Religion: Heroic Christianity

It is probable that a book modestly entitled Lettre aux Anglais (Letter to the English), of which the second French edition has just been published in Rio de Janeiro (it is not yet available in English), contains the first grand polemic produced by a Christian writer in World War II. Many books have surpassed Mein Kampf in reasoning and style; this one matches ts demonic energy with a spiritual blaze of equal force and infinitely greater sanity. The writer: Georges Bernanos, a French Catholic layman known to Americans as the author of a fine novel, Star of Satan (TIME, June 17, 1940), and a furious, eyewitness denunciation of the Fascist “Holy War” in Spain, Les Grands Cimetières Sous La Lune (The Vast Graveyards Under the Moon).

Bernanos is not, like England’s prodigious William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, a proponent of social reform. Nor is he, like his distinguished friend, Jacques Maritain, a scholastic philosopher. What Bernanos has done is to prove again, for the 20th Century, the psychological power of religious insight. In so doing he offers a profound challenge to free men in terms that most of them are beginning to understand.

Addressing the English, Bernanos reminds them of their complicity in the terrible failure of “realism” in the modern world. “English! The history we have written together since the armistice of 1918, with the blood of 5,000,000 men, is not the kind that children can read; if they understood the sense of it, it would dry up in them the source of happiness, break the spirit of their young lives. It is a history of realism, English. …”

The Bourgeois Without Honor. Georges Bernanos rode in the French Cavalry in World War I, receiving a chest wound and a Croix de Guerre. With the French dead of that war he kept up an inner dialogue during the 20 years in which the hopes they had died for—a true democracy, a true peace—came to nothing. He saw France’s elite, her smart coteries and politicians, mock the victory which the common men of France had won by selflessness and discipline. What was the essential weakness of the French ruling class? Bernanos calls it a lack of honor.

Honor and sainthood are Bernanos’ two absolutes. By reference to them he illuminates the history of France and of. all Western, Christian society.

Joan of Arc serves him for a symbol of France—peasant and saint, feminine yet a soldier, she too was hoaxed into recantation, into momentary surrender, by the casuists and torturers, the enemy propagandists of her time. To Bernanos, France remains at heart a Christian and human patrie of which he believes 18th-Century economic nationalism made nothing but a caricature. The bourgeoisie that inherited France in the French Revolution never, he thinks, fooled the French people. “It found itself in the position of a parvenu who, after acquiring a historic estate, wonders how to make himself respected. . . .”

Bernanos’ study of this parvenu, not as a Marxian class but as a type of human soul, pours out with the long-meditated irony of a Swift, the comic accuracy of a Moliere. While the Kingdom of God was transformed in the people’s simple mind into Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the gaiety and gallantry of the nobles also descended to the people. And the dominant bourgeoisie—including those whom Bernanos calls the devots (Pharisaically pious)—began to find in the people the very qualities it had feared and envied in the seigneurs.

Bernanos swears that if it had not been for the popular uprising that won the First Battle of the Marne, the Caillaux faction was prepared to “collaborate” in 1914 precisely as the Pétain Government did 26 years later. And what the Right after 1918 could never understand, he thinks, was that Frenchmen voted Left not out of sinful perversity but out of sheer personal repugnance for their rulers.

“The great tragedy of the modern bourgeoisie is to be rich enough and powerful enough to serve, but too base to rise to the conception of a disinterested service a service that doesn’t pay.” This type, with its prudent “moderation,” could not abide the absolute demands of honor. Prudently without honor, the bourgeois elite, out of hatred for its own people, regarding the war chiefly as a chastisement for them, in the end committed the one really irreparable imprudence: cowardice It was not a peasant girl-soldier and saint who inspired the rulers of France in 1940, but a womanish salon set typified by Hélène de Fortes, mistress of Premier Paul Reynaud.

With the “principles” of the Vichy regime Bernanos scorns to quarrel The word, he says, is “so degraded by usage that to say of a man nowadays that he has principles almost amounts to saying that he has a private income.” As for Pétain : “To hear you talk of the victor of Verdun one would have thought that the armistice was signed not by that military man alone but by the 350,000 dead in the boneyard of Douaumont.”

The Spirit in Rebellion. Bernanos’ mordant argument rests on a Catholicism too fierce for many Catholics. He has no respect whatever for what he calls common Catholic opinion—the sort that condemned him in 1938 for his antiFascism and may condemn him now as “antidemocratic.” Such people he charges with regarding their Church as an insurance policy.

Bernanos calls upon them to realize that the Church of Christ is facing one of the greatest perils in its history: the rise of a totalitarianism that would restore the crushing, bureaucratic “social justice” of the pagan Roman Empire. To that State, in which the citizen has the status of an inmate, Bernanos opposes the Christian society “where the poor would be honored, because God himself had been born poor and had blessed poverty”—not “in spirit” but as a social condition.

A heroic Christianity is what Bernanos demands, and he thinks the elements for it are ready. Just as in 1000 A.D., when out of the waste and decline of two empires, the Roman and Carlovingian, the magnificence of Chivalry arose, a new kind of men may appear in his beloved France and throughout Europe. Bernanos puts his faith in the insurgence of these men. Profit and money have already become ridiculous to them; as for Freedom, “We are seeing liberty gradually disassociated from juridical definitions and becoming human again.” In one of the exalted passages of his book he speaks to the anti-Fascist martyrs of Europe and affirms that the Christian Church is their possession as it is that of the saints.

Though he rejoices in this coming revolution, Bernanos’ mind is too robust and honest not to know the chances against its taking a Christian form. It is “doubtful that the atrocious deception of our people would let them return at first to the dogmas of our faith.” They may accept rather what they think is a dictatorship of the proletariat, not knowing until later that any dictatorship is in the end a dictatorship of bureaucrats and police. Bernanos evidently prefers even this prospect to a clerical Fascism. Facing it, he maintains that “we Christians hold ourselves responsible for human liberty.”

20th-century Quixote? Georges Bernanos’ Rio publisher says of him, “He is alone, this man.” Last year, in North America, Jacques Maritain was writing: “Crushed by the woes of Apocalypse, the French see no prophet rising from their people to tell the true horror of what has happened and to reawaken the spirit in its depths.” At that time Bernanos, self-exiled to Brazil since 1938, was filling five-cent notebooks with his sermons on the true horror, written with an eloquence worthy of the greatest writers of France.

%Alone intellectually, perhaps, he was nevertheless becoming popular in Brazil: with the Free French, for whom one of his sons fought; with many Brazilian Catholics, who could disagree in part but admire him wholly; with Brazil’s intelligent Foreign Minister Aranha, who made him a gift of a fine saddle horse; with his neighbors, who helped him remodel his farm on the rolling uplands of Minas Geraes province, and were rewarded by having their names all carved on the cornerstone.

Bernanos is now 54, stoutish, heavy-shouldered, with a grey mustache and grey hair. He limps badly from an old motorcycle accident, walks with two canes and is happiest on horseback. So are his handsome, brilliant wife and six children —three sons and three daughters—all of whom now live in the Bernanos manor, Cruz das Almas.

A few years ago Bernanos might have been dismissed as a modern Don Quixote. The dismissal is no longer possible. Even North Americans, to whom his seignorial temper may at first seem foreign, can recognize in his concept of “honor” a virtue familiar to them1 in their own great men and called by them “responsibility.” (He reminds Americans, too, that while their arsenal of Democracy helped to save England, the heroic example of England saved American democracy from committing its own stupendous Munich.)

For the U.S., whose tradition is Protestant, this Catholic surmounts denominational barriers. He believes in the people, as Lincoln did; he believes in religious absolutes, as did all the great American evangelists for 300 years. It may be that in a world still bound by the iron necessities of power politics, his exploration of the spirit will seem a side issue. But to those Americans who read him, his furious pages will have a timbre suggestive of that trumpet which they used to believe would summon them to another Judgment, on another day of wrath.