Fear of the Flesh

In his recent book, Bernanos, His Political Thought and Prophecy (Sheed and Ward, $3.95), Thomas Molnar follows the great novelist through the ideologies of this century with insight and authority. I use the phrase “through the ideologies” because Bernanos seemed to exhaust any school of thought he encountered, to empty it of its pretensions and leave it with all its insufficiencies exposed. Molnar correctly calls him a prophet, a man come to indict the age, a man so fretted by absolutes that he could rest in none of the actual or projected institutions of his time.

Bernanos saw this century, in its political aspect, as the search for an elite. Democracy had destroyed the gradations of a hierarchical and organic society, and Socialists and Fascists both looked for a charismatic class which could shape and lead the atomized masses. Right and Left shared the Liberal premises of a social order to be achieved by a maximum “manipulability” of the masses under the leadership of an intelligentsia. By reason of this shared goal and these shared premises nascent fascism and socialism were deeply related. Mr. Molnar shows, in the history of the French intelligentsia, an ambivalent attitude to these two outgrowths of the French Revolution.

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Garry Wills

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In his recent book, Bernanos, His Political Thought and Prophecy (Sheed and Ward, $3.95), Thomas Molnar follows the great novelist through the ideologies of this century with insight and authority. I use the phrase “through the ideologies” because Bernanos seemed to exhaust any school of thought he encountered, to empty it of its pretensions and leave it with all its insufficiencies exposed. Molnar correctly calls him a prophet, a man come to indict the age, a man so fretted by absolutes that he could rest in none of the actual or projected institutions of his time.

Bernanos saw this century, in its political aspect, as the search for an elite. Democracy had destroyed the gradations of a hierarchical and organic society, and Socialists and Fascists both looked for a charismatic class which could shape and lead the atomized masses. Right and Left shared the Liberal premises of a social order to be achieved by a maximum “manipulability” of the masses under the leadership of an intelligentsia. By reason of this shared goal and these shared premises nascent fascism and socialism were deeply related. Mr. Molnar shows, in the history of the French intelligentsia, an ambivalent attitude to these two outgrowths of the French Revolution.