ABSTRACT
Georges Bernanos is a psychological novelist and essayist whose distinctive vision combines a strong Catholic faith with highly conservative politics. He may not explicitly theorize his conception of how the mind works, nor do he and his fellow Catholic novelists present an entirely homogenous view across their work. Yet they explore human psychology and the ontology of mind from a Catholic perspective, and in doing so offer a sharply differentiated alternative to the prominent theories of mind that were being developed at this time. As such, their presence alters the cultural landscape of a period in which literary fiction was dominated by questions of consciousness. From our perspective in the twenty-first century, French cultural expression of the nature of consciousness in this period may appear to have been dominated by what was radically new, what was daringly controversial, or what took inspiration from fashionable theories from outside literature.
