Bernanos: Poverty of Spirit

Now, what the Gospel teaches us “on almost every page” is “poverty of spirit. Blessed are the poor in spirit, that is, blessed are they who possess the spirit of poverty, who retain the spirit of poverty even in the midst of opulence, because, even if they possessed everything, they would still cling to nothing.”⁸⁵ This ethos is by no means a spirit and a work of supererogation: it is the fundamental Christian spirit, which should be at the center of the most elementary Christian attitude toward ownership and possession: “According to Christian law, the owner is actually but the steward of what he owns. He administers the goods for his own profit, no doubt, but also for the welfare of the community to which he is accountable. Christian law has never recognized the jus abutendi that allows big or small speculators the right to destroy essential articles and provisions at will so as to fix their price at a high level.”⁸⁶ Even though here the chief concern is the “spirit”, nevertheless this spirit can at no moment in the world’s history be disjoined from the material reality of poverty or weakness that contains it:the existence of the poor and the weak is the efficacious sign and, hence, the “sacrament”, of poverty of spirit. The spirit of childhood is inseparable from the spirit of poverty: “The poor and children are those most privileged by the Beatitudes.”⁸⁷ And the spirit of childhood will always be nourished and enkindled by the existence of real children. Likewise the spirit of hope, which is also inseparable from the spirit of poverty, will always become really incarnate in the materially poor: “Hope is too sweet a food for the ambitious. It could risk softening their heart. The modern world has no time for hoping, or for loving or dreaming. It is the poor who alone perform a work of hope in and for our world, exactly as it is the saints who love and atone in our stead. . . . The meek shall inherit the earth simply because only they will not have lost the habit of hoping in a world full of people in despair.”