Faith & Spirit Quote by Georges Bernanos

Bernanos flips the usual moral script: purity isn`t a Victorian chastity belt or a disciplinary regime handed down by a joyless Church. He frames it as an enabling condition, almost an atmosphere, for a particular kind of perception - "supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine". In other words, purity isn`t the prize; it`s the lens. That move is strategic. It shifts faith from rule-keeping to recognition, from obedience to a charged clarity about who you are when seen against something absolute.

The sentence does its real work in the second half, where Bernanos refuses the easy scare tactic that impurity simply "destroys" faith. Destruction would keep the drama on the level of external consequences, like breaking a tool. Instead, "it slays our need for it" is psychologically sharper and more frightening: the danger of moral erosion is not that God becomes inaccessible, but that the appetite for God goes numb. You don`t lose the object; you lose desire. That is a diagnosis of spiritual modernity avant la lettre - not rebellion, but anesthesia.

Context matters. Writing in a France battered by secularization, consumer comfort, and the moral exhaustion between the wars (and then the Occupation), Bernanos often treated evil as banal not because it is harmless, but because it is habituating. His Catholicism is not cozy; it`s existential. The subtext is a warning aimed less at sinners than at the spiritually sleepy: impurity is terrifying precisely because it can make you content without transcendence.