'For, to tell the truth, man is indeed the being who walks between two abysses, and he is delivered from hell through Christ's abandonment by God, and God's grace has assumed this frightful, hard-as-steel, graceless form, and God has really given his Church and her sacraments and his chosen saints a participation in his battle with hell. None of these things should be forgotten or made to lose its bite. (p. 50)'
'"We must either get to the point where we feel we are right or we must resign ourselves to having eternal discussions with ourselves, as the poor damned souls in hell must have with the greatest logician of them all, whose name is the devil. Every comprehensive judgment is a risk, a wager. But the superstition, or rather the idolatry called Technology, closes our eyes to the divinatory character of Reason, which must either make a choice at the right moment or resign itself to a perpetual condition of doing without.' (quote from Bernanos, p. 93)."'
'"By what right...would you so insist on knowing what you are? This has no importance whatever. Do I, for one, know what I am? There are no duties to be fulfilled, sorrows to be suffered, injustices to embrace. Above all, there are illusions to be lost....A desire for self-knowledge, I swear to you, is the itch of imbeciles. Your sweet genius consists in being what you are without knowing it and without thinking about it, with that exquisite naturalness I so love and which is a grace of God. Yes, God's sweet mercy is within you. Don't ask her to explain herself , to justify herself. Don't bore her with endless chatter and discussions. Close the window, close the door, don't let anyone in. Allow his mercy to smile and pray within you. And when she weeps, say nothing." (quote from Bernanos, pp. 159, 160).'
'What remained unheard of, unimaginable, until the coming of Jesus is that God should have wanted to be poor along with his creatures, that in his heaven he should have wanted to suffer because of his world and did in fact make that suffering a reality, that through his Incarnation he put himself in a position of demonstrating to his creatures this his suffering out of love. And, if the suffering of man points only to that of the Son of Man behind him, then the Son through his suffering points to the wounded Heart of the Father. This is the final goal aimed at through all of Bernanos' work. (p. 191)'
'"If only he could become a saint, what bishop would not give up his ring, miter, and crozier? What cardinal would not give up his purple? What pope would not give up his white robe, his chamberlains, his Swiss guards, and all his temporal power? Who would not desire to have the strength to dare this admirable adventure? For sanctity is an adventure, we might even say the only adventure. Once you have understood this, you have reached the very heart of Catholic faith, you have felt the thrill in your mortal flesh of a terror different from that of death--the terror of a superhuman hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints.But who worries about the saints? We would like them to be venerable old men full of experience and politics, but in fact most of them are children. And children stand alone against all others. The clever shrug their shoulders and smile, saying: "What saint owed much to the churchmen?" Ha! Why bring in the churchmen? Why should this or that person, who is sure that the Kingdom of Heaven can be acquired like a seat in the French Academy or by cultivating connections with everybody--have access to the most heroic of men? God did not create the Church so that the saints would prosper but for the Church to transmit their memory, lest a whole torrent of honor and poetry should be lost along with the divine miracle....Into whose care would you put this flock of angels? History would, all by itself, have shattered them with its summary method and its narrow and harsh realism. But our Catholic tradition bears them along, without wounding them , in its universal rhythm....Do we really wish that all of these would have been placed, during their lifetime, in golden shrines and decked out with bombastic epithets, then to be lauded with genuflections and incense? Such niceties are only good for cathedrals canons! The saints lived and suffered like us. They were tempted like us. They carried their full load, and more than one of them, without letting go of this burden, lay down under it to die there....All of the Church's tremendous superstructure--her wisdom, force, supple discipline, magnificence, majesty--is nothing of itself unless charity animates it....We have great respect for administrative officers, the military police, surgeon-majors and cartographers, but our heart is with the men of the vanguard, our heart is with those who get themselves killed" (quote from Bernanos, pp. 261, 261).'
'"The Lord always did live and still continues to live among us like a poor man, and the moment always arrives when he decides to make us poor like himself. He does this that he might be welcomed and honored by the poor, in the manner of the poor, and that he might thus again enjoy what he had experienced so frequently back then, on the roads of Galilee: the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome" (quote from Bernanos, p. 263).'
'Holy is the person to whom a mysterious grace gives the force to pass beyond the boundaries of mediocrity (and, hence, beyond every mean and average) to enter a unique destiny that becomes the norm by which to measure mediocrity. This crossing of boundaries occurs by virtue of a call from God and thus is an act of obedience. At this level, the way leads into a wholly untrodden and pathless territory, all the more so as this way is, to the end, a following of the suffering Christ, whose abandonment by God and descent into the hour and place of darkness was a sheer treading in the pathless, or better, a being trodden and being dragged through the pathless. the more this way adheres to Christ, the more sightless it becomes.
'Such transcending, however, cannot lead outside the Church but only deeper into her. Thus, obedience to God can only be ever-deeper ecclesial obedience. It may indeed be that, when the average Christian obeys the Church, he does so in an average manner: that is, he adheres to her when she explicitly demands something of him, and for all the rest he lives his life and makes his decisions according to his own feelings and with a free responsibility all his own. Things stand very differently with the saint. His act of crossing over into "the sightless and pathless" largely robs him of this supposed average freedom in order to give him a different and higher freedom in God. The saint, then, by contrast to the average Christian, will cling to the injunctions and instructions of ecclesial authority, which for him becomes most concrete in his father confessor and his spiritual director. It belongs to the essence of this obedience that the one giving injunctions cannot himself accompany the one obeying on his way. It remains an absolutely solitary way shrouded in unseeing night.' [p. 267]
The mystic is the Christian who is given to experience subjectively something of the mystery of that sphere by whose life and truth every believer objectively lives his Christian life. This means, therefore, that every believer has fundamentally and objectively died both to the world and to his self and that he is given to live by virtue of a superworldly grace into whose sphere he has been transferred: henceforth, he lives on the basis of a "mystery" whose essence transcends all his natural capabilities and limitations, a "mystery" into which he must lose himself in total trust. The mystic has only one privilege: somehow to "see" what the ordinary Christian can "only" believe. This "seeing" of the reality of God-become-man, and for Bernanos it became (mysterium, sacramentum)the central criterion insofar as he, as a writer, had to be intent on rendering truth--even supernatural truth--perceivable by the senses. It was neither curiosity nor a kind of churchly aristocratism that urged him to explore the mystical domain but rather the strictest requirements of a "Catholic aesthetics". [p. 283]
'For modern man, who suffers from such nervous exhaustion, evil is not a revolt but an escape, a way for man to to rest by "distracting" himself (from distrahere: "to disperse" or 'squander"), a way for him to get out of himself and into the open, a method, alss, for man to strip himself of his person, just as a snake sheds its skin.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 407]
It is equally clear that this same Christ is also the Master of all who revolt against him and that no one has the competence or the possibility to know in advance what the final verdict of the Crucified over his executioners will be, that is, to affirm how far the grace of redemption will extend. [p. 454]
The retreat of the spiritual into self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction is a phenomenon that necessarily corresponds to the secularization of society. One consequence of such a retreat is that the spiritual itself becomes more and more worldly within its own realm: it is as if the spirit itself were becoming materialized out of the inability to perform its task of being the form of the matter of the world. The end result is that the alleged domain of the "spiritual" itself becomes politicized, and a whole 'casuistry' must be elaborated to justify this transformation. [p. 552]
Christendom can be produced only from the fullness of the Gospel and not from the clever mixture of equal parts God's Word and the demands of the times. [p. 587]
'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.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 605]
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