Writer Graham Greene As we know, the English author Graham Greene (1904–1991) himself divided his novels into “serious” and “entertaining.” However, no matter what problems they touched upon (whether political, social or existential), they have always been read with interest, because they never ignored the reader. In the novel, The Heart of the Matter, Greene raises the theme of a believer’s excessive reflection and introspection, which causes his spiritual death. Once, after reading George Orwell’s essay on this novel, I seriously believed that it was apparently a very abstract and lifeless work where the problems of faith were presented without any social specifics. However, Orwell, who was alien to religious matters, was wrong: the life of a “little man”—a policeman, even a religious one, in an African colonial country, is revealed in all the complexity of the intertwining of existential, moral, social and religious aspects.
Greene’s merit in this novel, as well as in The Power and the Glory, is that he does not show the intense inner life of a Christian as something frozen in fanaticism and blind conviction, but as a fluid, complex reality, where the confrontation between the versatility of man and the constancy of God is the heart of the problem. The Heart of the Matter’s protagonist, the policeman Henry Scobie, at a fateful moment in his life confuses introspection with repentance, misunderstanding many spiritual matters and taking an irreparable step. But both he and another character of the novel, Priest Rank, like the characters of Georges Bernanos and Robert Bresson, suffer, think and decide on certain steps. Their faith is not a crutch frozen in dogmatism that helps them live. If for an atheist the main source of the tragedy of life is human mortality, then for a believer it is the inability to understand the will of God fully, the painful desire to reconcile his will with His, and often the inability to succeed in this.
The Heart of the Matter is a tragic novel not only because of the ending, but also because it solves the problem of human salvation quite freely, but with such a truth of life. “Where is the borderline between salvation and eternal damnation?” Graham Greene seems to be asking. Is it as obvious as it seems, for example, to Catholicism and Protestantism? Can we know the limits of God’s mercy and His wrath? Church Tradition and the Holy Scriptures provide only guidelines, but not exact answers. In general, there is nothing final and permanent in faith and in life by faith. Despite the dogmas that are unchangeable and beyond any question, everything else is very fluid and unstable because man himself is fickle and suffers from it. Scobie keeps sliding down, committing one sin after another, but the pangs of conscience reveal to him the very essence of Christianity, which is repentance and human suffering from our own imperfection, the inability to not trample the Blood shed by Christ every day. In one of the final scenes (in church at Communion) The Heart of the Matter reaches the depths of Dostoevsky, so insoluble for the protagonist seems his existential contradiction caused by sin. How different it is from the atheists’ opinion that believers have decided everything for themselves and have calmed down in dogma and fanaticism, having believed in ready-made schemes! Such people should be the first to read this novel.
Graham Greene. The Power and the Glory Graham Greene, who became famous for criticizing American foreign policies in The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana, portrayed the unvarnished Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti in The Comedians, and was noted for responding quickly to the political topic of the day. In The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter he showed himself a shrewd analyst of the Christian soul, proving that a believer, even if he is a writer, is not necessarily a narrow-minded person. Sympathizing with leftist ideas, but at the same time remaining a Roman Catholic, Graham Greene showed by his example that the breadth of views, the desire for objectivity and authenticity in life are not always peculiar to atheists; to the contrary—the degree of hatred militant atheism is akin to religious fanaticism, especially if it is seasoned with ideological poison. Graham Greene’s sobriety of thought in looking at the existential problems of faith, as shown by The Heart of the Matter, could be envied by any atheist who considers himself an exposer of “religious opium,” for if a Christian does not have self-criticism, it means he is on the wrong path. But if his self-criticism, like that of The Heart of the Matter’s protagonist, goes beyond all imaginable limits, spiritual death is inevitable as well.
Cover of the second German edition of The Quiet American (1956). It appears that even such a well–known book as The Quiet American is not a banal detective story or a spy novel, but a rather detailed, consistent and relevant debunking of the democratic ideals of the West, for which blood continues to be shed worldwide. Pitting an experienced, jaded, and rather cynical Englishman head-on against an ingenuous and naive American brainwashed by bourgeois propaganda, Greene, from the perspective of a sophisticated and culturally experienced Europe, criticizes the ideological straightforwardness and militarism of the United States, doing so not openly, but latently, by artistic means. At the same time, The Quiet American is indeed a very fascinating and action–packed text—the author has managed to give a serious filling in the shell of genre literature. Writing a book about the civil war in Vietnam back during the French colonial policy, Graham Greene essentially predicted the American military expansion of the 1960s, analyzing its source and causes. The main one is the implicit faith of the “bearers of democracy” in the superiority of Western values and the idea of the need to impose them on “Third World countries”.
Describing the chaos of the Vietnam War, Greene writes that far more than two parties took part in it. Alden Pyle, a quiet American, but not a fighter by nature or a practical “hawk”, intervenes in this bloody farrago. The lack of critical thinking and ideological sophistication, according to the author, is a direct path to war crimes. The journalist Thomas Fowler is certainly a cynic who does not believe in anything, including God, although he suffers from this; but he will not let himself be fooled. He is rather a humanist who has lost faith in humanity, for whom life is above all. As for the other characters, they are presented by the author somewhat vaguely and schematically, more like in a novella than in a novel. The one who stands out is Phuong, a silent and obedient Vietnamese woman who doesn’t really care who guides her life. Phuong is very reminiscent of the female character who blackmails the protagonist of the novel Burmese Days by George Orwell; and in general, the whole context and colonial setting of Burmese Days with the everyday life of Europeans and Americans in a foreign land is very reminiscent of the atmosphere of The Quiet American.
All in all, despite its small volume, there are plenty of events, types, and cultural reflections in it, so this is clearly not fiction, as is commonly thought of most of Greene’s books. It is very important that Greene, a Catholic, was far from the fanaticism and dogmatism of the arduous and naïve. He was on the side of the disappointed and desperate, who had experienced much evil—who in his opinion, are closer to Christianity than one-dimensional dogmatists. Needless to say how relevant The Quiet American is—not only did Greene predict the US military aggression, having analyzed the worldview of those who were in Vietnam in the 1950s; he even showed that any fanaticism is the cause of bloodshed and war in the name of misunderstood justice and unwillingness to live peacefully. True, one can rebuke the author for creating a somewhat one-dimensional portrait of his American (let’s recall absolutely different, spiritually fragile characters in the books by Jerome Salinger or Truman Capote, who are also Americans). But those whom we know from the American literature of the 1950s and 1960s were “black sheep”, pariahs in their country, its atypical representatives and social marginals. But Greene portrayed the average American with a worldview that is very common in all times, which is why he is closer to typification than the characters of Salinger and Capote. The Quiet American is an astonishingly wise book, but at the same time it is tough in describing war; God willing, it will become irrelevant centuries later when the cultural code of the United States changes—if that ever happens.
We are used to thinking that to be strong is good, while to be weak is shameful, unworthy, and despicable. But is it really the case, and what is the true Power in a person? The answer to this question is suggested as you read Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory. The plot centers around the persecution of Christians in Mexico in the 1920s. The protagonist of the novel is a priest who has not renounced his priesthood and his religious beliefs, and, despite his many shortcomings, has become a confessor and a martyr for his faith. The nameless padre from Greene’s novel is, to put it mildly, imperfect: He suffers from alcoholism and has an illegitimate child. Remembering his past life, he sees only sins: arrogance, self-conceit, and pride. Now, deprived of everything and forced to flee from the police, who are seeking to shoot him for his refusal to abandon the priesthood and marry (in Catholicism, the priests are celibate), the padre is fully aware of his weakness and the power of God. My power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).
Man by himself has no power. And the numerous calls of secular people addressed to the Christian to “be strong”, to “muster his strength” and the like, mean nothing to him, because in countless falls he realizes his infirmity and weakness, the abyss the original sin plunged mankind into. It no longer holds sway over us—the Savior has destroyed its power—but consequences remain. God created man for Himself, and without Him man is nothing. It’s just that while man lived without sin in the Garden of Eden, he did not understand what he had, and when he lost it after the fall, he found himself alone with his weakness. Without Me ye can do nothing (Jn. 15:5). All the power in man is not from himself, but from God. When someone thinks that he himself is strong, pride is speaking in him, and the padre from Greene’s novel understood this very well. When he had everything, it seemed to him that it would last forever, but when the hardships came, he lost peace and comfort, and only then did he realize his own sinfulness.
“God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety?” (Graham Greene. From The Power and the Glory).
The very title of the novel speaks of the Power and Glory of God, revealed in a weak and humble man, and hidden from the proud. The uniqueness of this book is that it was written by a Catholic, but it offers a profoundly Orthodox understanding of sin and grace, holiness and pride, and it does not contain the heresy of the works of supererogation of which Catholicism boasts. As the priest travels, the people around him change—even a police lieutenant, who is a fierce atheist, softens up. Greene’s novel came out hard, tough, full of pictures of human suffering, and directed towards God. Is the power really so good, and what kind of power is it? Isn’t it of demonic origin? Otherwise, where does the rage and obsession of those who destroy churches and shoot priests come from? Where does the ferocity, brutality, and harshness of those who imagine themselves to be the mighty of this world come from? “Men of blood,” as the Psalmist calls them. They are opposed by those who are weak; and is this weakness, which always loses in this world, an attitude to kindness without fists, really so bad? The drinking padre from Greene’s novel is very far from ideal, sometimes even disagreeable, but he does not judge anyone and considers himself the worst of all.
Only the attitude to weakness is truly Christian. It is grace in a person that works, prays, and resists sin, not the person himself: But by the grace of God I am what I am: and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me (1 Cor. 15:10). Let’s not delude ourselves by talking about some “power,” imagining ourselves as “warriors fighting the enemy and sin”. It’s not us who fight, but God does in us. Graham Greene wrote his novel to glorify God and to put the “high and mighty” to shame. These “powerful” people, driven by Nietzschean pride, decide the fate of the universe, but they have no peace in their souls. From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (Jas. 4:1). Isn’t it better to be weak so that the grace of God may work in the soul? Wouldn’t it be better to realize our weakness so that God could save us, because He won’t save us without our will? Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory is an important novel for Christians, because it teaches humility and a sober awareness of who you really are, repeating after the Apostle Paul: Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits (Rom. 12:16). It’s time to acknowledge that we are nothing, and not to think of ourselves as the “leaders of civilization”, the “conquerors of outer space” and the “bearers of progress.” It’s time to realize that without God, without synergy with Him, which is not only in creative work, but in every human activity, we are not capable of even the smallest thing.
“How often the priest had heard the same confession—man was so limited. He hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt” (Graham Greene. From The Power and the Glory).