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Illumination in Georges Bernanos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Richard Barrett
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Given recent receptivity to the importance of aesthetics and the role of art and the imagination, an examination of an artist who managed to arrive at creative expression not in spite of faith but because of that faith will be both useful and, one hopes, inspiring.’ Georges Bemanos was to the early part of this century what Olivier Messaien has become to the rebirth of Opera today and is the chosen subject of this study for similar reasons. Even a cursory reading of the best known novel of Bemanos, the Diary of a Country Priest, will initiate the reader who is otherwise ill-versed in the central preoccupations of French literature or unlettered in the complexities of Catholic spirituality, into an entirely different perspective on the function of the novel and the drama of human redemption. For in a world of peer-assessment, target-determination, performance-related pay, this story as others from the Bernanos collection can contribute to the unravelling of the activism and success-ethic that lies at the heart of our conception of what it means to achieve fulfilment and self-awareness. Fifty years after the death of Bemanos, it is not too late to set our sights on this most original of French authors for a repristination of the function of the novel and the way that the supernatural can make a contribution to that function. This is a poignant exercise given the complaint of one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, that much contemporary English fiction has lost its creative edge to the tired hymns of suburbia and that much North- Atlantic fiction has been slowed by the relentless march of the grey ideologies of the contemporary academy.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 933 , November 1998 , pp. 473 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Cf. Monet, P‐M., ‘Jacques Maritain et la philosophic de la creation artistique’ in Nova et Vetera 3 (1997), 41–47Google Scholar; Maritain, J., Art et scholastique (Paris: Rouart, 1927)Google Scholar; Barrett, R., ‘The Priest as Artist’ in New Blackfriars 79 (1998), 213–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weakland, R., ‘Aesthetic and religious experience in evangelisation’ in Theology Digest 44 (1997), 319–330Google Scholar.

2 For more on the latter see Liam Hudson's Tanner Lectures at Harvard shortly to be published.

3 Hebblethwaite, Peter, Bernanos–An Introduction (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957), 23Google Scholar.

4 Cf. Journal d'un cure de campagne (Paris: 1941), 248Google Scholar.

5 Cf. Hebblethwaite, Bemanos, 39.

6 Délicat et non exclusif/Il sera du jour où nous sommes/Son coeur plutôt contemplatif/Saura pourtant l'oeuvre des hommes.' (Verlaine, Sagesse, III, 1.)

7 Cf. Sous le soleil du Satan, (Lyon: 1952), 39Google Scholar.

8 Ibid.

9 Cf. Estéve, Michel, Bernanos (Paris: Compagnie Franchise de Librairie, 1981), 35Google Scholar.

10 Cf. Murray, Jean, La Correspondance de Georges Bernanos, Vol.1, 1904–1934, (Paris, 1971), 42Google Scholar.

11 Cf. Ibid., 48.

12 Cf. Estève, Bernanos, 43–44.

13 Cf. Murray, op at., 31.

14 Cf. Ibid., 50.

15 'Et pour moi, vous m'avez cru un dilettante, sans l'affection bien sincere et bien forte, sans grande foi, préoccupé d'art parce que telle est la mode et que les compliments àV ce sujet flattent agréablement la vanité (Cf. Ibid.,75).

16 Cf. Ibid., 91.

17 Cf. Ibid.,35.

18 Letter to Abbé Lagrange, 16th May 1906, Ibid.,91.

19 Cf. Ibid., 79.

20 A letter of 1st January 1916, Ibid., 103.

21 A letter dated 1917, Ibid., 123.

22 One thinks of Brooke's remarkable poems ‘A Threnody for England’ and ‘A Soldier’ which are but the more lyrical expressions of his own thoughts revealed in letters to Churchill before his death.

23 Bernanos, letter to Dom Besse, 13th September 1918, Ibid., 153.

24 Cf. Ibid., 185.

25 Bernanos, in a letter of 10th November 1925, Ibid.,199.

26 Bernanos, 22 April 1926, Ibid., 221.

27 One would hesitate to suggest that Bernanos shared the view of the saying: ‘the intellectual's problem is not vision–it's commitment!’

28 'Je suis calmé parce qu'il me semble que ‘se voir’ et ‘s ’entendre' est très doux, mais inutile, et que le mieux de toutes choses, en amitié, c'est de toujours penser un peu à I'ami.' (Cf. Murray, op cit., 92.)