The Searching Soul: Graham Greene and Catholicism
If your bookshelf of cherished tomes is not inspiring you today, then I would recommend reading Graham Greene, a prolific novelist and essayist of the mid 20th century. Greene’s novels are richly textured character studies that take place in the foreign lands where he worked as a foreign correspondent, from West Africa, to Asia, to Latin America. He impresses as an economical writer who does not waste words. This is in part because his characters understand themselves well enough to remain cognizant of the real world and to not get lost in endless, subjective musings that end up being about nothing, which is the flaw of more than a few contemporary novels. The concerns that Greene’s characters wrestle with are universal in nature, including struggles with morality, the self-sacrificial nature of love, and the relationship between people and an eternal mystery that threatens to swallow up mortal beings without explanation or apology.
Referencing Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Greene wrote that a person’s nature did not change. Instead, Greene lays great importance on our childhoods, not only for the formation of character, but for the gathering of liminal experiences that we will spend the rest of our lives sifting through. Reading Greene’s childhood recollections, one is also left with the impression that the proverbial dye of our destinies has been cast by the time we leave our childhoods. Greene credits the book King Solomon’s Mines, his childhood favorite, for his work and travel in Africa, where in 1935, “I found myself sick with fever on a camp bed in a Liberian native’s hut with a candle going out in an empty whisky bottle, and a rat moving in the shadows.” In another autobiographical passage titled “Russian Roulette,” Greene remembers as a teenager, driven by “boredom and aridity,” taking hold of a revolver in the family home. He put one bullet in the six chambered pistol, spun the cylinder, and placed the muzzle in his ear. There was only the click of the hammer when he pulled the trigger. Greene experienced jubilation over this near miss. He would revisit this exercise five more times as a teenager, and the hammer always missed the bullet. As the thrill of this macabre exercise waned, Greene realized it was time to get serious about entering the world. So, he took a trip to Paris. He had learned through his games of roulette, however, that risking the total loss of the visible world could allow it to be made and enjoyed anew. More so than any childhood reading he accomplished, this realization undoubtedly inspired Greene’s work as a journalist in some of the most dangerous overseas postings that could be found.
Many of Greene’s essays are, on the surface, unreachable, covering writers like Conrad Aiken or Francois Mauriac whom most of us have not read. Even in these cases, one comes across insights that are worthy of further meditation. In his study of Mauriac, Greene takes time to lament the deterioration of the modern novel, where a religious sense has been lost that, as a consequence, lessens the importance of the human act. The end result is that the focus of the modern novel retreats to the subjective. The novelist thinks “that by mining into layers of personality hitherto untouched he could unearth the secret of ‘importance,’ but in these mining operations he lost yet another dimension, that being, the loss of the visible and spiritual world.
Thanks in part to his wife’s faith, Greene converted to Catholicism, though we can assume he did not practice the faith assiduously given that he eventually left his wife and carried on with his adventures as a foreign correspondent. Nevertheless, the intellectual tradition and spiritual practice of Catholicism deeply influences both his novels and his essays. The most compelling form of spirituality that Greene portrays in his novels is when characters, troubled by an often unarticulated yet evocative call, seek to understand the depths and potentiality of divine love incarnated in their own lives. The beauty of Greene’s work is that these searching characters never land on final answers, though they tend to realize something from their search as evidenced by the actions they end up carrying out in the world. It is no great stretch to suggest that Greene’s portrayal of spiritual experience is in line with Eric Voegelin’s model of transcendent experience and the subsequent meditative attempts at articulation of that experience. Greene’s novels do not have God or Spirit appear before his characters as external, objective phenomena. Instead, Greene’s characters represent the fallen condition of man, characters who, when not blithely ignorant, struggle to attain an understanding of how to realize love in their souls, and to find faith in a God who cannot be physically seen or heard, in a world where the faith of most people has descended to political ideology or self-interest.
Despite the suffering and confusion present in the world of Greene’s novels, the reader never senses that as an author Greene is guided by a nihilistic orientation. Rather, Greene differentiates himself from the illusory and melancholic temptations nihilism offers by analyzing the temptation in a nearly clinical way. His novel, The Comedians, placed in Haiti during the horrific reign of Papa Doc, is an example of this study of nihilism. The main character is a self-described comedian who “had lost completely the capacity to be concerned,” but as a faithless man, admired the dedicated, those people “committed to the whole world of evil and good.” The serious man, dignified and disciplined, “rebuked our levity,” reflected the comedian. At a funeral for a man killed resisting Papa Doc’s tyranny, a priest homilized, “The Church is in the world … Our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly.” In one of Greene’s later novels, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, we read of characters who have lost any enduring sense of meaning in the world, and having retreated to a purely hedonistic orientation, learn to despise themselves until they surrender to self-destructive violence. The characters who are able to overcome these self-defeating forms of life cling to “memories of love,” briefly experienced or vaguely remembered that love is.
It is interesting to compare Greene’s life and writings to Ernest Hemingway. Both writers were sensitive to Catholic culture, and both were physical and brave men whose overseas adventures informed them of the human condition. In fact, Greene probably saw more of the world, and more human suffering, than Hemingway, and Greene probably suffered as much or more the physical and psychological challenges that come with being immersed in the day to day life found in impoverished nations. While Hemingway’s response to human suffering is to emphasize the need for a man to carry out his responsibilities courageously in the face of meaninglessness, Greene recognizes the presence of grace in the suffering soul who is moved by love to sacrifice their life for goodness and service, and how human dignity is elevated in the presence of such sacrifice.
In Western culture, much of this century has been absorbed by a progressive desire to topple the political and economic structures that are identified as breeding various prejudices and injustices in the world. Having carefully observed the world and the inanities of leftist revolution alongside the meaninglessness of capitalist greed, Greene rejects progressive ideology and large political systems generally for a hope that rests in the capacity of a person to be a saint. The Quiet American is a Vietnam war novel published in 1956, rooted in Greene’s experience as a journalist in Vietnam in the 1950’s. It is obviously written before American involvement in Vietnam, making the novel an informative one on a number of levels. In the story, a debate about the war on communism begins during a firefight in the Vietnamese countryside. Defending future American involvement in the war between the French and the Viet Minh, an American agent argues the Vietnamese peasant does not want Communism. “They want enough rice,” retorts the novel’s narrator, a foreign correspondent. “They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.” The American agent responds with unquestioned belief in what he is doing; under Communism, the peasant will be “forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.” The journalist rejects this intellectual exercise of debating political systems in Vietnam, carried out by foreigners who have return tickets out of the country, and remembers a priest, “so poor he hasn’t a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut during a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish … I don’t believe in God and yet I’m for that priest.”
This orientation toward saintly love is revisited in one of his later novels, Monsignor Quixote. During a road trip through Spain, two old friends, a Monsignor and a Communist, comfortably discuss faith in God versus faith in the Communist Party. Ultimately, the Communist is left wondering how the hate of a man dies with his death, but how love can continue to grow even after death. The Communist is fearful of this love, in part because it cannot be rationalized away. Instead, this love has the potential to continue growing, and to lead a person down paths they would never have planned to follow. This delicate yet ever-present love, so often rejected or stamped out by violence and crudely formed personalities, is the lingering force hidden on the edge of human existence that Greene teases out in his writing. In his novel, The Honorary Consul, love and sacrifice are realized and practiced by characters who, on a rational level, cannot bring themselves to admit that love is something legitimate in a world of suffering.
With a gentle touch, Greene guides the reader to consider the virtuous act borne of love as rooted in something eternal that, like a light breeze that causes the leaves to tremble, cannot be seen or captured in an idea. But Greene was no religious dreamer. The faith of even his most saintly characters wavers between the assuredness of God’s call to love and serve, and the doubt that comes when God’s call meets the world of brute power, suffering and injustice. Greene’s saints are always vulnerable to the next temptation, sometimes the most subtle temptation being egoism.
The saving power of love is most explicitly revealed in his novel The Power and the Glory, a story about a Mexican priest on the run during an anti-clerical purge. The priest vacillates between self-interest and the desire for survival, and the soulful call to risk his life for the suffering and unredeemed. The novel represents as fine a study of faith and goodness in a world of suffering as any the reader will find. Greene even takes Ivan’s questionable concern for children in The Brothers Karamazov and rebuts the argument for socialism and progressivism, the priest recognizing that the soulful well-being of a suffering child in an isolated jungle village was “more important than a whole continent,” and that this prayerful concern for a child’s soul was what separated his faith from the faith of the political leaders who “cared only for things like the state.” Only the love born of faith can inspire a person to forgive their enemy, exercise compassion in the foulest prison cells or the loneliest village, or reach out prayerfully to a dying murderer in the hope of leading him to an experience of redemption. The person with faith can witness a miracle, beginning with the miracle of life, call it by its right name, and celebrate that miracle without dully explaining it away. Conversely, the Communist officer in charge of ridding the Mexican countryside of undesirables, and who knows better than to believe in the foolishness of God, realizes that with the success of his mission, “He felt without a purpose, as if life had drained out of the world.”
The intimate relationship between the suffering saint and the tormented pariah on the periphery of society is the height of what it is to be human for Greene. In his criticism of the French mystic Simone Weil, Greene questions her spiritual authority with her continual talk of “abandonment” and “universal love.” Greene dismisses these broad visions of universal salvation, be it through progressive political action or spiritual visions; “suffer first for someone you know and love,” he writes in response to Weil. Quit trying to bring an “infinite mercy” into a “finite” world. In Greene’s work, the only place infinite mercy is realized in this world is within a person’s soul.
The 20th century was filled with upheaval, and Greene was sensitive to the approaching dangers. Writing in 1936, he reflected, “today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality … When one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can…recall at which point we went astray.” In his analysis, the only hallmark of Christian civilization that he could identify consistently was that of the Christian conscience. While it was true that evil deeds took place in Christ’s name, the “signature of a Christian civilization” was that, when challenged, “we can admit to our crimes.” In 1948, Greene wrote that while the atom bomb “is powerless against conscience,” in recent years “we have witnessed an attempt to kill (Christian conscience) by means of a new philosophy designed to persuade men that Lazarus is without importance.” This new, anti-Christian philosophy is not only unconcerned with the hope for redemption of a sinner, it is also unconcerned with the depth and dignity of the individual person.
In his essay The Virtue of Disloyalty, written in 1969, Greene identifies resistance to the structures of political power as the greatest virtue a writer can possess. “It has always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy,” Greene observes. One responsibility the story-teller is tasked with is “to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding” for those who are not approved of by the State. “If we enlarge the bounds of sympathy in our readers we succeed in making the work of the State a degree more difficult.” This is a duty of the writer, “to be a piece of grit in the State machinery.” Greene would be busy in this day and age, with the liberty of the person under threat in every corner, but I also suspect Greene would continue finding the saints amongst us, telling the story of the holy one who serves the suffering and challenges the technocrat with the law of love, telling the Saint’s story for the sake of our common humanity.
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