Like Greene’s whiskey priest, Percy’s protagonists often inhabit a landscape which is both alienating and adversarial. Further, the alien surroundings present the protagonist with certain allurements and (vain) promises of self-fulfillment and peace. In Greene, these allurements were often represented by illicit love (The End of the Affair) or social and financial stability (The Power and the Glory). In Percy’s works, these material objects have already been proven vanities. Sex has been commercialized. Wealth has produced an upper-class even more vapid and vain than existed in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or A Handful of Dust. The last recourses of modern man are travel, sports, media, drugs, and sex. Each offer some measure of escape from the dreariness of atomized modern life. Of these remaining “pleasures,” sex is still “the cheapest, most readily available and pleasurable mode of intercourse with other selves and the only mode of intercourse by which the self can be certain of its relationship with other selves—by touching and being touched, by giving and receiving pleasure, by penetrating or being penetrated.” For Percy, the root of modern man’s hopelessness is the sense that he has lost all community, something which came about because of the Cartesian divorce of soul and body.

Percy’s comic-religious novel, Love in the Ruins, illustrates this divorce in its advanced stages. The story centers around Dr. Tom More—a descendant of the saint of the same name—who bears a striking resemblance to many of Greene’s protagonists, and even Greene himself. In his credo, More confesses:

I… am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one. I believe in the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, in God the Father, in the election of the Jews, in Jesus Christ His Son Our Lord, who founded the Church upon Peter his first Vicar, which will last until the end of the world. Some years ago, however, I stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to mass, and have since fallen into a disorderly life. I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all. Generally I do as I please. A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep His commandments is a liar. If John is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe.

Like Percy himself, More is a Southern doctor. Unlike the surrounding characters in the story, Dr. More stands out in that he still is very much an aesthete—one who believes meaning and satisfaction can be found in material things. Most of those around him, his patients particularly, have given up on any hope of finding desire, passion, or religious meaning. More himself is driven by seemingly paradoxical motivations, both aesthetic and scientific. While he is driven by the “musical-erotic” spirit, all his formal training (and the zeitgeist of the entire modern world) drive him to seek a scientific, atomized explanation for the world’s problems. And he believes he is about to achieve just such a scientific panacea. More’s new invention, the Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, is designed to measure the “length and breadth and motions of the very self.” Percy’s embeds More’s thoughts with a comical dose of self-parody. The “very self” can be measured? The soul has a specific length and breadth? Ultimately, More wants this scientific innovation to heal the split between mind and body, and thereby heal the spiritual and psychological sickness and insanity of modern man: “Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole!” The fundamental problem presented in Love in the Ruins, one which More approaches obliquely, is how man can find himself in an authentic and “lovely ordinary world.”

Ironically, More is both cynical and grandiose when considering his invention: “The vanity of scientists! My article, it is true, is an extremely important one, perhaps even epochal in its significance. With it, my little invention, in hand, any doctor can probe the very secrets of the soul, diagnose the maladies that poison the wellsprings of man’s hope.” The doctor is also concerned over how the world will receive the news of his lapsometer. The setting of the novel is starkly apocalyptic, as least from More’s perspective. More’s opening words imply a coming day of judgment: “Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened yet?” The America of the novel is torn apart by various political, religious, and ethnic factions. Civil war threatens, morality as we know it has ceased to exist, and all the seeds of chaos which were sown in the early 20th century have now come to fruition. American entertainment and literature has reached new lows (although not perhaps so new to those living in the 21st century):

I’ve stopped going to movies. It is hard to say which is more unendurable, the sentimental blasphemy of Knothead movies like The Sound of Music or sitting in a theater with strangers watching other strangers engage in sexual intercourse and sodomy on the giant 3-D Pan-a-Vision screen.

American literature is not having its finest hour. The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course. The Catholic literary renascence, long awaited, failed to materialize.

More himself is supremely ill-at-ease in the fragmented, God-haunted world he inhabits. Alienation threatens him on nearly every front. His own heritage as a Southern Catholic is itself alienating, much like the Flyte family in Evelyn Waugh. More’s Anglo ancestors were all good Catholics, in contrast to himself; as such they were all “wanderers,” like the Jews in the wilderness. What Catholics did exist in the South were either Mediterranean or Irish; the English Catholics were foreigners to both their fellow Englishmen and their fellow Romanists.

More appears to feel out of place among his own scientific community as well. At the Love Clinic, More and his fellow doctors try to discern the cause of the epidemic of sexual impotency. The doctors place two patients—and sometimes only one--inside a small observation room, hook them up to sensor wires, provide them with a bed and lubricant and set them to work. Percy’s description of the procedure is revolting. In one case, the doctors stand around talking about professional achievements and academic papers while watching a girl masturbate—assisting her efforts with certain electrical technology and making scientific notes periodically. A later example introduces a young couple, “volunteers,” who are brought together to copulate for the cause of science. The young people are herded into the room by a German doctor named Helga, and perfunctorily told to undress:

“Okay, keeds!” cries Helga, clapping her hands into the microphone. “Mach schnell! Let’s get the show on the road!”

“We have found,” Stryker explains to me, “that you can inspire false modesty and that by the same token a brisk no-nonsense approach works wonders. Helga is great at it!”

More, the aesthete. feels uncomfortable at the sterility of the science on display and finds an excuse to depart. “Leaving, I catch a final glimpse of [the young man], bare-chested and goose-pimpled, gazing around the porcelain walls with the ruminant rapt expression of a naked draftee.”

More cannot embrace this hyper-modern view of sexuality, nor does he believe it will ultimately solve the epidemic of impotency in America. One of his own patients comes to him to see about a cure for his lack of sexual prowess (which More believes will eventually be fixed with the lapsometer). More comments:

The usual story: daytime terror and nighttime impotence, even though he feels “considerable warmth and tenderness” toward his wife, Tanya (why doesn’t he just say he loves her?), and so forth. He is wondering again about the “etiology” of the impotence. Dear God, how could he be anything other than impotent? How can a man quaking with terror make love to his wife?

The catalyst for conversion in Tom More is the figure of Art Immelmann, a scientist eventually revealed as a Satanic agent who smells of sulfur and brimstone. While More believes his lapsometer will be able to heal the mind-body split (and therefore all of modern man’s angst and spiritual problems), he still believes he needs to fine-tune it to prevent it wreaking apocalyptic havoc on the world (in a beautifully comic expression of scientific hubris). Immelmann, on the other hand, proceeds to steal the lapsometer and wields it incautiously, causing chaos and promising health to all. In the end, More sees through Immelmann, calls upon the aid of his ancestor: “Sir Thomas Mores, kinsman, saint, best dearest merriest of Englishmen, pray for us and drive this son of a bitch hence.” At this, the devil disappears, with a “dazed hurt look through the eyes as if he had been struck across the face.”

The novel concludes five years later. The world has not died; no apocalypse has destroyed the West. But for all Tom More cares, it might’ve and it’s doubtful he would have noticed. More has settled down, married a Presbyterian woman, lives quietly in the servants’ quarters of his old estate. If no one else in America has, More has achieved the elusive “lovely ordinary world.” Or at least, he has focused his desire on that world and is living like a pilgrim in search of that paradisiacal home:

“Poor as I am, I feel like God’s spoiled child. I am Robinson Crusoe set down on the best possible island with a library, a laboratory, a lusty Presbyterian wife, a cozy tree house, an idea, and all the time in the world.”