The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Post #2

This is the second post on my reading of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.

You can read Post #1 here.  

 

Perhaps in my rush to get this discussion started, I incorrectly assumed everyone knew the history of the novel’s setting.  The setting of the novel is during what has been called the Cristero War in Mexico.  From Wikipedia: 

The Cristero War, also known as the Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada [la kɾisˈtjaða], was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico in response to the imposition of secularist and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, which were perceived by opponents as anti-Catholic measures aimed at imposing state atheism. The rebellion was instigated as a response to an executive decree by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles to enforce Articles 3, 5, 24, 27, and 130 of the Constitution, a move known as the Calles Law. Calles sought to eliminate the power of the Catholic Church and all organizations which were affiliated with it and to suppress popular religious celebrations in local communities.

 

The massive popular rural uprising in north-central Mexico was tacitly supported by the Church hierarchy, and it was also aided by urban Catholic supporters. US Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow brokered negotiations between the Calles government and the Church. The government made some concessions, the Church withdrew its support for the Cristero fighters, and the conflict ended in 1929. The rebellion has been variously interpreted as a major event in the struggle between church and state that dates back to the 19th century with the War of Reform, as the last major peasant uprising in Mexico after the end of the military phase of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, and as a counter-revolutionary uprising by prosperous peasants and urban elites against the revolution's agrarian and rural reforms.

While the war theoretically ended in 1929, there were localized persecutions all the way into the thirties.  I don’t think it is clear what year the novel is set, but Greene traveled in Mexico in 1938 and wrote a non-fiction book of his travels called The Lawless Roads, which he published in 1939.  I haven’t read the book but Wikipedia does not mention them.  His experience from the trip and the writing of the non-fiction book shaped his writing of The Power and the Glory. 

Now one other important fact from the Cristero War.  There were many martyrs that took place.  Priests were truly hunted down and shot.  One important martyr that symbolizes the plight of Catholic priests is that of Blessed Miguel Pro. You can read about Miguel at Wikipedia, but one thing that is ingrained in Catholic imagination is that at the time of his execution, Miguel spread out his arms so that his body became a cross, and just before being shot yelled out in that position, “Viva Cristo Rey!"  “Long live Christ the King.  There are pictures of Miguel Pro’s last moments at the Wikipedia entry.

The novel is in some ways a contrast between the almost perfect faith of Miguel Pro and the less than perfect faith of the whisky priest.  There are many allusions to Miguel Pro in the novel.  The woman who speaks of the martyrs to her children is undoubtedly referring to Miguel Pro.  The whisky priest is shot like Miguel, though he exhibits fear at his last moments.  The whisky priest even gets a last request like Miguel. 

I assumed this was common knowledge among Catholics, but perhaps that is a bad assumption.  Plus there may be non-Catholics who have not heard of Blessed Miguel Pro or the Cristero War.

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Part 2, Chapters 1 & 2

Summary

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.

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There’s a lot to be gained by a close examination of Part 2, chapter 1.  It’s by far the longest chapter in the whole novel, and I think it contains within it all the themes.  In Part 1, Greene looks at the whisky priest mostly from the outside.  In Part 2, the point of view shifts to the priest’s internal view.  It’s interesting to note that both Parts 2 and 3 tell the story mostly from the priest’s internal point of view, while Parts 1 and 4 are mostly from external to the priest.  I’ll give my thoughts on that later when I get to Part 4. 

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 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. 

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To speak of the whisky priest’s psychological complexity is ultimately to speak of the priest’s flesh, but that would not be the complete picture.  If the sins, the guilt, and the failures to live up to his vocation are on the horizontal plane of his nature, there is also a vertical plane, his transcendent plane.  There is his capability to love.  Christ commands us to love God and love one’s neighbor, and the priest in various places in the novel shows his love for God, but what is central to the novel is his love of neighbor.  It does strike me that his love of God in the novel is muted, but that is because I think it is a given.  In that wonderful sermon he gives to his home town peasants in the only Mass we see him celebrate in the novel we get this passage:

 

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.

 

Mr 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.

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To close this post, I’d like to embed the movie trailer to the novel.  The movie was made in 1961 and stars Laurence Olivier as the Whisky Priest and George C. Scott as the Lieutenant. 

 

Despite what is a superstar pairing of actors, the movie does not get great reviews.  I have not seen it.