A World of Empathy, Part Two: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

I introduced Graham Greene in a previous blog entry. The Power and the Glory takes place in a bit of Mexican history that I had known nothing about. Apparently there were Marxists revolutions in some Mexican states in the mid-twentieth century, in which churches were shut down and priests, except those who renounced their work, were executed.

The protagonist (Padre José) was a priest who knew his own inadequacy, which included a weakness for alcohol. But he knew that he was a priest, and couldn’t ever quit being a priest, a fact to which his own unworthiness was irrelevant. He had a burden of love, of pity, for all of the Catholics-in-hiding in the Marxist state. Every time that he had a chance to escape, he gave it up in order to administer last rites.

As with the protagonists in other Greene novels, the priest finds out that his empathy for people entraps him in conflicting feelings. Other priests have given into the revolutionaries, and he wonders if his refusal to also renounce his faith was just pride. And he also discovered that he could simply not stop being a priest even if he wanted to. When he was in prison, he was hearing the confessions of the other prisoners, even though they did not know he was a priest (since he was in disguise). The Catholics in hiding knew who he was but would not point him out to the revolutionary authorities. He knew that the man who was following him, a sallow ugly man with fangs, recognized him as the fugitive priest and planned to turn him in for a reward, but he could not help but give the man a ride on his mule when the man was sick. He could not avoid helping his Judas. Perhaps the worst conflict in the priest’s heart was the fact that the revolutionaries had shot hostages who refused to identify him: his military captor told him, “’I’ve shot three hostages because of you.’” If people had died for him, they deserved a saint, not a drunkard.

The priest was always thinking about his own sinfulness, and that of the world, even when he looked at the stars. “The glittering worlds lay there in space like a promise—the world was not the universe. Somewhere Christ might not have died. He could not believe that to a watcher there this world could shine with such brilliance: it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.” But he could not not be a priest: “But then he remembered the gift he had been given which nobody could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation—the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege. Wherever he went, whatever he did, he defiled God.”

And like most Greene protagonist, the priest knew that suffering was an unavoidable flip side to joy. He told his secret parishioners, “One of the fathers has told us that joy always depends on pain. Pain is a part of joy…Pray that you will suffer more and more and more. Never get tired of suffering. The police watching you, the soldiers gathering taxes, the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger…that is all a part of heaven…” From this he concludes that heaven is right here on Earth. And here was the pitiful (pity-filled) love that the priest could not avoid: “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”

To the priest, God’s love was even frightening in its intensity. “God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint-pot of ditch water. We wouldn’t even recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead to walking in the dark? Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

The central point of the novel is in this quote. Upon hearing yet another confession about sexual sin, the priest thought: “Man was so limited: he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or for a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” This important thought is something that would never have gone through the mind of a Protestant or Catholic fundamentalist.

It was pity that brought the priest to his death, and he knew this would happen the moment he chose to show pity. He had escaped to a state where religion was not prohibited, but the ugly fanged man found him, and told him that he was needed to offer last rites to someone back in the state he had left. The priest knew it was a trap, but he knew it was his responsibility to go. Of course, he was arrested and executed. Greene brought all the plot lines together at the end of the novel: at the end, the dentist who had met the priest at the beginning of the novel now watched his execution from his office window. The dentist’s patient, writhing in pain, was the military leader who had ordered the execution.

Greene’s point was that the priest, despite his own sins and doubts, was in fact a saint, because he loved people unto death. This is the kind of religion that an agnostic can comprehend and admire.