‘Lift up a Living Nation’: The Political Theology of Georges Bernanos

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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’).