Catholic Thought discussion
The Power and the Glory
>
Part 2, Chpts 1 thru 4
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
I hope you don't mind. Plus I had a close friend I've known since we were teens suddenly pass away. It's been a trying week.
Mod
Part 2, Chpts 3 & 4
Summary
Chapter 3
In jail the priest is placed in a crowded cell with an assortment of people. There is even a couple having sex in the dark. Some in the cell get into a conversation which turns to sin and priests, and in the process the whisky priest admits to being a priest, fully expecting that one of the cell mates will now turn him in for the reward. In so doing the whisky priest confesses his sins of alcoholism and of fathering a child. A pious woman in the cell asks him to hear her confession, but he refuses, and she, upset, scorns him bitterly.
In the morning, fully expecting to be identified as a priest, he is surprised that no one turned him in. In one of the cells is the mestizo who he had traveled down, but he too does not turn the priest in. Finally he is confronted by the lieutenant, who does not recognize him, and finally sends him off, even giving him money to get by with.
Chapter 4
The priest, not having anywhere to go, returns to the Captain Fellows house, hoping to get some food from Cora. He finds the house is mysteriously empty and abandoned, and without any food. There is only a crippled dog, and the whisky priest fights over and takes a discarded meaty bone.
He leaves the Fellows house and finds shelter in a village hut. The village too is abandoned, but there is a mysterious Indian woman who has hung about. Her actions make him suspicious and he searches the hut and finds hidden a child with multiple bullet holes, bleeding badly. He tries to save the child but he dies in his arms. Despite the inability to communicate, he learns the violence was caused by the fugitive American bandit and she learns that he is a priest. She presses him to go with her to bury her child, and she takes him on several day journey across wilderness and mountains to a place of crosses. The Indian woman places the body of her child at the foot of the largest cross and begins to pray. The priest leaves her there, exhausted and delusional from lack of food. Feeling guilty for abandoning her he returns to find her gone when a man with a gun finds him at the point of death. He is not the police but a man from the north, who nurses him and takes him north where it is safe to be a priest.
Mod
Mod
Yes, Manny. I agree with you about the quality of the writing but I am struggling to get by the words “the purple prose of an Evelyn Waugh. . .” Surely, you jest?
Mod
You don't think Waugh uses purple prose? Here's a definition of purple prose:
"In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that disrupts a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_...
Waugh's prose is ornate, but perhaps it would be a stretch to say it disrupts the narrative. When I use "purple prose" I usually just mean ornate. OK, I exaggerated per the actual definition. ;)
Manny wrote: "Where is everyone? No one is commenting on the book. Are people reading this?"I'm sorry--I've opted out of this one, just no time for one more book until I finish the ones I've read--Christus Vincit is a powerful book which CBC just finished (I'm still reading that one--hoping to read the Belloc book). I did read Power and Glory many years ago, but couldn't find our copy. Reading the discussions, though! Hopefully I'll be there for the next one.
Mod
I'm sorry--I've opted out of this one, just no time for one more book until I finish the ones I've read..."
I haven't read past the first chapter in part 2... I'm hoping to catch up this weekend.
Oops I should have written "the ones I'm still reading"!
Some of Greene’s descriptions remind me of the best of William Faulkner. In Part Three, Chapter One, for example, “the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl,” or “A little group of Indians passed the gate, gnarled tiny creatures of the Stone Age.”Reading The Power and the Glory at this moment in time seems unusually poignant. I’m thinking of Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion, where we read about a brilliant, charismatic Jesuit martyr from Elizabethan England; then Shusaku Endo’s Silence, where we learn of the slow erosion of the Christian personality under subtle torture in 17th century Japan; now, we are studying the suffering of a weak, flawed, but dedicated priest in anticlerical Mexico. And all our reading and learning and studying is being done at a time when Catholic priests and bishops are being arrested and imprisoned and “re-educated,” or, the bravest, forced to become shepherds of an underground church — under the Communist state in China. The paradox is real and painful.
Frances wrote: "the paradox is real and painfu.."No question about it. And we're seeing what was happening in Mexico and Central America throughout the past century. When will we ever learn?"
Mod
We will keep her and all your family in our prayers.
Mod
Mod
My fault Kerstin. I've been sidetracked. Let me try to catch up. Here's a first segment on why this is such a great novel.
Mod
So in the first chapter of Part 2 we see how complex the whisky priest character is before us. By writing from the priest’s internality, the novel enters what I’ll call the psychological phase of the work. What we have is a Dostoyevsky-esk drift into the heart of the character so that all his emotions, his character makeup, and his contradictions form a three dimensional profile—a psychological profile, if you will—of the central character. Let’s go through several passages in the chapter to accumulate this character profile.
The chapter opens with him riding through the woods with the police in search of him. Instead of fear, which we will see many times over, we has a strange thrill.
The priest scrambled off and began to laugh. He was feeling happy. It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings. (p. 59)
He stops to wash his face in a pool of water and sees his reflection.
He knelt down in the late sunlight and bathed his face in a brown pool which reflected back at him like a piece of glazed pottery the round, stubbly and hollow features. They were so unexpected that he grinned at them—with the shy evasive untrustworthy smile of a man caught out. In the old days he often practised a gesture a long while in front of a glass so that he had come to know his own face as well as an actor does. It was a form of humility—his own natural face hadn’t seemed the right one. It was a buffoon’s face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail. He had tried to change it—and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they’ll never recognize me now, and the cause of his happiness came back to him like the taste of brandy, promising temporary relief from fear, loneliness, a lot of things. He was being driven by the presence of soldiers to the very place where he most wanted to be. He had avoided it for six years, but now it wasn’t his fault—it was his duty to go there—it couldn’t count as sin. He went back to his mule and kicked it gently, ‘Up, mule, up,’ a small gaunt man in torn peasant’s clothes going for the first time in many years, like any ordinary man, to his home. (59-60)
The earthy, brown reflection and the analogy of his face to pottery suggests a primordial humanity, and one can’t help thinking of Isiah 64:8 where God is referred to as a potter and humanity is the clay. So in one sense the whisky priest is Adam, or Everyman, representative of the human condition.
Notice how many adjectives and nouns he uses to describe himself: shy, evasive, untrustworthy, humility, a buffoon. Notice the emotions: happy, exhilaration but those are temporarily covering up fear and lowliness. It’s almost if he’s experiencing a bi-polar range of emotions. And then there are the more complex feelings of duty and sin. It was his duty to go to his home, but endangering his fellow villagers was a sin. Implied there is guilt, which we will see later. And so we see a paradox of conflicting sensibilities: an obligation to do his duty, and the guilt that results from doing it. These conflicting emotions, the contradicting actions, the paradoxical motivations are at the core of his character.
We get more of his interiority as he contemplates his own decision.
In any case, even if he could have gone south and avoided the village, it was only one more surrender. The years behind him were littered with similar surrenders—feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary—and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went—too dangerous to carry with him. He had no business to say Mass without it; he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death. The routine of his life like a dam was cracked and forgetfulness came dribbling through, wiping out this and that. Five years ago he had given way to despair—the unforgivable sin—and he was going back now to the scene of his despair with a curious lightening of the heart. For he had got over despair too. He was a bad priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind—a whisky priest, but every failure dropped out of sight and mind: somewhere they accumulated in secret—the rubble of his failures. One day they would choke up, he supposed, altogether the source of grace. Until then he carried on, with spells of fear, weariness, with a shamefaced lightness of heart. (60)
More emotions: surrender, loss, failure, despair, fear, weariness, shame. He carries on despite the fact that he isn’t very good at his priestly obligations, that is, isn’t very good at his very identity. “He was a bad priest, he knew it.” And yet paradoxically he carries on those duties despite the fear at being caught and killed.
When he hears that the police are taking hostages and killing them if they don’t turn over a priest,
‘They are taking hostages now—from all the villages where they think you’ve been. And if people don’t tell … somebody is shot … and then they take another hostage. It happened in Concepción.’
‘Concepción?’ One of his lids began to twitch up and down, up and down. He said, ‘Who?’ They looked at him stupidly. He said furiously, ‘Who did they murder?’
‘Pedro Montez.’
He gave a little yapping cry like a dog’s—the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said, ‘Why don’t they catch me? The fools. Why don’t they catch me?’ The little girl laughed again; he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound but couldn’t see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child—bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live.
‘You see, father,’ one of the men said, ‘why …’
He felt as a guilty man does before his judges. He said ‘Would you rather that I was like … like Padre José in the capital … you have heard of him …?’
“He felt like a guilty man before his judges.” And so one of his dominant emotions is a sense of guilt. There is the guilt of being a priest, which causes the deaths of others. There is the guilt of being an alcoholic. There is the guilt of breaking his vow of celibacy.
I find his exclamation there, “Why don’t they catch me?” insightful. Why is he there in the dangerous territory pastoring, celebrating Mass, and issuing the sacraments? He has a chances to escape, and later actually reaches safe territory. At least twice he deliberately turns toward the very danger and though he doesn’t want to be captured, fully expects to be captured and shot. Is he doing it out of priestly obligation? Does he have a martyr complex? Does he do it for the thrill of the danger? Is he trying to expiate his guilt? You might be able to find justification for all those possibilities.
Which brings me to what I think Greene is after in this psychological profile. I think he’s creating a character based on what St. Paul says about himself in Romans 7:15-20.
What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
“I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” Why do we sin when we know better? It is a paradox. St. Paul is suggesting that it is part of the flesh, the very fact of being human, and at the very heart of being human is a paradox. And I think Greene is agreeing with him. Paradox is at the heart of this novel. In the whisky priest, Greene creates a character—an Adam type—that shows the psychological complexity that is at the very heart of Catholic anthropology. Adam sinned even though he had no intention of doing it. We see in the whisky priest the paradox of being human, wanting to be holy, wanting to obey God’s commandments, and yet doing what we really don’t want to do.
Mod
Oh no, not your fault. I have a hard time with stories like this in general.
Mod
Yes. But I think it goes deeper. He is man in a war zone. All normal ways of conduct that upholds a society and culture has been obliterated. He has been stripped of all human and spiritual/sacramental support. He is utterly alone having to muddle through. It has come down to mere survival and that has a coarsening effect. Would he have sinned in the same manner if his world hadn't spun out of control?
Mod
Absolutely. I've been focusing on the character, but there are the societal aspects of it too. There are several subtle references to TS Eliot's The Waste Land, which is a society devoid of spiritual life. The whisky priest is navigating through the waste land. What is interesting is that this society actually happened. This was the real state of parts of Mexico in the 1920s and 30s. There is no exaggeration here. The novel was published in 1940 I think, pre-dating Orwell's 1984 almost a decade. Greene was working on it in the late 30s. This was actually while the Nazis and the Communists were setting up their actual dystopias. Some dystopias are actually true and not imaginary.
Manny wrote: "Kerstin wrote: "Manny wrote: "In the whisky priest, Greene creates a character—an Adam type—that shows the psychological complexity that is at the very heart of Catholic anthropology. Adam sinned e..."Oh wow, Manny--thank you for that perspective. I do remember reading this in college and having much the same feelings about it that Kerstin expressed. Having read much about the Cristeros and the persecutions in Mexico and Central America (still going on), I'm now thinking I should give it another chance--especially since I never caught any connections with Eliot's Waste Land, which was a really big study at our university.
Mod
Mod
Saint Who? Saints Who Were Leaders
Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado
Martyr († 1927) Feast: June 26
A native in Mascota in Jailisco, Mexico, Josè was ordained a priest at twenty-four and two years later founded the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a focus on Eucharistic devotion. After several years in mission work, he was assigned to a parish. Although a new Mexican constitution outlawed public devotions, Josè went forward nevertheless with a bold plan to erect a giant cross devoted to Christ the King in the geographic center of Mexico. To announce the laying of the cornerstone, he had signs placed throughout the countryside declaring Christ the “King of Mexico.”
After this the authorities began to put increasing pressure on Josè to curtail his work. He was forced into hiding, but he continued to minister to his parishioners in secret. On the feast of the Sacred Heart, June 25, 1927, he was arrested when he was about to say a private Mass in a family home. The next day, he was taken to a large oak tree outside a nearby village and hanged. Josè placed the noose on his own neck so that none of his executioners would bear the guilt of that act.
Shortly beforehand, Josè had penned a poem anticipating his death: “I want to love you until martyrdom…/With my soul I bless you, my Sacred Heart./Tell me: is the instant of my eternal union near?/Stretch out your arms, O Jesus/Because I am your “little one.”
Loving Father, through the intercession of Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado, take me at the moment of my death into your eternal embrace.
(p. 80, Magnificat, Aug. 2021, Vol. 23, No. 6.)
That cross Josè built might be the same cross in the fourth chapter of Part 2, the giant cross the Indian woman places her dead child at the foot.
Wonderful insights, Manny. Thank you.
Mod
He kissed the top of the packing-case and turned to bless. In the inadequate light he could just see two men kneeling with their arms stretched out in the shape of a cross—they would keep that position until the consecration was over, one more mortification squeezed out of their harsh and painful lives. He felt humbled by the pain ordinary men bore voluntarily; his pain was forced on him. ‘Oh Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house …’ 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. (p.70-71)
If you have time go back a read over the Mass in Part 2, chapter 1 (pp. 69-71). It has been six years since he last celebrated. He performs it with such reverence and love that one feels the priest’s love of God. “Oh Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house” (Ps 26:8). He feels exhilaration again, performing the Mass, the “absurd happiness.” Why absurd? Because he is celebrating in a rundown hut with a chipped cup for a chalice and homemade bread for the Eucharist. But yet, it is the miracle of the Mass.
But passages where he is in direct contact with God are rare in the novel. The love of God seems muted because love of neighbor dominates the novel. We see it everywhere, with every relationship he has. We see it up front with Mr. Tench where the priest offers to share his brandy. They are essentially strangers but still have a heart to heart conversation. And Mr. Tench is later emotionally touched by the priest as he sees his execution. He has a heart to heart conversation with Coral Fellows, the girl who later will die and who sends out Morse Code to priest from the beyond. He has heart to heart conversations with the mestizo, who he knows will betray him. He has a heart to heart conversation with the people he meets in the jail cell and who do not betray him. He has a heart to heart conversation with the Indian woman whose child is killed. He even has a heart to heart conversation with the lieutenant, who though he will have him executed, is actually moved by his conversation with the priest. In fact the novel’s narrative propels forward through a coupled pairing of the priest and another character in dialogue. Let’s have a look at a couple of these conversations.
Let’s look at the Tench/Whisky Priest interaction first. First, the two by chance meet out at the port. The priest hears Tench exclaim something to himself in English and out of his own initiative responds to him in English. “You speak English,” Tench asks him in surprise. The priest responds he speaks a little English (p. 9). Why did the priest even respond? As it turns out it makes a huge difference to Tench. It will uplift him.
As a habitual expression, Tench uses the Latin phrase Ora pro nobis, “pray for us” (10-11). It comes right out of the Hail Mary prayer, the second half: “Sancta Maria mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen” (Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.). As it turns out, the last words the priest says to Tench when he departs is “I will pray for you” (17). It’s no coincidence that after Tench for the second time says Ora pro nobis, the priest tells him he has brandy and is willing to share it with him, answering Tench’s prayer (17).
When the two go back to Tench’s apartment, Tench offers to show him his dentistry equipment. The priest quietly is attentive, though I can’t imagine he would have much interest. But he is gently receptive, and one can see Tench uplifted. He is a lonely person in a foreign country, and here is someone acknowledging his person.
The priest notices that one of the apartment windows is actually a stained glass:
‘The window,’ the stranger said, ‘is very beautiful.’
One pane of stained glass had been let in: a Madonna gazed out through the mosquito wire at the turkeys in the yard. ‘I got it,’ Mr Tench said, ‘when they sacked the church. It didn’t feel right—a dentist’s room without some stained glass. Not civilized. At home—I mean in England—it was generally the Laughing Cavalier—I don’t know why—or else a Tudor rose. But one can’t pick and choose.’ (13)
Again the Blessed Virgin subversively enters between them. One should keep in mind that it is through that window Tench watches the execution at the end of the novel. So he is either looking through the image of the Madonna as he looks out or is by his head as he looks out the window.
When the dentist explains his failures at making molds to the priest, he starts to feel depressed. But the priest brings him back to a shared love.
His mouth fell open: the look of vacancy returned: the heat in the small room was overpowering. He stood there like a man lost in a cavern among the fossils and instruments of an age of which he knows very little. The stranger said, ‘If we could sit down …’
Mr Tench stared at him blankly.
‘We could open the brandy.’
‘Oh yes, the brandy.’ (13)
It is here then that they sit and their hearts open up. They have a conversation, and Tench shares his private life.
Tench poured himself out another glass. He said, ‘It gets lonely here. It’s good to talk English, even to a foreigner. I wonder if you’d like to see a picture of my kids.’ He drew a yellow snapshot out of his note-case and handed it over. Two small children struggled over the handle of a watering-can in a back garden. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that was sixteen years ago.’
‘They are young men now.’
‘One died.’
‘Oh, well,’ the other replied gently, ‘in a Christian country.’ He took a gulp of his brandy and smiled at Mr Tench rather foolishly.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Mr Tench said with surprise. He got rid of his phlegm and said, ‘It doesn’t seem to me, of course, to matter much.’ He fell silent, his thoughts ambling away; his mouth fell open, he looked grey and vacant, until he was recalled by a pain in the stomach and helped himself to some more brandy. ‘Let me see. What was it we were talking about? The kids … oh yes, the kids. It’s funny what a man remembers. You know, I can remember that watering-can better than I can remember the kids. It cost three and elevenpence three farthings, green; I could lead you to the shop where I bought it. But as for the kids,’ he brooded over his glass into the past, ‘I can’t remember much else but them crying.’
‘Do you get news?’
‘Oh, I gave up writing before I came here. What was the use? I couldn’t send any money. It wouldn’t surprise me if the wife had married again. Her mother would like it—the old sour bitch: she never cared for me.’
The stranger said in a low voice, ‘It is awful.’
Mr Tench examined his companion again with surprise. He sat there like a black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair. He looked disreputable in his grey three-days’ beard, and weak: somebody you could command to do anything. He said, ‘I mean the world. The way things happen.’ (14-15)
They speak of his children, one’s death, his wife and marital problems, and his heart has opened up to the priest. The priest was “somebody you could command to do anything.” He is receptive and understanding. One heart is speaking to another heart.
Mod
She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn’t trust and a ghost you could almost puff away, a piece of frightened air. She was very young—about thirteen—and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn’t got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms—everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door which a fist could break. (p. 33)
She carries an air of responsibility (her parents stand as a “boy” before, that is she becomes their parent), is unafraid, and “reduced” from the sun which I take to mean thin and smallish. But she comes across as “impregnable” because “life hadn’t got at her yet.” Despite her intelligence and sense of responsibility—after all she takes care of her emotionally debilitated mother—there is a quality of innocence. All these qualities and with perhaps a certain providential grace, she understands and gets correct the moral situation before her. She keeps the priest hidden from the police.
What we learn is that she has lied to the lieutenant about a priest on their property and has hidden the priest while kept the lieutenant at bay. It is through her directives that first she resolves the situation with the lingering policeman, then explains to her father there really is a priest hidden, and finally she takes her father to him. The father has absolutely no empathy for the priest. He is the exact opposite of Coral, refusing to give him drink and food, and insists he leave as soon as it gets dark.
What is astonishing is that the “politics” of the situation is completely irrelevant to Coral. As they are walking to the barn, her father snaps at the girl, “We’ve no business interfering with politics.” But Coral responds: This isn’t politics. I know about politics. Mother and I are doing the Reform Bill” (37). Her father is completely configured to the politics. Coral is configured differently. So she sneaks back out later.
Coral put down the chicken legs and tortillas on the ground and unlocked the door. She carried a bottle of Cerveza Moctezuma under her arm. There was the same scuffle in the dark: the noise of a frightened man. She said, ‘It’s me,’ to quieten him, but she didn’t turn on the torch. She said, ‘There’s a bottle of beer here, and some food.’
‘Thank you. Thank you.’
‘The police have gone from the village—south. You had better go north.’
He said nothing.
She asked, with the cold curiosity of a child, ‘What would they do to you if they found you?’
‘Shoot me.’
‘You must be very frightened,’ she said with interest.
He felt his way across the barn towards the door and the pale starlight. He said, ‘I am frightened,’ and stumbled on a bunch of bananas. (39)
She feels his hunger, and feeds him secretly. Not only has she lied to the police, she has disobeyed her father. Why? She doesn’t really know whether he’s innocent. She helps him because there is a suffering man who seems to have his dignity reduced. If the whisky priest is on a passion narrative in this novel—and that is one way to look at the story—Coral is Veronica wiping the face of Jesus at the sixth station of the cross. Her reaction when he tells her of the consequences of being caught is empathy: “You must be very frightened.” She looks into his heart and connects with it. The politics of the world crumble when faced with the humanity before her.
They continue this heart to heart conversation. At one point she offers a solution to his situation.
She said, ‘Of course you could—renounce.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Renounce your faith,’ she explained, using the words of her European History.
He said, ‘It’s impossible. There’s no way. I’m a priest. It’s out of my power.’
The child listened intently. She said, ‘Like a birthmark.’ (40)
“Like a birthmark,” she intuits the sacrament of Holy Orders. Like Baptism, Holy Orders is a mark on your soul that cannot be taken away (see Ps 110:4 “The Lord has sworn and will not waver: "You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek” and echoed in Heb 7:17). She understands his existential predicament. And so she offers him to return any time to hide out. She tries to tech him Morse code and asks him when he comes to signal with two longs and one short (41). It is interesting that two longs and one short in Morse code stand for the letter “G.” Why “G”? Perhaps standing for God?
The conversation then turns toward God. He asks her if she believes in God, and she says she has “lost her faith” at the age of ten. Here now it is the whisky priest’s turn to talk to her heart. He tells her twice he will pray for her and gives her hope that with a little brandy he can “defy the devil.”
Again, as in the conversation with Mr. Tench, what we have is heart speaking to heart. In these and other paired conversations with the priest throughout the novel, what I find is heart speaking to heart. Now this recalls St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s episcopal motto, “Cor Ad Cor Loquitur,” Heart Speaks to Heart. Newman took the phrase from a letter from Saint Francis de Sales, but today it’s identified with Newman. Now Cor Ad Cor Loquitur could be referring to God’s heart speaking to man’s heart, or vice versa. Or it could mean a human heart speaking to another human heart with God’s language. For a full understanding of the motto see this article, “Cor ad cor loquitur” John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Coat of Arms” from the he International Centre of Newman Friends. http://www.newmanfriendsinternational... From the article, “The Church is the communion of Christians who are “one heart and one soul” (Acts 4:32), speaking the new language inspired by the Word of God: cor ad cor.”
The priest speaks in this language of the heart, and all the characters respond in some measure also with their hearts, but that measure is perhaps a level of grace granted to the character. Mr. Tench receives the language of the heart and is touched enough to break his apathy and write to his wife, who writes back granting him a divorce. He is touched enough to feel the heartache of the priest’s death at the end of the novel.
Mod
Coral responds the most, as I’ve pointed out here. Later we see she has been touched by the priest when she brings up God and faith to her mother. The priest’s conversation, heart, and, indeed, his prayers have been working on the girl. In his dream of the night before the execution, the priest dreams of Coral. She is there at the feast in heaven, where he sees himself eating hungrily just like he did when Coral fed him in the barn. In the dream she, who we learn in the course of the novel has died, taps out Morse code for the priest. Notice also that in heaven she taps out differently than what she proposed in the barn. In the dream she taps out three longs and one short. There is no single letter in Morse code for three longs and a short. Three longs stand for “O” and one short stands for “E.” I could be off base here but could those be the vowels surrounding the word “love”? Of course that’s speculation, but the one thing for sure is that she communicates with him from heaven. Heart speaks to heart.
Mod
He said gently, not looking at her, with the same embarrassed smile, ‘How’s Brigitta?’ His heart jumped at the name: a sin may have enormous consequences: it was six years since he had been—home.
‘She’s as well as the rest of us. What did you expect?’
He had his satisfaction, but it was connected with his crime; he had no business to feel pleasure at anything attached to that past. (p. 61-62)
And so we see here the paradox of pain and joy. Later children come by to kiss the hand of a priest, and he looks for his daughter among them, though he has no idea what she looks like.
The real children were coming up now to kiss his hand, one by one, under the pressure of their parents. They were too young to remember the old days when the priests dressed in black and wore Roman collars and had soft superior patronizing hands; he could see they were mystified at the show of respect to a peasant like their parents. He didn’t look at them directly, but he was watching them closely all the same. Two were girls—a thin washed-out child—of five, six, seven? he couldn’t tell, and one who had been sharpened by hunger into an appearance of devilry and malice beyond her age. A young woman stared out of the child’s eyes. He watched them disperse again, saying nothing: they were strangers. (62-63)
The continuity of faith between generations has been atrophied. They don’t know the significance of a priest now that the persecution has been going on since before they were born. It is the girl with the appearance of devilry that turns out to be his daughter. In her eyes he sees a “young woman,” not a child. It is also important to note that he attributes hunger (the “one who had been sharpened by hunger”) for what I’ll call a loss of innocence. Yes, she is only seven but there is a lack of innocence in Brigitta that was there with Coral who was twice her age. In fact, when the priest has a moment of personal anguish, it is Brigitta who laughs at him. The anguish is in reaction to hearing that a man was executed from not turning in the priest.
He gave a little yapping cry like a dog’s—the absurd shorthand of grief. The old-young child laughed. He said, ‘Why don’t they catch me? The fools. Why don’t they catch me?’ The little girl laughed again; he stared at her sightlessly, as if he could hear the sound but couldn’t see the face. Happiness was dead again before it had had time to breathe; he was like a woman with a stillborn child—bury it quickly and forget and begin again. Perhaps the next would live. (63-64)
At this point he still doesn’t know that this is his daughter. Later he specifically asks for her.
He said shyly, ‘And Brigitta … is she … well?’
‘You saw her just now.’
‘No.’ He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize …
‘Yes, she was there.’ Maria went to the door and called, ‘Brigitta, Brigitta,’ and the priest turned on his side and watched her come in out of the outside landscape of terror and lust—that small malicious child who had laughed at him. ‘Go and speak to the father,’ Maria said. ‘Go on.’
He made an attempt to hide the brandy bottle, but there was nowhere … he tried to minimize it in his hands, watching her, feeling the shock of human love. (65)
“The shock of human love” is what makes the priest transcend his sins. It is his love for all humanity—not just in a general sense but with every specific human being—that makes him a true Christian. Jesus commands us to love our neighbor, but it is John in his first epistle that describes it as more than a commandment but of a thing of the heart.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love... Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us…We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 Jn 4:7-21)
It is a long passage, and though I took out part through ellipses, but I think that passage is central to the novel. It is through being in God’s love that makes us love, and then there is no room for hate. You cannot hate your fellow human being if you are in God’s love. But there is an implied corollary from this as well. How can you love your brother in general if you don’t love someone specific? Love of brother is not an abstraction of general humanity, but of specific persons.
Here the whisky priest loves his daughter in this specific way. And so he feels that “shock” of love. His empathy goes out to her. He protects her against her mother’s castigation (67) and wants to show her magic tricks (68). He wants to come down to her level and speak heart to heart. The child’s impudence prevents him. Still the child saves his life when the lieutenant enters the town and child identifies him as her father, which should rule out being a priest (76). Later he tells Maria “The next Mass I say will be for her” (79). The priest has one more conversation with Brigitta after the lieutenant leaves. At the garbage heap while looking for his thrown out papers, the child comes to him. They talk heart to heart. She tells him “they laugh at her” and that “everyone else has a father” (81). He is taken aback.
He was appalled again by her maturity, as she whipped up a smile from a large and varied stock. She said, ‘Tell me—’ enticingly. She sat there on the trunk of the tree by the rubbish-tip with an effect of abandonment. The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was without protection—she had no grace, no charm to plead for her; his heart was shaken by the conviction of loss. He said, ‘My dear, be careful …’
‘What of? Why are you going away?’
He came a little nearer; he thought—a man may kiss his own daughter, but she started away from him.
‘Don’t you touch me,’ she screeched at him in her ancient voice and giggled. Every child was born with some kind of knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast; but on parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew—the saving or the damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love. He saw her fixed in her life like a fly in amber—Maria’s hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the dusk: and the police beating the forest—violence everywhere. He prayed silently, ‘O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.’
And here we get more Christian anthropology: “Every child [is] born with some kind of knowledge of love” but “the world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.” [Actually as I think on it, this is more Catholic anthropology then general Christian. Some Protestant denominations believe in total depravity of humanity. That doesn’t fit here. Catholics believe we are born with the capacity for both.] And so we see why Brigitta is alluded to as a “young woman” and not a child. She has lost her innocence. Hunger, her mother’s harshness, Pedro’s worldly diatribes have smudged her soul. He makes one last effort to speak to her heart. I can’t quote the entire scene, but it’s worth reading. At one point he falls to his knees.
He went down on his knees and pulled her to him, while she giggled and struggled to be free: ‘I love you. I am your father and I love you. Try to understand that.’ He held her tightly by the wrist and suddenly she stayed still, looking up at him. He said, ‘I would give my life, that’s nothing, my soul … my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are—so important.’ (82)
I don’t think that giving up your soul for someone, which would be the ultimate death, is something the Catholic Church would approve (it smacks of making a deal with the devil) but he does say that several times in the novel. And I think he’s sincere about it too. It’s Greene trying to show he will die for his love. Right after the priest says he loves her and she’s so important, we get this coming from the priest’s inner thoughts:
That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.
And just like Coral, who separated the politics of a situation from the human connection, so too the whisky priest separates the politics of Mexico with his love for her. The philosophic underpinnings are right out of John’s first epistle, the separation of the worldly with the love in God, as I quoted above.
Finally he tries again to reach her heart, manages a kiss, says goodbye, and when he departs can feel the “whole vile world coming round the child to ruin her.” We never do hear about Brigitta again, but one hopes that just as the whisky priest’s heart to heart conversation and prayers effects Mr. Tench and his life, one hopes they will have a positive effect on Brigitta too in the future.
Mod
Mod
Yes, but the police are executing people to give him away. Under those circumstances, the hospitality was more than generous.
Mod
‘You didn’t expect to see me,’ he said.
‘Oh, but I did,’ the priest said. ‘I must thank you.’
‘Thank me, what for?’
‘For letting me stay alone with him.’
‘I am not a barbarian,’ the officer said. ‘Will you come out now, please? It’s no use at all your trying to escape. You can see that,’ he added, as the priest emerged and looked round at the dozen armed men who surrounded the hut.
‘I’ve had enough of escaping,’ he said. (p. 190)
And so the lieutenant gets his first shock, being thanked by the priest. In fact I think one could look at the conversation between the two as a mini enlightenment, an undermining of his preconceived notions. The lieutenant says “he is not a barbarian.” He says it again moments later. He is not a barbarian and yet he kills priests, those who harbor them, and indiscriminately peasants in order to pressure people to turn them in. It’s amazing how people can rationalize their evil. A storm ensues and the two are stuck in the hut and get into a conversation. In the course of the conversation, the priest lets out he has fathered a child.
He [the lieutenant] said with contempt, ‘So you have a child?’
‘Yes,’ the priest said.
‘You a priest?’
‘You mustn’t think they are all like me.’ He watched the candlelight blink on the bright buttons. He said, ‘There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest.’
‘Then perhaps we will be doing your Church a service …’
‘Yes.’
The lieutenant looked sharply up as if he thought he was being mocked. (191)
The priest’s honesty and humility is another shock to the lieutenant. The priest shows him magic card tricks, like he wanted to show Brigitta. It leads to a subject about the parish Guilds, which I take as some sort of religious camp or tent revival that served as a means to preaching. The lieutenant has bad memories of it recalling some sort of hypocrisy. The priest actually acknowledges the hypocrisy.
The priest said, ‘You are so right.’ He added quickly, ‘Wrong too, of course.’
‘How do you mean?’ the lieutenant asked savagely. ‘Right? Won’t you even defend…?’
‘I felt at once that you were a good man when you gave me money at the prison.’
The lieutenant said, ‘I only listen to you because you have no hope. No hope at all. Nothing you say will make any difference.’
‘No.’
He had no intention of angering the police officer, but he had had very little practice the last eight years in talking to any but a few peasants and Indians. 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.’ (193)
That is the most satanic line of the whole novel: “That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.” It disregards the man’s humanity. And what is it that overrides his innate sense of human compassion? The conversation continues, the priest disagreeing.
‘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. (194)
It’s the ideas he thinks the priest represents. The priest’s humanity has been devalued because of some abstract ideas. And priest goes on to explain his life, tries to explain his failings as a priest, tries to explain how he has tried to serve. He tries to explain the state of the world: “We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter—that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor—unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those” (194-5). The first part of their conversation ends with the priest kindness, “You have listened very patiently,” and the lieutenant responding with “I am not afraid of other people’s ideas” (197). Has the priest altered something in the lieutenant? It’s not evident but the lieutenant has now listened to a different point of view.
You can tell that something has changed within the lieutenant because later that evening, having stopped for the night and while the two men are sleeping in the same hut but both unable to sleep, it is the lieutenant who initiates the conversation. “You’re a man of education,” he addresses the priest. He wants to understand more. The lieutenant goes on to explain his views.
‘I’ve had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which you don’t have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor.’ He said in a low voice, ‘I’ve shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made me hate you.’(198)
And later he continues, “Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world.” What a violation of the heart. He wanted to give them the whole world because he identified with their poverty, and yet he killed them as a result of his ideology. It all stems not from love but from hate.
But the priest continues in his humility, denying his educated status.
‘I was never any good at books,’ the priest said. ‘I haven’t any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if I hated you, I wouldn’t want to bring up my child to be like you. It’s not sense.’
‘That’s just twisting …’
‘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.’ (199)
The priest here shows the lieutenant that there are a good intentions toward the poor. It is not a callus extortion of the poor but something that fits within the priest’s worldview. The lieutenant recoils:
‘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.’
The priest’s logic doesn’t fit into his worldview. He says he wants “to let his heart speak.” Now this is where I am convinced that Graham Greene is alluding to John Henry Newman’s motto Cor Ad Cor Loquitur, heart speaks to heart. Greene is an Englishman and a convert to Catholicism. John Henry Newman was an Englishman and possibly the most famous Englishman to convert to Catholicism. Greene is a writer, and Newman was especially known for his exceptional writing, both as a prose stylist and as a Catholic intellectual. There is no doubt that Greene would have been familiar a good portion of Newman’s writings, and certainly would be aware of Newman’s motto. I think that heart speaking to heart is at the crux of the novel.
It is fascinating that it is the lieutenant that wants to speak from the heart, but his heart has been altered by fallen world and his ideology. It is now the priest who recoils.
‘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.’ (199)
It is the priest who rejects the speaking from the heart. Speaing from the heart is not enough. The heart needs to be filled with God, not filled with the world. To explain the priest practically quotes from John’s first epistle.
‘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.’ (199-200)
God is love and our heart speaks God’s love if it abides in God. But this wonderful metaphor must be highlighted: “The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water.” This recalls what the angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin, “Hail Mary, full of grace.” It has been described that Mary, like a glass, is full of grace while we lesser creatures are granted varying amounts of grace. I’ve jokingly said that while Mary’s glass is full, mine only contains a thimble full. But Greene takes that metaphor of the glass and has the contents mixed with love—and one can think of it as the grace to love—and ditch water, alluding to the fallen nature in our beings. That is brilliant.
Does the lieutenant understand any of that? No, he gives no indication. He says that if a man served him like God serves us he would “put a bullet in his head” (200), quite a sacrilegious thing to say. Finally the priest opens up with sincerity, with empathy, and with communion with his fellow man.
‘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.’ (200)
And this is a good place to conclude the close look between their conversations. We see the lieutenant is not intellectually convinced, but his reaction to the priest does change. He has felt his heart moved. From there he treats the priest with a certain dignity. He goes out of his way to offer kindness to the priest. The priest becomes a human being and not an object of his ideology. He tries to get the priest a person to hear his last confession; he offers putting him in a cell with others to pass the last night; he gives him a bottle of brandy to ease the nerves. But he will not let him escape, and he carries out the passion narrative to its conclusion. We don’t hear of the lieutenant’s future but perhaps the grace experienced from the priest’s heart and his sacrificial death will have a beneficial effect in time.
Chapter 1
The priest on the run now on a mule comes to a familiar village. There he meets Maria, the woman who he has had a relationship with that has produced his illegitimate daughter Brigida. He learns that the police have enacted a policy of executing a villager from every suspected place where the priest may or may not be known to have visited. He is pushed to leave as soon as possible and celebrate Mass in the morning and then depart. But the police arrive before the Mass is over, and so the villagers quickly break up the Mass. The lieutenant interrogates the villagers, including the whisky priest himself. No one turns the priest in and the priest evades the questions that would have given him away, but the police decide to take a prisoner for execution. The priest offers himself in exchange but the lieutenant turns him down.
After coming to the conclusion that he can escape north where there is no Catholic persecution, the whisky priest decides against it and travels south. On mule he meets a mestizo, who he lets know he is heading to the town of Carmen. The mestizo, suspecting he is a priest, follows him, and in conversation and action intuits that he is a priest. The priest tries to separate himself from the mestizo, fully realizing the man is after the reward for turning in a priest, but cannot. When the mestizo gets seriously ill, and the priest has the chance to abandon him, the priest decides to let the mestizo ride on his own mule while they both journey to the town. Finally on that journey the priest confirms for the mestizo he is a priest, despite knowing full well the mestizo intends to turn him in. Just as he enters Carmen, the priest lets the mestizo and mule go down one road while he escapes by another.
Chapter 2
In Carmen, the priest is approached by a beggar, but the priest, pretending to be an alcoholic, tells him he wants to buy alcohol, especially wine. He doesn’t let on that he wants the wine to celebrate Mass, but that is his objective. The beggar brings him to the governor’s cousin, who secretly sells confiscated liquor. The governor’s cousin agrees to sell him a bottle of brandy and a large bottle of wine. The beggar tells the priest it would be courteous to offer the governor’s cousin a drink, and he does offer him brandy, but the governor’s cousin prefers to drink the wine. And so they open the bottle and the men drink as the priest despondently watches as the quantity of wine is diminished. Along too comes the jefe, who also joins the group drinking wine. Slowly despite the priest’s objections the wine is finished, and even most of the brandy. Walking about the town he runs into some men playing billiards where they learn he is carrying alcohol. They chase him and he runs to the home of Padre Jose, who refuses to harbor him. Turned away, he is caught by the police as a drunk, and when he cannot pay the fine for drinking alcohol is placed in jail.