We’ve re-introduced our children to Middle Earth and Narnia, lands where good battles evil and prevails despite individual frailties, where good intentions pave the road to heaven, where punishment brings redemption. Now we need to give Graham Greene back to adult audiences.
The Modern Yearning for God
In a society in which people make time for religious services on Sunday but are “too tired” or “too busy” to reflect on God the other six days, Greene’s mixture of sin and revelation may provide just the remedy.
Much of Greene’s fiction addresses deep religious concerns of the modern man. In such well-known works as The Power and the Glory (1940) or The End of the Affair (1951), Green uncovers the saint in the everyday. His protagonists suffer and fail, sometimes spectacularly, but they continue to seek their personal Savior. The characters include alcoholics and adulterers, petty bureaucrats and escape artists, but they yearn for union with the divine. For the nameless whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, the unending fear of capture by anti-clerical Mexican authorities subsides before his certainty that God is also the “policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge.” How could the priest not love a God who would die for the “half-hearted and the corrupt”? At the moment of crisis, he also finds courage, thus pushing a new generation (a youngster wavering between his mother’s pious storytelling and the armed capitan) toward the religious. For Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair, abandoned lovemaking and an extravagant promise to terminate the affair in exchange for her lover’s resuscitation bring her inexorably to Jesus. Not even the lover’s cruel, petty denial of a Catholic burial will nullify her salvation.
Greene’s Christian vision resonates in lesser-known works as well. The protagonists of A Burnt-Out Case (1960), The Heart of the Matter (1948), or even Brighton Rock (1938) seek peace outside of the reality of success. Greene works with insignificant characters who demonstrate passion for God and a great faith. Their faith may not bring them earthly happiness it rarely does but it seems clear that their eternities are secure. The characters find that “suffering is something which will always be provided when it is required” (A Burnt-Out Case); they live Romans 5:3-5, “knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Greene makes sacrifice and suffering meaningful by demonstrating the yearning his protagonists feel for the Holy Spirit. We could benefit from such yearning. We could learn from this interpretation of the benefits of suffering. And since Greene packages his suffering in tropical locales and anonymous bedrooms, it might be more enticing, even relevant (to the Desperate Housewives viewer for example) than stories from Scripture.
Moved by Love
Greene also wrote about the insidious banality of evil and its recognition/rejection of the good. His small-time gangster Pinkie in Brighton Rock hides revulsion for holiness behind a pale adolescent face. He seduces an innocent waitress to hide a crime: “What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn’t get along without goodness.” In another story, Greene’s Bendix notes that belief in a personal God requires corresponding belief in a personal devil. Greene’s characters know that evil actually exists, and his worlds are rich: some characters clothe evil in religious dogma while others demonstrate Christian goodness while professing disbelief.
Official religion is by no means always a hero; we all detest the character Ryker in A Burnt-Out Case, who uses his Catholicism to impose on his wife both emotionally and sexually. Yet one feels Greene opposes the misapplication of dogma and not the doctrine itself. He always prefers an honest atheist to a sneak.
Greene’s low-level bureaucrat, Scobie, summarizes God’s desperate love for human beings “God loved them, knowing the worst: [He] didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed” (The Heart of the Matter). During Mass, Scobie prays to avoid injuring his loved ones, even if he will be denied the peace for which he “pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.” He finally resorts to suicide to bring peace to the women for whom he feels responsible. However, it is the love of Jesus for Scobie, as for the majority of Greene’s characters, which moves them to their destinies.
Moved to Pity
Greene’s characters are attuned always to the sacrifice Jesus became on behalf of all believers. A Sarah Miles or Scobie cries out to Jesus to grant His peace and protection to those they love, albeit at the expense of their own happiness. Even when they despair it is because their pity for another overwhelms them. In this they reveal a measure of what some Christians call “GRACE” (God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense).
We also yearn for that blessing, recognizing our world to be directed at self-destruction. A passionate re-reading of Greene’s fiction could help bring us back to the realization of God at the center of every search. Although movie remakes of works like The End of the Affair entirely misread the message Bendix bitterly recognized (the “You” at the end of all roads) in favor of attractive bodies and an “R” rating, perhaps a reissue of Greene’s fiction would inspire filmmakers to address the issue appropriately. After all, if Narnia can become a hit, why not the Holy Spirit in tropical Africa?
“For it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than holocausts” (Hosea 6:6).
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Maria Andraca Carano was born in Cuba, graduated from Georgetown University, and lives in Houston with her husband and three daughters. She has previously reviewed books for The Weekly Standard and First Things. Her Favorite Graham Greene novel is The Heart of the Matter.