Excerpts from "The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos"

Georges Bernanos is a striking writer. He was mostly a novelist, but also wrote some essays of the social criticism type. He spent about eight years in Brazil, departing in the late 1930s and returning shortly after World War II ended. He was a fervent patriot of France and a fervent Catholic. This collection of essays sometimes strikes a tone that could possibly be called hectoring, although rallying is probably more appropriate. He was one of those far-sighted people from that period of time who seem to have mostly died out between about 1955 and 1996, during that period when the Cold War lingered like a miasma around the West, squelching any attempts at questioning liberalism.(Taking liberalism, of course, in the Enlightenment sense and not in the politics of America circa 1950s to 2010s sense).

This particular book is, I believe, a collection of drafts of speeches and essays which Bernanos was engaged in compiling into a book when he died. I actually quite like the unfinished quality; it's like listening in to a number of different speeches playing simultaneously. You hear the same threads over and over again. It's almost like a literary version of Cubism.

p. 42 "...the phenomenon which a Frenchman has the duty to look squarely in the face today -- in order to gain a clear and distinct idea of it -- is a crisis of civilization.... Are we in the presence of a new civilization which is experiencing growing pains? Or is it a crisis of human civilization itself, the critical period of an illness of civilization?"

p. 65 "Several times I have described this world before which humanity has been hesitating, wondering if we will be involved in it or not, for it scarcely resembles the New World we had been promised. New World is an inexact expression... for this world is not new at all. Capitalist or Marxist, liberal or totalitarian, it has not ceased to evolve towards highly concentrated centralization and dictatorship.  The regime of large corporations can in no way be opposed to state collectivism, since it is only another phase of this same evolution which I am denouncing.... Corporations have little by little collected for themselves the wealth and power which were formerly distributed among a very great number of enterprises, in order that the modern state, stretching its enormous jaws, when the proper moment comes, can swallow everything in one single glup, thus becoming the Corporation of Corporations, the Corporation-King, the Corporation-God."

 These passages are from a talk called "Why Freedom?"

p. 77 "You probably find it scandalous to hear me compare the modern world to hell. But this is an impression that the inhabitants of Nagasaki could not fail to have, unless they were not allowed time even for that."

p. 85 "The economy wants to control the peace, which is why peace isn't achieved. For the re-establishment of the economy, thousands and thousands of human lives, of old people and children, are still being sacrificed everywhere."

p.94 "Police states gradually regain the status and privileges of free states; they all gravely exchange treaties and agreements of protocol with each other. Do they really differ much in nature? That is a rarely posed question, but I am not afraid to raise it; I would like you to put it to yourselves before it is too late. The modern state has been decomposing for a long time, without your being aware of it. The democracies have been decomposing too, but some decompose more quickly than others. They have been decomposing into bureaucracy, suffering from it as a diabetic does from sugar, at the expense of his own substance. In the most advanced cases, this bureaucracy itself decomposes into its most degraded form, police bureaucracy. At the end of this evolution, all that is left of the state is police - police for the control, surveillance, exploitation and extermination of the citizen."

Bernanos spends most of his time in these essays talking about the cause of the decline of Western civilization, which he calls "despiritualization". However, he is not as pithy in those sections and so although I strongly encourage you to go and read the book I would be doing his thought a disservice by quoting him here. But his thoughts on resignation, hope, and despair are well worth excerpting (in three parts, and long):

p. 105 "Christian resignation is a virile virtue, which supposes a reasoned choice between the refusal and the acceptance of injustice. It seems to me, therefore, very far from being within everyone's reach. One usually encounters instead of it a kind of dull indifference to the unhappiness of others. Centuries ago, Christian resignation everywhere went to the scaffold and the stake with head held high, burning eyes, and hands crossed soberly over the chest. Today, it sits by the corner of a fire which  does not even warm it, with hanging hands and vacant eyes. I know very well that these truths are not to the taste of pastors who preach such resignation the way the priests of the catacombs used to preach martyrdom. So much the worse for them! When they repeat to us, as the bishops and archbishops of the Vichy collaboration used to, "Resign yourselves," we are not fooled, we know very well that they mean to say "Resign yourselves to having pastors like us."

p. 106 "I reject the worries of M. Mauriac. I refuse to take for hope this complaisance about worries, this kind of morose delectation in them. I am not deceived by the reproaches made to me for driving men to despair by my inflexible attitude. I do not want to drive people to despair; I want to pull them, by force, away from a resignation in which, underneath it all, they feel themselves very much at ease because it frees them from having to choose.This tearful, sunken resignation is the true form, the listless form, of despair."

p. 107 "Hope is a heroic virtue. People think it easy to hope. But the only people who hope are those who have had the courage to despair of illusions and lies in which they had once found a security they falsely took for hope... Hope is a risk that must be run. It is the risk of all risks. Hope is not complacency towards oneself. It is the greatest and most difficult victory that a man can win over his own soul."

 All in all, this is an extremely thought-provoking, well-written and well-translated, book of essays. I only read the first two essays, though, because they are exhausting and also because I have a lot of other library books out. Since Georges Bernanos was not a very prolific author, I decided to return it to the library and pick it up again at a later time.