Book 4, Book 4 : Chapter 2, The Creed of a Savoyard Priest Summary and Analysis

This section is devoted entirely to a subject of great importance. The author dedicates it to questions of philosophy and religion. The priest is the one giving the discourse. In truth he fell out of the priesthood and into what he describes as one of the most disturbing periods of his life. He had lost something. It might not be what one would have expected him to have lost: it was his certainty.

The story unfolds: this priest was actually one because his parents, both poor, had viewed it as a way for him to be upwardly mobile. He reports that he obediently followed the instructions for how to do become a priest and did. He discovered that his admiration of the marital condition led...