This essay popped up on my Facebook feed. I have read this book, and what is said eloquently here is true. No name was given for the author. I hope it's not AI. It has too much empathy to be AI.
Georges Bernanos wrote this in 1936, and it's one of the strangest, most unsettling novels about faith I've ever read. Not faith as triumph or certainty, but faith as a kind of sustained suffering, a daily choice to keep believing when nothing confirms that belief, when your body is failing, when your parishioners despise you, when God feels absent and you're too exhausted to keep searching. The unnamed priest writes in his diary, and you watch him disintegrate page by page. And Bernanos never flinches, never offers comfort, never suggests that suffering will be rewarded. He just shows you a man dying slowly while trying to love people who don't want his love.
The priest is young, sickly, poor, assigned to a small parish in northern France where nobody wants him. He eats mostly bread and wine because his stomach can't handle anything else, though we learn later it's cancer eating him from the inside. The villagers see him as weak, ineffectual, possibly alcoholic since he's always drinking wine. They mock him behind his back and sometimes to his face. And he knows all this. He writes it down with devastating clarity. But he keeps trying anyway, keeps making pastoral visits, keeps praying for people who have no use for him.
What Bernanos captures so perfectly is the particular loneliness of spiritual vocation in a world that's moved on from God. This isn't medieval certainty or Reformation passion. This is the 20th century, and most of his parishioners go through the motions of religion out of habit or social pressure while their actual lives are governed by resentment, boredom, petty cruelties. The priest can't reach them because they don't want to be reached. They've built comfortable fortresses around their small sins and don't appreciate someone suggesting there might be another way to live.
The encounter with the Countess is the novel's devastating centerpiece. She's a wealthy woman who's been spiritually dead since her son died years ago, nurturing her grief and bitterness like a garden. And the priest, in a scene of almost unbearable intensity, breaks through her defenses. He doesn't perform miracles or offer platitudes. He just refuses to let her hide. And something shifts, she experiences grace, real grace, the kind that shatters and remakes you. And then she dies that same night. And everyone blames the priest for upsetting her, for hastening her death with his fanaticism.
Bernanos is wrestling with something most religious fiction avoids: the possibility that serving God might look identical to failure. The priest accomplishes nothing measurable. He doesn't revitalize the parish or convert masses or perform visible good works. He just suffers: from illness, from loneliness, from the weight of other people's sins that he tries to carry. And Bernanos asks: What if that's enough? What if the value of a life can't be measured in outcomes? What if holiness is just the stubborn refusal to stop loving even when love returns nothing?
The other priests in the novel throw the protagonist's inadequacy into sharp relief. There's the priest of Torcy, older and pragmatic, who tells him to toughen up, to not take things so personally. There's his former teacher, who's become comfortable and complacent. They've made peace with the world's indifference. They've learned to manage religion rather than live it. And you see the choice clearly: you can survive as a priest by lowering your expectations, by treating it as a job rather than a calling. But our priest can't do that. Or won't. And it kills him.
I'll be honest, there are stretches where the spiritual anguish becomes almost monotonous. The priest circles the same doubts, the same feelings of inadequacy, and occasionally I wanted to tell him to eat something substantial and maybe see a doctor instead of writing another tormented diary entry. But that's also Bernanos's point, I think. Spiritual struggle isn't dramatic. It's repetitive. It's the same exhausting interior battle every single day with no resolution, no climax, just the grinding work of continuing.
The diary form is crucial. We're only getting the priest's perspective, his interpretation of events, and he's not a reliable narrator, not because he lies, but because he's so consumed by self-doubt that he can't see himself clearly. When he records small victories, he immediately undercuts them. When people show him kindness, he wonders what they really mean. He's trapped inside his own consciousness, and the diary becomes this claustrophobic space where his thoughts chase each other in circles.
The ending is abrupt and almost cruel. The priest dies alone, away from his parish, in a dingy apartment, attended only by a former seminarian who's left the church. His last words are "Tout est grâce" all is grace. Everything is grace. And Bernanos doesn't tell you whether to believe that. Is this faith? Delusion? The final victory of hope over evidence? The seminarian writes down what happened, and then the diary just stops. No resurrection, no vindication, no sense that his suffering meant anything to anyone but him.
Read this if you've ever tried to do something you believed in and watched it fail completely.
Bernanos shows you a man who gives everything and receives nothing visible in return, who dies young and in pain, whose life could easily be read as wasted. But he also suggests, quietly, without insisting, that maybe there are kinds of success the world can't measure. That maybe holiness looks less like achievement and more like faithfulness when faithfulness costs you everything. I'm not sure I believe that. But Bernanos made me feel it. And for 300 pages, that feeling was almost enough to pass for truth.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3Y66GjN
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