Only a Rough Caricature.

 “Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.”  

Diary of a Country Priest was not what I expected.  I thought I had read it once before, but none of it seemed familiar.   The above quote reminds me of this one from CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters:

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

 The country priest, the cure of Ambricourt, is a young man, and ill; in fact, he is dying, though he does not know it until near the end.   When I look back at the novel, it is a series of battles:  the priest is fighting to eat, to live, to serve his parish, to compensate for his keenly felt inadequacies.   He is battling, mostly, without a sense of the presence of God.   He is like a lone sentry at a small but crucial pass.    I am glad I read it during Lent.

What does it have to say to our modern -- anomie, if that's the word?  We aren't bored in the same way that his parishioners are, not quite.   They are peasants or small merchants or minor nobility.    They don't have smartphones or the internet -- mostly they seem to want to be left alone to a kind of dusty grubbing existence: 

Mine is a parish like all the rest.  They're all alike.  Those of today, I mean.  ....good and evil are probably evenly distributed, but on such a low plane, very low indeed!  Or if you like they lie one over the other; like oil and water they never mix.

At the beginning of the book, it seems like, analogically, he is stuck in a horrible, unsuitable marriage of unequals.  As the diary continues, it seems like he becomes more and more like Hosea, the prophet, commited to loving and caring for a bride who will never care for him, who despises him and makes him look like a fool.   He talks about the parish having a face, having eyes.     And then, closer to the heart of the book -- but I don't want to sum up the whole thing.  I am still thinking about it, anyway.

The devil is rarely mentioned in the book, but it seems that you can see his shadow quickly retreating everywhere you look.   Apparently, he has managed to set things up in this day and place so that secularity accomplishes what he wants it to do, even without an open break from religious life.   In the book, people still go to church, they still have their children baptized, they think of themselves as Catholics, but that is all.   It is the decaying of Christendom noticed by the young theologian-priest Joseph Ratzinger by the late 1950's.  

Of the boredom, the cure writes:

"It is like dust.   You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it.   It is sifted so fine, it doesn't even grit on your teeth.   But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands.  To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be always on the go.   And so people are always on the go."

and 

 I wonder if man has ever before experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of Christianity in decay

I would suppose "boredom" is a translation of French "ennui" which has a connotation beyond simply not knowing quite what to do with your time.     It evokes a deeper disposition of purposelessness, perhaps somewhat like what monks traditionally have called acedia -- listlessness and indifference, a bringing of despair into one's very being.    

There is a Sylvia Plath poem that she wrote as an undergrad, titled Ennui; it is a sonnet.    It probably expresses more of what Bernanos was noticing -- a kind of loss of high stakes, of, in fact, transcendence, and a replacement with, as the priest of Ambricourt says, "looking out for number one."    What else is there to do?  As Plath wrote:  

Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight

finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard

of, while blasé princesses indict

tilts at terror as downright absurd.

 I suppose that our Western society at least might be in the stage past the one Bernanos described-- Plath again here: 

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,

compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;

and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,

while bored arena crowds for once look eager,

hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes

shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger. 

The fact is that the unknown country priest is in the territory of beasts, heroes, angels and dragons; he senses it, though he can't see them, and certainly his parishioners can't see it, except in rare circumstances.  The battle fought is with invisible but very real foes, where grace is everywhere.