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THINGS IN COMMON

Thomas Merton and Graham Greene

were two of the 20th century’s more prolific writers of English. Merton (1915-1968) concentrated his efforts in religious exposition and advocacy of various social and political causes. He’d written several novels as a young man but only one was published and that after his death when his fame had been established by other things, most notably a spiritually-oriented autobiography he completed at the age of 31 that became a bestseller in 1948. Greene’s (1904-1991) reputation rested mostly on his novels but he was also a writer of short stories, essays, movie reviews and screenplays; and he completed two autobiographies. The men were contemporaries in the sense that Merton’s life fit well inside that of Greene – born 11 years later and died 23 years earlier. Merton spent most of his life in the United States, but he attended school in England from the ages of 13 to 19, while Greene was an Englishman whose works were popular in the United States and he sometimes incorporated Americans into the novels he wrote.

What invites comparison of the opinions of these men is the fact that both were raised in households where religion had little relevance, yet both converted to Catholicism, Merton at 23 and Greene at 21, and they came to be known as Catholic writers as a result of their dealing with people and issues associated with that religion. Subscribing to the same faith might make their agreement on God’s existence seem obvious, but with Greene especially assumptions of belief or allegiance could never be taken for granted.

To illustrate the danger in making such assumptions, I’ll stray from the main subject long enough to explore an attachment shared by the two men that was common in the times in which they lived and has strong parallels in our own day, but that I’ve never been able to make any sense of. The antagonism Merton and Greene felt to the Nazism preached by Hitler could be assumed so readily that to have asked either man how he felt about it might have been taken as an insult – an aversion automatically extended to the less virulent combinations of nationalism and socialism fostered by Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain and to all of which the word “fascism” was customarily applied despite the fact that it was really only appropriate for the party Mussolini founded in 1919. On the other hand even a cursory reading of Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto”, written back in1848, revealed the same kind of generalized judgments that characterized Hitler’s invective and derived from the same kind of resentments and prejudices, except that the former concentrated its vitriol into fewer words and aimed it at different targets (muddled minds: Karl Marx). What’s more, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had been at least as ruthless in pursuit of their Communist goals as Goebbels, Himmler and Heydrich would prove to be for the Nazis, and the success Communism achieved over time allowed its bosses to put an end to far more innocent lives than Hitler would manage in his 12-year reign. Also of interest is the fact that Communism was more hostile to religion than any of the fascisms were. Marx had labeled religion the opium of the people, and that attitude had had consequences for believers in Russia and Mexico and would later in Spain and China as well (red legacy). Given the number of indictments lodged against Communism by the time Merton and Greene took a look at it, it’s astounding that both men actually numbered themselves among its partisans for a while.

Merton’s infatuation took place before his religious conversion, lasting roughly from 1931 to 1935 with his active participation limited to the few months before he chose to bow out. It was flip-flops in policy mandated by party leaders that led to his disenchantment more than anything else, although the capriciousness of those changes led him to take a closer look at the inconsistencies and inanities of Marx and his Soviet implementers. Merton remained a captive of the animosities Marx had relied on in promoting class warfare, however, so that in writing about his experience later he rationalized what he’d done in terms of feelings he still held but in which he failed to acknowledge any prejudice. “… a shrew of a French-woman, one of those spiteful, sharp-tongued bourgeoises, who was giving free expression to her hatred of one of her neighbors who very much resembled herself.” “The so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, had produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere…has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism.”   “I was born the sworn enemy of everything that could obviously be called ‘bourgeois‘.“ “What astonished me altogether was the appearance of a saint in the midst of all the stuffy, overplush, overdecorated, comfortable ugliness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie.” “I do not say that it [devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux] changed my opinion of the smugness of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie: God forbid! When something is revoltingly ugly, it is ugly, and that is that.” Contempt for the bourgeoisie is no less pernicious than contempt for Jews, after all, and had consequences as dire – numerically even more so.

On the other hand Merton continued to view Communists and the groups they favored with stars in his eyes. “…in Harlem the Communists were strong. They were … performing some of the works of mercy that Christians should be expected to do. If some Negro workers lose their jobs … the Communists are there to divide their own food with them, and to take up defence of their case.” Negroes, laborers and union members; the poor, the out of work and the disaffected, including those among them willing to resort to violence: that was Communism’s constituency – the factions on which it depended for whatever political power it would attain and the ones it necessarily championed. It was also a constituency that gave Communism the lure it had for people like Merton and Greene, whose sympathies were tied to that race and those classes – and to those who sided with them. But justice is more complicated than allegiances. In fact it depends on overcoming the biases they inspire. “If you love those who love you,” Jesus reminded us, “what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. … But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” Sticking up for the groups you’re tied to emotionally or politically comes easily. What’s hard is treating your enemies with the same degree of consideration. Justice depends on viewing people as individuals, from outside the boundaries of race and class all the other traits that allegiances depend on.

In contrast with the briefness of Merton’s commitment, Greene’s persisted to the end. In defiance of all the evidence he’d been exposed to during the course of his life, in 1987 – four years before his own death and that of Communism in Russia – he presented the following to a group of officials in the Kremlin as the position of the church he’d joined 61 years earlier: “There is no division in our thoughts between Catholics – Roman Catholics – and Communists. In the Sandanista Government my friend Tomas Borge, the Marxist Minister of the Interior, works in close friendship with Father Cardinal, the Minister of Culture, the Jesuit Father Cardinal, who is in charge of health and education, with Father D’Escoto, who is Minister for Foreign Affairs. There is no longer a barrier between Roman Catholics and Communism.“

Catholics marching in step with Communists, followers of Christ arm in arm with those of Marx. Late in life Greene apparently saw nothing incongruous in Christians giving support to a political creed that had proved more destructive of human life and liberty than any in history and was hostile to God and the practice of religion as well. That was a combination of loyalties it would have been hard to predict. Certainly it would have been in 1963 when Rolf Hochhuth created a stir by writing a play in which he accused Pope Pius XII of having failed to oppose with sufficient vigor a political philosophy of similar malevolence.

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ROADS TO CONVERSION

 Thomas Merton

was born in Prades, France, in January 1915 to a father visiting that country from New Zealand and a mother from the United States whom he’d met and married in Paris. Since the Great War was in progress, France promised to be a more perilous place to live than the United States, so Tom’s parents took him across the Atlantic in 1916, and the three of them found a house on Long Island, New York, not far from where the parents of Tom’s mother lived. Two years later Tom’s brother, John Paul, was born.

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Tom received little religious education as a child. His mother had a notion of God sufficient to induce her to attend Quaker meetings on occasion, but in general she regarded organized religion as superstitious. His father was more receptive. He took the boy to a Quaker service so he could see what it was like and allowed him to attend services at the Episcopal church where he was the organist. Looking back on that early exposure to religious observance, Tom described it temperately: “One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done.“

Tom’s father was an artist, but in addition to playing the organ in a church, he took jobs as a landscape gardener and pianist at a movie theater to earn what the family needed to live on. Tom’s mother died of stomach cancer when her son was six. She’d avoided contact with him at the end of her life to spare him the pain of seeing her die, but his memories of her remained blurred as a result. Her death did allow Tom’s father to devote himself more exclusively to his art. He took his son to Massachusetts briefly and then to Bermuda, in search of subjects to paint. After a successful exhibition in New York, he left Tom in the care of his grandparents and went to France. Tom’s grandmother and grandfather had had little more involvement with religion than his parents, but they did think of themselves as Protestant. When they sent Tom to Sunday school he found it so boring he was allowed not to continue.

After two years in Europe Tom’s father returned but only long enough to inform his son that the two of them would be headed back across the Atlantic. It was 1925. The war had been over for seven years, Tom was ten and he dreaded the move, but when he got to France he was enchanted by the countryside they traveled through. He had his first exposure to the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages – an era that would exert an increasing influence on his thoughts as time went by. Tom spent three years in towns of southern France, with his father going off to paint while he had to accommodate himself to the difficulties of learning a new language and adapting to the varying kinds of boys he encountered in the schools he attended. He did develop an affection for France but it was based more on the culture that had evolved there earlier than for what the country had become by the third decade of the 20th century. In any case he felt a sense of relief when he learned from his father that they were moving to England in 1928.

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One of the things that made the transition as pleasant as it turned out to be it was the presence of an aunt and uncle who lived in the borough of Ealing in London. For a year Tom attended school at Ripley Court near their home while his father signed him up to board at Oakham the following fall.   Ripley was an Anglican school and at this point in his life Tom accepted its practices without difficulty. “I did acquire a little natural faith,” he wrote later, “and found many occasions of praying and lifting up my mind to God. … And for the next two years I think I was almost sincerely religious.”

On a trip to Scotland in the summer of 1929 Tom’s father fell ill and returned to London for diagnosis. The problem turned out to be a malignant brain tumor for which he had to be hospitalized.   Despite his father’s incapacity, in September Tom made the trip to Oakham, a hundred miles north. After adapting to life in his new environment, he started to assert his intellectual independence. Like Ripley, Oakham was an Anglican institution, but Tom bridled now at some of the religious and philosophical instruction to which he was subject.

During the summer break Tom was able to visit his father frequently at the hospital in London. Shortly after returning to Oakham in September, however, he was informed that his father had died. “The death of my father left me sad and depressed for a couple of months,” he wrote, “But eventually that wore away.” Other changes were taking place as well. “It was in this year … that the hard crust of my dry soul finally squeezed out all the last traces of religion that had ever been in it. There was no room for any God in that empty temple full of dust and rubbish… .” By the fall of 1931 Tom considered himself a different person from the boy who’d entered Oakham two years earlier. In his eyes he was, “the only one in the whole place who knew anything about life, from the headmaster on down.” The things he chose to read reflected his newly rebellious attitude. Except one. The headmaster gave him a book of poems by the Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tom didn’t quite know what to make of Hopkins’ poetry, but he did find it to his liking.

In 1932 Tom passed an examination that would allow his admission to Cambridge the following year. During the summer he visited Rome and got caught up in exploring the churches there and the religious art in them: “I loved to be in these holy places,” he wrote about it. ” I had a kind of deep and strong conviction that I belonged there.” “… for the first time in my life I began to find out something of Who this person was that men called Christ.” “I took the trolley … to the Trappist monastery of Tre Fontane. … and the thought grew on me: ‘I should like to become a Trappist monk.’ … The thought was only a daydream.”

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By the time he returned to the United States, however, he found that “… this real but temporary religious fervor of mine cooled down and disappeared. At Easter we went to the church where my father had once been organist … and there I was very irritated by the services.” At the end of 1933 he went back to England to take up his studies at Cambridge and was drawn into a self-indulgent crowd whose way of life he came to despise but from which he hadn’t the will to extricate himself. “Nothing compared to the bitterness that soon began to fill me in that year at Cambridge.” The administrator of Tom’s funds became aware of what was happening and advised him to give up on the diplomatic career Cambridge was supposed to be preparing him for. Shamefacedly Tom accepted his guardian’s advice and by November 1934 he was on a boat headed for New York.

He decided to enroll at Columbia University to which he could commute from his grandparents’ home on Long Island. He found the place to his liking. “These people were at once more earnest and more humble, poorer, smarter perhaps, certainly more diligent than those I had known at Cambridge,” is how he explained it, but it isn’t really clear that his new associates were any less involved in self-gratification than the ones in England had been, for whom he’d developed such contempt. “Three or four nights a week my fraternity brothers and I would go flying down in the black and roaring subway to 52nd Street where we would crawl around the tiny, noisy and expensive nightclubs ….” After emerging from a night of jazz and alcohol in Manhattan’s bars, Tom found that, “the thing that depressed me most of all was the shame and despair that invaded my whole nature when the sun came up, and all the laborers were going work.” Whatever glimpse he’d had in southern France and Rome of a more serious side of his nature had evaporated. “I was spiritually dead,” he admitted. “I had been that long since!“

By February of 1937 Tom was 22 years old had been at Columbia for two years. Despite his social excesses, the talent for writing he would draw on for the rest of his life had emerged. He was doing well in his studies and more than that in extracurricular literary activities. Among the courses he signed up for was one in medieval literature, so when he came across a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy he dove into it only to discover it was an exposition of traditional Catholic theology. Initially put off by the degree of its orthodoxy, he continued to read and found the book to be a revelation in providing intellectual legitimacy for a God divorced from superstition – a Being unique in requiring no cause and no justification for its existence, since existence is its very nature. This chance encounter with Catholic thought turned out to have lasting consequences. For one thing it inspired a desire to go to church, which he initially addressed by attending services at the Episcopal church where his father had played the organ but which fell short of what he’d been looking for.

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In February of 1938 he received his Bachelor’s degree and signed up for graduate courses in English. He also set out to write a thesis about William Blake, a poet from whom he’d drawn spiritual insights that led him to the conclusion that, “the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God.” How that was to be accomplished he had yet to work out. Among the realms of thought he delved into were those of the Eastern religions, in which he found parallels to the writings of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila. What clinched his link to Catholicism though, was Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism and the investigation of scholastic theology that book led him to undertake.

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In August Tom went to mass for the first time and found in it what he’d missed in the Episcopal service. Looking back on the state of mind he’d reached by September, he wrote, “It had taken little more than a year and a half from the time I read Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy to bring me up from an ‘atheist’ … to one who accepted all the full range of possibilities of religious experience…” While reading about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ conversion, Tom was seized with a determination to take a similarly decisive action. He went to a priest he knew and told him he wanted to become a Catholic. Two months of reading and instruction followed, during which time he came to realize that of the two main branches of Catholic thought, it was not the analytical approach of St. Thomas and the Scholastics he was most at home with, but the more intuitive spirit of St. Augustine, the Desert Fathers and the mystics. At the middle of November 1938 he was baptized into the Church and received his First Communion.

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The big step had been taken; what followed was a bit of a let-down. During the course of the next year, his life continued very much as it had been. It may have been the outbreak of war in Europe that jolted him into more serious reflections, but in any case it was in September of 1939 that he concluded that what he really wanted to do, was to become a priest. After conferring with a friend who knew the details of such things, he decided to join the Franciscan order. His friend also recommended an experience he himself had had: a week’s retreat at the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky.

Tom applied to the Franciscans but was told he’d have to wait almost a year, until August of 1940, to be admitted to their novitiate. He turned in his application and reluctantly went back to what he’d been doing. The following spring he traveled to Cuba, visited the churches there and was inspired by the humility of the people he found in them. Yet as the time approached for him to join the Franciscans, he was beset with doubts – not of his beliefs but of his motives and worthiness to be a priest. After a couple of failed attempts to reassure himself, he reluctantly abandoned his vocation. He did dedicate himself even more to his personal devotions, however, and the following Easter he made a retreat at the Trappist monastery his friend at recommended. During the week he spent among the community of monks sworn to silence, he came to appreciate the value of the contemplative life. “The last thing I did before leaving Gethsemani,” Tom recalled, “was to ask … for the grace of a vocation to the Trappists, if it were pleasing to God.” It took another eight months for Tom to convince himself that the mistake he’d made earlier was in choosing the Franciscans rather than this more demanding order. What he’d wanted was to give everything to God. In December 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tom packed up his things and headed back to Our Lady of Gethsemani – this time to stay.

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Graham Greene

was born in 1905 in Berkhamsted, 30 miles northwest of London where his father was the headmaster of an Anglican boys’ school. Along with his five brothers and sisters, Graham grew up and was educated in the sedate and comfortable environs of that school.

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His intellectual development can’t be described with anything like the detail that Tom’s can. Graham did write about his early life, but he didn’t reveal much about his thoughts, especially those of a spiritual nature . What we do know about Graham’s early years are incidents he chose to include in his autobiography, some of which were distinctly unusual.

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For reasons not obvious, the onset of adolescence brought him to an emotional crisis, “Only in the clouds ahead I could see that there was no luminosity at all,” he would describe his state of mind. “Yet anything, I felt, anything, even a romantic death, might happen to save me before my thirteenth year struck.” His view of his himself had become distorted. “I was back in the house of my early childhood, but the circumstances had changed. … In those early days I had not even been aware that there existed in the same house such grim rooms as those I lived in now. … I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties … I was like the son of a quisling in a country under occupation.” “There was a boy at my school called Carter who perfected during my fourteenth and fifteenth year a system of mental torture … Carter continually tempted me with offers of friendship snatched away like a sweet, but leaving the impression that somewhere some time the torture would end.”

Once he’d reached the age he’d been dreading, he found himself subject to self-destructive impulses. “I had passed thirteen and things were worse even than I had foreseen. I lay in bed in the dormitory … and … I began trying to cut my right leg open with a penknife. But the knife was blunt and my nerve was too weak for the work.” “I tried out other forms of escape after I failed to cut my leg. …   I went into the dark room …and…drank a quantity of hypo under the false impression that it was poisonous. On another occasion I drained my blue glass bottle of hay-fever drops.” “A bunch of deadly nightshade … had only a slightly narcotic effect, and once … I swallowed twenty aspirins before swimming in the empty school baths.”

“At last came the moment of final decision. It was after breakfast one morning … that I made my break for liberty. I wrote a note … saying that … I had taken to the [Berkhamsted] Common and would remain there in hiding until my parents agreed that never again should I go back to my prison.” At the age of fifteen Graham deserted the school lodgings he’d come to despise and took up residence on a patch of park land without a tent, blanket, rain gear, food or utensils – just a book he’d brought to while away the time. He intended to subsist on wild blackberries and sleep under the stars. His capitulation, as perhaps he’d known all along, turned out to be remarkably easy. “I think at least two hours must have passed … I moved rashly out beyond the cover of the bushes and began to descend, until … I came face to face with my elder sister, Molly. … I went quietly home with her. It was a tactical defeat, but it proved all the same a strategical victory. I had changed my life. … Perhaps I was nearer a nervous breakdown than I now care to believe.”

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Graham’s father talked with the boy at length about the incident but remained dissatisfied with the level of understanding he’d achieved, so he called in Graham’s older brother, Raymond, who was studying medicine at Oxford. Raymond suggested psychoanalysis. The result was that Graham was sent to live in the house of an analyst in the Bayswater district of London, a place he came to love.   When he returned to school from his psychoanalytic sojourn, everything at Berkhamsted had somehow been transformed. “I had no fear of the old routine of classes.” he said.” … I found it easy now to make friends. The domination of Carter was over for good. … I was at last in the mainstream.” Was it the sessions he’d had with the analyst that made the difference, relief from a routine he’d come to hate, attention shown him by his father and brother, a combination of the three, or was the turnaround essentially inexplicable? Graham doesn’t offer an explanation other than to say that the interval he spent with the analyst were the happiest six months of his life.

His loathing of his life at Berkhamsted had been overcome, and that allowed him to complete his studies there and move on to Oxford; but the underlying problem hadn’t been disposed of. By the summer of 1923 Graham was eighteen and felt that, “Boredom had reached an intolerable depth.” “I realized that my old enemy was merely biding his moment.” “A manic-depressive, like my grandfather – that would be the verdict on me today, and analysis had not cured my condition.” When he came across a pistol in a room he shared with his brother, he put it into his pocket and headed for the same Common where he’d staged his break for liberty three years before. Somewhere he’d read about Russian roulette: you put a bullet into one of a revolver’s six chambers, spin the cylinder, put the muzzle to your head, and pull the trigger. One chance in six you’ll kill yourself. “I thought I had stumbled on the perfect cure. I was going to escape in one way or another.” But it wasn’t to be – not this time anyway. “There was a minute click,” he recalled after he’d tried it, “and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into firing position. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation. … I went home and put the revolver back in the corner cupboard. This experience I repeated a number of times . At fairly long intervals I found myself craving for the adrenalin drug, and I took the revolver with me when I returned to Oxford.” Over the course of the next several months he repeated the exercise six times and survived all of them – by which time that form of flirting with death had lost its ability to energize him as it had earlier. He put the revolver away and was never tempted to take it up again. Avoiding boredom by extraordinary means continued to characterize his actions, however, leading him over the years to places like Liberia, Mexico, the Congo, Kenya, Malaysia and French Indochina at the times that they were in the throes of wars or revolutions that put the lives of everyone at risk.

Graham had given his readers a glimpse into the psychology of his youth, but what about the things Tom spent so much time on: God and religion and the evolution of the feelings that led to his conversion? The contrast in the two men’s experience is striking. Not only is Graham’s account of these matters more sparse, but the details are so ambiguous as to leave us wondering how he’d come to the position he held before his conversion, what he believed afterward, and if he could have put either into words with any precision.

By the age of twenty Graham was a confirmed atheist and the Catholic woman to whom he’d become engaged was aware of it. Nevertheless Graham decided to sign up for instruction in her faith to find out what she believed, having no thought of joining her Church and in fact considering such a turn of events impossible. The instructor assigned to him was a priest whose obesity seemed inappropriate to his calling but who turned out to be very different from what Graham expected him to be. Father Trollope had been an actor in his youth, he explained later, and had been moved almost against his will into becoming first a Catholic and then a priest, about which he mused: “See the danger of going too far. There are dangerous currents out at sea which could sweep you anywhere.” Graham developed respect and affection for Trollope and began looking forward to their sessions together. Somewhere along the line he also dropped his resistance to joining the Church. How much had that change been induced by his friendship with the priest? Looking back on it 45 years later, Graham insisted that he, “became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God,” only by an intellectual effort that was serious and prolonged. On the other hand, he could no longer remember what had led him to that conclusion, only that it was not, “by way of those unconvincing philosophical arguments,” that he would later make fun of in a short story. He also neglected to elaborate on Who he considered Jesus to be, the degree of moral authority he granted Him, how much faith he put in the gospels and what he thought of the Pope. However he may have felt about such matters, he was baptized into Church on February 1926 at the age of 21, having chosen Thomas for his christening name – in honor, he made clear, of the apostle commonly referred to as Doubting Thomas. “I remember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from the Cathedral: there was no joy in it at all, only a solemn apprehension. … I was afraid of where the tide would take me.“

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AFTERWARDS

Tom

If there’s a word for Tom’s approach to writing it’s enthusiasm. He was at his most entertaining in relating personal experiences along with his top-of-the-head reactions to them. And he could come up with an opinion on just about any subject you’d care to name and go on to express his thoughts a lively manner. (“If I ever had gone crazy, I think that psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.“) On one page he’d commend his newfound faith with the fervor of an evangelist (“What a revelation it [his first attendance at a Catholic Mass] was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another, not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray.”). On the next he’d deride a contending creed with equal verve (“Professor Hering was … one of the few Protestants I have ever met who struck one as being at all holy.“).

Together with the attraction his beliefs had for committed Catholics, it was these qualities of his writing that led to the success of the autobiography he wrote shortly after joining the Trappists. He called the book The Seven Storey Mountain after Dante’s conception of purgatory, and in it he focused on the intellectual journey he’d made from doubt to faith and from the noisy world of a student and writer to the silent realm of a contemplative monk.

In the little more than twenty years left to him Tom would turn out something on the order of two dozen more books on spiritual matters, an approximately equal number on moral, social and political issues, a dozen volumes of poetry, and a variety of writings on related themes – all with the acquiescence and encouragement of his superiors at the monastery.

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As time went by the kind of personal experiences that had constituted the bulk of his most popular book were replaced in his writings by philosophical reflections and interior musings. A balanced evaluation of contending ideas was not among Tom’s talents or interests, but his gift for words did make him an effective persuader – probably more than the value of his analyses warranted. As an example of the political insights he presented to his readers, here are some of Tom’s comments on the causes of war – so diffuse, he found them to be, that no individual could be held responsible; while the attitude he adopts is one of accepting culpability for the world’s travails by ostentatiously proclaiming his own sinfulness.

By this time, I should have acquired enough sense to realize that the cause of wars is sin.

Now it seemed that at last there really would be war in earnest. … They [most people] did not realize that the world had now become a picture of what the majority of individuals had made of their own souls. … There was something else in my own mind – the recognition: “I myself am responsible for this. My sins have done this. Hitler is not the only one who has started this war: I have my share in it too …”

I knelt at the altar rail and on this the first day of the Second World War received from the hand of the priest, Christ in the Host, the same Christ Who was being nailed again to the cross by the effects of my sins, and the sins of the whole selfish, stupid, idiotic world of men.

He realized that the reliance he put on emotion and intuition could lead to inconsistencies between what he wrote and what he did . “I have had to accept the fact that my life is almost totally paradoxical. I have also had to learn gradually to get along without apologizing for the fact, even to myself.” Here are some of the things he was talking about:

He’d become a pacifist well before he entered the monastery, yet he accepted without demur his nation’s involvement in war, his brother’s voluntary participation in it, and even being forced to contribute to the effort himself as long as he didn’t have to engage in combat – a hope that he never had to put to the test. (“This war was what I had earned for myself and the world. I could hardly complain that I was being drawn into it.” “Did we really have to go to war? … As far as I could see, it was a question no private individual was capable of answering … The men in Washington presumably knew what was going on better than we did … If they called us to the army, I could not absolutely refuse to go.”)

He believed that, having made man in His image, God was so personally committed to the welfare of His creatures that He came to earth as a human being to redeem them (“Christ was not a wise man who came to teach a doctrine. He is God, Who became incarnate in order to effect a mystical transformation of mankind.“); and he respected God’s first commandment not to have strange gods before Him. On the other hand he could simultaneously endorse such a completely different view of divinity as that of the Tao. (“If there is a correct answer to the question, ‘What is the Tao?’ it is: ‘I don’t know.’ … It is like an empty bowl that can never be filled.‘” “The whole secret of life lies in the discovery of this Tao which can never be discovered.“)

While proclaiming an all-encompassing love for mankind (“In Louisville … I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.“), he could issue blanket condemnations of people who started from premises different from his own. (“The greatest sin of … the West … is not only greed and cruelty, not only moral dishonesty and infidelity to the truth, but above all its unmitigated arrogance toward the rest of the human race.” “There are some men for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it down, … men who never look at anything until the intend to abuse it and who never even notice what they do not want to destroy.”)

While extolling a life of silence and meditation, Tom devoted much of his own time to producing manuscripts for publication and interacting with people outside the monastery – in person when he was allowed to, otherwise by letter. (“The fact that I was hurrying and ran into people only indicates that I was much less of a contemplative than I thought I was.” “There are days when there seems to be nothing left of my … contemplative vocation … And everybody calmly tells me: “Writing is your vocation.“)

As it turned out Tom died in Thailand at the age of 53, apparently of heart failure brought on by an electric shock he suffered while attending a monastic conference there.

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Graham

graduated from Oxford in 1925. He also started corresponding with a Catholic woman named Vivien Dayrell-Browning. Out of curiosity about her beliefs, he decided to take instruction in the Catholic faith, wound up joining her Church in February of the following year, and marrying the woman in October of 1927.   During this period of his life he was moving from one job to another in an effort to settle on something that suited his talents. Ultimately he landed a job as a sub-editor with The Times of London that seemed to fill the bill. In his off hours he engaged in a pursuit more to his liking – writing novels. After three tries he managed to get one published in 1929. It was called The Man Within, and its success was sufficient to induce him to quit his job – against the urgings of his employer, by he way, and unwisely it seemed even to him after three years without further success. Finally he tried his hand at an action thriller which he called Stamboul Train, and it proved to be a winner, at least to the extent of letting him continue in the profession he’d chosen. Once he’d got his feet on the ground, Graham was able to turn out one book after another, many of his 24 novels becoming best sellers with a lot of them being made into movies as well. He would write two autobiographies, four travel books, lots of short stories, essays and movie reviews, and collaborate on eight different screenplays.

It isn’t my purpose to evaluate Graham’s literary accomplishments, but some of the comments I make about his life and thought may create the impression that I dismiss his talent as a writer. Let me point out that among the eight screenplays Graham worked on, I would personally rank two of them among the best I’ve ever encountered: The Fallen Idol (1948) and what for me is Graham’s masterpiece, The Third Man (1949) – in neither of which does he use the word, Catholic, or make any reference to God or religion. Having had the sense to ignore that subject, he also seemed to profit from the constraints that screenwriting imposes on the people who do it; and in the particular films I named he was able to draw on the talents of director Carol Reed as well – none of which detracts from the magnitude of Graham’s achievement.

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As a successful author Graham was able to take advantage of material he gained in travels to out of the way places at perilous times and by indulging in practices prevalent in those locales. During his visits to Indochina during the war between the French and Communists in the early 1950’s, for example, he became a frequent and avid user of opium.

One of the things we can conclude from the way Graham lived his life is that his membership in the Catholic Church had little effect on his moral behavior, at least with respect to sex and marriage. Graham and his wife would have two children, one in 1933 and the other in 1936, but neither his attachment to his family nor the standards of his religion kept him from patronizing prostitutes and indulging in sexual liaisons as opportunity allowed. Some of his affairs lasted for years, including one with a woman named Catherine Walston that started in 1946 and led to the breakup of his marriage two years later. Although never divorced, Graham would live separately from his wife children for the rest of his life.  

If Tom can be characterized as an enthusiast, Graham came near to being the opposite. In a number of his books he offers an insight into his personality by including a character that has a lot of his own traits. The Graham stand-in is typically wry and reticent in casual conversation, a lapsed Catholic or borderline atheist. The image he presents to the people around him is of a man so weary of the world as to have lost interest in it and its people. But that turns out to be a pose. A little prodding from someone in the story brings out the moral philosopher in him, and he turns out to be quick to judge and harsh in his judgments, often harsher than the people he criticizes for engaging in the same practice but who rely on standards different from his own.

Malcolm Muggeridge was an English writer who was almost an exact contemporary of Greene, having been born and died one year earlier. The two men crossed paths during World War II as a result of their joint involvement in military intelligence, and they later wrote articles for some of the same publications. Muggeridge, who would later convert to Catholicism with results quite different from those of Graham, had a flair for summing up people in a few words. Here’s what he had to say about Graham.

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I once went with Graham Greene [to a stage show featuring nude women]. The spectacle appealed to him for its tattiness and seediness; the guise in which he most likes the Devil’s offerings to be presented. … For expeditions in the Blitz, he made a special act of penitence and other appropriate liturgical preparations in case death came upon him unawares. It made me feel uneasy, and even envious; like traveling in a first class railway carriage with a first-class ticket holder when one only has a third-class ticket oneself. I imagined Graham being carried away to paradise and I left behind in purgatory, or worse. Ever since I have known him, he has seemed to me to possess some special quality of aloofness and detachment from the passions he so concerns himself about in his novels, and, for that matter, in his life. If you come upon him unawares … an expression in his face of isolation from everything and everyone around him, makes it seem almost as though he were blind. One almost expects him to have a white stick, and to need a friendly guiding hand to see him across the road. I once without thinking said of him that he was a saint trying unsuccessfully to be a sinner, and I a sinner trying equally unsuccessfully to be a saint. The remark, which was widely quoted, annoyed him, not so much because it credited him with being a saint (a role for which he has no taste), as because of my pretensions to be a sinner. What sort of sinner are you? he asked scornfully, as though I had claimed some quite undeserved achievement or beatitude.

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DOES GOD EXIST?

Tom

We have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God.

I believe that Christ, Who is the Son of God, and Who is God, has the power to raise up all those who have died in His grace, to the glory of His own Resurrection.

God gave man a nature that was ordered to a supernatural life. He created man with a soul that was made not to bring itself to perfection in its own order, but to be perfected by Him in an order infinitely beyond the reach of human powers.

Jesus Christ was not simply a man, a good man, a great man, the greatest prophet, a wonderful healer, a saint: He was something that made all such trivial words pale into irrelevance. He was God.

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Enough said?

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Graham

wrote the first of two autobiographies at the age of 67. When he got around to explaining why he’d joined the Catholic Church 45 years earlier, he said, “I cannot be bothered to remember – I accept. With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness [as it turned out, he still had 20 years to live].” Not only did he leave the reason for his decision murky, but the degree of his commitment as well. “I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.” “At that time I had not been emotionally moved, but only intellectually convinced; I was in the habit of formally practicing my religion, going to Mass every Sunday and to Confession perhaps once a month, and in my spare time I read a good deal of theology – sometimes with fascination, sometimes with repulsion, nearly always with interest.” He did stop going to mass and Confession for a while but later resumed the practices.

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From the nature of the life Graham led and the content of the novels he wrote – say from Brighton Rock in 1938 to A Burnt-Out Case in 1960 – we’re led to conclude that whatever religious convictions he started out with grew weaker with time. Nevertheless he’d made a conscious decision to join the Church and was apparently reluctant to disavow that choice. He did continue to cling to certain Catholic practices while ignoring the more substantial matters that underlay them, suggesting that he found comfort of the sort that non-practicing parents get from having their children baptized and receive First Communion. He has a character in The Heart of the Matter take note of these confusions of the superficial with the substantial, that he himself was subject to: “‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me – it only stops you marrying me.‘”

Graham didn’t like being referred to as a Catholic author. He did invite the label though by the frequency with which he identified characters in his stories as Catholics and attributed their behavior to that fact. In speculating about the nature of his religious commitment, we should take note of the pressures of social etiquette. Members of some groups are given protection against disparagement by rules then in vogue – Negroes, Jews, women, and homosexuals certainly in this era – while unprotected groups remain fair game for negative generalizations that may be tolerated, acceded to or even applauded. One of the ways that members of these latter groups try to blunt the effects of socially acceptable prejudice is by criticizing the class they belong to even more than its critics do. A willingness to admit the failings of one’s own faction suggests open-mindedness without requiring an admission of personal guilt. When an individual man criticizes men in general for how they treat women, he isn’t confessing a fault; he’s blaming other men for their failure to do what he’s done. In a similar way a White person castigates White people for they way they treat Negroes; a German derides Germans for having been Nazis. Males, White people and Germans are born to the groups they find themselves in and can’t opt out. They deal with the consequences by whatever means they think appropriate. On the other hand a person’s religion is a matter of choice. Catholics can choose to leave the Church, but those who don’t can at least mitigate the denigration they’re sometimes subject to by the fervor with which they acknowledge that the clergy is behind the times and other Catholics are intellectually servile. Graham indulged this option to the hilt, demonstrating the lack of his subservience by the extent to which he ignored and belittled Catholic teachings. As a novelist he had plenty of opportunities to create characters to make the point. Catholics for whom he wanted to retain the reader’s sympathy he usually portrayed as having lost all or most of their faith, and rather than turning to a priest or the Bible to resolve their moral quandaries, they’d rely on their personal feelings. On the other hand, evangelizers and those who followed the teachings of the Church because they believed God’s authority lay behind them, usually got rough treatment at Graham’s hands. This kind of anti-loyalty could become so exaggerated as to constitute a parody of manipulative writing. Take a man named Rycker in A Burnt-Out Case. Graham subjects this Catholic to such an array of author-devised gimmickry in an effort to turn readers against him that the character becomes sympathetic in our eyes as an underdog relentlessly being attacked by a bully.

Here are a few other examples, none of which is the least obscure in the novel in which it occurs:

Brighton Rock (1938). The vicious gang leader and murderer is a Catholic. The woman who pursues him to put an end to his depredations has no religious feelings but acts out of her innate concern for others.

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The Power and the Glory (1940). During a suppression of religion in Mexico, priests and nuns who persist in their beliefs are being executed. They have to go on the run to survive – as would happen a decade later in Spain as well. It’s a situation custom-made for a Catholic writer to come to the defense of the persecuted members of his faith, and the plot Graham concocts seems designed to do just that: a Catholic priest is hounded by an enforcer of atheism as implacably as Valjean was by Javert in Les Miserables. But it’s Graham Greene at the controls this time around, not Victor Hugo. Rather than having a sympathetic down-and-outer like Valjean be his hero, Graham chooses to personify Mexico’s tyrannized Catholics by an alcoholic priest who’s violated his vow of celibacy in fathering an illegitimate child by one of his parishioners, is uncertain of his religious beliefs and tentative in acting on them. The man who’s out to kill him, on the other hand, is a dedicated agent of a communist-like government, convinced he’s helping the people of his region by disposing of the knavish priests and nuns who prey on them through their superstitions and in other contexts shows himself quite capable of acts of kindness. As you might expect, it’s this Javert-like character who carries the day in Graham’s account. Once he’s rounded up the priest, he has him shot. So what can the Catholics of Mexico take from the way things turn out? A little consolation maybe in viewing the murder of the priest as an opportunity he wouldn’t otherwise have had to triumph through martyrdom. But how about Graham himself? Quirky as his allegiances were, what did he think about killing people when they thought they’d go to heaven as a result?

The Heart of the Matter (1948). Major Scobie’s a likeable guy and a more than competent police commissioner, but he’s troubled by complications that have arisen from an adulterous affair he’s involved in. Raised as a Catholic, Scobie feels compelled to confess his sins to a priest, but in spite of what the priest, the Church, and the Old and New Testament have to say about adultery, Scobie’s innate sense of compassion induces him to disregard their advice. Think of the pain it would bring to his wife or mistress if either one of them had to get along without him! He goes on to explain to the confessor: “I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel – tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but … I’m not sure that I even believe.” So Scobie’s lost his faith or at least most of it; but there’s apparently a scrap lodged somewhere in his psyche, because he continues to be beset with mental anguish – not for having violated God’s laws concerning marriage and sexual intercourse, it turns out, but the Church-imposed restriction against receiving Communion while not being in the state of grace!  

The End of the Affair (1951).   A writer and a married woman are attracted to each other and fall easily into a sexual liaison. Both are atheists; neither has any moral compunctions about adultery. They’re in love, after all, and the woman’s husband is a bit of a bore. During the Blitz the two of them are carrying on their affair in a building when it’s hit by a bomb. The woman discovers the hand of the writer protruding from the rubble and thinks he’s been killed, but he pulls himself out and recovers without serious damage. From that day on though, she avoids further contact with him, putting an abrupt end to their affair. Two years later the writer encounters the woman by chance, one thing leads to another, and he gets a look at a diary she’d been keeping. He discovers that during the few minutes she’d thought he was dead, she’d made a deal with God – Whom she didn’t believe in – that if it could turn out that her lover was still alive, she’d break off her relationship with him. From that time until the present she’s lived up to the terms of the contract she’d made with a Being-who-didn’t-exist, giving Him an opportunity to prove to her that in fact He did. The story goes on to other religious inanities, some of which are of an explicitly Catholic nature, but the bargain with God lies at the heart of the plot – concocted by an adult human being, we’re led to believe, to serve as the basis for a book that turned out to be a best seller and went on from there to inspire two movies.

Sometime after publication of The End of the Affair Graham was informed by a Cardinal that his earlier novel, The Power and the Glory, had been condemned by the Holy Office, but that he, the Cardinal, thought The End of the Affair would have been an even more appropriate target. Graham would later take consolation from the reassurance Pope Paul VI offered him on the matter, but Pope Pius XII had shared the Cardinal’s reaction. “I think this man is in trouble,” Pius had observed to a British bishop after reading The End of the Affair. “If he ever comes to you, you must help him.”

A Burnt-Out Case (1960). The main character is an architect famed for the Catholic churches he’s designed. Somewhere along the line he’s lost his faith not only in God and his religion but in his profession as well. If there’s no God, what’s the point of building churches? So he gives up on civilization, flips a coin, and winds up in a leper colony in the Congo. His background proves useful in putting up a new hospital there. Everybody praises him for the effort he’s put into it and the humanitarian or religious impulses that motivated him; but the architect goes out of his way to insist there’s absolutely no noble or religious purpose behind any of his actions. There is one individual, however, even more important to the welfare of the lepers, and even more self-effacing in his work. That’s the determinedly but unabrasively atheistic doctor. There is another guy lurking in the background though, who eventually brings about the architect’s downfall. As you might guess, he’s a dedicated Catholic, particularly ostentatious in the way he practices his religion.

These are some examples of how an author considered Catholic by the literary world portrayed his church in those of his novels where he chose to raise the issue of religion, leading readers like me to wonder what the devil an anti-Catholic author might have been able to add.

From the diffidence with which Graham practiced his religion we’re led to conclude that his membership proved to be something of an embarrassment for him. Whether or not he would have joined the Church if he had it to do over again isn’t what we set out to discover though. What we would like to know is what Graham would have said to the question: Does God exist?

My guess is that even late in life he would have said yes but out of habit rather than conviction. There is a piece of evidence more instructive on the matter than his actual response, however. Looking back from 1971 Graham wrote, “in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God,” and he proceeded to add, “though I now dislike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations and prefer Chardin’s ‘Noosphere’.”

Noosphere. For those not familiar with the word, it comes from the Greek, “Nous,” meaning mind or intellect, and was popularized by the Jesuit priest, anthropologist, and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. To Teilhard and his disciples, the Noosphere is the sphere of mind or thought, as the atmosphere is the sphere of gases that surround the earth. Biosphere offers a closer analogy, being that area or realm of the earth in which living things reside. Teilhard endowed the Noosphere with properties beyond those of a geographic region though, viewing it as the repository of the effects of evolutionary processes that had already led to the emergence of human thought and will continue to direct man’s progress toward his ultimate destiny, which Teilhard identified with the Second Coming.

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You may find the idea of the Noosphere profound, looney or something in between, but the word was not intended as either a synonym or a substitute for God, whether the latter is conceived as an impersonal Creator, the Cosmos, an inward dwelling Spirit, or a thinking Being personally concerned with the lives of His creatures, as He is for Moslems, Jews and Christians. The Noosphere is a quasi scientific notion that occupies a place in Teilhard’s philosophy similar to what the biosphere does in that of Darwin’s disciples, each containing the effects of and evidence for evolutionary processes – those that led to human thought and social organization for Teilhard, and to the variety and sophistication of life-forms for Darwinists. Neither the Noosphere nor biosphere is opposed to a belief in God, but each is sometimes cited by its proponents as evidence against the need for God because the effects of evolution don’t require the intervention of an external intelligence.

We leave discussion of these philosophical points to those who find them interesting. What matters for us is that Graham viewed Teilhard’s Noosphere as a better word for what he believed in than an omniscient Being endowed with humanlike traits of the sort that Jesus personified and that the other members of the Trinity also exhibited. The vagueness of the meanings people attach to the words they use makes it difficult to be insistent about what they actually believe, especially with reference to such amorphous concepts as God, but this much seems clear: in the later stages of his life at least, what Graham meant by the word, God, would not have been regarded as God by you or me or the people who read his novels.

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Does God exist? Tom says yes. Graham says no.

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