The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel | Georges Bernanos

The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel | Georges Bernanos | A Communist reviews The Diary

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The Diary of a Cou...

	The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel Georges Bernanos Da Capo Press, 2002 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning spiritual humility himself. Awarded the Grand Prix for Literature by the Academie Francaise, The Diary of a Country Priest was adapted into an acclaimed film by Robert Bresson. "A book of the utmost sensitiveness and compassion...it is a work of deep, subtle and singularly encompassing art." ? New York Times Book Review (front page)

required reading for the religious

Last year marked the 70th anniversary of Bernanos's powerful tale of a young and earnest parish priest in rural France who feels that he is a total failure. From a merely human perspective he is not mistaken. As is fitting, we never learn his name. The entire novel is a diary in which he confides his doubts and loneliness, his sense of futility, struggles with a sense of vocation ("Keep marching to the end, and try to end up quietly at the roadside without shedding your equipment."), powerlessness in the face of suffering, clashes with clergy colleagues, the history of his own family dysfunction, and even disgust with his own body due to chronic stomach pains and an impoverished diet. He knows he is physically clumsy and socially awkward. He describes his parishioners as bored, boring, and petty. They gossip about him as a "secret drinker" and a womanizer, both of which are laughable. The priest loves his flock; he visits every home every year, and he prays for them. He has a keen sense of history and his own obscure role to play. He is an astute observer of the weakness, frailty and fallenness of human nature, especially his own. By the time he dies of stomach cancer at a young age, Bernanos has painted a portrait of what we realize is a genuine saint. On his deathbed at the end of the book the priest confesses, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere." Every person in ministry ought to read this book, but perhaps not until you turn fifty or so.

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A Communist reviews The Diary

Hello,

I don't know if you could call this a review but it is a story about an old friend of mine, born to Communist organizers during the Depression, in a Southern state. To protect his privacy, as best I can, I will call him Jim.

Jim, an avid reader and a fine writer, retained his political birthright throughout his life. He was a very soft-spoken, sensitive, man of high integrity and concern for the plight of the mass of men. I have seen his eyes tear up when he would discuss injustice. I was younger than Jim in many ways but he would always listen with respect and patience to my banal obervations, seldom putting forth his own opinions. Jim treated everyone like this.

It is difficult to describe Jim's religious beliefs as he never put his forth with any vehemence or showed disrespect for those of others. I would say that he was an agnostic, maybe an atheist. I don't think he knew either. I always had the impression that he wished he could believe but just couldn't.

Jim would devour books and when I would sometimes ask him to name his favorite book he would say, "well, after The Diary...this is my favorite book". I must have asked him this question a dozen times before the light went on to ask him just why it was his favorite book. (Although a Catholic, I only had a vague notion of the book thinking it was about a young man who escaped to a seminary to avoid a woman who was chasing him).

Jim then told me his story. It was in the fifties and he had just been released from a federal penitentiary after serving time on a trumped-up charge. He headed for New York City and found himself in a strange city despondent and broke. One night to keep out of the cold he went into a Catholic church and was getting warm when he noticed a book he was unfamiliar with: The Diary of a Country Priest. He started to read it and then said to himself that he was going to steal the book. Jim then went to an all-night Hayes & Bickfords and finished the book in one sitting. After he finished the book, he had what can only be described as a mystical experience. He spoke of experiencing a wave of warmth flooding over his body and said that he felt he would never be afraid again.

In spite of the experience, Jim never embraced any religious belief system but remained a seeker.

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Hope, Always There is Hope!

This book is about the search for hope, a search that involves every living human being. It deserves a second reading, slower than the first, when one is older and personally more familiar with the material, especially that in the climactic scene of Chapter 5. Bernanos is often compared to Dostoevsky, but he is much closer to Camus. One cannot read about this country priest, especially when he speaks of his passion for personal journal writing, without realizing that this is Bernanos himself describing his struggles and passions.

It is unfortunate that this book is labeled a religious novel, thus turning away many secular readers. Just as Dostoevsky was often thought a nihilist because of his brilliant writings on atheism, Bernanos could be thought one lost to despair because of his insights into the human condition. Camus says that one must invent hope if it does not exist; Bernanos does this with the country priest's diary. He leaves no doubt, however, that his hope is sincere and real.

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A materpiece depicting a life of suffering, infused with light , amidst gathering darkness

This book is a treasure. It is definitely not for those who yearn for a syrupy and sentimental christianity, where a doting Father provides for, and panders to, all the needs of his spoiled children. This is gritty christianity where the Father asks those whom he loves deeply to ascend Calvary with his divine Son for the salvation of the world.

The young priest, being devoured by cancer, is a luminous icon of Christ and a true Father to his flock. Darkness gathers around him - he is ascending Calvary with his Divine Master and his cross is the cancer in his body and a piercing dark night of the soul. A kind of petty wickedness surrounds him; even the children whom he catechises appeared aged ("wizened" as the writer to the preface notes) and bereft of innocence. By contrast, he is forever young and he is the innocent one.

"Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old" (page 18) says his old mentor the Cure de Torcy to the young priest.

The young priest is constantly struck by his inadequacies: he is a mere drop in the ocean of time and he notes with irony the priest's call: "We pay a heavy, heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always to near to the sublime". (page 74)

He notes the kind of self deceptivity that people engage in when confessing their sins (who is not painfully aware of the truth of here words?): "Petty lies can slowly form a crust around the consciousness, of evasion and subterfuge. The outer shell retains the vague shape of what it covers, but that is all. In time, by sheer force of habit, the least "gifted" end by evolving their own particular idiom, which still remain incredibly abstract. They don't hide much, but their sly candour reminds one of a dirty window-pane, so blurred that light has to struggle through it, and nothing can be clearly seen. What then remains of confession? It barely skims the surface of conscious. I don't say dry rot has set in underneath; it seems more like petrification" (page 87)

The darkness thickens and the priest notes: "I breathe, I inhale the night, the night is entering into me by some inconceivable, unimaginable gap in the soul. I. myself, am the night" "First I was no more than a spark, an atom of the glowing dust, lost in an unfathomable night. But, now the dust-spark has almost ceased to glow, it is nearly extinguished. " (page 105/106)

On the loss of faith, he notes "Faith is not a thing which one "lose", we merely cease to shape our lives by it. "No, I have not lost my faith. The cruelty of this test. Its devastation, like a thunderbolt, and so inexplicable, may have shattered my reason and my nerves, may have withered suddenly with me the joy of prayer - perhaps for ever, who can tell? - may have filled me to the very brim with a dark, more terrible resignation than the worst convulsions of despair in its cataclysmic fall; but my faith is still whole, for I can feel it..." (page 122)

On the community of sinners, be notes: "There is not only a communion of saints; there is also a communion of sinners. In their hatred of one another, their contempt, sinners unite, embrace, intermingle, become as one; in the eyes of Eternal God they will be more than a mass of perpetual slime over which the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly" (Page 139)

He has this supernatural ability to summon forth a kind of darkness from the member of his congregation: "For some time now I have had the impression that my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice...As though the enemy scorned to hide himself from such a puny adversary, as though he came to defy me openly, laugh in my face" (page 153)

His mysterious fatherhood, extraordinary for one so young, comes to the fore when he confronts the old countess over her bitterness and her refusal to let go of the deep spiritual psychological wounds that the death of her son has inflicted on her, wounds that are devouring her; her state is one of spiritual rebellion but yet masterfully keeps her self together through the force of her pride. Deep down, her cry is; "non-serviam". And yet this young priest of peasant stock brings her (an aristocrat) to a peace beyond all understanding - she is reconciled and resigned; she accepts peace from the young priest; he mediates the father to her. The dialogue is masterfully done and I was reminded on a number of occasion s of CS Lewis.

On the devouring darkness of evil, he writes:

"Our very hate is resplendent, and the least tormented of the fiends would warm themselves in what we call our despair, as in the morning of glittering sunshine. Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more... To stop loving, to stop understanding - and yet to love...The sorrow, the unutterable loss of those charred stones which once were men, is that they have nothing more to be shared". (page 164)

His pains increases and night grows around him: "Fear of death passed over me. The though of death often enters my mind and sometimes I feel afraid. I don't know to what I can compare this flash of terror. Like the lash of a whip through my heart, perhaps - Passion before Death". (page 232)

"My death is here. A death like any other and I shall enter into it with the feelings of a very commonplace, very ordinary man. It is even certain that I shall be no better at dying that I am at controlling my life. I shall be just as clumsy and awkward." (page 279)

And, yet he dies beautifully- where one darkness abounded every where; grace is everywhere with a luminous entity.

Bernanos has depicted a saint without sentimentality with the eye of a master-painter: who would have thought that 2000 years ago, the man dying on the cross was the saviour of the world. Saints too, like their Master, come into their own when they ascend their Calvary, making up what is lacking in their Master's sufferings.

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A Form of Christian Ministry

Diary of a Country Priest is both a literary and religious classic. I read this novel as part of a class on the theology of priesthood.

Our country priest is a man that one might find to be weak or non-effective. This is the view of this priest with the eyes of the world. He must been seen through the eyes of the Christian as the "Other Christ." He is a man who goes beyond himself to do the mission he has been given. One sees how grace transforms and builds upon the priest's nature. He is also a man who wants to live out the life of a pastor, in the image of the Good Shepherd, leading and ministering to his flock, even while bearing his crosses. This novel provides a form of the Catholic priesthood and perhaps for all Christian ministers.

It is a good story as well. One caution is that it is fiction written in the form of a diary. This means that the narrator is unreliable, not omniscient, so sometimes it is difficult to figure out what is going on all the time. Be patient with the style. While sometime difficult, I find that the style works very well and reading this book provides a certain satisfaction.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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