St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, born near the end of the Age of Enlightenment, was formed in a cultural milieu that valorized Reason and the calm equanimity of Classical Greece. The New York society in which she grew up much preferred Episcopalian respectability to the unseemly enthusiasm of Great Awakening preachers. As a teenager, she\u2019d had some powerful spiritual experiences, but her religious view was typical of her time: the \u201crules, rituals, and habits\u201d of Christianity were \u201cjust as subject to circumstance and taste as cuisine or fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was only in her late twenties, still dazed with grief after her husband\u2019s death and struggling to discern what came next, that Elizabeth was introduced by Italian friends to the Catholicism she would practice for the rest of her life.<\/p>\n
Unlike Elizabeth, Georges Bernanos, a famous French novelist of the early twentieth century, was a cradle Catholic. Born in 1888 and raised by middle-class parents who often invited local priests to dinner, he dedicated his life to God during his first communion at ten. He was a wide-eyed, dreamy child with a complicated nature who suffered much during his years in conventional, bourgeois Jesuit boarding schools, dreading \u201cthe black winters, the stinking classrooms, the dining rooms with their greasy breath, the endless and crushing High Masses during which the only thing that an overtired little soul could share with God was its boredom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the young Elizabeth Seton, Bernanos felt closest to God in nature, often roaming the country roads near the family home with his older sister and reveling in the beauty of the landscape. Later, during his college years\u2014including a brief stint at the elite seminary of St. Sulpice\u2014he considered taking orders before deciding that his real calling was to be a writer.<\/p>\n
If serious faith was already becoming unfashionable during Elizabeth\u2019s day, the situation had only gotten more pronounced by the time Bernanos began to write. Young Modernist intellectuals, profoundly disillusioned by the nightmare of World War I, revolted against the venerable institutions that had failed to stave off the carnage. Like Bernanos, many were battlefield survivors; unlike him, many had rejected the Christian doctrine of evil, which was anchored in a robust view of Satan and his works and ways. They were not sure about what they had been dealing with, where evil came from, or how to defend themselves against it.<\/p>\n
The diminishment of Satan as a culture-shaping force was well underway by the time Elizabeth was born, the seductive demon who\u2019d preyed on the girls of Salem already seeming quaint. When Bernanos began to write a century later, the Devil had nearly disappeared. People were still doing terrible things, but the new science of psychology could provide far more interesting and up-to-date explanations than reference to a laughable medieval relic.<\/p>\n
The fact that both Elizabeth Seton and Bernanos experienced what might be called \u201cSatanic theophanies\u201d\u2014terrifying glimpses of spiritual evil\u2014thus made them spiritual outliers.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth\u2019s encounter took place shortly after her oldest daughter died of tuberculosis. Though Elizabeth was astounded at the sixteen-year-old\u2019s unshakable courage throughout the ordeal of dying, she worried that Anna Maria\u2019s spiritual fortitude had not been enough to guarantee her salvation. So she knelt in fervent prayer at the graveside, seeking assurance that her child was truly safe in the arms of God. In place of the divine sign she was hoping for, however, came first a strange rattling sound and then, to her horror, a \u201clarge and ugly snake\u201d slithering over the grave itself. Elizabeth \u201clunged for the creature, dragging it toward a gate in the fence that enclosed the graves and hurling it away.\u201d Shuddering, she envisioned wild hogs digging Anna Maria\u2019s body from the earth.<\/p>\n
This episode haunted her for some time. She had long known that life required suffering, and her daughter had suffered more than most. But Elizabeth couldn\u2019t shake the notion that even the greatest agonies were not, in the end, sufficient to counterbalance sin or convince God to dispense grace. Yet without grace, how was a person to bear the trials of living? For a while, Elizabeth hovered on the brink of despair, sharing her inner turmoil with no one. Finally, she wrote to a French Sulpician priest, Fr. Brute, whose good counsel and urgent prayers helped her regain her spiritual footing.<\/p>\n
Bernanos too felt the presence of the Evil One. In his 1927 novel Under the Sun of Satan,<\/em> he constructs a mythical landscape, dreamlike yet frighteningly real, where shape-shifting demons relentlessly torment good people, for \u201c[Satan\u2019s] hatred has reserved the saints for his ministrations.\u201d The weak are even more vulnerable; as his priest protagonist gently informs a furious young woman who believes she is making her own brave choices: \u201cYou are like a plaything, like a child\u2019s toy ball, in the hands of Satan.\u201d<\/p>\n In later books, Bernanos\u2019 portrayal of evil becomes more subtle, in some ways closer to the early Christian view of Satan as an insistent whisperer rather than a horned-and-tailed monster. One of the most riveting scenes in his famous novel, The Diary of a Country Priest<\/em>, involves a confrontation between a bitter mother, enraged with God for failing to save her little son, and a young priest who can read hearts. He quickly discerns what she is trying to hide: she has come to hate her rebellious teenaged daughter, the child who survived when her little son didn\u2019t. When he accuses her of rejecting the God who still loves her, she rears \u201clike a viper\u201d before him, and he himself is \u201cseized with unnameable fear.\u201d He has caught a whiff of hell, which for Bernanos is not a place but a state of mind, a \u201cvast yearning for the void, for emptiness.\u201d Without our connection to the divine source of love, \u201cwe can still deceive ourselves, think that we love by our own will. . .. [b]ut we\u2019re like madmen stretching out hands to clasp the moon reflected in water.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet as Elizabeth discovered after her own brush with hell, when all is dark the light shines more brightly. Fr. Brute\u2019s compassionate intervention in her hour of despair led her to a deeper Catholic faith. \u201cHe owned hundreds if not thousands of books, and as the two pondered suffering and grace they read and discussed centuries of Catholic writing.\u201d Where in the past she\u2019d closed off her heart to protect herself from grief, the glimpse of desolation she received at Anna Maria\u2019s grave set her on the path to sainthood: \u201cYour first step in this heavenly way,\u201d she discovered, \u201cis to contract a habit of the presence of God. . . and let Divine Love cast out fear. Fear nothing so much as to not love enough.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Bernanos, one way God brings good out of evil is by allowing us these glimpses of the dark side. For until we understand the vastness of the gulf between God\u2019s love and Satan\u2019s relentless destructiveness, we often do not recognize a saint like Elizabeth Ann Seton when we see her. According to his admirer and biographer, the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Bernanos\u2019 great novelistic theme was simple yet profound: \u201cFor the saint to be revealed and exposed, hell itself must be exposed and revealed along with him.\u201d<\/p>\n