The Diary of a Country Priest

The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos (the inspiration for the Robert Bresson film of the same name) is the story of a naive young priest thrust into a venal, superficial, society that he is unprepared to understand. The animosity of his flock, combined with his failing health, lead him to a crisis of faith in which he comes to doubt that God is with him. This crisis is resolved only in the final moments of his life. As one critic says, his “road to death becomes a path to the Cross, minus only the crowds and the persecutors. His agony is neither symbolic nor comforting but a Christ-like sacrifice hidden from view, an unknown holocaust” (Bonnaud 41).

The priest teaches catechism classes to the boys and girls in the village, and, much to his dismay, they (especially the girls) delight in tormenting him. This is seen more succinctly, and thus more clearly, in Robert Bresson's film adaptation of the novel. In the film we see the priest holding Seraphita, his best student, after class to give her a prize. He asks her if she is looking forward to her first communion, and she says, essentially, it will come when it comes. But you're such a good student, he says. It's because your eyes are so lovely, she replies, and runs out of the church, accompanied by the laughter of the other girls who have been eavesdropping outside the door. The priest suspects that such humiliating encounters are planned, in advance, by the girls. “Children are children,” he tells himself, “but oh, why should these little girls be so full of enmity? What have I done?” What the novel (as opposed to the film) adds to this discussion is the fact that it is displays of premature lust that particularly horrify the priest, leading him to fear that there is no such thing as childhood innocence. This fear is embodied especially well in something the Countess tells the priest when, speaking of Chantal, she says, “You imagine that a girl has to grow up before she becomes a woman." This is precisely what the priest fears most—that the young girls in his catechism class might develop womanly wiles and appetites before they have even grown up.

The Country Priest's relationships with women are deeply influenced by his fear of lust, which he does not so much see as a threat to himself, but rather as a threat to his parishioners, especially adolescents. He writes:

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumour with the very organ which it devours, a tumour whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape. … With what strange solicitude humanity keeps watch over its children, to soften in advance with enchanting images this degradation of first experience, an almost unavoidable mockery. And when, despite all this, the half-conscious plaint of flouted young human dignity, outraged by devils, is heard again, how quickly it can be smothered in laughter! What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness!

Most important, the priest's diary hints at the profound crisis of faith that he is experiencing. In one passage, “overscored” but legible, he writes, “I wrote this in a moment of overwhelming agony, agony of the heart and of all my senses. A mad rush of thoughts, words, images. In my soul nothing. God is silent. Silence." He writes:

I feel that the worst is still to come; the real temptation which I await is far beyond, advancing slowly upon me, heralded by delirious cries. And my miserable spirit is also crouching for it, silently. A fascination of body and soul. (The sharp withering horror of this misfortune. The spirit of prayer was not torn out of me, it fell away of itself as ripe fruit falls.) Horror came afterwards. It was only when I saw my empty hands that I realized the vessel had been broken.

These passages show the priest looking deep inside and acknowledging the crisis of faith that he is experiencing. The fact that the lines are “overscored” (but not entirely) and not ripped out shows the priest's ambivalence about the feelings they express—although he is not totally comfortable putting them in writing, he also knows that destroying the evidence of his crisis would defeat the purpose of using the diary as a confessional. The priest's crisis of faith is expressed (or hinted at) several more times in the diary. He later writes, “Only God can know what I am suffering. But does He know?” before several other lines which he scratches out. Still later, several pages are again torn out leaving only one paragraph:

Resolved though I am not to destroy this diary, I felt bound to take out these pages, written in what really amounted to delirium. And I wish to bear witness against myself that this trial—the greatest disappointment of my wretched life, for I can imagine none worse—found me at first unresigned and without courage, and I was tempted to …

It appears that the priest was unable to resist the temptation to tear out the pages that expressed the darkest moments of his crisis. We can only wonder what he was tempted to do. Kill himself? Renounce his faith? Perhaps the strongest statement of the priest's faith (next to his parting words) is expressed in a sentence he writes in his diary quite clearly: “I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him nor within him can he perceive anything, except in the form of agony." The priest here stares straight in the face of something most others cannot acknowledge: truth is about pain.

Note: This review is in part an excerpt from a longer paper I am writing comparing Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin to the Country Priest. All rights are my own!