436 - Was Graham Greene a Donatist?

Was Graham Greene a Donatist?

By Samuel Terrien

"Many critics hold that Graham Greene was for some years a Roman Catholic novelist, and that later he lost his faith. One may ask whether, on the contrary, he did not intensify his search for an existential Christianity. "

FOURTH-CENTURY Donatists were sectarians who refused to separate the validity of the sacraments from the moral character of the officiating priests. In modern usage, the word refers loosely to Roman Catholics who question the pronouncements of the hierarchy in their struggle to understand the profundity and the demands of the gospel. Was Graham Greene a Donatist?

Through his novels that specifically touch upon the complexities of religion in contemporary culture, Greene has shown a clear evolution, moving from the ambiguity of a youthful neophyte-having converted to Roman Catholicism in his early twenties-to the mature stature of a writer who stood beyond the crutches and restraints of ecclesiastical allegiance. Three of his masterpieces constitute landmarks in this aesthetic and theological pilgrimage: The Power and the Glory (1940), The End of the Affair (I 95 1), and Monsignor Quixote (I 982).

I

The Mexican persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church after the First World War offered Greene the opportunity to examine the contiguousness of popular superstition and moral depravity with a bizarre fidelity to Christian faith. The hero of The Power and the Glory ¹ is never named, perhaps because the novelist wished to suggest, against the dominant trends of mid-century literature, that personhood may survive the loss of social identity. He presents the haunting figure of an anonymous priest who resisted the antireligious laws of the state and refused to accept a de facto laicization. Hunted for years by the police, this priest managed to avoid arrest at the cost of much hardship. In his province, churches and convents had been destroyed, but he celebrated the sacrament of the mass in remote villages,

Samuel Terrien is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Union Theological Seminary, New York. He is the author of numerous works, including The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology (I 978) and Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (1985). He has also written on Mozart (THEOLOGY TODAY , Jan. 1986 and Oct. 1988), T. S. Eliot (Jan. 1988), and Marianne Moore (Jan. 1991).

¹The Power and the Glory (London: Penguin, 1940,1982).

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baptized children, and heard confessions. However, this seemingly heroic servant of God was a hopeless alcoholic. He had also broken his vow of sacerdotal chastity and, indeed, had violated the welfare and self-respect of another human being. By sleeping with his housekeeper, he had fathered an illegitimate child. As he was passing through his old village several years later, his former common-law wife sheltered him for the night. Proud of being "the priest's woman," and at the same time afraid of provoking future trouble with the civil authorities, she hastened the next morning to send him on his way with food for his journey and a bottle of brandy.

At the point of departure, the hunted man met his illegitimate daughter. She was only seven years old but already sexually aware. She knew that this man whom the villagers called "Father" was also her own father. She accused him, not of having procreated her, but, on the contrary, as she put it, of being "no good to women."

The man discovered then and there the holy mystery, however strained, of human fatherhood and the love of a child. Falling to his knees, he sought to embrace her. She mistook the nature of his intentions for the sort of sexual molestations to which she had already been exposed in the village. Eventually, he was able to speak the words of a truly loving father, and she suddenly lay still in his arms, looking up at him. He said that he would offer his life, even his soul for her. His priestly vocation was renewed by this experience. He soon came to the reflection that he could love every soul as if each one were his own child.

Having reached the border of another Mexican province, where anti-religious laws were not stringently enforced, the alcoholic priest was entrapped by a traitor. Falsely called to attend a dying man, he retraced his steps, was caught by the police, and a few days later was shot at dawn, blindfolded, standing against a wall.

Is this the story of a flawed martyrdom? Should this drunkard be a candidate for sainthood? Maria, his erstwhile common-law wife and the mother of his child, knew better. She had berated him in no uncertain terms, as she wondered aloud what kind of a shabby martyr he would be, inspiring mockery in his people.

Toward the end of his tortuous and adventure-fraught trek, the brandy-priest even prayed to be caught. His attempt to escape made him aware that he was the slave of his parishioners. At the same time, he slowly came to the discovery that the root of his courage was only pride. This strange manifestation of hubris disguised itself beneath a mask of dignity, honor, and a feeling of destiny. The night before his execution, he confessed to his captor that cowardice could coexist with a sense of duty. Admirably depicted here is the paradox between sin and fidelity. The man loathed himself. At the moment of tasting freedom, he sensed the reality of the betrayal that was leading him to his death.

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In a review of Evelyn Waugh's Life of Campion ² Greene quoted Robert Southwell's confession. It might well have applied to the anonymous hero of the Mexican persecution, who hated himself and, like Southwell, might have said:

"A man? Oh no! a beast: much worse, what Creature?
A rocke: how call'd? A rock of scandale, Peter."

Not a few critics have taken this novel to be a celebration of "The Power and the Glory" of the Roman Catholic Church. This is not likely, for the words of the title do not appear in the most ancient manuscripts of the Lord's Prayer, and they are not used in the Liturgy of the Mass. Moreover, they ascribe the power and the glory to God, not to the church.

Greene never mentioned that the Mexican Revolution, which had engendered the anti-Catholic laws, was itself the result of three or more centuries of complicity between the church and the Spanish conquerors, who were also exploiters of the Indians and oppressors of the poor. Peter was the Rock, indeed, but the Rock of Scandal-the stone which causes stumbling.

More perceptive than many critics, officials of the Roman Curia discerned the hidden meaning of the novel. The Holy Office placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books. Cardinal Griffin summoned Graham Greene to Westminster Cathedral in London and suggested textual alterations, which the novelist politely opposed. The audience was abruptly terminated.

In the middle sixties, Greene happened to talk with Paul VI, who affably told him that he had read with interest The Power and the Glory. Greene could not resist informing the pope that the book had been forbidden under the pontificate of Pius XII!

II

An entirely different novel, The End of the Affair, explicitly critical of the Roman Catholic Church, brought together Maurice Bendrix, a London writer, and Sarah Miles, the elegant wife of a respectable but rather dull public servant. Maurice and Sarah became lovers, although, as he later confessed, her beauty seemed, at first, to make her inaccessible. ³ Their liaison remained secret, even during the Second World War. The dangerous circumstances of the London bombings only intensified the transports of their passion.

The night came when a direct hit from a so-called "buzz-bomb" hurled the front door of the house on Bendrix. Sarah discovered his body a few moments later, apparently lifeless, with only a hand protruding from the heap of rubble. She, of course, assumed that he was dead, but he was merely stunned. Ten minutes later, he returned

² Norman Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, Vol. 1: 1904-1939 (New York: Viking, 1989), p. 700.

³ The End of the Affair (London: Penguin, 1940, 1979), p. 35.

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to their bedroom and found her prostrate on the carpet. She arose, in amazement to see that he was alive. To his question about what she had been doing on the floor, she replied that she had been praying "to anything that might exist." Almost ashamed, she added that hopelessness can justify praying for a miracle.

Sarah had been a conventional, indifferent, vaguely free-thinking Anglican. What she did not reveal was that, in her desperation, she had made a vow to that unknown God. In her terror, she had childishly yielded to a primitive sense of magic and had promised the God she had not hitherto really believed in, that if her lover were brought back to life, she would offer up her own love as a self-sacrifice. She would totally, abruptly, and without relapse, end the affair. And she did.

For a long time, Bendrix remained ignorant of that vow. He thought that Sarah no longer loved him and that she had even fallen in love with some other man. In fact, she was in the process of conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Her health deteriorated, and, eventually, she died of pneumonia.

Through the reading of her diary, Bendrix finally learned the secret cause of their torture. The last part of the novel consists of his reflections on "The End of the Affair."

He remembered the elegance with which her erotic abandonment had "touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness." ⁴There was even a dash of irony within his envious admiration that through the Sacrament of Absolution in the Confessional, Catholics acquired a wonderful way of obliterating remorse. He observed that she might have been born a Catholic, although her beliefs had been as thin as his.

Their separation proved for him enigmatic and cruel. Almost the last words she had spoken to him evoked the psychological mist by which she was now surrounded. She told him that absence did not mean the death of love. After all, one can love God without seeing him.

In her journal, she offered her peace to that God in exchange for God's peace to him. To the priest who had engineered her conversion, Bendrix expostulated his hatred for what he called "your imaginary God." ⁵ Yet, Sarah's laborious conversion had not led her altogether on the road to paradise. In nearly the same mood of revolt as that of her forsaken lover, she, too, had accused the Deity, in whom she was beginning to believe. Then, like a wounded animal, she shrieked her pain, and her cry was not for faith, but for Maurice and his love, however corrupt.

The priest whom she had consulted when she sought instruction in the Roman Catholic Church failed to see that her vow to end the affair, the night of the bombing, represented a regression to a childish belief in magic, and her bargain with the God she did not believe in was a gross caricature of the gospel.

In her last letter to the lover she had renounced-a letter that

⁴ Ibid., p. 59.

⁵ Ibid., p. 227.

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arrived after her death-Sarah was lucid enough to depict her nascent faith as a delusion substituting for the loss of her happiness. This was her reaction to the priest's inflexible dictum that she could not get a divorce, marry Maurice, and also become a Roman Catholic. She left the priest, thinking that God has more mercy. Yet, when she saw the statue of Christ on the Cross, she reflected on the oddness of a divine compassion which looks like a punishment.

In agreement with several critics, Greene's biographer finds in the last pages of the novel the suggestion that Bendrix, the erstwhile atheist, is not unlike Greene himself, "still hounded by God." ⁶

It was the God beyond the god of the cold magisterium who sought him for himself. This God was not the magician's illusion which had seized the bargain-hunting and vow-committing Sarah in her moment of terror. The God who pursued Maurice is close to the mysterious grip of existential faith: not rationally proved, but ontologically rooted: the Being of our being.

The End of the Affair indicts all forms of theological mercantilism, as well as all forms of ecclesiastical authoritarianism that "devil" the Deity into a cash register of pseudo-infinity.

III

Three decades after the publication of The End of the Affair, and having reached the age of flippancy in wisdom, Greene wrote a tragicomedy, Monsignor Quixote that parodies Cervantes. More than ever, the elderly novelist was searching for a faith that is free from false security, denominational discipline, and vulgar pietism.

He confessed recently that he was probably no longer a Catholic. Yet, Monsignor Quixote⁷ unequivocally indicates that the live deposit of the Christian faith never ceased from keeping his restless soul in ferment.

Serving a small village church in the Spain of Franco, a seemingly naive priest, actually endowed with the shrewdness of the saints, is harassed by his bishop on account of his unorthodox but eminently humane actions. Among other extravagances, he has diverted the Easter offering to a charity organization that looks after the needs of the poor in prison. This welfare group had also aided some political enemies of the Generalissimo to escape from jail.

Suspended from his parish duties, the bewildered pastor, who bears the improbable name of Quixote, leaves his village on an extended trip. He travels in his own jalopy, together with an old friend, the ex-mayor of the village, who happened to be a loyal, albeit doubting, Communist. The priest plays with the fanciful notion that he descends from the fictional but very real Don Quixote. He calls his friend Sancho and the beloved old car Rocinante.

⁶ Sherry, op. cit., pp. xvii ff.

⁷ Monsignor Quixote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

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The novel is the hilarious and yet sad tale of their adventures, as they race against the windmills of evil, which are none other than the agents of the bishop and the officers of the Guardia Civile. Between their brushes with the police, they tirelessly exchange their views on religion, sex, birth control and pornography, Marxism, and the ecclesiastically-blessed capitalism.

Quixote boldly tries to defend the doctrines and the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church, but his fine irony renders his views almost as subversive as those of his friend, the Communist ex-mayor.

Following an automobile accident and relentless pursuit by the agents of the law, the two companions find refuge in a monastery. On the way, the priest witnesses a fiesta for the Virgin which horrifies him because the clergy are demanding that the impoverished faithful pin bills of money to her robes. He intervenes and is wounded, then carried unconscious into the monastery. In a day or so, although ill and utterly exhausted, Monsignor Quixote rises from his bed and in a heavenly delirium enters the monastic chapel to celebrate Mass at its altar, with a non-existent Host and a non-existent chalice. As he enacts in words and gestures the Sacrament of the Eucharist and offers a simulacrum of Communion to his Marxist friend, he falls and dies.

This scene is as unreal and as poignant as some of the fantastic tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Not unlike Francois Rabelais, le cure' de Meudon, Graham Greene raised the level of satire to that of a biting, and yet often gentle, humor which at times approaches the authenticity of the gospel stories.

IV

Although literary imagination may create characters radically different from the author's personality, it appears that in these three books, at least, Greene has portrayed mouthpieces for his own divided loyalties.

After sifting the evidence both from his writings and from the interviews he has granted in the past few years, one might question whether his conversion from conventional Anglicanism to the British form of Roman Catholicism was ever radical and without serious qualification. This is not to imply that he was dishonest when he entered the Roman Church in order to marry the girl with whom, at twenty-two, he was madly infatuated. She had told him bluntly that she would not marry him unless he became a Roman Catholic.

The Church of England, in which he had been reared, had not revealed to him the wisdom and the folly of authentic Christianity. Bored by ordinary behavior and suicidal in his teens, he was psychoanalyzed by a Jungian therapist as early as 1920. Full of contradictions, he was tormented by an inordinate hunger for sex, romance, and companionship, which, like many adolescents, he amalgamated and sublimated into a genuine desire for the living God.

During the "instruction" he sought from a certain Father Trollope,

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by whose manner and methods he was deeply disappointed, he wrote at the time that this priest made him feel "entirely anti-Catholic. " ⁸ Greene's Donatism could not have been better expressed. Moreover, his divided loyalties appeared in the note he wrote to his mother on the day of his official conversion, telling her that he was embracing the Scarlet-Woman.

He let his double-mindedness toward the church of his adoption persist throughout his long career, until he compared his denominational allegiance to the Apostolic Succession, the origin of which, he thought, was lost in the shadows of history. Nevertheless, when asked if he did not feel torn between the intellectual attractiveness of "monumental belief' and the superstition of the peasants in Mexico, he replied that the two aspects coincided, for he still preferred magic to the abstractions of Methodists and Anglicans. ⁹ It appears that Greene's religious mind remained ambivalent even throughout his late years. The Mexican cleric, the London novelist, and the Spanish Monsignor are in some ways the mirroring of his own doubts.

The alcoholic priest, hunted in the Mexican jungle, muses on The Prince of Denmark's hesitation between suffering and death.

The English writer survives bitterly the woman he loved, ready to pursue "a sort of life": this is precisely the title Greene selected years later for his autobiography (1971). The last words in The End of the Affair still echo the hurt that Sarah's church has inflicted upon him. He prays to the non-existent Deity, "Leave me alone!"

Monsignor Quixote's gentle skepticism feeds the roots of his spirituality. To Sancho, who asks whether he believes in some life eternal, he replies ambiguously that belief may not necessarily follow faith.

Against the monolithic solidity of the Roman hierarchy, he opposes the smile of tolerance based upon his deeper certainty. He recommends kindness to bishops, to the very poor, and to the uneducated. Quixote regrets that he has upset his bishop, whom he calls "the poor man," and he even doubts whether anyone is ever fully converted-even the Pope.

The leit-motif uniting these novels is the expectation that the church will change and become humane at the top as it so often is at the bottom. The lesson from Cervantes' immortal masterpiece is a call for the revolution of hearts, the explosive new wine that requires new vessels. Don Quixote was not just tilting at windmills. On his death bed, he learned that "there are no birds this year in last year's nests." ¹⁰ Graham Greene, the theologian, looked back upon his childhood and his adolescence, not as upon an unchangeable past, but as the warrant of a better future. A Sort of Life carries as its epigraph an ironic

⁸ Sherry, op. cit., p. 257.

⁹ Marie-Francoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene; tr. G. Waldman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 146.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 34.

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sentence from Kierkegaard, the Danish existential thinker, who more sharply, perhaps, than any other writer about fear, guilt, and, especially, the fragility of genuine Christian faith, observed, "Only robbers and gypsies say that one must never return where one has been." ¹¹

The novelist searched without pause for a Christianity that transfigures the whole of existence but does not create an egoistic satisfaction of security. Like the church, the self is becoming.

¹¹ For the influence of the Northern Pascal upon Greene, see Anne T. Salvatore, Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief (Tuscaloosa & London: The University of Alabama Press, 1988), in particular, pp. 74 ff.