Agnology - a study in human ignorance

Graham Greene’s personal background is strikingly similar to Evelyn Waugh. Both were born to parents of the hardy Edwardian stock. Greene, like Waugh, had an unhappy youth, and apparently attempted suicide early in life. In 1926, after graduating from Oxford, he began a career in journalism. In one of his film reviews he referred derogatorily to Catholic dogmas, and a young woman by the name of Vivian Dayrell-Browning wrote to correct him about the finer points of doctrine. As is often the case with young intellectuals, Greene was impressed by the wit and eagerness of the girl. They were soon engaged. This, naturally, posed a problem for the atheist Greene, and he thought it would be only fair of him “at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs” of his new fiancée. He began receiving instruction from a certain Father Trollope, “a very tall and very fat man with big smooth jowls which looked as though they had never needed a razor.” According to Greene, Trollope was everything his private caricature of the Church had taught him to hate. Yet, over time, Greene began to experience at least an intellectual sympathy to the Church’s teaching, if not an emotional one. He fought to defend his atheism as if it were “a fight for personal survival,” but after a few weeks gave up the struggle and “became convinced of the probably existence of something we call God."

Greene was often called a “Catholic novelist,” much to his own displeasure. It’s not difficult to imagine how this label would drive Greene to want to compensate for his pious label by writing in a rather impious voice. The End of the Affair is written from the perspective of Maurice Bendrix, who obsesses over his former lover, Sarah Miles. Maurice is a decidedly unpleasant protagonist. In his first-person account, he admits at the beginning of the novel that what follows “is a record of hate far more than of love.” At first, the reader believes this hate to be directed at Sarah, who has turned her back on Maurice and their illicit shared love. The novel shifts back and forth between the present and Maurice and Sarah’s wartime adultery (placed several years in the past).

January is so far away. I can't wait for this: Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The bloody crucifix cannot be made to fit a Cartesian mold. God, certainly, must not be allowed to interfere in the course of human events. [In The End of the Affair,] for Maurice (and Sarah, at first), the “sin” of God is not so much His existence, but His interference where He does not belong. Modernism can tolerate a vaporous divinity, or even a docile priesthood; it cannot abide, however, the taunting earthiness of faith.

For Greene, the sexual act represents an anti-type of Christian communion. In their adultery, Maurice and Sarah find what they believe is a fulfillment of real love. What, after all, could be more sensually intense and communal than sex? The vague eroticism which Maurice mistakes as love, Greene reveals to be a deformed type of true religious Love. The desperate orgasmic cry which Sarah lets loose during love-making is not erotically charged, but is rather a cry echoing from within her hollow soul. The sexuality which seems so carnal turns out to be distinctly less fleshy than the representation of the bloody crucifix. The modernist is not at all comfortable with flesh—not in its truest definition. Greene must be read in this way. Sex as a sensual pleasure provides an image in negative of true Communion. When Maurice finally begins to realize that the “man” whom Sarah had left him for was God Himself, Maurice treats God like a sexual interloper. God has stolen Sarah’s affection, even her physical presence from him. God has wooed her like any lothario, and ravished her.

This is what makes the miracles in the last few chapters of the novel so important. Sarah’s body, which was once misused for banal sex, is transformed into a conduit of grace (in a very Catholic manner).

While the first world war had set Europe reeling back in horror at what modern warfare was capable of, the second had a more complicated effect. For the first world war had the effect of making pacifists of an entire generation—both in Europe and America. World War II, on the other hand, had a double-sided effect. In Europe it served to cripple the continent’s economy, kill off large percentages of manpower, and destroy millions of acres of land. The United States, fighting thousands of miles away from its homeland, suffered far less, losing a much smaller percentage of its population; the war also had the effect of revitalizing the United States’ economy.

In Carol Reed’s classic movie, The Third Man, written by Graham Greene, the spiritual and moral mood of post-war Europe is aptly portrayed. Set in normally picturesque Vienna, the story shows a shell-shocked city, with the beautiful old architecture of Christendom hallowed out by the devastation of war. As Roger Ebert describes it, “More shots, I suspect, are tilted than are held straight; they suggest a world out of joint. There are fantastic oblique angles. Wide-angle lenses distort faces and locations. And the bizarre lighting makes the city into an expressionist nightmare.”

This expressionist nightmare is the world of nearly all Graham Greene’s novels—particularly those written after the second world war.

Greene’s own relationship with the Church is famously cryptic. Often, the faithlessness of his fictional protagonists seem to mirror his own personal struggles with the faith. His faith was deep enough that Edith Sitwell wrote in 1945 that Greene would have made a great priest. Yet, even when his faith was still young, he wrote that he could never answer that sort of holy call: “chastity would have been beyond my powers.” The sense of the Church’s claim on him his entire life. In a 1979 interview, at a time when Greene given up on the faith, he explains why he no longer partakes of Communion....

In 1938, Greene traveled through Mexico in order to write a chronicle about the persecution of the Catholic Church under a stridently atheistic Mexican regime. Anti-clericalism had been violently present in Mexico for several decades, most infamously under the presidency of Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-28). Mexico had suffered through many years of social unrest and revolution in the first couple decades of the 20th century. In 1917, a degree of stability was restored in a national constitution. The terms of the constitution mandated that all education must be strictly secular, outlawed monastic orders, limited the practice of public worship, and made churches register with the state while limiting their right to own property. Further, members of the Catholic clergy were prohibited from wearing clerical vestments, voting in government elections, and from making any public comments about government policy to the press or their congregants. The persecution of Catholics was especially severe in the state of Tabasco under Governor Tomás Garrido Canabal (1920-24, 31-34). Churches in Tabasco were closed and priests were forced to marry or flee at risk of their lives. Canabal also ordered crosses removed from grave stones, suppressed the word “adios” (to God), and threatened clergy members with imprisonment and death. The governor's atheism was so exaggerated that he named his children Lenin and Zoila Libertad (he also had a nephew named Lucifer), and chose to call his farm animals "God," "Pope," "Mary," and "Jesus." It is also claimed that he encouraged a local satirical play which featured a stud bull being paraded around called “the bishop” and an ass labeled “the pope.”

This is the Mexico which provides the setting for The Power and the Glory. In many ways, the Mexican repression of the Church is a violent parallel to the more “scientific” and ”peaceful” ecclesial repression taking place in the former domain of Christendom. Mexico, the colonial child of Europe, merely carried out the same anti-clerical agenda of the modernists in a more overt, childish way.

Victor Davis Hanson at TNR:

Bin Laden and his evil Rasputin Dr. Zawahiri were confident on September 11 that such guilt and self-loathing in our hearts could be seasoned, and that it could then be harvested through their own arts of revisionism, victimization, and lies. And consequently within a brief six years of his murdering, our own voices — indeed the very elites of the West — in the luxury of calm before the next attack, are often emboldened to proclaim that the government of America, not the terrorists abroad, is the real danger.

The great lesson of September 11 was not that the jihadists ever believed that they could kill us all. Rather, they trusted that enough of the West and indeed enough of us here in America, might at the end of the day declare that we had it coming.

In this long war, that belief was — and is — far deadlier even than an unhinged murderer at the controls of an airliner.

Question whether America is anything but the salvation of the world, and one is deadlier than an unhinged murderer.

That's right, children.

HT: Scott Clark. Really.

It surprises me every September 11th how incredibly literate Osama Bin Laden's anniversary epistles are. He makes for a fascinating arch-nemesis. Take this for example, in response what he calls the neo-conservative charge that America must fight Muslims in order to avoid another Jewish holocaust:

I saw, refuting this unjust statement, that the morality and culture of the holocaust is your culture, not our culture: In fact, burning living beings is forbidden in our religion, even if they be small like the any, so what of man?! The holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe, but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us. And my proof for that is in what your brothers, the Spanish, did when they set up the horrible courts of the Inquisition to try Muslims and Jews, when the Jews only found safe shelter by taking refuge in our countries. And that is why the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us and we have not incinerated them...

It's shockingly effective rhetoric, as long as you take his claim at face value. And certainly, to a traditionalist Muslim, this must seem infinitely more convincing than anything coming from the forked tongues of Bush, Cheney, or Pearle.

How Science Displaces Faith in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis

The Baconian project does not appear at first glance to be an especially mystical or religious adventure. We are accustomed to looking back on the work of Sir Francis Bacon as one of the seminal writs of divorce between faith and natural reason. Bacon’s own words from The Great Instauration lend credence to this view. He prays to God, “that things human may not interfere with things divine,” and that a clear delineation between the two realms will “give to faith what which is faith’s.” Simply put, some matters are the domain of natural reason and induction, while the “divine mysteries” must be relegated to the realm of divine revelation.

I know indie cred isn't very credible these days, but this movie has my attention. Juno got rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival, which just closed up shop. And the soundtrack looks superb.

The cast looks top-rate as well. And Reitman's previous movie, Thank You For Smoking (adapted from Christopher Buckley's novel) was brilliant satire.

Federal Vision debate over at De Regno Christi. So far, it's been a really healthy discussion with a strangely appropriate diversion into where the TRs and FVs fall on the modern-postmodern continuum. Caleb Stegall's comments are great. Makes me wish I had followed The New Pantagruel before it went defunct.

Second: Slate's discussion of the new book on Patrick Henry College: God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. Again, fascinating stuff, especially when compared to my own school.

Greene’s novel centers on an unnamed protagonist, a “whiskey priest” who reluctantly serves the Church during this dangerous period of Mexican history. Throughout the novel, the priest is given multiple opportunities to flee Mexico for safety, and each time the whiskey priest reluctantly chooses instead to remain and serve the Church. He is no saint—he is constantly drunk or despairing of his plight—but at the same time represents the Church to the Mexican people. Before the persecution, the whiskey priest was a gentleman, almost an intellectual. As Joseph Kurismmootil comments, “he was cultivated in speech and manners and much sought after. He was smart and ambitious, and presided like a god over the parish committees.” But under the tyranny of the atheistic government, the priest is forced into hiding, occasionally coming across a bit of wine with which he might administer an impromptu Communion for whatever village is currently harboring him.

As you’ve seen, George Herbert’s The Country Parson is the work of a very devout man who both had a supreme confidence in God and a high view of the minister’s calling. When we look at The Country Parson together with his poems from The Temple, it’d be easy to get the idea that Herbert lived in a time of peace and that his rural parish never had to worry about economic, political, or theological unrest. But that’s actually false. The England of the 16th and 17th centuries was probably the most tumultuous age that Britain has ever known. This something I’d like to address later. But first, I’d like to look at the content of The Country Parson—analyze it’s structure and some parallels to the Temple. After this, we’ll return to this issue of the paradox of Herbert’s pastoral concerns juxtaposed against this tumultuous era of English history.

The Power and the Glory is the closest that Graham Greene ever got to allegory. By the end of the story, the whiskey priest has been transformed from a Jonah-figure who flees from his calling into a Christ-figure who accepts his death sentence from an oppressive Pilate and prays for the man who betrayed him. A resurrection theme is also at work; the ambiguous ending hints that the stranger represents the martyred priest back from the dead, ready to continue the Church’s work in Mexico.

While Greene himself is far too subtle to make these interpretations explicit (C.S. Lewis-style), his story clearly tells a narrative which has a broader scope than Mexico alone. Like The End of the Affair, this novel is clearly the story of the making of a saint. Both Sarah Miles and the whiskey priest are deeply flawed individuals who nevertheless have been called by God as ministers to an ungrateful world. Like the prophet Jonah, both Sarah and the priest are constantly involuntary vessels of grace. Each is defined by his or her baptism or ordination. Each acts like Christ, ministering to the sick and the poor; relics of each are sought after by the faithful (Luke 8:43-48). The whiskey priest, as pathetic as he is, is still hunted down by the political authorities in Mexico.