 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm your host Joseph Pierce and this week we're going to be looking at one of the great Catholic novelists of the 20th century, Graham Greene. And although he is certainly one of the great Catholic novelists of the 20th century, he struggled with his Catholicism and the Catholic characters in his novels struggle with their Catholicism, if you like, reflecting the struggles of the author himself. So Maurice Behring, who we talked about last time, was a saintly figure in many ways. In the final years of his life, he suffered from Parkinson's disease, very debilitating illness and suffered those physical pains with absolute holiness as people testify. Well, Graham Greene, on the other hand, seemed to spend most of his life wanting to gratify his lower appetite or so it seems. So as Behring might be seen as a saint, although it's not for me to canonize him, Greene was certainly not a saint, although it's certainly not for me to condemn him, judge him. And I will be doing an element of judgment in this because that's my job. We need to obviously make judgment calls and to understand both authors and their works and their characters within their works. That requires an element of discrimination, discretion, judgment. But that's not the same thing as judgmentalism. It's not the same thing as condemning someone to hell. But I do, in one of my books, I wrote a chapter called In Pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster. We might set the scene by discussion of Graham Greene by looking at at least some of the things I had to say about him because the subtitle is The Quest for Graham Greene. In pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster, in pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster, the quest for Graham Greene. So I'm just going to pluck out highlighted passages. The quest for Graham Greene involves a pursuit of the Green-Eyed Monster that haunted his luridly vivid imagination. Greene's novels and the characters that adorn them are riddled with anger and angst. Simultaneously confused and confounded by a deep sense of guilt and failure, his characters are informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility. The oppressive weight of the real presence of Christian faith or the terrible emptiness of its real absence turn Greene's novels into a fascinating and unforgettable conflict between the fertile and the furtive. The depiction of the drunken priest in the power and the glory and also in the play The Potting Shed exudes Greene's morbid preoccupation with human folly and failure, as well as as well as exhibiting his beliefs in the remnants of human dignity even amid the deepest degradation. At other times, as in the comedians, he squirms in with the squalor of sin and cynicism, or as in Brighton Rock, he squeals in the sadistic self-indulgence of the psychopath. Greene's fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativist age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own characters and in consequence at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created. I then refer in this to Graham Greene's sort of autobiography, which is called A Sort of Life, where he's obviously struggling at school, suffering from depression, anxiety, and he says, my brother suggested psychoanalysis as a possible solution and my father, an astonishing thing in 1920, agreed. Thereafter, for six months, the young and no doubt impressionable Graham Greene lived at the house of the analyst, the psychiatrist, to whom he had been referred. And whether this is significant, he chose the following words of Thomas Brown as an epigraph to his first novel, The Man Within, quote, there's another man within me that's angry with me. In later years, the genuine groping for religious truth in Greene's fiction would often be thwarted by his obsession with the darker recesses of his own character. This darker side is invariably transposed onto all his fictional characters so that even their goodness is warped. Greene's own human nature is not black and white, he says, but black and gray. So he's not his own, he saw human nature as not black and white, but black and gray. But if you take symbolically black to be evil and white to be virtue or goodness, when there's only evil, that's a murky halfway between vice and virtue, there's no virtue. And he referred to his need to write as a neurosis, an irresistible urge to pinch the abscess which grows periodically in order to squeeze out all the pus. Forgive me for the imagery, this Graham Greene's not mine. Such a tortured outlook may have produced entertaining novels but could not produce any true sense of reality. Greene's novels were Frankenstein monsters that were not so much in need of Freudian analysis as they were the products of it. Greene's conversion in 1926 when he was still only 21 years old was described in a sort of life in which he contrasted his own agnosticism as an undergraduate when to me religion went no deeper than their sentimental hymns in the school chapel with the fact that his future wife was a Roman Catholic. This is a quote. Met the girl I was to marry after finding a note from her at the Porter's Lodge in Balliol, that's a college in Oxford, protested against main accuracy in writing during the course of a film review of the worship Roman Catholics gave to the Virgin Mary when I should have used the word hyperdulia. I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously and we became equated. The girl was Vivian Darrell Browning then 20 years old who five years earlier had shocked her family by being received into the Catholic Church. Concerning Greene's conversion, Vivian recalled about these are words that she said to me I met her. I say more than a moment I met her at her home in Oxford back in the late 1990s when she was about 90 years old in her early 90s and more more on that at the moment. But this is Vivian what she told me when I was interviewing her. He was mentally converted. Logically, it seemed to him was all rather private and quiet. I don't think there was any emotion involved end quote. This was corroborated by Greene himself when he stated in an interview that my conversion was not in the least an emotional fair. It was purely intellectual. So again, a little bit about meeting with Graham Greene's widow. In the 1990s, Graham Greene had only died a few years earlier. They both lived to a ripe old age. But she lives in a big sporting house in in Oxford. And she was blind by this stage, I think almost totally blind. Very pleasant. Well spoken, lady. The thing that sticks in my mind most is her description depiction of the day that Graham Greene basically deserted her and their children. He came home and announced he would not be returning ever and walked out and she Thomas very evocative thing of she was upstairs with the children looking out the bedroom window as watching her husband and the father of her children walk away from their lives for the last time. And just as he got to the corner, he looked back once briefly and then disappeared. He then thereafter had a series of relationships with women. But he never divorced. Both his wife remained a devout Catholic and he certainly remained a Catholic of sorts, a sort of life, a sort of Catholic. And they never sought a divorce. And more on that perhaps presently. But there's a scene when I read Graham Greene's novel, Quiet America, which is a great novel actually, I recommend it, where the character of Fowler, the cynical middle aged English journalist, quite clearly in some sense a reflection of Greene himself and quasi autobiographically describes his leaving his wife for the last time. And it's quite clearly he's remembering the same scene that his widow remembered and speaking to me. So when I read, I read the novel after that conversation with her. So that was something which struck me and stunned me at the time that Greene had put this real life moment that had, if you like, seared itself in his wife's memory into his novel. Let's carry on without discussion to our quest for Graham Greene in pursuit of the Greene-eyed monster skipping some space here. He's still talking about his conversion, I'm quoting him. My primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. I didn't disbelieve in Christ, I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in evenly remote possibility of a supreme omnipotent and omniscient power, I realised that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It's like a fight for personal survival. End quote. The fight for personal survival was lost and Greene in losing himself had gained the faith. Yet the dogmatic atheist was only overpowered. He was not utterly vanquished. He would re-emerge continually as the devil, or at least as the devil's advocate in the murkier moments in his novels. The literary critic J.C. Whitehouse has compared Greene to Thomas Hardy, rightly asserting that Greene's gloomy vision at least allows for a light beyond the darkness, whereas Hardy allows for darkness only. Chesterton said of Hardy that he was like the village atheist brooding over the village idiot. Greene is often like a self-loathing skeptic brooding over himself. As such, the vision of the divine in his fiction is often thwarted by the self-erected barriers of his own ego. Only rarely does the glimmer of God's light penetrate the chinks in the armour, entering like a vertical shaft of hope to exorcise the simmering despair. Few have understood Greene better than his friend Malcolm Muggeridge, who described him as quote, a jekyll and hide character who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony. There is more truth and perception in this one succinct observation by Muggeridge than in all the pages of Psycho Babel that have been written about Greene's work by lesser critics. The paradoxical union of Catholicism and skepticism incarnated in Greene and his work had created a hybrid, a metaphysical mutant, as fascinating as Jekyll and the hide and perhaps as futile. The resulting contortions and contradictions of both his own character and those of the characters he created give the impression of depth, but the depth was often only that of ditch water perceived as bottomless because the bottom could not be seen. Greene's genius was rooted in in the ingenuity with which he muddied the waters. It was both apt and prophetic that Greene should have taken the name of Saint Thomas the doubter, Saint Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, at his reception into the church in February 1926. Whatever else he was or wasn't he was always a doubter par excellence. He doubted others. He doubted himself. He doubted God. Whatever else might be puzzling about this most puzzling of men, his debt to doubt is indubitable. Ironically it was this very doubt that had so often provided the creative force for his fiction. Perhaps the secret of his enduring popularity lies in his being a doubting Thomas in an age of doubt. As such Greene's Catholicism becomes an enigma, a conversation piece, even a gimmick. Yet if his novels owe a debt to doubt their profundity lies in the ultimate doubt about the doubt. In the end it was this ultimate doubt about doubt that kept Graham Greene clinging doggedly desperately and doubtfully to his faith. So there we have, if you like, my own analysis in the effort to pursue the Greeneard monster. The quest to understand Graham Greene, that the enigma, which is Graham Greene. I'm now going to put those principles, if you like, into practice by reading parts of a long essay, which is published in a chapter in my book 12 Great Books, on heresy and orthodoxy in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. So The Power and the Glory is Greene's most famous novel probably, also arguably his greatest. It's set during the time of anti-catholic persecution in Mexico, following the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s. Most Catholic readers of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory are happy to accept the novel's Catholic credentials on the strength of its happy ending. The arrival of a new priest to replace the martyred whiskey priest signifies the continuum of the faith and its resurrection. Always while the ends well are so we attempted to assume. It's almost as though the novelist is to be forgiven, his theological and philosophical philandering throughout the novel because of the eustrophic climax that he presents to us at its end. Much as the whiskey priest is forgiven his manifold sins through his martyrdom. Like the deathbed penitent, the sins of the novelists are to be forgiven because of the good end he has made. But does such an ending absolve the novelist of all critical responsibility for his earliest sins of infidelity? Should we forgive and forget? Or should we insist that the author remains responsible for any early apropos in his work? Should we not remind ourselves and the author that a good end never justifies evil means? Such questions should animate any discussion of Greene's masterpiece necessitating a closer scrutiny of the work as a whole irrespective of the virtuously climactic twist in its tale. As with all literary criticism an objective reading of the work requires an ability to see it through the eyes of the author so far as this is possible. In seeing the power of the glory through the eyes of Greene, we perceive the whiskey priest almost demented in piety and anti-piety as reflection of Greene himself. So in the essay I then give some of the biographical details and the discussion thereof which we've already done in the earlier part of this episode. So when we want it is therefore necessary to reread the work with an eye to the error it contains the reader becoming the whiskey priest confessor calling attention to the priest's sins and demanding amendment thereby succeeding where the novel's pathetic Padre Jose fails. There is of course much that is good and laudable in the whiskey priest a goodness that is exemplified in the real if reluctant martyrdom that he endures throughout the length of the work but even this goodness is polluted by Greene's creative neurosis using his own words. At the end of the first chapter the priest feels an unwitting hatred of the child and the sick woman to whom he is going to minister the sacraments blaming them for his missing of the ship that would have taken him to freedom. Hatred like all disordered passion is a disease of the will does not and cannot be unwilling it might become so ingrained and so habitual that it seems that we can do nothing about it but all sin in reality can be overcome by the will's cooperation with grace where there's a will God provides the way. Further example of Greene's torture due to paradox is his characterization of the weak priest Padre Jose as a martyr this is not the whiskey priest it's another character. Unlike the priests who had chosen death or exile Padre Jose had renounced his priesthood and was now living with his former housekeeper unhappy in his menage and dreading the regular duties of the marriage bed he ruminates wistfully on his own fate compared to that of the priests who had lain down their lives for their faith. Quote, he thought with envy of the men who had died it was over so soon they were taken up there to the cemetery and shot against the wall in two minutes life was extinct and they called that martyrdom here life went on and on he was only 62 he might live to 90 end quote and so we see how the coward and equivocator who serves much to the cynical pleasure of the marxist lieutenant as a living cause of scandal to the church and the priesthood is seen as the true martyr while those who have been killed for their faith have taken the easy or cowardly way out. If such ruminations are simply those of the dishonored priest wallowing in self-pitting isolation we can have no cause for complaint but what if there is something of the morbidly playful and yet earnest voice of the author himself in these thoughts what if green wants us really to consider Padre Jose as more of a martyr than those who have been killed for holding firm in their faith if so we must up braid him for his error it is true that the weakened treacherous priest is suffering greatly for his choices indeed it is true that he might be suffering more than those who die violent deaths for their faith but suffering does not constitute virtue or martyrdom if he is suffering for his own sinful actions he is suffering the consequences of his own choices are those who suffer the pains of hell martyrs only Milton satan would answer such a question in the plaintive affirmative and there is certainly something of the Miltonian satanic in the squirming twists of greens decidedly unchestitonian use of paradox greens paradoxes unlike chestitons are not those of paradise but of paradise lost as we witness the woefully pathetic Padre Jose's final reluctant surrender to his wife's pleas and he come to bed we know that he himself has made the unwelcome bed in which he now must lie and which he must lie not only in the supine but in the perjurious sense of the word he is living a lie and must suffer the consequences of his actions and the pangs of his conscience we feel for him in his agony even if he is culpable and we sense the supernatural consequences of his choices as the priest drags himself after his loveless bed somebody somewhere laughed and we feel that it is satan himself who is laughing we will learn later that Padre Jose is in the grip of the unforgivable sin despair that's a quote in the grip of the unforgivable sin despair and discover in this choice of phrase another of greens provocatively perverse paradoxes no sin however gross and grotesque is unforgivable despair is not unforgivable the problem is that the desperate soul refuses forgiveness in his pride and we should not lose sight of the fact that despair is ultimately a sin of pride the desperate soul believes that his sin and his hopelessness are beyond the forgiving power and fathomless love of the one who offers forgiveness and who has died for the sin the desperate soul believes that his sin is too big too grievous to be forgiven the true paradox is not that despair is the unforgivable sin but that the despairing man lacks the humility to hope for forgiveness once again we would have no cause for concern if the perverse paradox is only the product of Padre Jose's tortured and contorted conscience a grievous error on his part that constitutes the very heart of the problem yet we suspect that the third person narrative also contains more than a grain of the author's own contorted conceptions of truth such a suspicion is reinforced and perhaps confirmed a few pages later when we are informed that the novel's other priest and its principal protagonist the whiskey priest had also quote given way to despair the unforgivable sin and quotes or twice despair is named as the unforgivable sin in this instance the phrase appears in the long narrative section in which we can surely assume that the voice is that of the author and not that of the whiskey priest or at least that green is dabbling and dappling with literary impressionism blurring the voices of the narrator with that of his characters so that the author's voice blends indiscernible with theirs if this is so the author shares in the errors that they espouse and commit the result is that is what may be termed literary schizophrenia in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the author's objective voice from the subjective voices of the characters in the text the author loses himself in the plot and in so doing is in danger of losing the plot itself or losing his readers within it another disturbing fact of the fictional narrative is the characterization of the whiskey priest illegitimate child she is presented as being almost demonic a small malicious child who utterly untameable laughs sadistically at her father she seems to be evil incarnate possessed by the devil himself she knows her she knows her catechism but she won't say it we are told by the child's mother such ingrained recalcitrance is confirmed by her spiteful defiance of the whiskey priest efforts to show her affection quote he caught the look in the child's eyes which frightened him it was again as if a grown woman was there before her time making her plans aware of far too much which like seeing his own mortal sin looked back at him without contrition clearly the girl emerges here is a metaphor for the priest's sin of fornication a fact that is reinforced by her mother's description of her as a little devil a few lines later nonetheless the novel is not a formal allegory and as such the girl cannot be reduced to mere metaphor as a real concrete person she transcends and supersedes such abstract personification she may represent the sin on one level of meaning but she's also the priest's real flesh and blood daughter and as such her personhood demands our respect and our sympathy it is precisely because she is a real person and not a mere personification that we find her behavior so alarming we are similarly alarmed by the children who taunt Padre Padre Jose so cruelly and by the selfishly motivated children of the pious woman who are seemingly immune to the charms of the saccharine hagiographies that she reads to them why is it that green is so seemingly allergic to the presence of purity and sanctity in his work that he will not admit even a modicum of childlike innocence amid the gloom of human degradation returning to our initial assertion that green obsessively transposes a darker side onto all his characters so that even their goodness is warped we lament his apparent unwillingness or inability to allow even the children their innocence contrary to christ's exhortation that we must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven green banishes everyone from paradise by refusing to admit the childlike into his fictional kingdom nobody is childlike in green's novels not even the children themselves can anyone truly come to christ in such dismal dystopias so the chapter in the book the essay goes on but i think that you get the point here that perhaps i'm giving green a hard time but we'll finish with how did green finish so to speak as a man and he certainly is a great story teller there's no doubt about that it's intriguing that when he died his final will he left nothing not even a single penny to his current mistress he left every penny to his wife whom he betrayed at this point 45 or so years earlier and one can only detect or deduce an element of not just guilt but logic as in theological that if green had given any money to the women with whom he was having extramarital affairs he would be endorsing his own mortal sin it suggests therefore that green was very much a catholic in his understanding of doctrine even if he was not a catholic in his willingness to practice the faith in terms of the virtue demanded of those who who acknowledged the doctrine perhaps he summed up the that with a an account he had with a saint a real life living saint and that's Padre Pio. Graham Green was in on holiday in Italy with one of his mistresses and they both attended a mass at which Padre Pio was the celebrant and the green was close enough to the altar to actually see the blood stains the congealed blood on the on the gloves of Padre Pio at the end of mass someone asked him if he would like to meet Padre Pio and green literally ran from the church and when he was asked why he had done so he wrote he saw he replied that if he met a real life saint and didn't repent he knew he would be going to hell so he chose to run away because he wasn't planning to repent so we can say really in this encounter with Padre Pio that Graham Green was running from from the saint because he was running from sanctity I suppose in the final analysis as it's not for us to make a final judgment on any soul that we may merely ask Padre Pio to pray for him and on that note that hopeful note I will bid you adieu so until next time on the authority goodbye for bless and good reading this has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by tan for updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority 25 to get 25 off your next order including books audiobooks and video courses by Joseph Pierce on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Bellach as well as tans extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life to follow Joseph and support his work check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co and thanks for listening