Until I began researching Graham Greene for my thesis, I never realized that Mexico was violently atheistic for a fair portion of the 20th century. Actually, literally, violently anti-God. Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexican president from 1924-28, declared clerical vestments illegal, divested Catholic clergy of the right to vote, stole church property for the state, and threatened clergy who were critical of the state with imprisonment and death. One particular governor, Tomás Garrido Canabal, went so far as to actually hunt down practicing priests. A profane man both privately and publicly, 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."

According to Wikipedia, he encouraged a local satirical play which featured a stud bull being paraded around "called 'the bishop' or an ass labeled 'the pope.'”

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. - Charles Baudelaire

Modernity itself goes by different names and glides by under different guises. As one raised in a fairly stereotypical conservative evangelical home, I particularly remember associating modernism with atheism, with evolution and humanism—to be modern was to be of the world, in the worst possible way. Modernity was the avant-garde—the art which put crucifixes in vials of urine, which spilt buckets of paint over canvases. Modernity was at the same time the hyper-rationalism of the scientist in his God-proof laboratory where he killed babies in utero in order to perform stem-cell research. Modernity also, to my mind, managed to produce confusing literature populated with anti-heroes and confused sexuality.

The reader should be aware of this personal background. However, while modernism can certainly claim these associations, the sense in which I now wish to define modernity takes a different angle....

On the evening of December 31, 1900, the town of Toledo, Ohio, gathered downtown for a ceremony sponsored by the local Red Cross to ring in the new century. Local luminaries took turns behind the podium offering their own guesses at what 20th century might hold. The town mayor, a man by the name of Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, offered his starry-eyed predictions about space travel, every man having his own private air yacht, and the extermination of mice, rats, and other urban pests. Moving beyond these futuristic trivialities, Mayor Jones moved on to grander presumptions—utopian soliloquies and Enlightenment fantasies of a century of Reason and justice. Like a man taken up to the seventh heaven, he offered a glimpse forward into the next century:

Looking forward into the distant yonder, in my visions I see the people of Toledo of 100 years hence, assembled for a purpose similar to that which called us together tonight. In fancy I listen to their speeches and hear their songs. The white dove of peace spreads her beneficent wings over the nations of the earth, for they shall “learn war no more.” I listen intently to the music of their voices and I find that they have learned the lesson of life. Its key note is harmony and the words of their song are “Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

A utopian dream dies hard. Yet by the end of this 20th century of harmony and universal good will, the hopes of Mr. Golden Rule Jones were lying under the toxic heap of two world wars, a catastrophic nuclear threat, the breakdown of traditional Western morals, the fracturing of many European nation-states, as well as a host of less overt but equally destructive cultural trends.

None of this is a terribly original observation. The “Death of the West,” in its many facets, has been predicted, feared, or celebrated for at least one hundred years. Whether or not the old Grand Sire of modernism has actually been bumped off by some irreverent deconstructive nephew is still up for debate. But even the staunchest modernist around must admit that things aren’t quite what they used to be.

Modernism is now a little like the emperor who was parading through the streets in what he told everyone was the newest fashion. But on the street corner a little boy stood there wondering aloud why the emperor was walking through town with his family jewels out for display. Much has been written about the emperor’s senile mishap over the past several decades; it is the purpose of this little work to take another look at that little boy on the corner who knew before anyone else just what a fool the emperor was. Or rather, my thesis concerns three Roman Catholic novelists who dared propose that Western modernism was nothing more than a rotting skeleton.

It’s common to see the two world wars as the events which finally dealt the lethal blow to modernism’s utopian dream. However, several decades before Europe burst into flames, the enigmatic works of Friedrich Nietzsche hinted at the consequences of modernity. In 1882, he wrote what might be his most famous passage, a brief story about a wild-eyed madman who in the early morning light runs into a marketplace to ask the incredulous shoppers all around him, Where is God? He answers himself, "I want to tell you. We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers." For Nietzsche, the rationalistic Christianity which had oppressed the West for centuries had about run its course. The truce between reason and myth, between order and chaos, was soon to be broken. And this was all because the “God” of the Enlightenment—the respectable divinity which modernism had domesticated—had finally died. Nietzsche’s madman continues on, asking what sort of atonement or holy ceremony will replace the old dead God. “How shall we console ourselves, we, the murderers among all murderers?” Nietzsche concludes his story:

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!"— It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

For Nietzsche’s madman, “God” is the god of Western rationalism (which, to him, is nothing more than Socrates’ wicked bastard child). In his wide-eyed frenzy, the madman sees what the respectable Victorians fail to recognize: modern rationalism has outlived its ability to maintain respectability. Modernism has been living among the tombs which were once the holy temples of Christendom. It is nothing more than a squatter on hallowed ground. As the madman saw it, modernism had thereby invited its own destruction. The “tremendous event” which was prowling about in search of something to destroy had already set it sights on the pomposity which was Western rationalism. The end was inevitable, only the moment of judgment remained unclear.

Western Christians have usually been careful to find ways to make Christianity palatable to secularists—never more so than at the turn of the 20th century. The assault on church dogma had perhaps never been more fierce. Darwinism, social engineering, abortion, women’s suffrage, temperance, and a host of other movements threatened the traditional stands of the old Western Christendom. It was becoming socially unacceptable to hold to the beliefs that had been commonly held for centuries. The Church had for centuries been told that its authority was limited to the supernatural realm. Liberty of conscience, the great modern idol, meant that everyone was allowed to believe what their conscience dictated so long as it did not harm anyone else. This liberty of conscience neutralized the Church under the pretense of protecting us all from the abusive power that the Catholic Church supposedly wielded in the late middle ages. This was a particularly convincing nightmare for Western Protestants, for whom confusing the spiritual and secular worlds summoned up the collective bad memories of the Inquisition, Jesuitical oppression, papal tyranny, and a host of other medieval outrages.

While the Enlightenment neutralized the Church’s authority for several hundred years, the end of the 19th century saw modernism begin an all-out assault against what remained of the old Christendom. The truce which had been tentatively held since Descartes and Hume was broken with great violence as traditional morality, authority, sexuality, and human identity were challenged. The radical Mikhail Bakunin made this very clear, writing in 1871: "The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth." The authority of the Church—its judgments, rituals, and its pulpit—is the great idol against which the priests of modernity utter their imprecations. A private religion might be tolerated, but one which claims the power to bind and loose cannot. Modernity, according to Bakunin, “is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.” The grand story that modernity tells itself is just this—no priest or divinity can pass judgment on an individual conscience.

...The “tremendous event” which was prowling about in search of something to destroy had already set it sights on the pomposity which was Western rationalism. The end was inevitable, only the moment of judgment remained unclear.

That moment came with the advent of what was ironically called “The Great War.” Europe had experienced a rare century of near peace, excepting a few minor wars between France and Germany, and Britain and Russia. Certainly nothing to equal the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century. The irrepressible optimism which clouded over Europe at the outset of the 20th century managed to carry even into the first days of the Great War. Englishman H.G. Wells wrote a little volume titled The War That Will End War. It would seem that the reality of millions mired in the trenches, choking on blood and mustard gas would eliminate the last drop of hope from Europe. But, initially at least, Mr. Wells was not alone in believing that the Great War would serve as a purgation of Europe’s remaining evil. Namely (for the Anglo-American alliance), the Kaiser and his Germanic serfs—a distasteful reminder of medieval feudalism. President Woodrow Wilson emphasized in his declaration of war that the free peoples of the West were not declaring war on a “free” people, but on an oppressive empire. The Anglo-American mission was suitably modern: “Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power.”

The violence of the war, however, did manage to penetrate deeper than the idealists at first admitted. An extended wartime note from Winston Churchill details the horrific, unimaginable nature of the new kind of war:

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived – not without reason – that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed…. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea…. When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.

The old guard still proclaimed that the Great War had served its prophetic purpose: the dead had fallen in the trenches to make straight the way for democracy. But the younger generation that survived the war began to develop a different view of things. It was not lost upon the younger generation that “there had been an unimaginable unprecedented moral degeneration.” In fact, they seemed to embrace the moral freefall into which Europe had been thrown.

The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end....[but he] is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over. - Walker Percy

Very little can be said about the recent misadventures of modernism that hasn’t already been pointed out by some postmodern critic who regularly dances on the grave of certainty, rationality, and objectivity. The purpose of this work is not to argue that we are living in a postmodern world; this much is assumed, for better or worse. Something has changed. Some current of belief or unbelief has pushed modernity into waters it hadn’t charted out.

The scope of this work is focused on three Roman Catholic novelists of the 20th century: Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Graham Greene (1904-1991), and Walker Percy (1916-1990). Each entered the scene while modernity was trying to recover from its freefall into relativism and uncertainty. Each novelist picked up on the signs that modernity was in its death-throes (something many modern evangelicals fail to notice even now). And each shared a common idea of what needed to be restored in order to bring peace back to an age of violence and uncertainty. In the middle of all the hundreds of postmodern philosophers and their weighty tomes, the books of Waugh, Greene, and Percy provide a perspective on our age which is accessible, relevant, and counter-intuitive. Many Christians still attempt to defend the faith within a modernist framework. Others have abandoned certainty and dogma, failing into the warm embraces of a postmodernity which is all-too-welcoming of any group which has fled from the abusive arms of dogma and Christendom. Claims to exclusivity or objectivity of belief were supposed to have been buried under the rubble of modernism. They now are left only to haunt the hollow cathedrals of dead Christianity with its dead god, drifting between gargoyles with a grotesque face only a medievalist could love.

The three novelists that will be analyzed subsequently are worthy of infinitely more ink than this thesis can afford. However, collectively, their works form a unique microcosm of the death of modernity. In their own ways, they perform individual autopsies on the haggard god which Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882. These autopsies can be outlined in three overlapping parts: 1) an observation of the excess of immorality which presaged modernism’s final fall (Waugh); 2) an analysis of Europe’s senility and moroseness after two world wars (Greene); and, 3) a prognosis of what is to come based on the symptoms that plague the West (Percy). If this outline is a little vague, I trust excerpts of the stories and images of the novelists themselves will serve to clear things up.

The death of modernism can be (and has been) analyzed from a great many angles. The perspective which Waugh, Greene, and Percy (and hopefully this work) provide shares the outlook of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. There truly is nothing new under the sun—a sermon which modernity apparently slept through during its youth. One finds in Ecclesiastes a pattern of youth, middle age, senility, and death which applies not just to individuals, but also to cultures and to ages. As our three novelists will demonstrate, the Preacher could’ve warned modernity about the evil that lay in wait for it. All the knowledge that can be stored up in books and minds and ages eventually falls under judgment. All that is hollow and vain will be exposed. All that vaunts itself will be lowered into earth at last. And every evil work will be burned under the same blood-red sun.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Adam Fenwyck-Symes has a depressing existence as far as fictional characters go. He is the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies, and his character confirms the fact that Evelyn Waugh was a sadist when it came to his own literary creations. Symes is a modern young man—one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men—a typical example of his own Lost Generation (as Hemmingway would call it). The setting of Vile Bodies is inter-war Britain, with its dichotomized society of old-line Victorians shell-shocked by the Great War and up-and-coming ne’er-do-wells, interested only in the latest gossip, fashion, and anything unserious. Compared to the other characters who populate the novel, Adam Fenwyck-Symes is at least an occasionally sympathetic figure. His story is introduced as he has the misfortune to run afoul of an old-fashioned customs official while returning home from overseas.

One by one he took the books out and piled them on the county. A copy of Dante’s Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.

“French, eh?” he said. “I guessed as much, and pretty dirty, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books” –how he said it!—“in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can’t stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. That’s what he said the other day in Parliament. I says ‘Hear, hear….’

Symes’ copy of Dante is confiscated by the zealous official, along with Symes’ own memoirs which he was planning to publish in order to prove to Nina that he was ready to marry her. This confrontation with an older Victorian generation is only the first of many in Vile Bodies. Another memorable episode is Adam’s visit with Nina’s father, a retired and senile British colonel who is too cheap to pay for a bus or cab fare, but endlessly excited about the prospect of funding a new religious film about the life of John Wesley. Adam petitions the old man for financial aid, but discovers too late that the check the old man gives him is signed “Charlie Chaplin.” Tellingly, the Colonel’s home is named “Doubting Hall,” which Adam’s cabbie mispronounces as “Doubting ‘All.” It’s more than hinted that both the old and the young generation in Vile Bodies suffer from a great, all-encompassing meaningless. There is nothing sacred, nothing stable any longer. The war was proved meaningless; virtue is meaningless, certainly; marriage is meaningless—and most frustratingly, pleasure is meaningless. After Nina and Adam spend the night together, Nina comments, “I never hated anything so much in my life... still as long as you enjoyed it that's something.” Nothing brings fullness or resolution—even sex fails to bring intimacy or fulfillment. It is societal impotency on a number of levels.

From the opening episodes in Vile Bodies, it’s easy to assume that the target of the novelist’s satire is the older generation of Victorians—with their comically stodgy notions about money and fashion, literature and movies (not to mention their pride and xenophobia). They are certainly comedic figures throughout the novel—they are even antagonists quite often of Adam and his fiancée. Yet as Symes and his friends get into comedic tangles and scrapes, the reader is left with the nagging idea that there’s something wrong with the younger crowd, too—for all their charm, wit, and vivacity.

Adam’s friends are all over-the-top. Agatha Runcible, a Paris Hilton figure with infinitely more verbal flair, commands the attention of all the London gossip rags. Her greatest moment comes after she sponsors a drunken party with some rather naïve young girls, wakes the next morning to an extremely awkward breakfast with their parents, then walks out the door to discover she had been partying and dining at Number 10 Downing Street, the residence of the prime minister (whose tenure doesn’t last long after the newspapers spread the word of what happened under his very nose). Among other misadventures, the voice of the narrator remains passive and unamused as the “bright young things” flit about between various excesses and comedic immoralities.. The younger generation knows how to laugh at itself, if nothing else. But gradually, the narrator does seem to develop an acid tone as he relates the endless frivolity of Symes and his friends. The narrative voice notes how they pass their time with

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…. Those vile bodies….

In the end, the bright young things reach the end of their own “fatal hunger for permanence,” as a Jesuit character phrases it. Agatha Runcible dies among her own hallucinations, turning to Symes: “How people are disappearing, Adam.” Another of Adam’s friends is exiled to France on account of homosexuality. Others fall prey to malicious gossip, backbiting, and fashion faux-pas. In the end, everything comes crashing down as an apocalyptic war consumes Europe.

In a 1979 interview, Graham Greene answered the question of whether he went to Communion still:

No, 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.

Roger Ebert on Scorcese:

I have often thought that many of Scorsese's critics and admirers do not realize how deeply the Catholic Church of pre-Vatican II could burrow into the subconscious, or in how many ways Scorsese is a Catholic director. This movie is like an examination of conscience, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?

Eliot, "Chorus from the Rock":

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

Evelyn Waugh, like Adam Fenwyck-Symes, was very much at the heart of modern life in the 1920s. By his friends’ accounts and his own, Waugh indulged in about every fad, fashion, and lifestyle that raged through the generation lost between the two world wars. He loved modernist poetry, unlike his Edwardian father. He was attracted to socialism and cubism, to Hemmingway and (by many accounts) homosexuality—each an unavoidable presence in Oxford at that time. His early essays and editorials display the usual undergraduate disdain for gray heads and old ideas. He wrote in 1921 of his own generation, “they will be above all things, clear-sighted, they will have no use for phrases or shadows. In the nineteenth century the old men saw visions and the young men dreamed dreams. The youngest generation are going to be very hard and analytical … and they will not call their aim ‘Truth.’”

The effect that the First World War had on Waugh’s generation cannot be overstated. Much like the Vietnam war’s impact on the hippie generation, the Great War opened an immense cultural gulf between the Edwardians and the Bright Young Things. The latter believed that the war was an unnecessary tragedy caused by their parents’ pride and false nobility. Humphrey Carpenter illustrates this in his indispensable work, The Brideshead Generation: “Evelyn’s generation’s attitude to the Great War is evoked in Nancy Mitford’s first novel, where a young aesthete states to a returned soldier: ‘We haven’t exactly forgotten it, but it was never anything to do with us. It was your war and I hope you enjoyed it, that’s all.’”

In Vile Bodies, Waugh tells a story of similar feeling. Written in 1930, the novel was the last written before Waugh converted to Catholicism. He had begun his literary career as a satirist of the sacred idols of modern England. Critics praised his first two novels for their heartlessness. The Fortnightly Review compared Vile Bodies to Eliot’s "The Waste Land" and added it to the canon of “contemporary literature of disillusionment.”

The state of Waugh’s personal life at the time was probably unknown to the reviewers at the time. Waugh had married Evelyn Gardiner in 1928 (friends called the couple He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn). The marriage was never strong, and She-Evelyn reportedly began cheating on her new husband only a matter of months after the union was made. The tragedy of the marriage would later become literary fodder for Waugh’s satire, A Handful of Dust. But at the time, the divorce proceedings sent Waugh into depression—Vile Bodies was written out of these circumstances. Waugh’s brother, Alec, recalled how at the time his brother told him, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” A few months after the divorce was finalized, Evelyn formally joined the Church of Rome.

Waugh had always been a moralist of some stripe—it is, after all, part of the job description of a satirist. However, while before his conversion his moral vision could only mock, his post-conversion satire gradually develops an alternative vision to the hopeless wanderings of his generation. In his early fiction, Waugh consistently highlights how his age has lost the ability to feel or to find a consummation of any kind—religious, sexual, or artistic. He makes it clear that this state of frustrated tension is not the result of complacency. The Bright Young Things want nothing more than to find fulfillment of some kind. Why else the frenzy of artistic and bacchanalian activity? The crazed parties in Vile Bodies are manifestations of the younger generation’s desperate need for meaning, according to Waugh; if nothing else, they provide distractions from the interwar hopelessness about everything.

Waugh’s most magisterial novel, Brideshead Revisited, provides a fascinating post-conversion look back on this period of time. Written in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is the story of Charles Ryder in two parts: the first being his interwar life as a Oxford student taken under wing by the Bright Young Thing, Sebastian Flyte; the second part takes place some years later as Ryder and the other Bright Young Things begin to see their world fall apart as rumors of war with Germany begin circulating.

In the first part of the story, titled “Et Ego In Arcadia,” Sebastian Flyte introduces Ryder to the colorful, charming world of the British aristocracy at college and at home. In many ways, it is a more cultured version of the scene in Vile Bodies. Charles and Sebastian spend their school days idly, and always with a bottle of wine in hand. Sebastian’s social circle is not so concerned with academics, rather preferring to spend their time drunkenly reciting Eliot’s latest poetry. Charles idealizes his friend’s wit and self-possession—a feeling that only intensifies when the two friends spend a holiday at Sebastian’s home, Brideshead Castle. The aristocratic Flytes becomes Charles’ surrogate family—the pious Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s Catholic mother; Sebastian’s sister, the aloof and sexual Julia; the youngest sister, the precocious young Cordelia; and later in the story, the exiled agnostic, Lord Marchmain. Much like their school days, Charles and Sebastian are rarely sober, and spend most of their time lounging around the immense grounds of the manor. Sebastian, though, is vaguely uncomfortable while at home—a point which Charles fails to understand at first. The source of his discomfort lies in the reminder while at home of the residual Catholicism of his heritage which resides primarily in his moralistic mother. Sebastian’s relationship with the family religion is something which Charles had not encountered before....

Throughout his novels, Evelyn Waugh is consistently pessimistic about the future of modernity. Those characters who are most modern are also the most heartless, for they have the least to lose. Like Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust or Mr. Joyboy in The Loved One, the modern man for Waugh had no reason to honor family, religious, or moral customs. Further, since ultimate meaning had been stripped from life, any normal sentiments and pleasure were no longer there to be had. In the modern world, sex is painful (and unproductive), war is pointless, the art of today will be forgotten by tomorrow. Even the death of a child doesn’t warrant a few tears from his parents.

Confronted with this bleak waste land, the modern man becomes like Adam Fenwick-Symes or like Hooper. Either he gives himself over to meaningless entertainment and frivolity, or he becomes a passionless victim of ennui (which is, ultimately, what Adam Fenwick-Symes succumbs to)....

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).

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.

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.

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.

Sunday mornings I'd leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and pluming, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape country side to a—town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing here? says the bemused expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—

Back to the motel then, exhilarated by—what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.

"My God, what is it you do in church?"

What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.

The idea of an apocalypse is usually associated with violence, war, and chaos—both natural and otherwise. But not every ending of the world is carried out like some nuclear Ragnorak. Some deaths are violent, but the saddest deaths are often the ones witnessed over the passing of many diseased and impotent years. And it is this sort of death which Walker Percy observed clinically in the apocalyptic middle-to-late years of 20th century America. For Percy, the most obvious sign of this apocalypse was the pervasive, obsessive way in which Americans wanted merely to desire and to find something ultimately fulfilling and worth wanting. Desire was (and is) a precious commodity, something both cheaply bought and rarely durable. The cliché of American life is the idea of the search, the journey to self-hood and self-expression and self-worth and self-immortalization. There must be something more, no? This is enough to qualify an American as “spiritual.”

In his essay, “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” Percy introduced his idea of a fictional protagonist who lives in the sterile modern world, ends his workday as a technician “feeling more disembodied than usual.” Passing by an old empty church, a strange figure emerges from the shadows of the ruins—a weary pilgrim, flawed and wayfaring much “like the whisky priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.” The stranger confronts the technician: “‘You look unwell friend.’ ‘Yes,’ replies the technician, frowning. ‘But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is the best of the consciousness-expanding community-stimulating self-integrating drugs.’”

The strange modern pursuit of the natural world and its pleasures is for Percy a smokescreen to hide evidence of a panicked retreat from the supernatural. The Cartesian world is always trying to guard the natural against the incursions of the supernatural. It would seem the worst possible nightmare for the modernist would be a world in which natural objects have “superstitious” power. The paradox of the modern is that the natural world becomes degraded in the process of protecting it from the spiritual world. Percy, as a Catholic, saw evidence of the spiritual in very common objects: in bread and wine and sex and wooden crosses and words spoken by man.

The prospect of authority residing in a physical-metaphysical institution like the Church has always driven the modernist mad. But for Percy this is the inevitable end—the denouement at which the entire plot of the Western world is about to arrive. The mere existence of truth or meaning is useless if it cannot be spoken or transmitted by someone with authority. The message “is not enough.” There must be “someone who delivers the news and who speaks with authority.”

In 1969—what some consider the high-watermark of modernism --sociologist Peter Berger wrote, “we have come a long way from the gods and from the angels. The breaches of this-worldly reality which these mighty figures embodied have increasingly vanished from our consciousness as serious possibilities.” But not yet entirely, Berger allowed. He went on to tell of a priest working in the slums of a European city who was asked why he continued to work in such a place. The priest gave the answer: “So that the rumor of God may not disappear completely.” Of course, one might argue this rumor of the supernatural was one of the worst-kept secrets of the modern age. In fact, the observations of supernaturalists like Waugh, Greene, and Percy amount ultimately to a very simple conclusion: God is there, and He is not silent.

This simple statement of dogma carries with it a malicious whisper, though: if God is there, if He is not silent, what will He say concerning our modern project? He has cast down towers before. He has babbled tongues and afflicted kings with plagues, madness, and worms of the stomach. Apparently, He is a God who works His judgment in life as well as death. Is there cause to fear? Will we be judged?

The particular geniuses of Waugh, Greene, and Percy can sometimes be lost on some readers for the simple reason that their worlds often seem devoid of hope. Of course, very few Old Testament prophets were honored with ticker tape parades. But each novelist, in some ironic way, does offer some cause for hope.

Modernism would have us distrust all authority not contained in the individual conscience or the State magisterium. But all three novelists would have us turn instinctively to the Church [for authority]. For them, the rituals, the transcendent morality, and the sacraments which the Church offers are the means by which the West can escape the floodwaters rising on all sides. The material “things” and blessings which the Church has the authority to dispense are Christ to the world. The service of its ministers, the food and drink of its table, the waters of its baptismal fonts—all these things are the Son of God made flesh. Even Graham Greene during his darkest years of apostasy retained an instinctual trust in the elements of the Eucharist.

This trust in the incarnate, bodily nature of faith is not something reserved only for Roman Catholics, however. Evelyn Waugh, as traditional a Catholic as he was, allowed that the nature of modernism had realigned the battle-lines so that the fight was no longer between Protestant and Catholic, but between Christianity and chaos. The total breakdown of historic morality and aesthetics is all that can be expected when “the supernatural basis” upon which they rest have been denied for so long. The Protestant and the Catholic both have a moral imperative to proclaim the incarnate Word to a world which has become blind to the divine glory which surrounds it.