Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art (review)

Although Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) was a bundle of contradictions, Michael Tobin, a professor of French literature, argues for a theological foundation unifying the writer’s life and vision. He locates the source in the Latin liturgy’s mingling of water and wine: “grant that we may be made partakers of his divinity [eius divinitatis esse consortes],” first invoked by Bernanos in Majorca (1934–38) and then throughout the 1940s (pp. 33, 46, 166, 179). The prayer encapsulates “Bernanos’s essential theology of divinization: the Christian is not called merely to imitate Christ, but to become Him by sharing in His divinity and so, by implication, in His Incarnation” (pp. 33–34; emphasis in original). A fundamental dialectic revolves around “abstraction,” Bernanos’s great enemy (pp. 20–21): incarnation, divinization, and re-Christianization on the one hand; dis-Incarnation (neologism: désincarnation) and de-Christianization on the other (pp. 204–05; cf. 35–36)

Tobin’s survey of Bernanos’s vast output is succinct yet profound. Novelistic characters are analyzed through the prism of “heroic corporeity” (p. 20). Father Donissan in Under the Sun of Satan (Paris, 1926) ends as “an incomplete Bernanosian hero” because he cannot accept his own body (p. 72). The bodily suffering of Chantal de Clergerie in Joy (Paris, 1929) is “the very suffering of God himself” and proclaims “the good news of divinized Pain” (pp. 85, 86). By contrast, the apostate hagiographer Father Cénabre in The Imposter (Paris, 1927) and Joy is “offended by his [own] corporality,” resists giving his saints bodies, and displays only crosses stripped of corpuses due to his “unconquerable horror of Our Lord’s Passion” (pp. 110, 111, 118). The nameless curate in The Diary of a Country Priest (Paris, 1936) completes Father Donissan’s unfinished journey. On the day he dies from stomach cancer, his diary entry reads: “I am at peace with myself, with this poor carcass” (p. 105).

Two of Tobin’s most admirable working traits are careful attention to biographical-historical settings and intertextual linkages between Bernanos’s novels and nonfiction. These help Tobin stretch the envelope in analyzing the “apocalyptic vision of shadows and corruption” found in the posthumously published Un mauvais rêve (Paris, 1950) and “the great, largely unread masterpiece M. Ouine” (Paris, 1946; p. 106). Abandoned in 1936, Bernanos returned to finish it because the “disastrous events of 1940, which included the fall of France, freed him from [his] creative paralysis” (p. 151). The novel’s significance is illuminated by a nonfictional line from the apocalyptic 1939–40: The world was “recommencing the mystery of the Incarnation backwards [à rebours]” (pp. 156; cf. 47–48).

The book’s shorter second section surveys the mostly antifascist essays written between 1940 and 1948, especially the disturbing “La France contre les robots” (Rio de Janeiro, 1946). Here Bernanos addressed Brazilian students in January 1945:“liberty” is precious because “he whom the liturgy invites to participate in God’s divinity—divinitatis consortes—could never renounce this sublime risk” (p. 179). The book concludes with a coda devoted to the work posthumously discovered at the bottom of a trunk, soon after scored by Francis Poulenc as the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957). Here again intertextuality: Dialogues of the Carmelites “only become intelligible after one has pored over the several thousand pages of wartime and postwar journalistic prose” (pp. 186n1, 187).

If Tobin’s thesis is correct, one obvious cause for the writer’s eventual eclipse in Catholic quarters is implicit in his theological vision: an “Alexandrian” emphasis on divinization downplays an “Antiochene” moral or exemplar aspect of Christology—the “imitation of Christ.” (Curiously, the compassion of Father Donissan, the incomplete hero, makes him “the most Christological of all” Bernanos’s saints: incarnation or imitation? [p. 95].) After the war, an increasing number of Catholic intellectuals (like François Mauriac) gravitated to the Left. Bernanos considered them “imbéciles...