Bernard Iddings Bell (October 13, 1886 – September 5, 1958) was an American Christian author, Episcopal priest, and conservative cultural commentator. His religious writings, social critiques, and homilies on post-war society were acclaimed in the United States, England, and in Canada, receiving praise from intellectuals such as Albert Jay Nock, T. S. Eliot, Richard M. Weaver, and Russell Kirk. Featured on the cover of Time magazine as America's "brilliant maverick," he authored over 20 books and numerous articles appearing in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Criterion, Scribner's, and Commonweal. For the majority of his career, he toured and lectured at universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and Princeton as well as "almost every cathedral in England."
Life
Early Years and Education
Bernard Iddings Bell was born in Dayton, Ohio, the second of four children to Charles Wright Bell, a paper manufacturer, and Valentia Bell, née Iddings. His siblings were Florence, Myrta, and Alfred. They were of Portuguese descent.
Several early experiences helped to shape Bell's "maverick" ideas and character. Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and friend of Bell, related the following anecdote in memoria:In educating his only son (who died at the threshold of manhood), in extensive travel, and in devotion to his ordained duties as a priest, he spent his money as it came: and that on principle. For when Bell was a little boy, he learned something from his grandmother. His grandparents, straitened in their means, had been frugal, saving all their lives to build and furnish a house to their liking. In old age they achieved their end, and their house was built and well furnished; and just then Bell's grandmother discovered that she was suffering from an incurable malignant cancer. Put to bed, she had her grandson called in, and said this to him: "Bernard, your grandfather tells me that they are going to put me under drugs soon, and then I will not be able to talk to you. So I want to tell you now what I have learnt from life. I have had a long life and a rather hard one, and I have learnt this: Never save any money."Charles and Valentia raised their children in the Episcopal Church, which at the time was considered evangelical but by the 1930s "would probably be given the name Fundamentalist." Bell recalled that as a child, his mother once told him that God was in Heaven and that Heaven was "up there," so he imagined God to be a silvering gentleman who lived on the roof and looked like "a somewhat glorified copy of my paternal grandfather." However, this mental picture gradually lost its vividness and dissolved into "a vague aura, a spiritual influence, a permeating benevolence."
The midnight of December 31, 1899, Charles Bell gathered his children together to give thanks for the coming century, whose blessings of technology and modernism, he believed, would bring about a more enlightened, peaceful world. In A Man Can Live Bell recalled, "[My father] was quite sure that the modern world was wise, sound in structure, giver of all good. We children too were sure of it. Our friends were sure of it. What we heard and read made us more sure of it. Our teachers were sure of it. Even our priests, preachers, rabbis were sure of it." Struck by this vision of human salvation, he became profoundly disillusioned with the church and ceased praying, except intermittently and perfunctorily.