TREMANDO DI TENEREZZA
PASSIVITÀ E CONSENTIMENTO TRA GEORGE BERNANOS E PAUL RICOEUR

Giulia Zaccaro

In this essay we will navigate the Journal d’un curé de campagne, in search of the points of contact between the masterpiece of Bernanos and Ricoeur’s philosophical questioning. It is the philosopher himself who testifies to the debt towards a singular work like the Journal. In Soi-même comme un autre he writes: « I do not hide the sort of enchantment in which this quote from Bernanos, which appears at the end of Diary of a country curate, holds me: Hating oneself is easier than one thinks. Grace consists in forgetting. But if all pride had died in us, the grace of graces would be to love ourselves humbly, in the same way as any other suffering member of Jesus Christ ». We too want to remain under the spell of these words that are both mysterious and very clear, which alone sum up the meaning of Bernanos’s work and Ricoeur’s philosophy of will. Understanding the grace of graces means facing the involuntary that lives inside us, a passivity with which we struggle but which we must allow, in the hope of a future reconciliation that has already been accomplished. Hope becomes tenderness and tenderness hope.