Vol.13 No.4 1946 - page 453

PRIEST AS SCAPEGOAT
453
ner of his eloquence from Leon Bloy and Charles Peguy, but displays
none of Bloy's private anguish, none of his highly colored, analogical
and indeed allegorical theologising, and none of Peguy's affectations
of a pre-Tridentine simplicity. The direct descendant of Bloy is Ber–
dyaev, a Russian. The direct descendants of Peguy are Gill, Chester–
ton, Pepler, the bucolic, tankard-draining, hand-loom-weaving, one–
acre-and-a-cow English Arcadians. In France itself, the Mendelian
laws of intellectual descent operate with greater complexity, .though
from Peguy we derive J.O.C., the
]eunesse Ouvriere Catholique.
Like
Bloy, Bernanos lives in the world and attacks
les bien-pensants,
but
his fantasy has been chastened by Peguy. Like both, he is a French
patriot. Unlike both, he shows no special predilection for the poor.
So far as an infidel can judge, he stands in far less danger of excom–
munication than did either of his predecessors.
But a man gives away his predicament
in
dreams. In a body of
work as cleanly divided as Bernanos', his fiction will represent the
dream-life as T. S. Eliot's poetry does. A number of Eliot's prose
doctrines are refuted in his verse, and much of Bernanos' rhetoric is
given the lie by fictions produced when the censor was nodding and
the will rampant.
The work of Georges Bernanos is at bottom primitive, pre-Chris–
tian. At the same time, its appeal is also post-Christian and not at all
uncongenial to an audience conditioned by the theories of Freud and
his successors.
As
music plays directly upon the rhythms of the heart–
beat and the bowels, Bernanos, though he uses Christian stage-pr-op–
erties and Christian prestige, plays upon the most deeply flowing
mas,-impulses of mankind. Bernanos (in his fiction) is a witch-doctor.
He is also a psycho-analyst for whom and for his patients primitive
magic is still operative and primitive
tabus
still valid. The excitement
attached to watching a girl pray is a marked instance. And always in
the centre of the stage stands the figure of the scapegoat priest, on
whom we load all our sins and send him out into the wilderness and
who is the point at which primitive belief assumes the Christian para–
phernalia.
There is a little recognised form of heresy or predisposition to–
wards heresy which consists in taking the part for the whole or an
attribute for the reality. All forms of idolatry indeed are in some
sense identical with the erotic tendency known as fetishism. The heretic
in such a case may never give overt expression to an heretical doctrine.
He substitutes an ancillary for the central mystery and adores some–
thing other than incarnate God. It is not far from the truth to say
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