The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Post #4

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

You can read Post #1 here.  

Post#2 here.  

Post #3 here. 

 

Finally the last paired conversation with the whisky priest that is worth looking at in detail is with the lieutenant.  The lieutenant is perhaps the hardest of the characters to touch his heart, but here too I think the priest’s heart to heart conversation works on the police officer.  The two meet for the final time at the gringo’s death where the whisky priest was trying to give the gringo last rites.  The gringo has died and the lieutenant springing the trap comes into the hut and makes himself known.

 

‘You didn’t expect to see me,’ he said.

 

‘Oh, but I did,’ the priest said. ‘I must thank you.’

 

‘Thank me, what for?’

 

‘For letting me stay alone with him.’

 

‘I am not a barbarian,’ the officer said. ‘Will you come out now, please? It’s no use at all your trying to escape. You can see that,’ he added, as the priest emerged and looked round at the dozen armed men who surrounded the hut.

 

‘I’ve had enough of escaping,’ he said.  (p. 190)

And so the lieutenant gets his first shock, being thanked by the priest.  In fact I think one could look at the conversation between the two as a mini enlightenment, an undermining of his preconceived notions.  The lieutenant says “he is not a barbarian.”  He says it again moments later.  He is not a barbarian and yet he kills priests, those who harbor them, and indiscriminately peasants in order to pressure people to turn them in.  It’s amazing how people can rationalize their evil.  A storm ensues and the two are stuck in the hut and get into a conversation.  In the course of the conversation, the priest lets out he has fathered a child.

 

He [the lieutenant] said with contempt, ‘So you have a child?’

 

‘Yes,’ the priest said.

 

‘You a priest?’

 

‘You mustn’t think they are all like me.’ He watched the candlelight blink on the bright buttons. He said, ‘There are good priests and bad priests. It is just that I am a bad priest.’

 

‘Then perhaps we will be doing your Church a service …’

 

‘Yes.’

 

The lieutenant looked sharply up as if he thought he was being mocked. (191)

The priest’s honesty and humility is another shock to the lieutenant.  The priest shows him magic card tricks, like he wanted to show Brigitta.  It leads to a subject about the parish Guilds, which I take as some sort of religious camp or tent revival that served as a means to preaching.  The lieutenant has bad memories of it recalling some sort of hypocrisy.  The priest actually acknowledges the hypocrisy.

 

The priest said, ‘You are so right.’ He added quickly, ‘Wrong too, of course.’

 

‘How do you mean?’ the lieutenant asked savagely. ‘Right? Won’t you even defend…?’

 

‘I felt at once that you were a good man when you gave me money at the prison.’

 

The lieutenant said, ‘I only listen to you because you have no hope. No hope at all. Nothing you say will make any difference.’

 

‘No.’

 

He had no intention of angering the police officer, but he had had very little practice the last eight years in talking to any but a few peasants and Indians. Now something in his tone infuriated the lieutenant. He said, ‘You’re a danger. That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.’ (193)

That is the most satanic line of the whole novel: “That’s why we kill you. I have nothing against you, you understand, as a man.”  It disregards the man’s humanity.  And what is it that overrides his innate sense of human compassion?  The conversation continues, the priest disagreeing.

 

‘Of course not. It’s God you’re against. I’m the sort of man you shut up every day—and give money to.’

 

‘No, I don’t fight against a fiction.’

 

‘But I’m not worth fighting, am I? You’ve said so. A liar, a drunkard. That man’s worth a bullet more than I am.’

 

‘It’s your ideas.’ The lieutenant sweated a little in the hot steamy air. He said, ‘You are so cunning, you people.  (194)

 

It’s the ideas he thinks the priest represents.  The priest’s humanity has been devalued because of some abstract ideas.  And priest goes on to explain his life, tries to explain his failings as a priest, tries to explain how he has tried to serve.  He tries to explain the state of the world: “We have facts, too, we don’t try to alter—that the world’s unhappy whether you are rich or poor—unless you are a saint, and there aren’t many of those” (194-5).  The first part of their conversation ends with the priest kindness, “You have listened very patiently,” and the lieutenant responding with “I am not afraid of other people’s ideas” (197).  Has the priest altered something in the lieutenant?  It’s not evident but the lieutenant has now listened to a different point of view.

You can tell that something has changed within the lieutenant because later that evening, having stopped for the night and while the two men are sleeping in the same hut but both unable to sleep, it is the lieutenant who initiates the conversation.  “You’re a man of education,” he addresses the priest.  He wants to understand more.  The lieutenant goes on to explain his views.

 

‘I’ve had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which you don’t have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor.’ He said in a low voice, ‘I’ve shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made me hate you.’(198)

And later he continues, “Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world.”  What a violation of the heart.  He wanted to give them the whole world because he identified with their poverty, and yet he killed them as a result of his ideology.  It all stems not from love but from hate.

But the priest continues in his humility, denying his educated status. 

 

‘I was never any good at books,’ the priest said. ‘I haven’t any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn’t that right?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Well, if I hated you, I wouldn’t want to bring up my child to be like you. It’s not sense.’

 

‘That’s just twisting …’

 

‘Perhaps it is. I’ve never got your ideas straight. We’ve always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry—hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It’s better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven—so long as we don’t push his face in the dirt.’ (199)

The priest here shows the lieutenant that there are a good intentions toward the poor.  It is not a callus extortion of the poor but something that fits within the priest’s worldview.  The lieutenant recoils:

 

‘I hate your reasons,’ the lieutenant said. ‘I don’t want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say—pain’s a good thing, perhaps he’ll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak.’

The priest’s logic doesn’t fit into his worldview.  He says he wants “to let his heart speak.”  Now this is where I am convinced that Graham Greene is alluding to John Henry Newman’s motto Cor Ad Cor Loquitur, heart speaks to heart.  Greene is an Englishman and a convert to Catholicism.  John Henry Newman was an Englishman and possibly the most famous Englishman to convert to Catholicism.  Greene is a writer, and Newman was especially known for his exceptional writing, both as a prose stylist and as a Catholic intellectual.  There is no doubt that Greene would have been familiar a good portion of Newman’s writings, and certainly would be aware of Newman’s motto.  I think that heart speaking to heart is at the crux of the novel.

It is fascinating that it is the lieutenant that wants to speak from the heart, but his heart has been altered by fallen world and his ideology.  It is now the priest who recoils.

 

‘At the end of a gun.’

 

‘Yes, At the end of a gun.’

 

‘Oh well, perhaps when you’re my age you’ll know the heart’s an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn’t talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child’s strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love.’(199)

It is the priest who rejects the speaking from the heart.  Speaing from the heart is not enough.  The heart needs to be filled with God, not filled with the world.  To explain the priest practically quotes from John’s first epistle.

 

‘Oh,’ the priest said, ‘that’s another thing altogether—God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.’ (199-200)

God is love and our heart speaks God’s love if it abides in God.  But this wonderful metaphor must be highlighted: “The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water.”  This recalls what the angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”  It has been described that Mary, like a glass, is full of grace while we lesser creatures are granted varying amounts of grace.  I’ve jokingly said that while Mary’s glass is full, mine only contains a thimble full.  But Greene takes that metaphor of the glass and has the contents mixed with love—and one can think of it as the grace to love—and ditch water, alluding to the fallen nature in our beings.  That is brilliant. 

Does the lieutenant understand any of that?  No, he gives no indication.  He says that if a man served him like God serves us he would “put a bullet in his head” (200), quite a sacrilegious thing to say.  Finally the priest opens up with sincerity, with empathy, and with communion with his fellow man.

 

‘Listen,’ the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, ‘I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they’re in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I’m not telling them fairy stories I don’t believe myself. I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too.’ He said slowly, ‘I wouldn’t want it to be any different. I just want justice, that’s all.’  (200)

And this is a good place to conclude the close look between their conversations.  We see the lieutenant is not intellectually convinced, but his reaction to the priest does change.  He has felt his heart moved.  From there he treats the priest with a certain dignity.  He goes out of his way to offer kindness to the priest.  The priest becomes a human being and not an object of his ideology.  He tries to get the priest a person to hear his last confession; he offers putting him in a cell with others to pass the last night; he gives him a bottle of brandy to ease the nerves.  But he will not let him escape, and he carries out the passion narrative to its conclusion.  We don’t hear of the lieutenant’s future but perhaps the grace experienced from the priest’s heart and his sacrificial death will have a beneficial effect in time.

###

 

Part 2, Chpts 3 & 4

Summary

Chapter 3

In jail the priest is placed in a crowded cell with an assortment of people.  There is even a couple having sex in the dark.  Some in the cell get into a conversation which turns to sin and priests, and in the process the whisky priest admits to being a priest, fully expecting that one of the cell mates will now turn him in for the reward.  In so doing the whisky priest confesses his sins of alcoholism and of fathering a child.  A pious woman in the cell asks him to hear her confession, but he refuses, and she, upset, scorns him bitterly. 

In the morning, fully expecting to be identified as a priest, he is surprised that no one turned him in.  In one of the cells is the mestizo who he had traveled down, but he too does not turn the priest in.  Finally he is confronted by the lieutenant, who does not recognize him, and finally sends him off, even giving him money to get by with.

Chapter 4

The priest, not having anywhere to go, returns to the Captain Fellows house, hoping to get some food from Cora.  He finds the house is mysteriously empty and abandoned, and without any food.  There is only a crippled dog, and the whisky priest fights over and takes a discarded meaty bone. 

He leaves the Fellows house and finds shelter in a village hut.  The village too is abandoned, but there is a mysterious Indian woman who has hung about.  Her actions make him suspicious and he searches the hut and finds hidden a child with multiple bullet holes, bleeding badly.  He tries to save the child but he dies in his arms.  Despite the inability to communicate, he learns the violence was caused by the fugitive American bandit and she learns that he is a priest.  She presses him to go with her to bury her child, and she takes him on several day journey across wilderness and mountains to a place of crosses.  The Indian woman places the body of her child at the foot of the largest cross and begins to pray.  The priest leaves her there, exhausted and delusional from lack of food.  Feeling guilty for abandoning her he returns to find her gone when a man with a gun finds him at the point of death.  He is not the police but a man from the north, who nurses him and takes him north where it is safe to be a priest.

###

I have to say, chapter 4 of Part 2 is one of the best pieces of fiction writing one will ever find.  The passages with the Indian child and mother and the trek to the field of crosses is absolutely heartbreaking but superbly written.  It may not have the purple prose of an Evelyn Waugh or an F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the tone and pacing and detail is of the highest quality.  One should really just appreciate the writing in that chapter.  I think I’ll read it again.

###

As I was going through this month’s Magnificat magazine and which overlapped with my reading of The Power and the Glory, I came across this passage which instantly recalled the novel.  Magnificat has a regular feature where it provides a short biography of a saint, and each issue coordinates the saints’ by a topic.  In this issue the topic was “Saints Who Were Leaders.”  I was shocked to find this saint I had never heard of, but was very much relevant to the Cristero War and of course The Power and the Glory.

 

Saint Who?  Saints Who Were Leaders

 

Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado

Martyr († 1927)        Feast: June 26

 

A native in Mascota in Jailisco, Mexico, Josè was ordained a priest at twenty-four and two years later founded the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a focus on Eucharistic devotion.  After several years in mission work, he was assigned to a parish.  Although a new Mexican constitution outlawed public devotions, Josè went forward nevertheless with a bold plan to erect a giant cross devoted to Christ the King in the geographic center of Mexico.  To announce the laying of the cornerstone, he had signs placed throughout the countryside declaring Christ the “King of Mexico.”

 

After this the authorities began to put increasing pressure on Josè to curtail his work.  He was forced into hiding, but he continued to minister to his parishioners in secret.  On the feast of the Sacred Heart, June 25, 1927, he was arrested when he was about to say a private Mass in a family home.  The next day, he was taken to a large oak tree outside a nearby village and hanged.  Josè placed the noose on his own neck so that none of his executioners would bear the guilt of that act.

 

Shortly beforehand, Josè had penned a poem anticipating his death: “I want to love you until martyrdom…/With my soul I bless you, my Sacred Heart./Tell me: is the instant of my eternal union near?/Stretch out your arms, O Jesus/Because I am your “little one.”

 

Loving Father, through the intercession of Saint Josè María Robles Hurtado, take me at the moment of my death into your eternal embrace.

(p. 80, Magnificat, Aug. 2021, Vol. 23, No. 6.)

That cross Josè built might be the same cross in the fourth chapter of Part 2, the giant cross the Indian woman places her dead child at the foot.