The priest in the novels of Graham Greene  

‘How do you know I am a priest?’

‘When you have been a priest as long as I have you will recognize a colleague. Even without his collar.’ ¹

Priests, in the complex worlds of Graham Greene, bear an indelible stain that can never be eradicated by the perversities of this world. Greene was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926 and Roger Sharrock has suggested that ‘[f]rom one aspect his was a purely intellectual conversion; but from another, on account of his distrust of rational and philosophical grounds, it was an act of total commitment, a wager in the spirit of Pascal’. ² Sharrock’s observation captures beautifully the spirit of the novels and their priests. Looked at rationally, the priest is all too often a mess – but it is here, in spite of all, that we see the power and the glory in a world of saints and sinners.

In a scene in Monsignor Quixote (1982), the Monsignor is reading, in public, The Communist Manifesto, to the distress of his communist friend Sancho, who fears the eyes of the secret police. The Monsignor admits that ‘this little book is different. It is the work of a good man. A man as good as you are – and just as mistaken.’ ³ The Monsignor is a holy fool – a man who sees goodness where others see evil. His death, perhaps, is inevitable, dying during the Mass that is no Mass, caught between doubt and love, the very doubts themselves becoming the salvation of his friend the Marxist Sancho.

But what of the nameless priest in The Power and the Glory (1940)? This was, Greene tells us, the only novel written to a thesis, and yet ‘a book [that] gave me more satisfaction than any other’. ⁴ There is indeed something of a contrived quality in the book, not least in the counterpointing of the priest and the police lieutenant who hunts him down, a man also driven by integrity and idealism. These two are, in Greene’s own words, ‘the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives; the drunken priest who continued to pass life on’. ⁵ But the pathetic priest remains the messenger of a kingdom that is more powerful than anything on earth, driven in spite of all his failings. And there is always another priest to take his place.

Leon Rivas in The Honorary Consul (1973) is another failed priest who ineptly leads a group of Paraguayan terrorists planning to kidnap the American ambassador, as incompetent as a terrorist as he had been as a priest. Yet he is a man whose priesthood is rooted in an integrity that is more than books and theology. Just before he is killed, Rivas remarks to his unbelieving friend Dr Plarr, ‘I am no theologian, I was bottom in most of my classes, but I have always wanted to understand what you call the horror and why I cannot stop loving it.’ ⁶ In fact, most of Rivas’ final discourses in the hut where he is caught with his prisoner, the honorary consul Charley Fortnum, are clearly Christian. ‘But I believe in Christ,’ he admits. ‘I believe in the Cross and the Redemption. The Redemption of God as well as of Man.’ And finally he affirms, ‘Yes. I still call myself a Catholic whatever the bishops may say. Or the Pope.’ ⁷ The question must be asked whether Rivas’ last Mass in the sordid hut is indeed a Mass, its final words of dismissal, ‘Ite, Missa est,’ ⁸ the signal for his death. He dies trying to assist his friend, begging Plarr’s pardon, and himself forgiven, as a ‘joke’ by Plarr – ‘Ego te absolvo.’ The Honorary Consul is peopled with failures. The ambassador says of Charley Fortnum, kidnapped through an amateurish mistake, ‘Fortnum is such pitiably small beer.’ ⁹ But it is among such small beer that the life of the true priest finally is to be found.

The thought of Blaise Pascal haunts Greene’s novels and above all the ‘wager’ of Section Two of the Pensées. God truly is a hidden God, yet ‘we may well know that God exists without knowing what he is’. ¹⁰ Pascal continues:

God being thus hidden, all religion which does not say that God is hidden is not true; and all religion which does not offer a reason for it is incapable of teaching us. But our religion does just that: Truly thou art a hidden God.

And so what of the wager?

You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. That is one point cleared up. But your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and the loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; wager that God exists. ¹¹

This wager lies at the heart of Greene’s ‘poetic’. A short story of 1948 entitled ‘The Hint of an Explanation’ is about a ‘hidden’ priest discovered in a conversation between two strangers on a cold, dark train journey – each on different sides of Pascal’s wager. One of them (it is revealed at the end that he is a priest – by his collar), tells a disturbing story from his Catholic childhood: ‘You mustn’t expect too much meaning. But to me there seems to be a hint. That’s all. A hint.’ ¹² The other man does not know what is meant by the hint, but it is the priest for whom the hints mean everything, although he admits that ‘they mean nothing at all to another human being than the man who catches them. They are not scientific evidence – or evidence at all for that matter.’ ¹³

A priest will always recognize another priest – even without his collar. But in other novels by Greene, there are ‘priests’ who remain even more hidden – unknown to the Church and perhaps known only to God. In The Heart of the Matter (1948), Father Rank talks to Major Scobie’s widow Louise after Scobie’s suicide. She insists, ‘In spite of everything, he was a Catholic.’ Father Rank replies: ‘The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’ Scobie, Father Rank insists, was wrong, ‘but I think that what I saw of him, that he really loved God’. But the bitter turn of the knife comes from the widowed Louise’s last words in the book: ‘He certainly loved no-one else.’ And Father Rank admits the possibility of this. But at the centre of Scobie’s character there is always ambiguity. He is, in his way, a deeply priestly character – remaining uncorrupted by money or ambition. But he is corrupted by sentiment – and, like all of Greene’s priests, flawed perhaps because of his very goodness – an adulterer, drawn into shady financial dealings to help his wife.

A moment before his death by a deliberate overdose of tablets, Scobie begins what seems to be a prayer that is never completed. ‘He said aloud, “Dear God, I love …” but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor.’ ¹⁴ In a letter to Marcel Moré dated 12 July 1950, Greene suggested that the ambiguity of this prayer is lost in the French translation. Was Scobie expressing his love for two women (or for one of them), or his love for God? Greene continues in his letter, asserting Scobie’s own uncertainty:

The point I would like to make which is probably heretical is that at the moment of death even an expression of sexual love comes within the borders of charity. After all when a man knows that he is dying in a few moments sexual love itself becomes completely altruistic … and therefore there must be some confusion in the mind as to the object of love. ¹⁵

Such ambiguity rests in all of Greene’s ‘priestly’ characters. Scobie is no priest, but he is one of many characters in Greene’s novels that might have been, perhaps. In his autobiographical Ways of Escape, Greene admits that The Heart of the Matter did not begin in his mind with Major Scobie but with a minor character in the book, Father Clay, whom Scobie meets up-country when he sets out to enquire into the suicide of the young officer, Pemberton. ¹⁶ Father Clay is a pathetic figure, trying to serve the Church faithfully, yet ‘without resources’, lamenting his failure to save Pemberton and quite unsuitable in his faithfulness to the rule of the Church. He is obsessed with the damnation of the suicide. Scobie, on the other hand, is concerned with mercy and forgiveness as he hands Pemberton’s pathetic suicide note back to the young priest.

‘You are not going to tell me there’s anything unforgiveable there, Father. If you or I did it, it would be despair – I grant you anything with us. We’d be damned because we know, but he doesn’t know a thing.’ [Father Clay:] ‘The Church’s teaching …’ [Scobie:] ‘Even the Church can’t teach me that God doesn’t pity the young.’ ¹⁷

Greene frames the conversation as if between two priests – and it is Scobie, the older man corrupted by sentiment, who is, in a way, the true priest beyond the boundaries of the Church – even without his collar.

The End of the Affair (1951) is a troubling novel, not least because the unattractive character of Bendrix is obviously written so closely from Greene himself. In this disturbing novel of adultery and obsessive sex, Greene, through the character of Sarah, slips into a mystical tone reminiscent of St John of the Cross and directly draws on St Augustine’s Confessions. On her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Sarah, it would appear, works miracles of healing, even from beyond the grave, and the novel slips for a moment out of the time of the grimy quotidian of the wartime city, its opening words by Bendrix already a clue: ‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ ¹⁸

Father Crompton, the priest who receives Sarah into the Church and who finally speaks to her husband Henry and lover Bendrix after her death, is perhaps the most theologically articulate of Greene’s Catholic priests, drawing directly on Chapter 11 of Augustine’s Confessions, which links time and eternity in its opening sentence: ‘O Lord, since you are outside time in eternity, are you unaware of the things that I tell you?’ ¹⁹ But the priest and his theology simply state the mystery, and he meets the puzzlement of Henry and Bendrix merely with these textbook words:

St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child. ²⁰

Such words from the priest only enflame the grieving, guilty and perplexed Bendrix, the novel’s narrator:

Quite suddenly I lost my temper. I believe I was annoyed chiefly by his complacency, the sense that nothing intellectual could ever trouble him, the assumption of an intimate knowledge of somebody he had only known for a few hours or days, whom we had known for years. ²¹

Here, at the end of the book, one senses the angry voice of Greene himself – a believer yet fractured and demanding of the priesthood not complacency but rather an honest insufficiency rather than the smooth, thought-through paradoxes of the God of theology. And so, the novelist puts into the mouth of the sceptical character Bendrix – and in their own way they both mean it – ‘Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.’ ²² The End of the Affair is one of Greene’s darkest novels. Here is the Church presented without reserve, and it is not enough. Bendrix ends the novel with a prayer thrown out to God in utter despair: ‘O God, You’ve done enough. You’ve robbed me of enough. I’m too tired and too old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.’ ²³

Published nine years later, A Burnt-out Case (1960) marks a turning point for Greene, a deliberate attempt to draw a ‘hollow man’ ²⁴ and a book that, in Greene’s own words, ‘represented the depressive side of a manic-depressive writer’. ²⁵ But although there is a ‘false’ priest at the leprosy mission (Father Thomas, obsessed by his spiritual problems), the other priests working there are decent men, though set against the devoted, wholly undevout, utterly dedicated Dr Colin. Querry, the burnt-out case, seeks oblivion from worldly success and promiscuous sex, setting out on a journey of redemption. Even in Querry there are hints of the priest – though without a collar. On 13 February 1961, Greene wrote in a letter to Catherine Walston.

I feel as though I’ve come to the end of a long rope with A Burnt-out Case & that I’ll probably never succeed in getting any further from the Church … Now I must start returning home. ²⁶

Almost a year later, on 30 January 1962, Greene wrote to Ralph Wright OSB, a poet and Benedictine monk. He admits that there are hints of ‘returning health’ in Querry, even at the moment of death. He went on:

One must remember that technically the book is written through the eyes of Querry and it is Querry’s irritation with the facile Father Thomas and the bogus Rycker. These two are intended as a contrast to the really selfless and practical work of the fathers of the mission. I think you would find that if these two characters had been left out the book would suddenly have become extraordinarily sentimental. On the one side Querry rediscovering a bit of life, on the other a group of noble priests. To make their mobility plausible one has to put in the shadows. After all even the everyday life of a Catholic is haunted by the corruptio optimi. ²⁷

The full phrase is corruptio optimi est pessima – the corruption of the best is the worst of all.

The almost miraculous rescue of the leper boy Deo Gratias – an absurd, significant name – by Querry is the first sign of what Greene calls his ‘returning health’. ²⁸ But it is in death that ambiguity makes everything possible. Having been shot by the jealous Rycker, Querry is carried onto the veranda. Rycker, a man who cannot be mocked or laughed at, and thus knows nothing of the divine comedy, fetches a cushion for Querry.

He said, ‘He shouldn’t have laughed.’

‘He doesn’t laugh easily,’ the doctor said, and again there was a noise that resembled a distorted laugh.

‘Absurd,’ Querry said, ‘this is absurd or else …’ but what alternative, philosophical or psychological, he had in mind they never knew. ²⁹

In death, the decent, erring Scobie and the burnt-out Querry are one in the ambiguity of their final words – each leaving open a door on the one side of which is despair, and on the other salvation. The end of A Burnt-out Case is the beginning, for Greene, of the journey that finally takes him to the gentle, sad, still questioning but ultimately absolute world of Monsignor Quixote.

Pascal and his wager never entirely leave Greene. For him, as for Pascal, scepticism is ineradicably a part of faith and the life of the priest, and he is always pushing this ambivalence further, not as a theologian but as a novelist. Pascal underwrites almost every page of The Quiet American (1955), which has no actual priest, although the world-weary narrator, Fowler, does say of the local policeman: ‘You would have made a good priest, Vigot’ ³⁰ – a man made to hear confessions. Pyle, the quiet American, is an idealist whose idealism is dangerous because it is theoretical, claiming moral superiority. But thus to see the world in black and white is a fatal addiction – for the true world is grey, and here the wager must be made. But it is a hard lesson. At the end of the novel, Fowler reflects: ‘Must I too have my foot thrust into the mess of life before I saw the pain?’ ³¹

Greene’s early, brilliant and still powerful novel Brighton Rock (1938) was his first popular success. Here Greene enters a world that is distinct from his own – the long-gone world of Brighton racecourse gangs and hoodlums. Pinkie is a character from the slums of the town leading a gang doomed to extinction, and indelibly a Catholic. The power of the novel lies partly in the way in which Greene displaces sympathy from the cheerful Ida Arnold – her intentions set on justice – towards the sinister and immature boy-villain Pinkie, with his aura of strange spirituality even in the darkness of his crimes.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,’ he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments.’ ³²

After Pinkie’s death, the novel ends with one of the first of Greene’s fictional Catholic priests, an old wheezing man hearing the confession of Pinkie’s ‘wife’ Rose. He has no name – as the narrative says, ‘Priests come and go.’ ³³ He teaches Rose through Pascal, and with the haunting words: ‘You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone – the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.’ ³⁴ The priest tells her that even Pinkie may be saved, for ‘the Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy’. Rose continues to assert that Pinkie is damned – he knew what he was doing – but the priest replies, gently, ‘Corruptio optimi est pessima.’ ³⁵ That same phrase again – although, of course, Rose does not understand him. As Greene’s fiction develops, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God is found in ever more remote places, outside the Church and through priests who have lost their way. But in Brighton Rock, the priest appears for a moment in the name of the Church itself – asking that Rose, too, may pray for him. He is a priest who would have been instantly recognized by Monsignor Quixote, though in the comedy of his later writings, Greene has come full circle with a more nuanced, gentler and less ecclesial image of the priest.

And so finally to Monsignor Quixote, in which the priest is sent gently on his travels with his communist friend Sancho. But his distance from the Church is ever kept with a kindly, knowing air. As a protection, the Mayor insists that he wears a pair of purple socks indicative of his elevation to Monsignor. But immediately Quixote suspects the elegant shopkeeper they encounter to purchase the socks. ‘It occurred to Father Quixote that such a man was almost certainly a member of Opus Dei – that club of intellectual Catholic activists whom he could not fault and yet whom he could not trust.’ ³⁶

Quixote’s final exile from the Church comes with his separation from his bishop, whom he treats with gentle humour: ‘“I have upset the poor man,” he thought. “Bishops, just like the very poor and the uneducated, should be treated with a special prudence.”’ ³⁷ And so to the final scene, the dry Mass in the Trappist monastery where Monsignor Quixote is brought after his accident in his car, Rocinante. The commentary is provided by Father Leopoldo and the sceptical materialist Professor Pilbeam. Quixote’s resolution to say Mass, his wits now deranged, had begun with a splendid moment of rebellion.

‘You condemn me, Excellency, not to say my Mass even in private. This is a shameful thing. For I am innocent. I repeat openly to you the words I used to Dr Galván – “Bugger the bishop.”’ ³⁸

He mumbles ever more incoherently in a gloriously comic, serious, spiritual celebration. And as the Mass – without elements – continues, so the unbelieving Sancho ‘receives’ the non-existent Host from his friend in a moment of pure communion. Professor Pilbeam persists in his scepticism – but there are things stronger than the rules of the Church. Father Leopoldo asks: ‘Do you think it’s more difficult to turn empty air into wine than wine into blood? Can our limited senses decide a thing like that?’ ³⁹ Perhaps Quixote’s spiritual integrity is finally shown by his sowing of saving doubts in the mind of his friend Sancho, another instance of the awful strangeness of the mercy of God.

The older Greene, in the final words of Monsignor Quixote, has become more delicate than in his earlier work:

Why is it that the hate of man – even of a man like Franco – dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end? ⁴⁰

In these novels by Graham Greene, it is in the doubt and the weaknesses that hope resides. And it is the genius of the novelist to know the true priests of this world – even without their collars.