation of words, but the disIncarnation of the one Word. A devout Catholic, Bernanos believed that the betrayal of the Word necessarily led to the betrayal of all words. The teenage Bernanos’s rejection of words that did not express the “substance” of the speaker and the fledgling novelist’s crusade to restore meaning to the “sacred words” both sprang from the fundamental doctrine of his religion and his life: the Word-Made-Flesh. When Bernanos abandoned the novel after 1940 he may have exchanged one literary form for another, but the theological thrust of his work remained. He devoted his pen to the struggle against totalitarianism, a stance that is evident in his first full-length assault on fascism and the Catholic bourgeoisie who supported it: “Faute de vivre votre foi, votre foi n’est plus vivante, elle est devenue abstraite, elle s’est comme désincarnée. Peut-être trouverons-nous dans cette désincarnation du Verbe la vraie cause de nos malheurs” [Because you have not lived your faith, your faith is no longer alive; it has become abstract; it is as it were, disincarnate. Perhaps we will discover in this disincarnation of the Word the true cause of your misfortunes] (Oe II 510). The political

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problem, like the moral problem, is a question of words. As the War approached, it became for Bernanos specifically a problem of disincarnate Christian words. What was their relation to European politics of the 1930s and the coming of war? To put it succinctly, a society that retained from Christianity little more than its vocabulary and a few religious habits was ripe for any demigod, even Hitler. The disincarnation of faith through its reduction to concepts was merely the tip of an apocalyptic iceberg. Hitler, the war, the carnage, were particularly savage manifestations of a process seen everywhere in the modern world: the disincarnation of the Word that was with God and that was God. The heart of Bernanos’s creative vision, therefore, lies in the “word,” but it is the living word that is at issue. For the youthful Bernanos this simply meant the actualization of one’s ideals. For the mature Bernanos it came to mean becoming oneself the Living Word, undergoing the process of divinization – the very antithesis of dis-Incarnation – which was the cornerstone of his spiritual life. The esse divinitatis prayer, which he had first encountered as a very young child, represents a theological perspective and a distilled expression of sanctity as he saw it. This fragment from the Roman liturgy pulsated through twenty years of polemical reflection and inspired the creation of his famous fictional saints. Divinization, symbolized liturgically by the few drops of water poured into the chalice of wine, is as radical as it is radically orthodox. Fundamentally, it is, as it was for Christ Himself, an act of self-emptying. It is the essence of Chantal de Clergerie who, her very being “torn away,” dies upon Golgotha. It is the core of Donissan’s “defeat” and of Ambricourt’s final victory. In Ambricourt, Donissan too is divinized, as both keep vigil together in the shadows of the Garden of Olives. The darkness in Bernanos’s novels is dark indeed, for the Light came into the world and the world would not accept it. Yet his opus radiates an incandescent literary and spiritual beauty. In the end, if the struggle of light over darkness is the

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thematic dialectic of Bernanos’s art, then the tension between dis-Incarnation and divinization is the theological foundation upon which it rests. In 1947 Bernanos prepared a preface for a book by Luc Estang to be titled Présence de Bernanos. While writing it, Bernanos may have had a presentiment of his own closeapproaching death, or he may have simply been suffused with the spirit of Blanche de la Force and her fellow Carmelites, whose tale he was then fashioning. Whatever the case, he formulated an axiom that embraces both the trials of these women of faith who are the personae of his last testament and his own hard journey toward a now imminent death: “La souffrance surnaturellement acceptée divinise” [Suffering that is supernaturally accepted divinizes] (Le Lendemain c’est vous 247). That was the single shining truth that he took with him to the end. He died on 5 July 1948.

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Index

Action Française, 3, 12–13, 15, 19, 22–3, 37–9, 200 anti-Semitism, 3; accusation of, 4 Atlantic Charter, 167–68 L’Avant-Garde de Normandie, 18–20, 200 Balthazar, Hans Urs von, 74n4 Baudelaire, Charles, 101, 130 Beaumont, Ernest, 95n6 Béguin, Albert, 186n1 Belperron, Pierre, 104 Bernanos, Yves, 30 Bloy, Léon, 32, 182 Brazil, 4–5, 42, 53, 59n2, 166, 171, 178 Bruckberger, Father, 186n1 Bush, William, 56n1, 59n2, 139, 156, 186 Butor, Michel, 132n7 capitalism, 4, 168–9, 179 Daudet, Léon, 6, 19, 200

Dialogues des Carmélites [Dialogues of the Carmelites], 29, 161, 184, 186–99 Drumont, Edouard, 4, 12, 23 Les Enfants humiliés, 38, 156 Estang, Luc, 205 facism, 28, 169, 176, 203 Falange, the, 3–4, 29–30 France, Anatole, 201–2 La France contre les robots, 171, 175, 178, 189 Franco, General, 50 French Academy, 29, 38, 88 Fumet, Stanislas, 181 Gaucher, Guy, 74n4 Gaulle, General de, 5, 31n8 Gide, André, 120, 203 Gordan, Dom Paul, 5 La Grande peur des bienpensants, 4, 23–4, 26, 106

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Bernanos: The Theological Source of His Art

Grands cimetières sous la lune [Diary of My Times], 3, 5, 28–30, 34, 44, 100–1, 161 Histoire d’une âme [Story of a Soul], 74 Hitler, Adolf, 36–7, 50, 161, 163–4, 169, 176, 204 L’Imposture [The Impostor], 6, 75, 77–8, 106–19 La Joie [Joy], 6, 72–88 Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest], 6, 29, 73, 88–106 Lagrange, Father, 13–15, 17, 200 Lefèvre, Frédéric: interview with, 5, 56–7, 73; letters to, 60–1, 64, 120–2 Le Lendemain c’est vous, 182–3, 205 Lima, Jorge de, 165 Majorca, 3–4, 28–30, 46, 101, 150 Maritain, Jacques, 5–6, 59, 59n2 marxism, 168–9, 179–82 Mauriac, François, 5–7, 68, 179, 181 Maurras, Charles, 3, 6, 12, 19, 22, 37–54, 200

Un Mauvais rêve [A Bad Dream], 106, 121, 126–39, 143, 153 monarchism, 13, 18–21, 37, 40, 43, 169–70 M. Ouine, 106, 125, 139–57 Munich Agreement, 36, 38, 48–9 Mussolini, Benito, 40, 50, 176 nazism, 4, 161–62, 176 Nous autres Français, 38–9, 44, 102 Panache (royalist journal), 18 Pascal, Blaise, 82, 177 Péguy, Charles, 182 Pétain, Marshal, 48–50, 52 Pius xi, 29 Les Prédestinés, 73 Présence de Bernanos, 205 Raymond Marie, Soeur, 74n4 Roman liturgy, 33, 204 Rosenberg, Alfred, 164, 164n1 “Satan et Nous,” 66 Scandale de la vérité, 38–9 Sillon, le, 13–51 Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan], 5, 22, 28, 55–72, 59n2, 119–25 Soviet Union, 168 Spanish Civil War, 3, 28, 36, 101, 150 Stalinism, 168

Index Teresa of Avila, 73–5 Thérèse of Lisieux, 31, 59n3, 74–5, Tobin, Michael R., 59n3, 74n4 Tunisia, 177

Versailles, Treaty of, 167 Vichy, 48–51, 53, 166, 185 “Une Vision catholique du réel,” 56, 120 Weil, Simone, 4, 29

Vallery-Radot, Robert, 90

217