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‘Lift up a Living Nation’: The Political Theology of Georges Bernanos
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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‘Lift up a Living Nation’: I take these words of G.K. Chesterton’s well- known hymnic poem, ‘O God of Earth and Altar’, as a suitable emblem for a study of Bernanos’ ‘polemical’ works. In fact, the three stanzas of Chesterton’s divine apostrophe — called simply, in the Collected Poems, ‘A Hymn’ - perfectly match the spirit and content of Bernanos’ political writings. Nor is this entirely surprising, for the two writers belong to a stream of intellectual reflection and spiritual endeavour in early twentieth-century England and France, where writers in a Catholic tradition (both Anglo-Catholic and Roman) sought to envisage and commend a new Christendom, on the basis of what was best in the English and French anciens regimes as well as humanity and the Gospel — all with the aim of countering and overcoming that extended cultural and political crisis which in England opened with the Edwardians and ended with the Second World War and in France coincided with the Third Republic and the division of the country between Vichy and the Occupied Zone. It is noteworthy that Chesterton’s ‘hymn’ was first published in The Commonwealth for November 1907 — the very year of Bernanos’ earliest published work, seven short stories on the themes of kingship, childhood and heroic death in the Royalist monthly Le Panache.
The prayer in Chesterton’s poem addresses a God who is named at once for the land (‘earth’) and for the traditional cultus of a Christian people (‘altar’). It speaks of the faltering of a political elite, and the disorientation of the masses; the excessive power of money (‘the walls of gold’) and the internal division that follows on party conflict (‘the swords of scorn’).
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- Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The Collected Poems of Chesterton, G.K. (London, Methuen, 1937), 146–147Google Scholar.
2 Information kindly supplied by Mr Aidan Mackey of the G.K. Chesterton Library, at Plater College, Oxford.
3 Jurt, J., Les Attitudes politiques de Georges Bernanos jusqu'en 1931 (Fribourg, Editions Universitaires, 1968), 58–62Google Scholar.
4 Coates, J., Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, Hull University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
5 Bernanos, G., La Vocation spirituelle de la France. Lnédits rassemblés el presentés par J.‐I. Bernanos (Paris, Plon, 1985)Google Scholar. True, the title given this collection was selected by Bernanos' son and literary executor, Jean‐Loup. But it is absolutely fair to the book's content and typical of its vocabulary.
6 Whitehouse, J.C, Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset and Georges Bernanos (New York and London, Garland, 1990), 41–42Google Scholar.
7 Bernanos, G., La grande Pew des Bien‐Pensants: Ea^uard Drumont (Paris, Grasset, 1931), 88,98,126Google Scholar.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 441. On the varieties of 20th century ‘Social Catholicism,’ see Nichols, A. OP, Catholic Thought since the Enlightenment (Pretoria, Univ. of South Africa Press and Leonminster, Gracewing, 1998), 90–94Google Scholar.
10 G. Bernanos, La grande Peur des Bien‐Pensants, op. cit., 443.
11 Sutton, M., Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism. The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Ibid.,66.
13 Chesterton, G.K., Orthodoxy (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 62Google Scholar.
14 Bernanos, G., La France contre les robots (Paris, Plon, 1970), 30Google Scholar.
15 Idem., Les grands cimitières sous la lune (Paris, Plon, 1938)Google Scholar.
16 The theme of Cooke, J.E., Georges Bernanos. A Study of Christian Commitment (n. p.Avebury, 1981)Google Scholar.
17 Bernanos, G., Lettre aux Anglais (Rio da Janeiro, Atlantica, 1942), 223Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., La Vocation spirituelle de la France, op. cit, 43, 37, 212–213. On the general theme, see my Christendom Awake. On Re‐energizing the Church in Culture, forthcoming from T &T Clark,Edinburgh, in 1999.
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