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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Having imprudently decided to speak to you tonight about a country in which I have never set foot ... an authentic inhabitant of which I’m not at all sure I’ve ever met... in short, since I decided to speak to you about the saints and sanctity, the miracle, the true ... incontestable miracle would be that you manage to listen to me without boredom.
The words could seem forced coming from someone whose novels were famous for their saintly characters, whose personal devotion to the cult of the saints was prodigious, and who was given to repeating that ‘our Church is the Church of the Saints’ and ‘the time of the saints always comes.’ But there in Tunisia in 1947, a year before his death, giving a talk to religious sisters, George Bernanos was not being falsely modest. Talking or writing about saints or sanctity he had been doing for much of a lifetime, but he had not for that become certain that he was altogether justified in doing so nor that his contemporaries would or should be prepared to listen to him on the subject. Francois Mauriac once said of Bernanos, ‘the misfortune of not being a saint, which we hardly suffer from at all, he assumed in our place and for us.’ If Mauriac was correct, then we would have to conclude that Bernanos failed his favourite subject, or at least in the purpose for which he had taken it up. For more surely his intention in both talking and writing about saints and sanctity was to make us reassume that misfortune ourselves. It is an historical question to know whether his contemporaries had; it is much more pertinent to know whether his present-day readers might.
Citations of Bernanos from Essais et écrits de combat, Vols. I (1971) & II (1995), eds. Michel Estève et. al. and Oeuvres romanesques (1961) ed. Albert Béguin et. al, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade (Gallimard, Paris). All translations from the French are my own.
2 ‘Nos Amis les Saints’ in Vol. II, p. 1371.
3 Interview with Frédéric Lefèvre in 1926, Vol. I., p. 1040.
4 L'Imposture, Oeuvres, p. 329.
5 Saint Dominique, Vol. I, p. 3.
6 Ibid.,pp.,6, 11,15.
7 Sous le soleil de Satan, Oeuvres, p. 138.
8 Ibid., p. 227.
9 Interview, Vol. I, p. 1043.
10 The Interview with Lefévre was actually a text presented to him by Bernanos. It was originally published in April of 1926. Bernanos' Saint Dominique was published the same year in December, but there is no extant manuscript of the latter and so it is not known for certain whether it was composed before or after the Interview. See Notes, Vol. I, pp. 1319, 1649.
11 Saint Dominique, Vol. I, p. 4.
12 Ibid.
13 Interview, Vol. I, p. 1043.
14 Sous le soleil de Satan, Oeuvres, p. 308.
15 Journal d'un curé de campagne, Oeuvres, p.l 143.
16 Ibid.,p.1157.
17 Ibid.,p. 1241.
18 Ibid. p. 1256.
19 Béguin, Albert, Bemanos par lui‐même (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1954), p. 112Google Scholar.
20 Saint Dominique, Vol. I, p. 5.
21 Bernanos changed his mind about identifying the Order with the charity of its founder over the matter of the Inquisition. See Les grands cimitières sous la lune, Vol. I, p. 390; Notes, p. 1329.
22 Bernanos succeeds better that he had with St. Dominic in making Joan of Arc seem like a real human being. Nevertheless the humanity is still subordinated to a now revised conception of sanctity. See Jeanne, relapse et sainte, Vol. I, pp. 21–42.
23 Journal, Oeuvres, p. 1245.
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