Among the many things for which the Swiss Catholic Theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), is famous is making it abundantly clear over a writing career of almost sixty years, just how important saints are to the ongoing mission of the Catholic Church. As with martyrs, saints are witnesses to the possibility of the Christian life by means of its actual demonstration. They are its fundamental apology, because they provide an example of the beauty of the Christian life and the workings of grace that makes the impossible possible.
In the 1940s, Balthasar wrote on Patristic figures such as Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus, fully mindful that their lives corroborated the dynamic sanctity of which they spoke so eloquently. In the 1950s, Balthasar showed that he did not feel above writing in a more standard hagiographical vein when he joined his reflections on the life of Thérèse of Lisieux with that of Elizabeth Dijon (Elizabeth of the Trinity). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he made clear in his extraordinarily expansive theological aesthetics, The Glory of the Lord, that the great writers of the Christian tradition such as Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Pascal, and others were also great exemplars of the Christian life that they lifted up, and that the great Christian writers of the modern age, for example, Dostoevsky, Hopkins, and above all Péguy, were its most successful apologists precisely because they spoke to a life transformed by Christ in the Holy Spirit rather than getting involved in the justification of doctrine or precept.
Their task was to show that holy life is beautiful, that it is glorious. Against the odds, against the deafness of the modern world, in face of the difficulties of representing the holy person who cannot be encapsulated in the category of the “interesting,” these writers succeeded in making the life grounded in and open to God not only credible, but eliciting and shaping our deepest desire. Yet, if we look forward from Glory of the Lord to the second pillar of the triptych, Theo-Drama, written in the latter half of the 70s and early 80s, we are advised that the transformed life that is the goal of our yearning is at the same time the fruit of trial with regard to which our personal circumstances, historical contingencies, temptation, and even failure are of a piece.
In addition, with respect to “drama” as a category in the sprawling opening volume of Theo-Drama, Balthasar presents the reader with a wide canvas of literary depiction in the ancient and modern world from which to inform and to fill out the contours of a life graced and made coherent and integral by a specific mission, whether Sophocles or Euripides, the Stoic drama of Seneca and Terrence, Calderon in the Spanish Baroque, the great twentieth-century playwright Hugo Hoffmansthall (1874-1929), or the altogether more familiar Shakespeare. In Theo-Drama, as elsewhere, Balthasar, dubbed by Henri de Lubac as the “most learned man in Europe,” has the unfortunate habit of making his readers feel uneducated, though the display of erudition might seem a little bit less egregiously overwhelming should we recall just how much Shakespeare is influenced both by Seneca and Calderon.
Interestingly, nowhere in the great triptych do we find an express treatment of Georges Bernanos, though Balthasar’s liking for French authors is well known. If he shows in the triptych that he is a lover of Péguy’s poetry that lavishes attention on childhood, innocence, rootedness, fidelity, love, and above all hope, it also should be remembered that he is the translator of Claudel’s lavish celebration in Cinq Grand Odes of the psalmic posture on the world that gives glory to God and of Claudel’s great play Le Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper), which is a drama of the reality and difficulty of obedience to God’s will. Yet, there is a sense that when it comes to the representation of the saint in the modern world, not only does Bernanos eclipse these French greats, but, arguably, any and all representations of the saint in any language.
In his 1954 text, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, Balthasar shows this in and through the size, the extent of quotation (25% of the 600-page text), the comprehensiveness of treatment of saintly figures across Bernanos’s entire oeuvre, and the level of his analysis of Bernanos’s entire canon. In addition, it is good to be reminded that it is more or less a rule in Balthasar that, if he has already published a monograph on a thinker, this means that the figure will not find major treatment in the triptych. For instance, in the 1940s, Balthasar published monographs on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. None of these figures are presented in volume two of Glory of the Lord as examples of “clerical styles,” just as essentially nothing is said about the Austrian playwright-poet, Reinhold Schneider (1903-1951) in Theo-Drama 1, on whose prophetic political voice he wrote a book in 1953 and was in the process of revising when he wrote the opening volume in the history of drama in Theo-Drama.
Having removed a prejudice against the text’s central place in Balthasar’s work, the thematic distribution of Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence should be noted. Balthasar spends the first of four parts of the text speaking to Bernanos’s self-consciousness as a Christian apologist, given what he deems to be the failure of the Roman Catholic Church to provide a live alternative to the skepticism and cynicism of the modern age. By comparison, he spends three-quarters of his monumental book speaking to the various star-crossed figures, male and female, priest and lay, in Bernanos’s work, as the only viable apology for Christianity.
Saints are figures of all three of the theological virtues, that is, of faith, hope, and love. Perhaps in line with Saint Paul, one can say that they are figures of love or charity above all. Yet, even as this is so, hope in the very future of Christianity rests on their ability to provide a credible picture of a life lived in truth and love and thereby help to persuade a thoroughly self-satisfied modernity that the world is not a self-enclosed system, but a dialogue between God and the world summed up in prayer, wherein God comes to meet the individual sinner and confront corporate sin and in solidarity present the offer of a redeemed life and union with him. If the saint is the apology and hope for the Church, it is only because the saint finds his or her model in Christ, first in the thickness of incarnation, secondly in the extravagant and Eucharistic love of the Cross, and finally—though this is already implied in the Cross—in the resurrection into new life that affirms and transforms our very fleshy lives.
Balthasar’s Bernanos: An Ecclesial Life serves here as both guide and inspiration for reflecting on Bernanos’ representation of holy lives as central to his literary task. Here I will follow Balthasar to the extent that I divide my reflections on Bernanos into general considerations of the French author’s prophetic critique of secular modernity and his apocalyptic figuration of the fundamental decision facing Christianity in the modern age. Beyond that, however, the essay arises from my own reading of Bernanos’s literary and critical work and represents, as with my previous essay on Bernanos, my own judgment of his parsing of the perplexities and difficulties of the situation of Christianity in the modern world and the hyperboles of the pairs of demonic evil and divine grace and despair and hope that he uses to indicate the lower and upper limits of a situation that is one of trial. Since I have already spoken to the first item of these two pairs, that is, demonic evil and despair, it behooves me to speak to grace and hope not only for the sake of balance, but to reflect what for Bernanos is the love- and hope-filled Christian message.
Critique of Secular Modernity and the Catholic Church
In his novels, and in his essays, Bernanos submits both the modern secular world and the Catholic Church to relentless criticism. With regard to secular modernity, the objections have less to do with scientific progress, the rise of critical intellect, and the aspiration for freedom, and more with the thoroughgoing uncritical acceptance of their value and the laziness indicated by modernity’s lack of interrogation regarding the price to be paid for the goods of efficiency, utility, repeatability, and transparency that otherwise might disclose themselves to be ambiguous. Bernanos’s criticisms arise neither from nostalgia, nor from the convictions of a conservative figure such as de Maistre who, in the agon between the modern and the ancient, decides definitively for the latter. Rather, in Bernanos’s case, they arise from a sense of prophetic mission to tell the whole truth about the complex situation in which Christianity finds itself in the secular age, in particular the new certainties that secular modernity has provided to replace the religious certainties of the past and the way it has essentially immunized itself from criticism as it has perched itself as the judge of human behavior, disposition, and psyche.
In his essays, Bernanos discloses secular modernity’s blindness and its commitment, not always highlighted, to the prison of immanence. In his novels he exposes the vanities of the modern age as he presents us with the doctors who cannot heal themselves, psychologists who do not know themselves, historians who are not a match for the subjects they would explain, and men of letters who fail to tap into the well-spring of emotions, and thus are fated to produce phantoms of life and simulacra. He does not deny that secular modernity sheds light, but asks about its limits when it comes to human desire, possibility, exceptionality, and exemplarity. Secular modernity’s analytic and interpretive instruments seem too weak to illuminate our darkened world: one might say it offers a mere candle to illuminate a psychic universe full of dark energy that would demand the equivalent of a Hubble or a Webb to track and read.
It is the terrible and questionable gift of the Christian writer to see into the recesses and crevices of the social psyche wherein lie pods of seething corruption, disordered sexuality, and spiritual ennui that the light of secular modernity cannot catch and perhaps to some extent that in its knowingness has sponsored and maybe even contributed to create. As the priest has had his confessional as his thesaurus of human fault, the Christian writer has always known about what we confess and what we dare not confess, in particular our fantasies of unrestricted power, the lust for domination that is never satisfied and abides by no rules. The Christian writer knows—and here Dostoevsky has blazed the trail—that secular modernity generates and shapes monsters. The voice of the Christian writer is prophetic, the vision of the world apocalyptic. Darkness has descended—as illustrated in the killing fields of France where the best were sacrificed to the gods of war(s). The Christian writer is an augur and a visionary: the time is the crisis of crises, a time in which our humanity is at stake. The Christian writer does not invite us, but rather compels us to sound the world, to discover that it is “world” in the Johannine sense, and thus to be able to hear the nightmare speak and to see it emptied of life—a veritable necropolis—flushed of grace and shredding reality as if sucked into the delirious center of nothingness that is its definition without the divine love that should be its charter and that would stay its entropy. In this circumstance, where can hope come from? Surely not from secular modernity itself that masks and exacerbates the problem created by our lack of acknowledgement of our sinfulness and unwillingness to accept finitude.
In this critique of modernity, similar to, but perhaps even more hysterical than that provided by Dostoevsky, one might have expected that the very Catholic Bernanos would have posited the Church as the answer. Following the precedent of his hero, Charles Péguy, however, this is not the answer Bernanos provides. As prophetically tested and apocalyptically examined, the Church does not stand. The problem with the Church is not that it is not perfect. Bernanos believes with Augustine and Pascal that the Church is a Church of sinners and saints, and ultimately for more sinners than saints.
Bernanos’s rage against the Church is that the reaction of the Church to the challenges presented by modernity is nothing short of a disgrace (perfidie). Faced with its dwindling social status, it does not witness to the difficult truth of our lostness and the liberating truth of the redeemer who has entered into solidarity with our condition and our flesh in order to save us. Instead, there is homage to the status quo, collusion with the powers that hate it, and shameless acceptance of its subaltern status and even the terms of this status. Bernanos demonstrates his obvious disgust with prelates and reputable clergymen affecting an Enlightenment stance and decrying the level of superstition within the Church. He is scathing about major seminaries teaching their ambitious young seminarians how to get along with the modern world that sees it to be antediluvian, and laments minor seminaries teaching seminarians little or nothing and sending them to poor parishes like veritable lambs led to the slaughter.
The Church is rudderless and adrift, acting more out of the instinct for survival than possessed of something like a plan or understanding to the slightest degree the essence of its vocation. It takes opportunities for advancement and protection where it can find them, and is prepared to take on board as much of the Enlightenment detritus as is consistent with maintaining its position and not leaving it further behind. If it does not embrace science wholeheartedly, it will at least nod in its direction. It embraces as much of secular historiography as allows it to whisper about the Church as a special conduit of values—though not necessarily salvation. It shies away from speaking about sin; closes its lips on all matters relating to money and power; remains silent about its ascetics and saints and, when not silent, wonders whether there is something pathological after all about their excess; and with regard to Christian mystics, who with the saints are exemplars, what has leached into the heart of the Church is curiosity as illustrated in the work of Henri Brémond (1865-1933), whose multivolume history of “religious sentiment” is a classic in the field, at once urbane, modern, and, Bernanos suspects, the work of an unbeliever.
Still, despite the worst that Brémond can do to deform and weaken a great heritage, despite the malfeasance and apathy of Church leaders, for Bernanos, there is yet hope for Christianity. The front as well as rear lines in the battle against the corrosiveness of the modern age and its leaching of Christianity that, nonetheless, does it the honor of mimicking in both its rituals and its generation of exceptions, are the saints. They are so not because of their exceptionality, as if somehow von Munchhausen-like they raised themselves from the mire or—to change the metaphor—have Daedalus-like sculpted themselves perfectly from the shapeless clay.
Not above declaiming, Bernanos declares that saints are saints because they have been touched by God and made into his instruments. Some of their awkwardness and idiosyncracy remains as if one can see something like a seam between nature and grace. Yet, they are servants of God, each with his or her own mission (whether Joan of Arc, Thérèse of Lisieux, or the Curé d’Ars). They are less exceptions than exemplars; they are icons or “transparencies” of God’s love for the world and for human beings, carnal, broken, and mysteriously and miraculously in God’s eyes lovely and beautiful, and thus eminently worthy of our attention.
The Saint as Apology
Given Balthasar’s encyclopedic treatment of the topic of saints in Bernanos, an attempt at comprehensiveness would seem to be pretty much beside the point. Better to examine closely a few texts in more detail, perhaps referring to a few others in passing. The two novels I will comment on here are Diary of a Country Priest (1936) and Joy (1928), both of which are accessible and have decent English translations, even if it is difficult to translate Bernanos’s lyricism into a non-Romance language. I begin with the novel regarded by most commentators on Bernanos as his most fully realized, and by Balthasar as one of his two most successful renderings of a saint in his oeuvre, the other being the drama, Dialogue of the Carmelites (1949). Perhaps as an indication of their literary merit, both were adapted to the screen, the Diary, of course, receiving its magical visual translation in Bresson’s searing black and white (1951), Dialogue roughly a decade later (1960), while also becoming an opera.
Diary of a Country Priest is just that, a diary, a series of snapshots in real time of the life and struggles of an overwhelmed priest in a provincial backwater with its own codes, ranks, secrets, yet, not uninfluenced by the enlightened modernity that has spread its tentacles everywhere. It also provides a tableau of impressions of a rattled and raddled Catholic Church exhibiting a cowardly conformity to the operative and emergent powers, as well as a nostalgia for a form of life that had been lost, that is, the position of clergy as “rulers.” It is not an accident that the peregrinating Curé is unnamed, for he is simply passing through, not because of ambition, but because “belonging” to the parish for which he has responsibility is not something salutary.
The parish is a real symbol of sin, the jelly of pervasive vices mixed with more of exotic fruit, with which the sickly priest—who in due course dies—fails to effect a workable relationship, try as he may to witness to the terrible love of God and all his terrifying forgiveness. As a literary form, the diary is meant to expose the unmediated thoughts and feelings of the priest to our gaze, to make us free to appreciate or not, judge or not, the debacle of the priest’s performance in the parish against the backdrop of his understanding of his vocation and what he feels he must represent and do in a time when the priest has come to have little more than decorative function. Bernanos, one could say, in this way performs something like a reduction of a life to experience or experiences that makes it more elemental than a hagiography.
From his perspective, while not entirely dismissed, hagiography speaks to something secondary, that is, the events and experiences of a person as they get “worked up” in the conventional “story” of a saint from whom the religious instructor can draw moral lessons. Thus, the literary form of the Diary is that of confession. This confession is filled out with the chronicle of episodes of the unnamed Curé’s failure in his role as a priest, frustration regarding his mission in a “local” world dripping in ancestral vices and dealing with the advanced guard of reason poking into its consciousness and being. To these considerable challenges we can add destitute priest’s experiences of deep unworthiness and his difficulty in praying to the point that he feels abandoned by God.
The world of the parish is very much the “world” of the Gospel of John: it is defined by opposition to the will of God and indifference to or outright refusal of his grace. If single in its opposition, this world is complicated in its makeup: there is the large seam of rural believers both used to and suspicious of the Church with unchristian habits that they do not feel obliged to break and armfuls of peccadillos that from their point of view are more or less sanctioned by custom. To underscore that no backwater, no matter how remote, is beyond the reach of enlightened modernity, Bernanos plugs in Dr. Laville, an example of modern unbelief, even if a fairly benign one, but tellingly also a drug addict. Finally, in terms of the dramatis personae, at once belonging to a different and higher social stratum in the parish of Ambricourt and emblematic of a kind of rebellion against God, we have the despairing Countess and her emotionally disturbed daughter, Chantal.
These latter two fall into the category of “monsters”—with Chantal self-designating as such—with the Countess obdurate in her hatred of God after the death of her son, and Chantal having set herself a course of perversity, despair, and self-loathing, as well as plotting the death of Mlle Louise, her father’s lover. The mission of the young and ineffectual priest is to attend to the spiritual needs of all of these groups, low and high, even if the spiritual trial he undergoes is focused on his battle for the souls of the two women who have made a vocation of hatred. The results are mixed: a miraculous conversion in the case of the Countess; apparent defeat in the case of Chantal whose cynicism and will to destruction borders on absolute.
The only other truly good priest in the novel, that is, the Curé de Torce, lovingly lays out one of the main reasons that leads to the mismatch between the truly serious priest and his parish and indeed between the priest and his world. This is, the inevitable clash between clarity and charity: “You work things out too much. You get your adverbs all muddled. Life ought to be as clearly constructed as a French sentence.” We hear echoes of the contest between Descartes and Pascal, of a transparency of psyche versus the tangles and abysses that are true to our condition, and the drama—vertical rather than horizontal—of sin and grace. We also hear echoes of the “holy fool” after the manner of Prince Myschin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
The Curé of Ambricourt is an innocent in that he lacks the skillset to run a parish efficiently. More importantly, he illustrates innocence, a pre-lapsarian-like faith that our identity is our identity before God and through God and that a life be characterized by the simplicity that enables us to order our desires appropriately. This will necessarily mean taking on the evangelical councils of poverty, chastity, and obedience in all their spiritual depth. They are to be accepted, however, not merely in the order of prescription and proscription, but with such whole-heartedness that we can access their secret force, that is, the power not our own of giving our self away that, nonetheless, is lodged in the very root of the self, a chastity that is not only celibacy but the absence of the concupiscence that is difficult to root out in any form of life, and the surrender that is a yielding not with a groan but with a joy that one might be of use to God in his stirring romance with the world.
As the very sick Curé, used to poor fare throughout, increasingly comes to depend for his sustenance on bread dipped in wine, the Eucharistic character of his giving himself away comes to light, as does, of course, its Christomorphic character. This giving away literally involves the yielding up of a life in death after the fashion of Christ in solidarity not only with those who are weak, but also with those who mock and ridicule all who do not cut a figure in the world. In a passage at once redolent of the great French spiritual tradition of “self-annihilation” and deeply admired by Balthasar, the self-questioning priest finds a moment of sweet release to celebrate what is truly beyond him: “Oh miracle—thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands.” Miracle, indeed. The Curé of Ambricourt is this miracle, but not because he is his own creator or demiurge. Bernanos does not conceive him to be the hero in a story that affirms his grandeur and supereminence, if only reluctantly and far too late. He is not an exceptional, but exemplary figure, a figure of what one is and what one can do when touched by grace, or in the French spiritual idiom that has a long history, when touched by charity.
The young Curé seems ill-matched to take on the forces of evil and their imbrication of which his parish provides a microcosm. Their weapons are of custom and habit, neglect, irony, ridicule, and hatred; his sole weapon is charity. His odds are no greater, but perhaps importantly, also no less than that of Christ on the Cross, who promises resurrection. History may or may not be dramatic, but salvation history certainly is. One cannot predict outcomes in a spiritual trial, though one can refer this trial to the archetype of the Paschal mystery. Yet in the night of destitution that the Curé lives through and in which he remains faithful to his mission, he speaks of the hope, at once absurd and carnal, for sinners and himself. Everything rests on this hope—which is also the emphasis of his major French Catholic literary predecessor, Charles Péguy—which Bernanos—perhaps harkening back at his earlier work—believes to be synonymous with joy. This serves as a natural segue to the second novel I would like to discuss that involves a female saint and, given Bernanos’s affection for both children and Joan of Arc, a saint who appropriately is young.
Joy is the third and final novel of Bernanos’s opening triptych of novels that begins with Under the Sun of Satan (1926) and in between sees the publication of The Impostor (1927) which, arguably, is the text in which Bernanos’s critique of the Catholic Church is at its most concertedly unsparing. Similar to Diary, Joy is the story of holiness in action in a deeply fallen world in which a young woman of obvious virtue, Chantal de Clergerie, elicits puzzlement, curiosity, and finally hatred. The atmosphere of the de Clergerie household is dark in that it is shadowed by the premature death of Chantal’s mother and by the louring presence of her blind, addled and thoroughly noxious, paternal grandmother who seems to be an elemental malicious spirit untouched by time and untreated either by Christianity or the secular modernity that is in the process of consigning Christianity to the past.
This darkness is added to or, at the very least, not relieved much by her hapless, vacuous, neglectful, and hypochondriac father, who is tolerant of Catholicism, but for whom it functions as a cloak of respectability. Chantal’s father is the very epitome of the petit bourgeois mediocrity that Bernanos detests. This dark household, which Chantal makes her own by running it and by being its benign tincture, is a crossroad for the light of modernity with its frequent visitors that are its carriers, for example, Perouse who is a psychiatrist, Cenabre, a priest who has lost his faith, and who non-incidentally is an expert on the great mystics, and its transient Russian nihilist who, in line with Dostoevsky, Bernanos thinks is the Enlightenment’s monstrous fruit. Though the novel beautifully describes the house grounds and attends to the beauty of the French countryside, in which only Chantal and the peasants in the novel truly belong and truly breathe, in terms of literary form and shape the novel is a drama of perspectives on a phenomenon—in this case Chantal—and in terms of content a spiritual drama between holiness represented by Chantal and the sin and evil arrayed against her that is both home-grown and imported.
Throughout the novel, Chantal protests against the all too manifest interest in her person. Without coquetry or conceit, she insists that there is nothing to her. She is simple, even a little banal. Like Thérèse of Lisieux, hers is the “little way.” She does the house choirs, tries to make life easier for her father to attend to his intellectual pursuits, enjoys running wild with her dogs, is at one with the daily rhythms of a household that syncs with light and dark and the changes of seasons and weather.
In addition, her apparent conventional piety lines up with this simplicity to the degree to which, despite being disabused by her of the idea, her father thinks that as she comes of age she is intended for the convent. It is, however, in this small familiar life that she has found her mission. Of course, her spiritual life is far deeper than might be initially supposed, something recognized by Father Chevance, her spiritual director, and himself a person of true holiness. The early part of the novel finds Chantal grieving for the death of her “dear friend” Chevance, who while he did not think of her as exceptional in a worldly way, was convinced that she was touched by grace and touched with grace everyone who interacted with her. Bernanos does not depict Chantal as an ingénue. Yet, she is not without naïveté. Like Alyosha Karamazov, she is disturbed by the all-too-human death of the saintly Chevance.
Nonetheless, like Alyosha, Chantal exhibits an untoward level of spiritual perception or knowledge of the heart (cardiognosis). She sees into the motivations of all around her, and the seeing is a form of forgiving. This is especially the case with regard to her emotionally stunted and intellectually dilapidated father. It is true also with regard to Fiodor, who spies on her and knows of her secret mystic ecstasies. To see with love is to see that what seems impossible for human being is not impossible: the blind see, the lame walk, enemies embrace, and the spiritually dead can experience rebirth. Chantal’s deep faith is marked by prayer that modulates her relationship to God, marked by obedience to his will and surrender to his grace. At the same time, for her, and for Chevance, who has lit the path for her, in surrender lies her true freedom.
Though all Chantal desires is the continuation of her small life, despite herself she is at the center of the conflict between good and evil that her very goodness brings to a head. The evil is ramified: obdurate maliciousness in the grandmother, fetid self-concern in her father, rank curiosity in the case of Perouse who wants to catalogue and dismiss her spirituality, and ambivalence in the case of Cenabre who wonders whether Chantal might be the moment of the renewal of his faith or the confirmation of his bottomless cynicism.
While Chantal neither chooses to be at the center of this drama, nor to be the banner for God, this is the role assigned her. This is her spiritual mission that correlates to the physical mission allotted Joan of Arc. Given the depth, as well as the comprehensiveness of his understanding of Bernanos’s entire oeuvre, no one would have been in better position than Balthasar to appeal to the situation of struggle as apocalyptic, indeed, after the book of Revelation, to think of Chantal’s situation as precisely mirroring that of Christ, that is, goodness drawing the attention of the “world” in an escalation of enmity towards the one who is innocent. In fact, however, Balthasar does not do so. Still, he powerfully brings out the Christomorphic shape of Chantal’s life and death, not only in its simplicity, prayerfulness, and obedience, but also as representing a form of undamaged and/or redeemed life open to all of us and in solidarity with us in our brokenness and frailty. Even when, or especially when, our cravenness and obscenity is brought into the light, Chantal is figured as an image of Christ’s vicarious substitution. Balthasar is right to assume that if not Christomorphic, the saint is not a saint, but a hero.
If the modern world lauds the latter and despises the former, Bernanos makes it clear that this ranking inverts the proper ranking. The hero, as Kierkegaard pointed out so well, is the highest figure in the order of immanence. The hero can instruct, but not save. Neither, of course, does the saint save, but the saint is an icon of the God who saves us in Christ, the God who refuses to despise us despite the manifold reasons we have provided, and who is prepared to come among us, suffer with us, and thereby confront the pride, the lust, and despair that mark our journey away from him.
The distinction between saint and hero is one that preoccupies Bernanos throughout his entire authorship. Balthasar observes at one point in his great text that Bernanos was worried as to whether the two were confounded in the priest protagonist, Donassin, in his first novel, Under the Sun of Satan, who throughout submits himself to a regime not only of rigorous fasting and insufficient sleep, but a regime of self-punishment. The text, however, in which the distinction is most conspicuously drawn—though perhaps also complicated—is in Dialogue that dramatizes the guillotining of sixteen Carmelite nuns in the time of the French Revolution.
The focus is on Constance and Blanche, two nuns whose names, Constance and Blanche, indicate their very different dispositions. Constance is the naturally brave one with perhaps less deep piety than her fellow sister whom she encourages at every step of the way. In contrast, Blanche is the natural cowardly one who, despite the depth of her faith, initially seems to betray her vow of martyrdom, though finally finding the strength to take on the role of martyr. Constance, though more reluctant than Blanche to make the vow of martyrdom, exhibits precisely the kind of courage and resilience that is inscribed in her name. In a very definite sense, then, Bernanos seems to suggest that Blanche belongs among the ranks of saints, Constance in the order of heroes. At the same time, however, there are more than a few suggestions that the different dispositions of the two nuns do not break as neatly as might be suggested into those of saint and hero, but rather suggest a kind of plurality of disposition in the order of sainthood itself.
Existential Tendency of the Apology of Saints
Bernanos tells us in his essays and shows us in his literary work that in the modern world the saint can be counted on more than the Church to serve as a bulwark for Christianity. Not doctrine, not precept, or the dispensing of the sacraments, it is the saint, the Christian life in action and suffering, who represents not only Christianity’s best chance at apology in a world grown indifferent and hostile to it, but essentially its sole chance.
Doctrines have been dismissed as mystifications; precepts set aside as idle; and the sacraments have decayed into rites. In contrast, the saints are sufficiently aslant to pose a question; sufficiently angular not to be reduced to a comfortable and ignorable morality; and sufficiently touched by an energy that is not of this world—although for it—to remind that the invisible pulses in the visible.
The register of the saint is existential and dramatic; his or her life is a life of suffering and trial because it is enacted in a world of sin in which not only does goodness not necessarily prevail, but even proves to be something like an apocalyptic provocation, provoking misunderstanding and hostility. This life can be eclipsed in a multitude of ways, for example, by the flattening into hagiography with its temptation to edit out difficulties, doubts, temptations, or idiosyncrasies that make saints unattractive, by romances in which saints become heroes, or perhaps by the Church’s juridical processes in which miracles become uppermost and the grounds for justification of the saint’s life. For Bernanos, the juridical process of canonization is itself secondary.
Indeed, he has Chantal say at one point that the strange thing about Christianity—presumably real Christianity—is that miracles play such a little role in it. Doubtless, Chantal is not denying the notion of miracle altogether. Everything about Joy is about the “signs” of God’s working in the world. What she is relativizing is the notion of an observable interruption to the working of nature, and casting cold water on miracles as the means to rid us of ambiguity regarding the spiritual world that has been the constitutive modern dream since Descartes and whose disastrous consequences we have come to inherit. God’s working in the world, his activities through saints, will be seen only if we cover our eyes to the glamor of the world and come to see in squints.
On Bernanos’s account we can so learn. In any event, we must. In the order of apology, the saints are our only hope. In the order of theology, however, the saints are our only hope for Christianity to be seen or listened to in the modern age, because of their Christological form, and ultimately because of the Cross. They are veiled transcriptions and inscriptions of Ave Crux, Spes Unica, an adage taken from a stanza a sixth-century Christian poem/hymn, which so happens to be the motto of the order that founded the university at which I teach.
