Bernanos and the Patriarch

[anglomedved]

I have just finished ‘Lettres aux Anglais'. These were written in 1940-1941 by the well-known French Christian writer Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) . In exile in Brazil, he tries to come to terms with the defeat of his country in 1940, and to pull out of the débâcle a set of Christian values for a contemporary society.

 One senses that, without being ancien régime or monarchist, he is wary of the modern state and of democracy ("Democracy is the political form of capitalism .. Nascent capitalism, as it grew and evolved, gradually transformed democracy according to its needs" p. 198). He goes digging in his country’s history for a deeper sense of value, which he finds in the idea of 'honour', closely linked to the ideas of chivalry and the need for an elite. (“I am not saying that the world will be saved by the masses, ... the world will be saved by the élites.” p. 102)

 He takes an interesting angle on the feudal system, pointing to how a new set of values grew out of the break-up of the pagan Roman empire, based not, as before, on codified law, but a widely-accepted code of mutual social duty and obligation, supported by the Church. For him this system worked, for several centuries, better than the codified law-based system, which is organizationally cumbersome and expensive and allows people to play the system, rather than be judged by the instinctive feeling of their fellow men for what is right and wrong. It presupposes the existence of an élite, with a strong sense of ‘honour’, and which must merit  its position by its sense of excellence and duty.

 Bernanos may have bent history a bit to his ends, but I smell in his writing much of what I think the Russian Church is trying to say. Here too I sense a desire for a code ofmutual  social duty and obligation to take precedence over lawbooks and lawyers (and in particular human rights ones). The instinct is also for government by the elite, under the moral guardianship of the Church, rather than parliamentary democracy.

 Whether this will work in Russia I don’t know, in the face of excessive social disparities, an intelligentsia which has to be ‘anti’ in order to maintain its identity and the ingrained habit of using the slightest advantage to feather one’s own nest.

 

 But Patriarch Kirill, Fr Vsevelod Chaplin and those round them would, I think, find they  had a lot in common with Georges Bernanos.   

 

 But where Bernanos has the edge over them is as a writer, and in particular the producer of quotable ‘killer’ sentences. I know of no apologist of Russian Orthodoxy (at least in translation) with his style and acumen.  A pity.