The Evangelism of Georges Bernanos

Extract

Georges Bernanos is established as a great novelist. But today the author of The Stdr of Satan and The Diary of a Country Priest stands as a prophet. The honest, impassioned and radical judgments of A Diary of Our Times and of the recent Plea for Liberty are those of a man who can no longer contain his devotion to people, his profound concern for their souls, within the limits of any art pattern. He must break out, no matter how wonderful his power within the realm of art, and evangelize his convictions more directly. It is common now to see important poets and novelists assuming responsibility for the social salvation of mankind: the mention only of T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Thomas Mann and Sigrid Undset (separated widely in art and outlook, of course, but all united in their criticism of modern civilization and in their hope that justice may finally exist among the men of the earth) will be sufficient verification. This is not a time, it appears, in which the pure speculations and naked truths of philosophers and theologians easily subdue and win minds. For this is a day of the denial of absolutes and the measured thought of formal philosophers and formal religious thinkers, even the most true and sympathetic, has small influence with the multitudes of confused. So poets and artists, out of their more concrete and more attractive, unanalytical handling of experience, rise to speak.