Bernanos: Lust and Blindness v Pure in heart see God, know themselves

The whole secret of Joy, moreover, is surely that Chantal—although immersed without knowing it in the abyss of God’s simplicity—is wrenched from this holy shelter by the complicated sin she wishes to take upon herself, and she is dragged into an environment wholly alien to her in which she can only be a victim. But it is Chantal’s secret that, even in an atmosphere of sin and of clever and cynical machinations, she can, by the power of her simplicity, remain the dominant character who knows how to defeat her enemies—apparently with their own weapons but in reality with a superior secret weapon. Or, as Bernanos wrote to a religious shortly before his own death: “It’s true that the Gospel is written for the simple, and that only simplicity gains us access to it. But, if there do exist souls who have received the gift of simplicity, there are many others who have not received it. So, for the sake of these, it is perhaps good to make oneself complicated in order to lead them elsewhere little by little.”29 It belongs to the “economy” of simplicity (in the old theological sense of the term) that it can take on the form of sin and the form of the reflective intellect without losing itself.

Now, there exists another name for simplicity, for a divine quality communicated to us by grace that is defined by the singleness and seamlessness of the divine Being: this other name is purity. The Middle Ages spoke of the “pure” Being of God. But, in man, purity is a quality that can be conceived only as applying to the totality of man’s being, consisting of both body and soul. In its specific form as chastity, purity is the precondition for the simplicity characteristic of the person who can and wants to know himself, not in himself, but in God. Impurity and unchasteness are not merely (as Thomas Aquinas usually describes them) an external obstacle to pure knowledge untroubled by the senses; they are, in fact, the internal destruction of the light that shines only in God. Unchasteness, according to the country priest’s profound meditations, is secretly the same thing as unbelief, for faith is the evidence and knowledge of things in God, not in man himself, while unchasteness is one and the same as the curiosity to know oneself and all things only in oneself, a truth about which Freud has taught us a great deal. Unchasteness is also one with madness, because reason remains intact only when it transcends itself in the direction of God. The abuse of the sexual faculty for loveless self enjoyment presupposes, as a basic spiritual attitude, the abuse of the rational faculty for loveless self-knowledge, and this can be nothing other than madness: “I have not lost my faith, because God has deigned to preserve me from impurity. Such a comparison, alas, would probably make the philosophers smile! And it’s obvious that the most disorderly of personal lives could not put a reasonable man so far off course that he would, for example, begin to doubt the truth of certain axioms in geometry. But there is an exception: madness. After all, what do we know about madness? What do we know about lust? And what do we know about the secret dealings between these two things?”30 The Curé d’Ambricourt then reminisces about his youth as a very poor boy, about all the abominations he witnessed: “What would have been the use of understanding these tilings? I had seen diem. You don’t understand lust; you see it. I had seen those wild faces, suddenly frozen into an indefinable smile. Dear God! Why don’t we realize more often that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is precisely the mask of anguish? . . . What if madness and lust were really one and the same thing?”31

Sitting in his confessional, a priest can be overcome “as by a kind of vertigo” by those eternally identical whisperings that are “like the writhing of worms and the stench of the grave”: “The image of a perpetually open wound emerges, through which the substance of our wretched species is flowing out. What accomplishments could man’s brain not have attained if the poisonous fly [of lust] hadn’t laid its larva within it!” Neither Bernanos nor his hero, however, can be accused of prudery or, what amounts to the same thing, of sexual obsession. No one has dealt with this theme more soberly than our author. This gives him the right to call things by their name: “Whoever has any experience of sin cannot ignore the fact . . . that lust is constantly threatening to smother both virility and intelligence under its parasitic vegetation and hideous luxuriance. Since it can create nothing, lust is reduced to staining—in its very seed—the frail promise of humanity. Lust is probably at the origin, at the very source, of all the blemishes of our race.” And the young priest concludes with this decisive insight:

Purity is not something prescribed for us like a punishment. Experience shows that it is one of the mysterious but self-evident conditions for that supernatural knowledge of oneself—of oneself in God—which is called faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge; rather, it abolishes the need for it. You no longer believe because you no longer desire to believe. You no longer desire to know yourself truly. This profound truth—the truth about yourself—no longer interests you. And it is useless to say that the dogmas that only yesterday had your assent are still present in your mind, that only reason rejects diem. What’s the difference, if we can only really possess what we desire? This is so because for man there is no such thing as total and absolute possession of anything. You no longer desire. You no longer desire your joy. You could only love yourself in God, so now you no longer love yourself.32

Thus, only faith is truly an act involving the whole of man: it is not a transcendence of the spirit over the body; it is an act whereby both the body and the spirit, together, transcend toward God. We can, then, understand the following reflection, which the country priest interjects in the midst of his dark night of the soul, when he feels his faith is wholly hidden or even that it has been taken from him: “At tunes it seems to me that [my faith] has withdrawn, that it’s subsisting in a place where I wouldn’t have looked for it—in my flesh, in my wretched flesh, in my blood and in my flesh, my perishable but baptized flesh.”33

All of this explains why Bernanos, as also Claudel, thunders so loudly against the alleged ideal of self-knowledge. The only true self-knowledge occurs in God, and there man does not see himself but, through faith, God. Tins vision of God is the truth of what man is. To look