In English History, the period leading up to the First World War and all the way to the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Literary Revival. During this time, so many prominent authors were converts to Roman Catholicism, that there are records of aspiring British novelists even converting to the Roman Church in hopes of finding some new literary inspiration.
Graham Greene was one such convert (though out of conviction). He was in many ways my own patron saint when I was a Roman Catholic. His works have said to promote faith by doubting doubt. A sort of existential via negativa if you will. Ironically, I find Greene’s Christian Existentialism to be more Lutheran than Roman because he always communicates the reality of human sin. He does more to attack human nature in his novels than St. Augustine did when fighting Pelagius. In most of his novels the story is one where the character must be considered damned by Roman dogmatics, but whom Greene defends and portrays as always having faith even until the end – which makes it all the more tragic.
That Reformation question: can a man still fervently believe in Christ and be a sinner, Greene’s novels de facto proclaim a Yes! to, as did Luther. Greene was subversive in that one could simply read his works as tragedy, or one could hope with the sinning character for salvation. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has portrayed the angst of Luther’s description of the Christian as: “at the same time saint and sinner”.
Malcolm Muggeridge (another Catholic convert) described his friend Graham Greene by saying he was “a Jekyll and Hyde character, who has not succeeded in fusing the two sides of himself into any kind of harmony.”
Here is one passage I enjoyed from the novel “The Heart of the Matter”. It’s about a police officer who is in a state of frustration and unease over the way his life is going. He is a Catholic convert and his wife is quite devout, but he no longer loves her and doesn’t know how to resolve things with her. Acting as though he loves her exhausts him, and so she offers to just leave and go to South Africa to help him have peace. Peace and Despair are two great themes in Greene’s work, as well as that of the Catholic Literary Revival.
“… she said, ‘if I go away, you’ll have your peace.’
‘You haven’t any conception,’ he accused her, ‘of what peace means.’ It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him… by day he tried to win a few moments of its company … Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.
…
He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this action might carry him. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.” – Graham Greene “The Heart of the Matter” 61-62
***