A Saint in Mortal Sin?

Graham Greene is, like Waugh and others, one of the great novelists of the 20th century whose name has often been relegated to the back of the academic catalog in favor of the gibberish, stream of consciousness, proto-intersectional doggerel that masquerades as literature. Good writing can, and should, teach, but it primarily tells a story, something my English professors at Cornell were never too eager to admit to us.

Greene was a bad Catholic, let us not delude ourselves. I recently read his End of the Affair, an intriguing novel told from the perspective of a shunned lover angry with his ex-mistress, who continues to live with her bourgeoisie husband after making a promise to a God she is not sure she believes. The narrative easily speaks of sensual encounters, codependency, and nostalgia with the ease of any well cultured person who never asks the deeper questions of his own soul; indeed, if Greene was a deeper man than Maurice Bendrix, then he was a very versatile writer indeed.

What intrigues in this quasi-modernist novel is the proposition that one remains utterly dependent on God while leading a life in mortal sin. Bendrix's lover, Sarah Miles, makes a hasty vow during the Blitz and wonders if she really means it. She is hardly haunted by God in the sense that later platitudes of "Catholic guilt", otherwise known as a conscience, linger in some. She is simply and acutely aware of a presence of God and wishes it were not there. She visits a St. Mary's, Park Road, in London and finds it excessively fleshly—replete with statues and gore, cold, and all too real. Simultaneously, she meets an outmoded rationalist preacher to whom no one will listen. She admits to the secular sectarian that it all seems like it should be nonsense if not for the inner knowledge that she is not alone, that her vows stands always before her.

We later find out that she once received Baptism out of her mother's spite years earlier and that she requested instruction in the faith at the time of her death. The secularist, whose face was mutated, is cured after sleeping with a strand of Sarah's hair. Sarah becomes a silent saint, dying to her own desire for Maurice Bendrix and retaining her difficult promise to God. In the end, Maurice even acknowledged God's existence by asking Him to leave him alone.

One could congratulate Greene on breaking convention and making the supernatural the real if only Sarah did not merely do the right thing, seeking conversion, but was actually good and had some apparent depth to her soul. She is cold to Bendrix, and he certainly returns the favor, but we see no actual yearning for God, for the Good, for that which Augustine prayed "Make me good, just not yet."

At the very least, Greene's sinful saint is a vast improvement over Karl Rahner's anonymous Christian.