Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence Pt 2 Chapter IV

The country priest, for his part, writes the following words in his journal on the eve of his departure for Lille: “Doubt concerning oneself is not humility. I even think that at times it could be the grandest, almost delirious form of pride: a kind of ravenous jealousy that makes a wretch turn against himself and devour himself. The secret of hell must lie here.”³⁶⁸

Such affirmations are only intended to point to the presence of hell in this world. In order to isolate the essence of hell more plainly, Bernanos sets about excluding the passion and fire of revolt, since these are too intimately bound up with the wholesome and necessary vitality of our temporal existence: “Elemental woe is calm, solemn, like a king on his throne, mute as a shroud”, says Fiodor in Joy. “As for despair: it confers on us an empire equal to God’s.”³⁶⁹ And, speaking of the child he once was, Bernanos himself says: “I’d rather see him in revolt than jaded by disappointment, because most frequently revolt is but a form of transition, while disappointment of this sort no longer belongs to this world: it is brimming and dense as hell itself.”³⁷⁰ In the countess the country priest comes up against “all the harshness of hell”.³⁷¹ What Bernanos puts in highest relief, however, is the coldness of hell, no doubt echoing Dante unconsciously: “I am cold itself. The essence of my light is unbearable cold”, Satan declares to Donissan.³⁷² “His masterpiece is a peace that is mute, aloof, frozen, comparable to the thrill of nothingness.”³⁷³ Chevance says to Cénabre: “Alas, Sir, in blasphemy some love of God may still be found. But the hell you inhabit is the coldest of all.”³⁷⁴ And Chantal says to her father: “The world for which our Lord did not pray, the world you think I know nothing about—pshaw! It’s not so hard to find it: it’s the world that prefers cold to hot.”³⁷⁵ In his one and only sermon—at the grave of the murdered shepherd—the Curé de Fenouille says to his “dead parish”: “All of you feel chilled to the bone, frozen cold. People always speak of the fires of hell, but no one has ever seen them, my friends. Pure cold is hell!”³⁷⁶

The nature of fire is different. In the words of the mayor of Fenouille, fire “triumphs over everything. There’s no filth and no smell that can resist fire. The purest water is not as pure as fire: fire would find something to consume even in pure water, don’t you agree? . . . Water can do nothing for our miseries, but nothing is above fire. Fire is God, I do declare.”³⁷⁷

Fiodor, the Russian in Joy, views the matter differently: “The secret of this house is not evil—no: it is grace. Our cursed souls drink it like water and find it tasteless, insipid, even though it is the fire that will consume us all eternally.”³⁷⁸ These elements, however, are but images; we must consider the thing itself they signify. The country priest knows that “hell is no longer to love”,³⁷⁹ but what this means exactly no one knows. It is the breaking off of all solidarity, something that for us is strictly unimaginable. It is a “sacred solitude” based on “a total and definitive rupture with the society of men”,³⁸⁰ or, what amounts to the same thing, it is the state of a person who has never really engaged his soul: “Could not damnation be to discover too late, after one’s death, that one has never used one’s soul?”³⁸¹ This had been the country
priest’s view: “I believe—in fact, I am sure—that many men never engage their being, their deep sincerity. . . . Once stripped by death of all the artificial limbs society furnishes to people of their kind, they will find themselves just as they are and just as they have been without realizing it: hideous undeveloped monsters, mere human stumps.”³⁸² Thus we can understand the statement that “we always end by hating the truth we have deliberately disregarded. This is one of life’s great secrets and also the secret of everlasting hell.”³⁸³