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.
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