The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Now that he no longer despaired it didn’t mean, of course, that he wasn’t damned—it was simply that after a time the mystery became too great, a damned man putting God into the mouths of men: an odd sort of servant, that, for the devil.

There was a time when he had approached the Canon of the Mass with actual physical dread—the first time he had consumed the body and blood of God in a state of mortal sin. But then life bred its excuses—it hadn’t after a while seemed to matter very much, whether he was damned or not, so long as these others …

The candles smoked and the people shifted on their knees—an absurd happiness bobbed up in him again before anxiety returned: it was as if he had been permitted to look in from the outside at the population of heaven. Heaven must contain just such scared and dutiful and hunger-lined faces. For a matter of seconds he felt an immense satisfaction that he could talk of suffering to them now without hypocrisy—it is hard for the sleek and well-fed priest to praise poverty.

He began the Consecration of the Host (he had finished the wafers long ago—it was a piece of bread from Maria’s oven); impatience abruptly died away: everything in time became a routine but this—‘Who the day before he suffered took Bread into his holy and venerable hands …’ Whoever moved outside on the forest path, there was no movement here—‘Hoc est enim Corpus Meum.’ He could hear the sigh of breaths released: God was here in the body for the first time in six years. When he raised the Host he could imagine the faces lifted like famished dogs. He began the Consecration of the Wine—in a chipped cup. That was one more surrender—for two years he had carried a chalice around with him; once it would have cost him his life, if the police officer who opened his case had not been a Catholic. It may very well have cost the officer his life, if anybody had discovered the evasion—he didn’t know; you went round making God knew what martyrs—in Concepción or elsewhere—when you yourself were without grace enough to die.

A man said, ‘Better go north, father,’ and stood waving his hand. One mustn’t have human affections—or rather one must love every soul as if it were one’s own child. The passion to protect must extend itself over a world—but he felt it tethered and aching like a hobbled animal to the tree trunk. He turned his mule south.

How often the priest had heard the same confession—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 a civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber merchant. It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

‘Nobody here,’ a voice said, ‘wants their blood money.’ Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals … He had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.

He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or 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 imagination. He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman. ‘You and Father José,’ she said. ‘It’s people like you who make people mock—at real religion.’ She had, after all, as many excuses as the half-caste. He saw the kind of salon in which she spent her days, with the rocking-chair and the photographs, meeting no one. He said gently, ‘You are not married, are you?’

All the voices slowly became faces—there were no surprises. The confessional teaches you to recognize the shape of a voice—the loose lip of the weak chin and the false candour of the too straightforward eyes. He saw the pious woman a few feet away, uneasily dreaming with her prim mouth open, showing strong teeth like tombs: the old man: the boaster in the corner, and his woman asleep untidily across his knees. Now that the day was at last here, he was the only one awake, except for a small Indian boy who sat cross-legged near the door with an expression of interested happiness, as if he had never known such friendly company.

What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days—and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt…

Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. An animal never knows despair.

He had been walking all day and he was very tired; he found a dry spot and sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing. All around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company—his aloneness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered—for no apparent reason—a day of rain at the American seminary, the glass windows of the library steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books, and a young man—a stranger from Tuscon—drawing his initials on the pane with his finger—that was peace. He looked at it from the outside: he couldn’t believe that he would ever again get in. He had made his own world, and this was it—the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again—fear because he was not alone after all.

He could feel no meaning any longer in prayers like these. The Host was different: to lay that between a dying man’s lips was to lay God. That was a fact—something you could touch, but this was no more than a pious aspiration. Why should anyone listen to his prayers? Sin was a constriction which prevented their escape; he could feel his prayers weigh him down like undigested food.

The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses; the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins; then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith—faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau—it looked as if it was within reach—and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle began to eat, and the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?

‘Of course,’ Mr Lehr said, ‘my sister and I are Lutherans. We don’t hold with your Church, father. Too much luxury, it seems to me, while the people starve.’

Mr Lehr and his sister had combined to drive out savagery by simply ignoring anything that conflicted with an ordinary German-American homestead. It was, in its way, an admirable mode of life.

The priest afterwards took the soap and followed suit. He felt it was expected of him, though he couldn’t help thinking it was a waste of time. Sweat cleaned you as effectively as water. But this was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness—cleanliness, not purity.

It was appalling how easily one forgot and went back; he could still hear his own voice speaking in the street with the Concepción accent—unchanged by mortal sin and unrepentance and desertion. The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency. It seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.

He interrupted the woman savagely, ‘Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night … remember your real sins.’ ‘But I’m a good woman, father,’ she squeaked at him with astonishment. ‘Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?’ He said, ‘Have you any love for anyone but yourself?’ ‘I love God, father,’ she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor—the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl—another of the pious—like himself. ‘How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man—or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.’ He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. ‘It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.’

‘Oh, he’s a good Catholic, father.’ Scratching under his arm-pit, he didn’t look at the priest. ‘He’s dying, and you and I wouldn’t like to have on our conscience what that man …’ ‘We shall be lucky if we haven’t worse.’ ‘What do you mean, father?’ The priest said, ‘He only killed and robbed. He hasn’t betrayed his friends.’ ‘Holy Mother of God, I’ve never …’ ‘We both have,’ the priest said.

‘Father,’ the voice said urgently, ‘you let me be. You look after yourself. You take my knife …’ The hand began its weary march again—this time towards the hip. The knees crooked up in an attempt to roll over, and then the whole body gave up the effort, the ghost, everything. The priest hurriedly whispered the words of conditional absolution, in case, for one second before it crossed the border, the spirit had repented, but it was more likely that it had gone over still seeking its knife, bent on vicarious violence. He prayed: ‘O merciful God, after all he was thinking of me, it was for my sake …’ but he prayed without conviction. At the best, it was only one criminal trying to aid the escape of another—whichever way you looked, there wasn’t much merit in either of them.

Now something in his tone infuriated the lieutenant. He said, ‘You’re a danger. That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.’ ‘Of course not. It’s God you’re against. I’m the sort of man you shut up every day—and give money to.’ ‘No, I don’t fight against a fiction.’ ‘But I’m not worth fighting, am I? You’ve said so. A liar, a drunkard. That man’s worth a bullet more than I am.’ ‘It’s your ideas.’ The lieutenant sweated a little in the hot steamy air. He said, ‘You are so cunning, you people. But tell me this—what have you ever done in Mexico for us? Have you ever told a landlord he shouldn’t beat his peon—oh yes, I know, in the confessional perhaps, and it’s your duty, isn’t it, to forget it at once. You come out and have dinner with him and it’s your duty not to know that he has murdered a peasant. That’s all finished. He’s left it behind in your box.’

‘Once,’ the priest said, ‘I asked myself that. The fact is, a man isn’t presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and one bad. He gets caught up. The first year—well, I didn’t believe there was really any cause to run. Churches have been burnt before now. You know how often. It doesn’t mean much. I thought I’d stay till next month, say, and see if things were better. Then—oh, you don’t know how time can slip by.’

‘Perhaps it is. I’ve never got your ideas straight. We’ve always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry—hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It’s better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven—so long as we don’t push his face in the dirt.’ ‘I hate your reasons,’ the lieutenant said. ‘I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say—pain’s a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak.’ ‘At the end of a gun.’ ‘Yes, At the end of a gun.’ ‘Oh well, perhaps when you’re my age you’ll know the heart’s an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn’t talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child’s strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.’

‘Oh,’ the priest said, ‘that’s another thing altogether—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 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 walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.’

‘Listen,’ the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, ‘I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they’re in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I’m not telling them fairy stories I don’t believe myself. I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too.’ He said slowly, ‘I wouldn’t want it to be any different. I just want justice, that’s all.’

The lieutenant rode on for a little while in silence; they came to the cemetery, full of chipped angels, and passed the great portico with its black letters, ‘Silencio’. He said, ‘All right. You can have him.’ He wouldn’t look at the cemetery as they went by—there was the wall where prisoners were shot. The road went steeply downhill towards the river; on the right, where the cathedral had been, the iron swings stood empty in the hot afternoon. There was a sense of desolation everywhere, more of it than in the mountains because a lot of life had once existed here. The lieutenant thought: No pulse, no breath, no heart-beat, but it’s still life—we’ve only got to find a name for it. A small boy watched them pass; he called out to the lieutenant, ‘Lieutenant, have you got him?’ and the lieutenant dimly remembered the face—one day in the plaza—a broken bottle, and he tried to smile back, an odd sour grimace, without triumph or hope. One had to begin again with that.

When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death. He crouched on the floor with the empty brandy-flask in his hand trying to remember an Act of Contrition. ‘O God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins … crucified … worthy of thy dreadful punishments.’ He was confused, his mind was on other things: it was not the good death for which one always prayed. He caught sight of his own shadow on the cell wall; it had a look of surprise and grotesque unimportance. What a fool he had been to think that he was strong enough to stay when others fled. What an impossible fellow I am, he thought, and how useless. I have done nothing for anybody. I might just as well have never lived. His parents were dead—soon he wouldn’t even be a memory—perhaps after all he was not at the moment afraid of damnation—even the fear of pain was in the background. He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.