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....
I’ve broken the rules. They are rules I respect, so I haven’t been to Communion now for nearly thirty years….In my private life, my situation is not regular. If I went to Communion, I would have to confess and make promises. I prefer to excommunicate myself…. There’s a difference between believe and faith….Faith is above belief. One can say that it’s a gift of God, which belief is not. Belief is founded on reason. On the whole I keep my faith while enduring long periods of disbelief. At such moments I shrug my shoulders and tell myself I’m wrong—as though a brilliant mathematician had come and told me that the solution of an equation was wrong. My faith remains in the background, but it remains.
In this way, Greene’s religious life seems a very clear reflection of the Europe’s relationship to the faith. Both feel in some way hounded by God and the sense of faith which had once been such an integral part of Western society. Greene is a little like Nietzsche’s madman ranting about empty cathedrals, which—though empty—still stand as monuments and reminders of Christendom.
