The appeal of theological concepts and Christian values to the post-war reading public in France is evident in the widespread acceptance of such writers as Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Simone Weil, Gabriel Marcel, and, of course, Claudel, Bernanos, and Mauriac. The continuing popularity of these authors is also evidence that they have captured the prevalent but often underscribed mood of a contemporary society whose almost Cartesian attachment to rational evidence and relentless logic is accompanied by a constant sense of God's presence in history and in individual human beings. Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism (1920), Frontiers of Poetry (1943) and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953) have had an impact upon philosophers and men of letters throughout the world; with Gates of Heaven, Raïssa Maritain has established herself as one of the genuine mystical poets of modern France. Simon Weil's Weight and Grace (1947), Supernatural Knowledge (1950) and Problems of the Working Class (1951 reveal, the first intuitive understanding of religious principles, and the last, a socialist-tainted though Christian humanism and profound sympathy for the working class. The theistic existentialism of Gabriel Marcel's From Refusal to Invocation (1940), Homo Viator (1944) and The Mystery of Being (1951) point to a quest of spiritual truth which is not at all alien to the need of escape from our materialistic twentieth century. Paul Claudel's six decades of Christian playwriting culminating with The Satin Slipper (1930, but produced in 1943) constitute a summation of the author's beliefs in a life of sacrifice of love and happiness for the reward of God's grace. Such sacrifice can also be noted in one of the best novelists of our time, Georges Bernanos, whose Diary of a Country Priest (1936) and Monsieur Ouine (1946) proclaim an idea crystallized later by the atheist Albert Camus, namely that the dignity of Man resides only in helping others improve their lot in life. Finally, with François Mauriac's The Desert of Love (1925), The Vipers' Knot (1932) and Diary (1947), the profoundly religious although Jansenistic-tinged investigation of the problem of incommunicability of men points not to a solution but to the necessity of self-analysis and betterment of each individual being in spite of possible predestination chains which may bind many of us to the gates of hell.

A variety of scholarly works are available on these theistic authors whose stature and identification or close adherence to Church dogma are generally recognized, including Pierre Henri Simon's History of French Literature in the Twentieth Century (Paris, 1956) and Rev. Charles Moeller's Literature of the Twentieth Century and Christianity (Paris and Tournai, 1953-1960). There is still need of, however, a compact study dealing with the contributions of more debatable post-war writers deeply interested in theology but whose religious beliefs are often in contradiction with established theistic principles, often slyly and sometimes openly antitheistic.

For Albert Camus, Vercors, André Gide, André Malraux, Françoise Sagan, as for many others who will not be mentioned here, God does not exist. Or if He does, in the tradition of the deistic principles of Voltaire, God is silent, impassible. Faced with an inaccessible God, which is tantamount to no God at all, these writers, whose plight is both acute and sincere, are forced to seek a means of terrestrial salvation, a means for preserving human dignity in spite of the fact that men die without ever being happy. This woe of humanity, expressed by Camus' Caligula (Act I) with almost irrefutable simplicity, constitutes the immediate and principal effect of the silence of God. “There is only one Universe for us: Men,” wrote Vercors and, eight years later, he developed this idea by declaring: “The honor of being a man is this courage without reward of living without yet knowing the reason for one's life.” This courage must not be sterile even in the accomplishment of the most servile tasks imposed upon men. Retelling the ancient Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus suggests that even the most futile chore, that of carrying a stone to the top of the mountain only to see it fall to the bottom and have to carry it up again, need not belittle human grandeur, which consists precisely in doing one's best with patience and constancy in an absurd world to which we can still give meaning by facing defeat without revolt and victory without pride.

In Camus' The Plague (1947), the Jesuit priest Paneloux prays at the death-bed of a child: “God, save this child”; but the child dies and Dr. Rieux objects: “You surely know that this one, at least, was innocent.” God did not answer the priest's prayer, and Dr. Rieux, representing modern man, refuses to accept a creation in which innocent children are tortured or die. This dilemma, this having to live in a world surrounded by the silence of God can be solved, however, by complete devotion to fellow-man. The solution does not admit even a belated return to more established religious beliefs as a practical measure, before death, in the sense suggested by the bet of Pascal. Mersault, for example, the hero of The Stranger (1942), will refuse the “philosophical suicide” suggested to him by the priest who visits him in prison and who, before the execution, begins to speak of God. Camus' atheism is complete for he fears that the Church will soon play a role analogous to that of the states which, glorifying themselves, oppress and despise men of flesh and blood who live their daily lives in mild revolt against the certitude of death. Of course, what Camus fails to understand is that in Christian revelation sometimes the just, the innocent, or the saint pays for the others. This is the mystery of the Beatitudes, unaccepted by Dr. Rieux and unexplored by Father Paneloux, who is unable to answer the atheist he faces. Another point which remains unobserved by Camus is that ever since the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, declaring that “The greatest misfortune of the Church in the twentieth century is that it lost the working class,” the Church has constantly tried to familiarize itself again with the problems of the masses, to become once more involved actively in the great questions facing the war-devastated world of our time.

But Camus was not alone in his shortsightedness. The antitheist André Gide wrote in his Diary: “Why seek new masters? Catholicism or communism requires, or at least involves a submission of the spirit … which will become but another form of totalitarianism worth nothing more than the nazism which has just been defeated.” And “the world will be saved, if it can be, only by the unsubmissive.” The atheism of Gide leads, as logical atheism must, to a militant antitheism evident in the proud display of the calm and serenity with which he maintained that he was awaiting death. Gide's final moments recorded in his diary, will serve as example to future apologists of atheism who will point to the possibility of living without God, without hope, and yet knowing complete happiness when faced with annihilation. To this they will oppose the death of Christian heroes, that of Bernanos' characters, for example, who face death with fear, sometimes with cowardice. They will not understand that faith in God permits the Christian to measure always the distance between him and the Lord, and that this distance, in which the Christian sometimes has the impression of being abandoned, causes fear quite explainably, whereas lack of faith leads to self-aggrandizement and to an equalization of the ego with God.

What is significant and pathetic is that the atheism and antitheism of these men manage to permeate and spread even to strongly theistic writers who, while not denying the existence of God, emphasize the momentary distress of the Christian whose prayer remains unanswered. Julien Green furnishes a case in point. In his Diary, a number of statements point to the “silence of God” even in texts written after the author's conversion in 1939: “The voice of God resounds in us, but it is often silent”; The silence of God! The silence of God! I thought of it all day long”; “God inhabits the world of silence”; “The civilizations disappear one after the other, and He keeps silent.”

If, in their search for values in an absurd world, Vercors advances no solution, Camus preaches the fraternity of men, and Gide alleges the possibility of transcending the powers of death by becoming indifferent to them, André Malruax proposes a more tangible escapism, one practiced, consciously or not, by many a sincere Godless artist: the study of human creativeness, which alone proves the dignity of Man and, by its ability to survive, Man's hope and chances to escape the absurd. This is not the young Malraux, the rebel, the communist, the advocate of a materialistic proletariat, the author of The Conquerors (1927), The Human Condition (1933), The Hope (1938); this is the mature Malraux, that of The Psychology of Art (1952), The Voices of Silence (1954), The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture (1956). The author sees in art a negation of the Eternal, of the Being: the art-producing artist is linked to God, Creator of mankind, but in the comparison God is on the short end because his Creation is transitory (men die), whereas that of the ancient Greek artist, for example, outlives the centuries and proves the superiority of the artist over the Creator. This is not simply an atheistic attitude; it is an aggressive antitheistic affirmation for it implies that the Creator, by limiting the artist's span of life, makes Man a lesser artist than he could otherwise be. God is thus construed as the enemy of Art: He invariably kills the artist. The twenty centuries of Christian-inspired art are almost entirely bypassed by Malraux, who discusses principally the contributions of ancient Greece and Rome. In addition, what he fails to see, or to point out, is that the more one searches into the art of past civilizations (see, and this is one example of many, M. P. Nilsson's Civilizations of Yesterday and Today, Paris, 1954), the more one realizes that religious currents were very important in spite of the frailty of mythological gods: the Iliad and the Odyssey give frequent accounts of the more influential gods of the Greek masses as seen in their funeral monoliths.

But not many read or understand the message of fraternity in Camus, of tranquility in Gide, of art in Malraux; their efforts filter through to the masses via more popular and briefer writers whose metaphysics are stated in the simpler terms of “do evil and avoid boredom.” Françoise Sagan is a good example of such an author. Her novels: Bonjour Tristesse (1954), A Certain Smile (1956), Do You Love Brahms (1959), A Castle in Sweden (1960) and The Wonderful Dreams (1961), all point to the necessity of transforming our present terrestrial hell, caused by boredom, into an earthly paradise by means of sinning without love of sin but with a hatred of the good. This attitude, unfortunately shared by so many readers (she would not have found the vast audience she did or been so successful, had she not captured a wide-spread mood of her generation), stems from the “silence of God” which results in the unbearable loneliness of Man. Since God does not care, there is no hope: “I had nothing to sacrifice, no hope,” says Dominique, the heroine of A Certain Smile. “To live,” she adds later, “is nothing but to arrange it so that you be as content as possible.” And happiness is then defined as “the absence of boredom.” But how does one escape a Godless, therefore an absurd and bored existence? It is not easy, for even sin, when it becomes part of one's life, is contaminated by that feeling of emptiness which accompanies the absurd. Each individual act of sin must then be transitory and followed by another whose novelty will not last any longer, but which will bring about the deception of temporary relief: in A Certain Smile, Dominique, the young mistress of the quadragenarian Luc, will arrive, with the latter, at a sincere complicity. They will not trick each other; they will not speak fanciful words of love; they will simply say that they could feel something—and the purest beauty, that of Mozart's music, will only evoke a certain smile. But even this type of sin, an illicit affair with a married man based not on love but on pure complicity, can offer only a temporary solution: the boredom due to loneliness cannot be long dispelled by the mirages of even an ideal liaison. The partners are taken in by their own game, they want to make it last more than its natural life; or, once the deception of security is gone, the arrangement must be terminated and a new one must be sought. In Do You Love Brahms, the heroine, Paule, makes the usual attempt to escape solitude. The weak, vulnerable, lonely and bored Paule, who despises her lover but who cannot do without his meaningless protection, has no other recourse than to create her own prison. Her rather awkward and frequently unfaithful Don Juan provides Paule with a needed certitude: the assurance that she has nothing further to fear. But when the novel ends, the reader has the feeling that the temporality of Paule's sinful, almost senseless affair must soon be cured by the quest for and the discovery of a new convalescence. Only the patient will become ill again, and the alternation of boredom and lack thereof will give, perhaps, some form of meaning to an otherwise senseless world.

The appeal of such a Godless passage through life is obvious especially to today's youth caught between the plights inherent in the aftermath of the last war and the uneasy expectation of a more calamitous future conflict. A life of successive sins provides a facile remedy for a generation of young men and women faced with a silent God and placed on this planet amidst an absurd atmosphere of men's recurring inhumanity to men. Moreover, God's silence implies the absence of a system of punishment and reward: hence, the only deterrent remaining, that of one's individual conscience (which can be often appeased by sophisms), is not sufficient to prevent the committal of acts normally stopped by fear of eternal damnation. It is therefore clear that Sagan's views are antitheistic: God is guilty of having created Man and of having abandoned him after Creation; Man is then entitled to seek his own salvation, often at the expense of his fellow-man, and to uphold the contrary, to affirm Man's responsibility to the Divine in spite of His silence, is to commit an injustice even greater than that of God.

Of such an injustice the Church is accused today in the antitheistic Sartrean publication Temps Modernes. The Church, the antitheists maintain, is guilty of attempting to make Man so subservient and so forgetful of his dignity as to pledge allegiance not only to an unworthy Omnipotent but also to His even less worthy agents on earth, the mass of individuals wearing the cassock and doing God's meaningless work among us. Now, while it is true that this Sartrean and aggressive atheism has been constantly declining since 1952 among the French intellectuals, the average French bourgeois, as embodied in the characters depicted by Françoise Sagan (Dominique reads the “admirable book of J. P. Sartre, The Age of Reason”), finds it difficult to return to a more conservative belief in a God who cares, in a God whose Son died on the Cross in order to save us all. Many individual French priests have recognized and have attempted to eliminate the problem by joining the Priest-Worker movement which flourished in the 1950's. The Church's involvement in daily human plights was construed as a natural outgrowth of the affirmation of Pope Pius XI quoted above. Later, however, it became evident that the work of individual priests in factories was incompatible with a life of soul-saving and contemplation, and, in 1954, a limit of three hours of manual labor per day was put into effect. In 1956 the movement deteriorated further when a number of French Church officials took part in peace and anti-American demonstrations, joining in such cries as: “Ridgway means war; Ridgway go home.” Finally, in 1959, Cardinal Pizzardo of the Vatican Council Office ordered the dissolution of the movement, a decision viewed by many as a blow to French theism and a trump card in the hands of the antitheists who could now point to this as proof of the Church's disinterest in the masses.

But whether affirming or denying the existence of God, French literature in the twentieth century is largely bound to religion which, more often than not, molds and inspires it. In no other country, certainly not in America where novelists and playwrights remain morbidly shy of religious issues, do writers speculate so abundantly on sin, on Redemption, on charity, on Man's relationship to God. There is certainly aggressiveness in antitheists like Gide, Sartre, and Sagan, but there are also humility and benevolence, remorse and prayer in writers like Julien Green and Camus. Today, then, because of its deep involvement in religious issues and in spite of the negators, France remains, perhaps more than ever, “the eldest daughter of the Church.”