Faith and Doubt: The Novels of Graham Greene

The kinds of religion to which I am agnostic are those that have easy and clear answers to every question. I admire people who, whether religious or not, seriously engage the questions of ultimate meaning. Characters who take steps of faith despite doubt, even though they cannot explain their faith, and do so without condemning those who disagree with them—these characters are common in the novels of Graham Greene, a twentieth-century British novelist. He converted to Catholicism, not because of being convinced by evidence or of doctrine, but because of an emotional attraction to it, a need he felt in his soul. This being the case, Greene never makes his readers, or his characters, feel as if there is something wrong or evil about them for not agreeing with his religious sentiments. Greene’s novels are not widely popular today, probably because his attention to the meaning of life is considered tedious by religious fundamentalists and atheistic seekers of pleasure alike. But it is precisely this that has made me love every novel of Greene’s that I have read: four and counting.

I just finished reading Monsignor Quixote. It is about a friendship between, and aimless adventures of, a Catholic priest and a communist ex-mayor. As you might guess, the priest is Quixote, the ex-mayor goes by Sancho Panza, the priest’s old car is Rozinante, and they hail from the little Spanish town of El Toboso. Neither of the men, though officially expected to do so, considers the other man to be outrageous or stupid even if he considers the beliefs to be so. The priest realizes that there are questions he cannot answer. Just as the priest does not have to personally answer for the atrocities of Torquemada and the Inquisition, the communist does not have to defend the atrocities of Stalin.

Just as did the original Quixote and Sancho, these two men had a common enemy, the windmills, represented in this novel by the Guardia, the police who supported Generalissimo Franco before his death, and who still operated as a force that always, if slightly, exceeded its legal limits. And just as in the original, Quixote did things that got him in trouble but which he did for sincerely good reasons. In the original, Quixote rescued a chain gang that was on its way to the galleys, men who were officially condemned by legal authorities. In this novel, Quixote helped a criminal to escape pursuit by the Guardia. As Quixote said, “the Good Samaritan didn’t hold an enquiry into the wounded man’s past.” He simply helped him, and did so immediately. Since in this novel Quixote is an innocent priest, his Dulcinea is a long-dead woman saint. Instead of Mambrino’s helmet, Quixote had a pechera, which is a kind of bib worn by high-ranking priests.

This novel could easily have become a fictitious framework for lectures. This is the feeling I got from the Alan Lightman novel Mr g, which has a deliberately ridiculous fictional background for exploring questions about cosmology. But Greene is a master of creating characters who have real reasons for what they believe and discuss and do, something quite lacking in Lightman’s novel.

The climax in Greene’s novel occurs when Quixote, hiding from both church and civil authorities, sees a Catholic procession which has been designed by the local priest as a way of getting larger and larger donations. Quixote stops the procession and denounces it as blasphemy. And at the end, Quixote ends up serving communion to the communist Sancho.

The most human part of the novel was that both men recognized the other as religious, but also as having doubts. Greene said that sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together more than sharing a faith. Sancho was no ordinary communist; he had studied to be a priest before giving up religion. And when Sancho suggested that Quixote read some Marx, the priest ended up liking Marx, noting that Marx, even if wrong, was trying his best to help the poor people whom capitalism had oppressed. Sancho had more faith in communism than in Stalin, and Quixote had more faith in Catholicism than in Rome. The priest noted that if you have complete faith, in the Bible or in Marx, you can quit thinking, something that both men refused to do.

Monsignor Quixote had a current of humor running all through it, neither of the two main characters taking himself too seriously. It was especially funny when they spent the night at a brothel, only Quixote did not know what it was. The bedside tables had condoms, and Quixote thought they were balloons, and he started to blow one up and it exploded. Sancho to Quixote: “Have you never seen a contraceptive before? No, I suppose you haven’t.” Quixote: “A contraceptive? But what can you do with a thing that size?” Sancho: “It wouldn’t have been that size if you hadn’t blown it up.”

The main point, at the very end, is that a man’s hate dies with him, while his love lives on past his death.

I didn’t like the original Don Quixote, by Cervantes. It has memorable scenes, which are clever, but otherwise I found it tedious. Most of Cervantes’s work is not about Quixote but are other stories told by other characters. Quixote is a minor character in his own novel. And Quixote is downright brutal to his follower Sancho, often hitting him violently. I got tired of that. It has some great one-liners, as when Cervantes says that to help a man ungrateful is to pour water into the sea. But, all in all, I would suggest watching a rerun of Man of La Mancha rather than reading the original Don Quixote. However, if you read Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene, you will have to read, or at least read about, the original or you will miss the numerous references to it.

The priest returns to a place where he knows he will die in The Power and the Glory; the emotionally-torn adulterer confronts himself in The Heart of the Matter; Monsignor Quixote is not only significant but funny. These great novels make me want to read a lot more by Graham Greene. Perfect for a Christian agnostic.

Novel as Experiment in Whitehead’s Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was one of the most famous novels of 2016. In this novel, a young slave Cora escapes from Georgia on the Underground Railroad, and eventually...does she make it? I won’t spoil the ending. But in this novel the Railroad is really a railroad, with railroad cars on tracks running through tunnels.

One impression is inescapable, and intentional. The amount of deliberate suffering inflicted by slave owners and slave hunters on the slaves, and even on other whites, is almost infinitely brutal. In this novel, slave hunters would kill and rape white abolitionists. Slave owners would put the eyes out of a slave who tried to learn to read. A white daughter turned in her parents to be hanged for hiding a fugitive slave (Cora), in return for an elevation of her social status. One slave hunter wore a necklace made out of human ears. One slave owner tortured his male slave by cutting off the slave’s manhood, stuffing it in the slave’s mouth, and sewing it shut.

Remember, this is fiction. Many of these things did not actually happen. For example, it makes no economic sense for slave owners to torture and kill their slaves for minor infractions; slaves were expensive to buy and maintain. Slave owners would, in the real South, treat slaves like animals, but not usually worse. But Whitehead achieves the novelist’s purpose, to make the reader hate slavery, and to see how it turns slave owners into devils.

And then I realized that this was the point. Most of these brutal things occurred at some point in history, but not all at once. During the lynchings after the Civil War, whites would indeed torture blacks. In doing so, they were not losing any money, the way slave owners would have. Whitehead took actual events from the lynching period and stuck them into the time of slavery. Whitehead also created a superficially nice-looking South Carolina, where black escapees were treated nicely, but it turns out that they were being sterilized in the name of scientific eugenics, and being used in scientific experiments. These things actually happened in the first half of the twentieth century. By placing the brutalities of fictional Georgia and North Carolina alongside the superficial niceness of the fictional South Carolina, Whitehead was inviting us to compare them. Were eugenics and scientific experimentation (as in the Tuskegee experiments), any less brutal than slavery? We usually don’t ask that question, because they occurred separately in history. Whitehead lines them all up during one brief time in Cora’s life. He performs an experiment with history. Hypothesis: eugenics is less brutal than slavery. Conclusion: No, they are both brutal.

I tried this kind of literary experiment when I was in junior high. I wrote a short story in which I divided England into two counties, Rupertshire and Spratleyshire, and I gave them two different forms of government. I set them side by side and allowed a traveler to directly compare them. That’s all I remember about this story, which might be in a box somewhere.

The Underground Railroad will certainly stir your fury. The young escaped slave Cora did not take every opportunity for revenge that came to her. I found myself wishing she had tortured and slowly killed the slave catcher in Indiana, rather than leaving him alive and tied up. That is, Whitehead stirred my desire for revenge then confronted me with mercy. This literary theme will never grow old.

Colson Whitehead broke up the timeline of history in a way that is forbidden in most historical fiction: he altered the historical context. But he made this broken timeline into parallel segments and compared them, as in a scientific experiment.

I published this essay on my evolution blog earlier this fall.