(novel, 1940)
Grace is a theological concept that everyone talks about but few understand in any depth. Perhaps no author did a better job of illustrating what grace involves than a man who knew himself to be in desperate need of such grace, Graham Greene. In The Power and the Glory, he tells the story of a priest who is hunted by the authorities during a time of intense religious persecution in Mexico. The priest is morally weak and struggles with alcoholism (Greene calls him the “whiskey priest”), but he is still committed to trying to fulfill his priestly duties for the believers who have had to go into hiding. His life is in grave danger as he is hunted by the authorities, who wish to kill him.
The policeman who tracks the priest through the course of his desperate wanderings is a committed and puritanical atheist, convinced of the rightness of his cause. While the priest is a moral failure, the policeman is an earnest, honest, and morally upright man. But that doesn’t mean the priest cannot be used by God in spite of his failings—he is, again and again, an imperfect instrument in the hands of a perfect God, an unexpected saint whose stumbling attempts to follow God produce greater results than he could ever have imagined.
Greene did not originally plan to write a novel when he visited Mexico in 1938 to research the extent of the persecution that was taking place against the Catholic church. He was going to pen a piece of nonfiction about the violence against the priests and nuns, and about the attempt of the government to systematically eradicate the faith. When he saw what was actually happening, which included the martyrdom of the clergy, he found himself deeply impressed by those who persevered and heroically worked to keep God’s message alive. For the first time he began to understand that faith was not simply an idea or a philosophy but a source of unimaginable strength and courage, and he was deeply moved.
This experience also awakened within Greene a desire to side with the underdog, and he spent much of his career speaking out against those who took advantage of the downtrodden and marginalized. He flirted with communism, appreciating its concern for the masses, but became increasingly disillusioned with the way that the communist vision was carried out. Through the years his political ideology was anything but consistent, and it led him at times to support questionable revolutionary leaders. His actions, however wrongheaded they might sometimes have been, were founded upon his desire to challenge the wielders of power and speak out for those who could not speak for themselves.
Graham Greene was born in 1904 in England. His father was a schoolteacher, and Greene suffered much at the hands of fellow students who suspected him of being a snitch for his dad. Greene was likely bipolar, and his sadness and depression became so overwhelming that he was sent to live with a psychiatrist who could teach him how to better cope with life. But despite that intervention, he continued to be stalked by feelings of deep depression and suicidal thoughts.
What began to turn him around was meeting a young woman, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, with whom he was powerfully smitten, but who was a committed Catholic. This was a problem for Greene, who considered himself an atheist. But such was his love for her that he undertook instruction from a priest to see if he could bring himself to believe. If nothing else, he thought, it would be interesting to try to understand how someone could actually believe the tenets of Catholicism. Over time, as he questioned and argued with the priest, he found himself becoming convinced of its truths. He had no great emotional epiphany, but instead a dawning sense of intellectual conviction. “My conversion,” he later wrote, “was not in the least an emotional affair. It was purely intellectual.”1
After his baptism, Greene married Vivien. When he was confirmed he chose “Thomas the Doubter” as his confirmation name, which seems entirely appropriate. Greene was a doubter par excellence. He doubted God, he doubted others, he doubted himself, and he even doubted his doubts. “The trouble is,” he famously said, “I don’t believe in my disbelief.”2 Throughout his life he clung desperately and doggedly to a belief in God, and his struggles of living a life of faith in a world of doubt became the impetus for some of his best novels.
Greene’s writing style is almost cinematic in its ability to immerse the reader in environments that feel damp, dark, seedy, and forbidding, yet strangely almost mystical. Perhaps that is why so many of his novels have been made into successful films. Those who have read his books know that there is no other literary experience quite like a sojourn in “Greeneland.” Although he also wrote numerous travel books, plays, essays, film reviews, and autobiographical musings, his most memorable work is contained in his novels, which roughly divide into two categories. He wrote what he called “entertainments”—thrillers, spy stories, comedies, and mysterious tales; and he also wrote more serious novels about spiritual crises—what have often been referred to as his “Catholic novels.”
These novels, which revolve around characters who agonize about their struggle against evil and temptation, include The Power and the Glory and such books as Brighton Rock (1938), whose main character, Pinkie Brown, is a young gangster who is utterly and chillingly evil but is convinced of the reality of hell and damnation even as he undertakes his crimes. Pinkie finds his foil in the sweet and loving Rose, whose love is stronger than his evil. The Heart of the Matter (1948) unfolds the story of a conflicted Catholic police officer in West Africa who struggles with faithfulness to his marriage and commitment to his faith as he is drawn into a relationship with a young widow. It becomes clear that his feelings for her are as much kindness and pity as they are lust. The controversial conclusion of the novel explores the nature of suicide and the extent of God’s grace. The End of the Affair (1951) also explores faith and marital unfaithfulness, and ends with a shattering moment of sacrifice and mystical revelation.
One of Greene’s last novels, published shortly before his death, is the delightful Monsignor Quixote (1982), which plays off the famous book by Cervantes as it tells the story of a road trip between two old friends—one a priest and the other a communist ex-mayor. As they travel they argue and debate about faith and doubt, the meaning of life, the hopes and limits of politics, and the restless sensual urges of human beings. Greene presented these topics with a light, humorous touch, but the novel works toward a powerful and moving conclusion. One cannot help but think that the book is, in a sense, Greene’s argument with himself. Though the atheist mayor scores many debate points along the way, it remains clear that Greene’s ultimate sympathies were with the kindly old priest and his simple and innocent love for God.
Greene specialized in characters who hold strong convictions about God and faith but find it difficult to live them out. They fight losing battles with their own sensuality and the temptations of drink, sex, and power, but their consciences always exert a largely ineffectual pull toward doing the right thing—until a key moment when their wavering faith is tested and then proves triumphant, even if not in the usually expected ways.
Greene himself was not unlike his flawed characters—a committed Catholic whose conscience was fully active but often ineffectual. Like Paul’s dilemma in Romans 7, he knew the right thing to do, but found himself doing the opposite—and then feeling terrible about it. He struggled with drinking too much and with infidelity. As a young man Greene sometimes even played “Russian roulette.” He would load one or two bullets into a revolver, spin the chamber, and then put the gun to his head and pull the trigger. It was a flirtation with the odds, birthed by severe depression and an overwhelming sense of boredom with his life. After his conversion he no longer played this dangerous game but he did, with great regularity, place himself in one risky situation after another, clearly not afraid of dying. He was a compulsive traveler and visited out-of-the-way places all over the world; much of his energy throughout his life went toward trying to escape or stave off boredom.
Most specialists believe that if he were alive today, Graham Greene would be diagnosed as bipolar, a diagnosis that certainly fits with the extremes of his mood swings and consistent battles against depression. His own struggles helped make his fiction unique. He had a keen insight into the nature of evil and how it could overtake a life. While other Christian novelists might represent the heroic actions of people of faith, Greene told stories about people who were reluctant heroes or outright failures, people whose beliefs haunted them rather than sustained them. In his novels one can frequently sense the fiery flames of judgment licking just below the surface of ordinary human lives. But the God we glimpse in his novels is a God who looks beyond our frail and demented humanity and intervenes in unexpected ways, even in ways that sometimes move counter to accepted religious thinking. Perhaps that is what Greene was speaking of when he wrote of “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”3