Literature concepts and applications

Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory (1940) is one of his works that the author himself identified as a Catholic story, and it is clearly concerned with issues of Catholicism in both theory and practice. The novel is set in Mexico in the 1930s at a time when the Church was in conflict with the political powers in Mexico. Greene gives his story an allegorical structure, with the two opposing forces represented by the Whiskey Priest and the Lieutenant of Police, neither of whom is ever named beyond this identification with their jobs and roles in life. The metaphorical framework for the novel evokes images of death, leading ultimately to the death of the priest but also suggesting the death of a corrupt religious order. The novel was deemed anti-Catholic by the Church, which sought to have it banned for a time, though the novel is more critical of the way the Church administers its religion than it is of catholicism in a more general theological sense. The novel is even more critical of the sort of government that believes it can legislate human thought and determine what people can and cannot think and then enforce its will. As the novel shows, such an intention is doomed to failure.

Many critics cite The Power and the Glory as Greene's best novel, and it was certainly the work that first signaled the full development of his great talent. In some ways, he differed from other writers of his time in a way that made him less flashy but more deeply realistic in the tone he set in his works:

Unlike many literary practitioners in this century, he did not experiment with language, subvert traditional narrative, or choose exotic subjects. He simply used the powerful imagination that led him to speak of his work as a "guided dream." That imagination -- fired, at least during the great middle years, by intense moral and religious perception -- made Greene's fiction the best-realized portrayal in its time of the drama of the human soul (Royal 16).

The novel indeed begins with an evocation of death and dying as Mr. Tench goes out into the heat and dust of a Mexican afternoon: "A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference; he wasn't carrion yet" (Greene 715). The whiskey priest also is not carrion yet, but from the first it is evident that his days are numbered and that he lives with a sense of doom. He appears as a vulture hangs in the air above, observing, and presumably waiting for him as well to be carrion. There is a sense of mystery about the priest from the first, emphasized by the fact that he is never named and that he is referred to again and again as the stranger, implying both that he does not belong and that there is something about him that remains always hidden.

The idea of a mystery is carried throughout the novel in several senses. The story has the structure of a mystery story, but it also refers to the "mystery" as found in religion, meaning the contemplation of the ineffable. Greene examines this concept within the structure of a thriller, but it is clear that he has deeper intentions than the writer of a thriller usually would. In this and several other of his novels, Greene analyzes the idea of the spiritual in terms of Catholic thought:

Greene's books were a symptom of Catholic thinking that was increasing in depth, but inevitably his work collided with the pious rigidity inherited from the nineteenth century. Nevertheless his widely read fiction exerted a strong influence.

The "open Church" of the 1960s, with its acceptance of all "men of good will" had in its background the puzzled, slowly comprehending, worldwide Catholic audience on which Greene's themes were working in the 1940s and 1950s. These were the decades when the separatism that had dominated the nineteenth century was surrendering to the older recognition that had begun with such men as Campion and continued with such men as Newman: that there was good in all people. Greene's work was a sign of the accelerated convergence between the Catholic and the non-Catholic worlds. (Kellogg 127).

Of course, the Church itself did not see this sort of future for itself and so challenged writers like Greene for going against the orthodoxy of the time. In 1953, the Catholic Church denounced The Power and the Glory:

While the author's intention had been "to bring out the victory of the power and the glory of the Lord in spite of man's wretchedness," this aim had not been achieved. Rather, "the latter element" -- that is, human wretchedness -- had appeared "to carry the day" in a way that did injury "to certain priestly characters and even to the priesthood itself." Moreover, the novel portrayed a state of affairs so "paradoxical" and "erroneous" that it would disconcert "unenlightened persons" who formed the majority of the readers (Schloesser).

As noted, Greene himself referred to three of his novels as his "Catholic novels": The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair. At the same time, Greene did not like being called a "Catholic novelist," for that restricted him too much. Many Catholic leaders would agree and criticize Greene's catholicism. In 1953, Cardinal Bernard Griffin of Westminster wrote a pastoral letter condemning the three Catholic novels, citing a Vatican official's view of Greene's work. Cardinal Giuseppi Pizzardo condemned The Power and the Glory for being "paradoxical." At some point, Greene met Pope Paul VI, who commented on the cardinal's unfavorable reaction by telling him, "Mr. Greene, some aspects of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that" (Sherry).

Greene is not a polemicist for any specific point-of-view, however, and he does not follow any doctrine closely in his novels. In The Power and the Glory, Greene explores conflicts and paradoxes in the Church, in government, and in the soul of the human being. In spite of his role as an allegorical entity, the whiskey priest is not black or white but instead is a fully realized and complex human being, as is the police lieutenant who serves as his opposite. Greene explores his themes in terms of the way human beings act in paradoxical fashion rather than holding to one clear course, and for that matter, he presents the Church in the same light, which may be one reason many in the Church saw him as an enemy. Sherry says of the main character in The Power and the Glory,

Weak and sinful?

alcoholic, the father of a child?

he runs from death, yet serves in doubt. At any juncture he could reveal himself, marry and live safely. He does not, but he is keenly aware that his persistence in secretly administering the sacraments is grudging and less than ideally noble (Sherry).

Sherry further points out that Greene does not present this character in simple terms but instead develops him more fully:

But?

and here is Greene's paradoxical mind at work?

we discern through hints about the priest's past that perhaps, despite his weakness, he is indeed holier than he would have been without persecution, and even without violating his vows. For it is only in those experiences that he has learned how to suffer and to love, respectively. How else can we reach holiness, the novel challenges us to ponder, except from the place where we are? (Sherry).

Greene wrote this novel based on his own experiences in Mexico, experiences he wrote about before in The Lawless Roads in 1939. He then traveled through Tabasco and Chiapas, which were Mexican provinces where the Church was under persecution. Many of the characters and settings in the novel were drawn from this trip. In both books, Greene is interested in the attitude of the Mexican government toward religion. The state was then dedicated to imparting a Socialist education and to eliminating all religious doctrine. Many of the priests were forced either to marry or to accept martyrdom, while a few tried to continue their ministry and remain out of the custody of the police:

In outlawing the influence of the Church and in making any practice of its dogma an act of treason, the government under Garrido Cannibal sought to establish a state that would consider the bodily needs of the people and free them from the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the Roman Catholic Church. It sought to enforce a secular order in place of a religious one. The attempt failed, for the new order could not destroy the forms and symbols of the old (De Vitis 76).

In this novel, Greene shows some of the reasons why this effort was doomed to failure, even as he also shows how certain corrupted elements of the Catholic Church were also doomed in the long run. Even as he celebrates the achievement of the whiskey priest and the failure of the lieutenant, Greene does so in a paradoxical and ironic way: "One tends to forget that the virtual triumph of the priest is due less to the sustaining power of his faith than to the nihilism of the opposition" (Atkins 124). Similar paradoxes abound in Catholic doctrine and are embodied in the life of the priest. The priest in the novel has endured pain and guilt for years "but recognizes in his suffering the purposeful presence of God's love" (Kelly 53). The whiskey priest is heroic in spite of himself. He would be deemed a fallen priest by most assessments, for he is not only an alcoholic but has fathered an illegitimate child. He is also terrified of both pain and death, which makes his willingness to endure both more heroic than if he were the sort of uncompromising saint many expect him to be. Ultimately, he finds salvation through his daughter, a young woman "who appears to have lost her innocence prematurely and has little hope for joy in this world" (Kelly 53). Updike finds the development of this character to be perfect for the themes of the novel, noting that the "nameless whiskey priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anti-clerical Mexico. Roman catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both" (Updike 16). In the novel, it is significant that "those who believe in the priest are children. Most adults have little faith in him, but the young draw their hope from him although he is weak and corrupt" (McCann 435). Perhaps they see more clearly than the adults and than the priest himself, for the heroic act he undertakes at the last is not something he would have foreseen for himself..

The story in the novel divides into four sections. The reader is introduced to the whiskey priest in the first of these, learns that he is trying to escape from the state in which he stands as the last representative of the Church, and encounters numerous other characters. In the second part, the priest returns to his village to see his daughter and narrowly escapes discovery by the lieutenant. When he shows up looking for wine to celebrate the Mass, he is arrested for violating the anti-liquor laws. In part three, he is released without being recognized and is about to escape entirely when he is called back to minister to a dying gangster. This proves to be a trap, which he knows but enters just the same, and he is arrested and executed. The last part of the novel looks to the effect his death has on the other characters (Lodge 24).

The novel is also structured around three meetings between the priest and the lieutenant. The priest is running and hiding from the police, so it is natural that such meetings are few. These meetings also bring into play another important element, the element of delay. The first two times the lieutenant meets the rest, he does not recognize him as the man he is hunting. This delays the inevitable capture. Malamet states that "Greene's incorporation of deferral as a thematic component in the novel's Christian content" (Malamet 21J) is reinforced by the teachings of the Church, such as when the priest tells the peasants that they deny themselves now so they can gain more in heaven:

Here life resembles a dilatory quest that culminates in heavenly fulfillment, but this tribute to what lies ahead is subverted by the insistent and immediate pursuit of the lieutenant close at hand (Malamet 21J).

The delay also adds to the theme of change, of becoming, of alteration. The priest should be easy to find given that the police have a picture of him with a ring drawn around his face to make it easy to see, but in fact, the face of the man has changed. Where formerly he was a buffoon, he is changed internally if not externally. Greene emphasizes that the man tried to change his face physically but could not, but he also shows in the book that the man is a different person than he was, and it is this difference which fools the police.

The internal change is very important, showing a belief in the possibility of redemption and so in the doctrines of the Church. Those who find Greene to be anti-Catholic are mistaking his real concerns about the way the Church responds at times and about the corruption that he finds in the Church in Mexico for a lack of belief. De Vitis finds that Greene not only believes in Catholic doctrine but in the Church itself and that he embodies this belief in this novel:

In The Power and the Glory Greene asserts the vitality of the Roman Catholic Church as he attempts an explanation of the value of its beliefs. For all his weaknesses the whiskey priest becomes the representative not only of his Church but of the cumulative wisdom of the past; in short, Western humanism (De Vitis 77).

Green does this not in a polemical structure but within the allegory of this novel, an allegory in which the priest can be seen as an embodiment of Everyman: "For the priest while determining the means of his salvation becomes a man fighting the unifying but degrading urges of a power cult" (De Vitis 77).

Janet McCann finds certain repeated themes in Greene's work centering on ideas about death, and she writes,

Greene's notion of life as a moral drama is reflected in his treatment of death and dying in the novels. His main characters usually meet sudden and violent ends, but their deaths are almost always accompanied by hints of hope... In most cases, Greene surrounds death with such mystery and ambiguity as to suggest an entirely different perspective on the total picture?