Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existance

Bernanos’ diagnosis of our sick age is grave. Man, turned into a collective mass and handed over to the power of machines, is in the process, not only of losing his most inalienable goods, but of abandoning them voluntarily. What was once freedom will soon be something unknown¹ and, indeed, undesirable. Man is becoming a trained animal.² His own dignity is being radically debased by the machines;³ he is “at once degenerating and hardening”;⁴ and “the systems flaunted at us are systems of decomposition.”⁵ He has become totalitarian in his own intimate self.⁶ Totalitarian man,⁷ whose freedom is in the process of decomposing, is logically followed by the totalitarian State: the latter is more “a symptom than a cause”.⁸ Here, it is man himself who is being gambled away,⁹ for, without freedom, man can by no means continue to be rational, to be a “holy person”: henceforth he can only be a higher animal,¹⁰ and, in his race with the machine, he can only come out a loser.¹¹ Mankind has suffered so intrinsic a loss that Bernanos compared this time and again to the chronic loss of vitamins in an organism¹²—a radical feebleness that has long since abandoned all faith in “health”, that is, in freedom of the spirit.¹³ The condition is one of thorough depersonalization.¹⁴ The ascendancy of technology leads automatically to police terror;¹⁵ the capitulation of freedom of itself leads to the hypertrophy of the State; and both things together lead to the substitution of truth by propaganda,¹⁶ because the truth becomes something indifferent or indeed repulsive to the personless individual,¹⁷ and because such an entity as “the personless individual” is too depleted to be able to judge responsibly, to choose, and to become committed to the end to a truth that has been acknowledged. But as the power of the State grows, its real worth declines because no one takes responsibility for it:¹⁸ the State thereby becomes the intrinsic enemy of the free man, of the hero, and of the saint.¹⁹ The “soft monster”²⁰ is ready for every atrocity,²¹ indeed, for every impulse to destroy.