Gerda Blumenthal on The Diary of a Country Priest

A few excerpts from Gerda Blumenthal’s beautiful chapter on The Diary of the Country Priest in her The Poetic Imagination of Bernanos (which I just discovered while looking for von Balthasar’s book on Bernanos in the ASU library):

For once and only once, the Bernanosian imagination has succeeded in freeing the finite, earthly landscape of human endeavor from the encroachment of the satanic water by purging the springs of the earth to the point where even the poorest soil can taste the promise of redemption. (129)

The earth’s thirst for the infinite is no longer seen as so incommensurable with the resources of its own inner springs of life that it must almost inevitably succumb to the satanic delusion of plenitude, as held out by the sea, or be delivered from the agony of its finiteness in mystic ecstasy. . . . The mystery of the Incarnation begins to cast a light of its own, in which the earth is displayed not as humiliated but as triumphant in its very poverty. Chosen by the infinite divine spirit as a partner and co-creator, the earth invites and makes possible God’s most beautiful and unpredictable inspirations. In the Journal, the earth’s immense role in the drama of creation that is steadily unfolding through time at last becomes fully visible: it is seen as nothing less than the challenger and embodiment of the creative spirit at work, the precious clay in which the finite and the transcendent, time and eternity, earth and water, are reconciled and become one in a positive, dynamic union. (130)

The principle purpose of the curé d’Ambricourt’s diary, as he himself conceives it, is to free him from the blinding vertige of the infinite that threatens to divorce him from earth. It is to summon him back to the concrete, humble reality of his own existence each time that the unmeasured élan of his dream of Paradise makes him lose his footing and threatens to cast him back into the sea of death. For the first time in a Bernanosian work, we see the protagonist’s glance deliberately turning on himself not in the self-delusion but in the heroic endeavor to face up fully to his own finite share in the divine work of redemption and to see it as clearly as possible. The challenge this fragile dreamer sets for himself, as he records his daily, hourly battles against his own terrors and “hateful weakness” and against the myriad delusions of richness that he sees throttling his flock, is indeed a complex and heroic one. It is to learn to accept the poverty of his condition, which has filled him with both pain and shame, and to turn it into the royal poverty of one who is conscious that, while nothing he has or does can of itself bear fruit, it is through his “empty hands” that the Father has chosen to compete his work of creation. It is a challenge fit for a king, for if he fails to do his part, grace itself suffers a setback. (140-141)

Blumenthal is to Bernanos as Ivanov is to Dostoevsky.

From the introduction:

The immense drama of salvation which unfolds throughout Georges Bernanos’ works . . . is conceived poetically as a contest between two elements, water and earth. The most persistently recurring Bernanosian image of man’s tragic quest for Paradise is an unfathomable sea, on which a vessel–all of humanity–is steadily being pulled off its course in pursuit of an unknown yet clearly divined destination. This destination is the Father’s Kingdom, the “land of fountains” where a blighted earth will at last have regained access to the live-giving springs of divine love which were lying buried in its depths and have been restored to fruitfulness. However, the vessel is no sooner launched in its pursuit of Paradise than we see it arrested and engulfed by a water which reveals itself to be, ironically, not the “azure spring” of the saving water of grace but the satanic water and death in the form of an all-engulfing flood of savage, primordial power.

The deep ambivalence of the Bernanosian water expresses poetically the two spiritual poles between which the human earth is suspended in the novelist’s universe and tossed back and forth: the infinite source of divine love, beginning and end of all creation, which keeps the finite and vulnerable earth young and enables it to produce ever-new forms of life; and the “thirsty water” of satanic hatred which seeks to undo the earth by first assaulting it violently, then engulfing it in mirages, and finally pulling it back into the uncreated abyss. (xiii-xiv)

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