"The wall of the burial-ground had fallen in: one or two crosses had been smashed by enthusiasts: an angel had lost one of its stone wings, and what gravestones were left undamaged leant at an acute angle in the long marshy grass. One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber merchant. It was odd – this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures – you had to kill yourself among the graves."

It may have been the subject matter but this book was hard to follow and such a relief to finish.

Saying that, it is not a book I would have abandoned.

The Power and the Glory - as remote as it may have been to anything I can relate to - was strangely compelling because the story of a secular regime oppressing people by outlawing religion (or anything else that posed as an opposition) - seemed to reflect much of the time it was written in.

And of course, I am glad to see that Greene has by this time (1940) moved on from writing insipid thrillers.

(Review first posted on BookLikes.)

That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone: now in his corruption he had learnt...

There is a key scene which takes place in a prison after The Priest is arrested for the less serious crime of possessing brandy and not the more serious crime of treason, for which he is also deemed guilty by the authorities. There he meets a woman whom he describes as "complacent" in her piety. His own struggle with complacency forms the core thrust of this story.

Before religion was outlawed The Priest led a rather comfortable, albeit bland existence. Reading his description of his old life I was reminded of Dante's Inferno specifically the Uncommitted, the lukewarm who chose neither good nor evil. They are condemned to a sort of eternal twilight existence outside of Hell. An eternity of waiting outside the velvet rope.

It's only after he is on the run does his life take on any dimension--he is unrecognizable from his photograph from those earlier days. It's while on the run that he encounters true sin, the kind that gets you past the velvet rope and into the second or third circle of Club Inferno: He fathers a child out of wedlock, an unpardonable sin because he is not truly sorry for it. He loves his daughter.

Here's the paradox: it's through a sin which will condemn him to Hell according to the Church rules that he comes to understand true love and humility:

This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child.

But in the end he is incapable of it:

He prayed, "God help them," but in the moment of prayer he switched back to his child beside the rubbish-dump, and he knew it was for her only that he prayed. Another failure.

This is what makes the ending so fascinating for me. Throughout the novel the struggle of The Priest is contrasted with the struggle of The Lieutenant, a misguided and often brutal reformer who is capable of small acts of kindness nonetheless. The Lieutenant is not one of the complacent ones. In his own way he is saint, one of "Hell's Saints" to use a phrase from The End of the Affair.

Even though The Priest cannot achieve saintliness, there's reason to believe that he may win a victory over The Lieutenant after all. In a world where suffering and sin is almost unavoidable, "Saintliness" (by the Church's definition) may not be necessary after all. Such a wonderful ending and such a humane vision.

The Power and the Glory is a powerful novel that is unashamed to reveal the inglorious that resides in human nature and the real struggles the best of us encounter in trying to rise above our limitations. The protagonist is an unnamed whisky priest who is all too acutely aware that he is unfit for office.

The story is set in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s when the Catholic Church was outlawed by the revolutionary government. It was a time of religious persecution and a capital offence to function as a priest. All priests are to be shot unless they conform to the governor’s law to marry. The whisky priest is the last priest alive on the run, hotly pursued by a police lieutenant who despises the Catholic Church and everything it stands for.

A reward is placed on the head of the priest. In every village the priest has visited and given shelter, hostages are taken and killed unless they turn him in. I followed the whisky priest’s desperate shuttling from place to place to avoid capture with fear and trembling. It soon became clear that even though the priest is an alcoholic and has fathered a child, and continues to struggle with elements of the faith, he is moved by the suffering of others. On many occasions when he is at risk of being arrested, he has visited the dying, conducted Mass, listened to the confession of the people at their insistence, and even extended help to an outcast whom he knew will betray him. Yet, at other times he is not above charging the poor for baptism and bargaining with cantina owners for liquor, including wrestling the last chicken bone from a lame dog. He is ashamed and mortified. He encounters kindness from people he meets while on the run, and is moved by their extraordinary affection and companionship.

What stood out was Greene’s ability to bare the whisky priest’s soul to us. He is tortured by his failings and unworthiness. Yet, he is honest in not being able to repent and is ashamed of his empty prayers of contrition and even habit of piety. What struck me the most is his palpable humanity. Reading his painful struggles, it is impossible to be self-righteous and think I can do better. The dominant feeling I had toward this priest is one of pity. The last section that documented his fate was heartbreaking.

I was left with one thought after the last page was turned. Perhaps, there are no saints. There are only fallible human beings who sometimes, in rare moments of better judgment, succeed in showing kindness and compassion toward others.

The Power and the Glory is considered Greene’s masterpiece and worthwhile reading.

The Wiskey Preist, a clergyman of ill repute and notoriously bad morals, but a priest nonetheless. 

“But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .”

(Book 589 from 1001 books) - The Labyrinthine Ways = The Power and The Glory, Graham Greene

The Power and the Glory (1940) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. The title is an allusion to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen." It was initially published in the United States under the title The Labyrinthine Ways.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «جلال و قدرت»؛ «قدرت و جلال»؛ «قدرت و افتخار»؛ «مسیحای دیگر یهودای دیگر»؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ انتشاذاتیها: (وزارت فرهنگ و ارشاد اسلامی، امیرکبیر؛ طرح نو، چشمه) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هشتم ماه دسامبر سال1996میلادی

عنوان: قدرت و افتخار؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: عبدالله آزادیان؛ تهران، امیرکبیر، سال1342؛ در312ص؛ چاپ دیگر سال1393؛ شابک9789640016664؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده20م

عنوان: جلال و قدرت؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: هرمز عبداللهی؛ تهران، طرح نو، سال1373؛ در325ص؛ چاپ سوم سال1387؛

عنوان: مسیحای دیگر یهودای دیگر (قدرت و جلال)؛ نویسنده: گراهام گرین؛ مترجم: هرمز عبداللهی؛ تهران، چشمه، سال1376؛ در325ص؛

جلال و قدرت را انتشارات طرح نو منتشر کرده، همین کتاب با نام «قدرت و جلال» در انتشارات چشمه چاپ شده است

گراهام گرین، این کتاب خویش را، پس از سفر به «مکزیک» در سال1938میلادی، بنوشتند، و در آن به سر و سامان اسفبار مردمان کشور «مکزیک»، در زمان اجرای قوانین ضدمذهبی دولت آن کشور، پرداخته اند؛ این اثر که هم در موضوع، و هم در درونمایه، به پشتیبانی از ایمان مسیحی می‌پردازد، در زمره ی شاهکارهای ادبیات مذهبی غرب قرار می‌گیرد، هر چند که تشبیه کشیش میخواره، و متزلزل داستان به «حضرت مسیح»، موجب زشت شمردن این اثر، از سوی کلیسای کاتولیک نیز شده بود

نقل از ص183: (وقتی انسان بتواند چهره ی زن یا مردی را به‌ دقت در نظر مجسم کند، همیشه می‌تواند به او احساس ترحم نیز داشته باشد، این صفتی است که با تصویر خدا قرین و همراه است؛ وقتی انسان خطهای گوشه ی چشمها و شکل دهان کسی را ببیند، و ببیند که موهایش چگونه رشد می‌کنند، دیگر محال است بتواند به او نفرت داشته باشد؛ نفرت تنها از کمبود و درماندگی نیروی تخیل سرچشمه می‌گیرد؛ امید غریزه‌ ای است که تنها ذهن استدلالی و معقول بشر می‌تواند آن را از بین ببرد)؛

از ص198: (غریزه مانند حس وظیفه است – آدم آن را براحتی با وفاداری اشتباه می‌کند)؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/03/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 04/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Classic Parable, 1930s Mexico, Paramount Importance Today
"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant," 1950.

Greene was driven to write this sympathetic novel about persecution of Mexican priests after visiting the Mexican province of Tabasco in 1938 at the height of the Mexican anti-clerical purge of Marxist revolutionaries. Upon returning home, Greene called it the "fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth." [Note: obviously this was before the Nazis' slaughter of millions of Jews during WW II.]

The Power and the Glory is Greene's nearly flawless parable of dualities in society and within us: good vs. evil, spirituality vs. materialism, love vs. hate, and the freedom of the individual versus the intrusive and paternalistic state.

Greene based the novel on the life of a real-life whiskey priest who "existed for ten years in the forest and swamps, venturing out only at night." It is structured as a game of cat and mouse between the priest and an unnamed Communist police lieutenant as part of an attempt to eradicate the country of Catholicism.

The lieutenant despises the church and is obsessed with capturing the priest to execute him for the greater good of the state. The communists' attempts backfired, turning the priest into a martyr in the eyes of the people.

To me, the novel's focus on hope and redemption and the lessons of Greene's realistic parable make it a classic. The whiskey priest is a significantly flawed man, a bad alcoholic, who has been scandalized by fathering a child in a night of weakness with a peasant woman. He is acutely aware of his defects and failures as both a man and a priest. Although a man of the cloth with faith in a hereafter, he is terrified of pain and of death, and thus acknowledges his doubt. His knowledge of self elevates him to the level of heroic in the novel, as he is redeemed by his conviction that he is responsible for his sins and the suffering he has brought on others, especially on his illegitimate daughter.

He especially feels a sharp pain when seeing her--she's around 10--because she seems to have lost her innocence way too soon and thus he sees her as having scant hope for pleasure and happiness in the world. His love for her and sense of responsibility for her plight, her ruined purity crush the man: "The world was in her heart already like the small spot of decay in a fruit." So, through the sin of her conception and the love he has for her, he finds salvation, even in his darkest hour as the chase by the lieutenant and police force gets tighter and closer.

Though dark and tense, this novel is so hopeful in Greene's vision and truth that even a most flawed man can achieve redemption if he can humbly accept his fallibility and responsibility for his sins and the harm he has caused others. Indeed, such a man can gain back respect and even be admired to the point of being heroic.

In today's world where our leaders spew spastic shit daily in 140 characters under a tweety bird, full of noxious narcissism, always passing the buck and refusing to admit even the possibility of their human fallibility or a sense of responsibility when things go wrong, this parable seems a particularly important read for young adults and a must-read reminder to the rest of us of our greater selves.

“He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted-- to be a saint.”--Greene

I have always listed this book among the top ten novels of my life, but have not read it for many years. I agree with John Updike, who says of the book, “This is Greene’s masterpiece. The energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, and an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist.” I just reread Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which I found terrific, but darker than Power and the Glory, which though also dark, sings in places, and is ultimately moving, and unforgettable. And to this agnostic (me, I mean), he makes a powerful case for some kind of faith in love, even possibly God's love:

“'Oh,' the priest said, '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, and smashed open graves. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.’”

And it’s a particular kind of love that this priest and Greene explore, one for the poor, the indigent, and not the love of the Crystal Cathedral and the comfortably rich.

The Power and the Glory is one of four “Catholic” novels from Greene (also including The End of the Affair and Brighton Park), though all of them feature struggles with faith worthy of Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee. This is a pilgrimage novel—such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in a way, a story of hope and love in the darkest of times. The whiskey priest is stripped of every religious vestment, his life reduced to bare spiritual essentials. He’s not a saint, he’s very much a human being with deep flaws who continues to serve as a priest and keep his faith in God.

Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation was in part intended to address what were seen as abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, which some had seen as getting rich and fat as the poor suffered. This was also the idea behind the Red Shirt anti-clericalism of Mexico in the thirties, where priests were forced to marry, and the Church and indeed all evidence of religion was eventually--for a time--banned. Priests who did not renounce their faith were at one point rounded up and shot. Those who didn’t turn over priests in some towns were taken hostage and shot. It is in this context Greene writes of the last priest in the state of Tabasco, who had fathered a child whom he loves, though it is evidence of his "sin," his "adultery."

The whiskey priest can hear the confessions of people wherever he goes, but he himself can't yet renounce his own transgressions.

“When we love the fruit of our sin we are damned indeed,” the whiskey priest thinks. But he can’t repent this sin, because he loves her, of course, which of course makes so much sense for all of us.

The priest also drinks, and he is afraid of the death that he is faced with as the authorities hunt him down, as he is tracked down by a character he knows as “Judas” again and again. Pomp and “respectability” are taken from him, as he, like Jesus, goes among the poor, the destitute.

“How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

His is an identity by subtraction--almost a kind of Buddhist renunciation, or maybe John Calvin and Martin Luther's stripping down the Church in their Protestant moment to the bare, unadorned essentials of faith--as he loses everything he has owned, is reduced to rags, without shoes. And still he performs the Mass as he shuffles from village to village, hearing confessions of people as he goes.

And his nemesis in this tale is a red shirt atheist/Communist lieutenant who hates the Church and its indulgences, and hates the priest, too, for not taking an active role against poverty: “It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.”

There are powerful images of spiritual anguish in this book, such as this one of an encounter on the road between the priest and a woman whose baby has died, who carries him in search of a blessing, maybe searching for a miracle:

“The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”

This is a powerful novel of spiritual depth, one of my favorite books ever. When I first read it I was a Christian, and again when I taught it, and now think of myself as an agnostic, but I was still very moved by this book again all the way through. I don't think you have to be religious to strive for some kind of meaning in bleak circumstances. Greene was once asked where he imagined the whiskey priest might be, in the afterlife, and he answered “purgatory,” which is to say neither saint nor damned, but as a deeply flawed and sympathetic human being who loves his daughter, who makes him realize: “We must love the whole world as if it were a single child.” With that kind of love, then, you could have some chance of changing the world. You don't have to be religious to understand that kind of love and commitment to goodness.

An unnamed priest is on the run during the 1930s’ persecution of Catholic priests by the anti-clerical government in Mexico.
Our protagonist who has succumbed to alcoholism, is running away from authorities and if possible, hides in pious people’s houses.
Nevertheless he constantly chastises himself for his flight. He is torn between giving himself up, continuing his escape and fighting against the persecutors by secretly administering confessions and baptisms, albeit drunk.
Is he a coward? Should he have martyred himself like many of his brothers?
Or is he a hero?

Apparently books where Mexico is terrible is where it's for me, right now? These trifling excuses for GR reviews brought to you by late nights + pandemic. Fun times.

I'm honestly not sure why I like Graham Greene so much, but I tend to circle back to his books every few years. This one is set during a period of anti-clericalism in Mexico during 1930s. The protagonist is a fugitive priest who, despite being a coward, a sinner, and an alcoholic, continues to try and priest for people. He’s pursued by an unnamed lieutenant who pointedly shoots any villagers who have harboured the priest. Needless to say, this does not end well.

It’s kind of a fascinatingly ugly book. The priest is such an utter ruin of a man—he’s done pretty much everything a priest shouldn’t do—and yet watching him strive, almost against his own nature, for fragments of grace is … strangely moving? A juxtaposition of the human and the divine that works for me in ways a less flawed exploration wouldn’t or couldn’t.

From what I understand the Catholic Church wasn’t a super fan of this aproach. But that kinda just makes me like it more.

And I do think, in spite of everything, perhaps because of everything, there’s space to hope here. A faith that even staunchly faithless me can see beauty in.

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

n  Resulta demasiado fácil morir por lo bueno o hermoso, por el hogar o los hijos o la civilización: fue necesario un Dios que muriese por los hombres mezquinos y corrompidos.n

Este libro figura entre los 100 mejores libros desde los años 20's al presente según la revista Time. A mi me dejó marcando ocupado (de ahi la falta de estrellas, pues aun lo estoy pensando)

La historia situada en México de los años 20's cuando el gobernador de Tabasco (Partido Socialista Radical), entre otras medidas, prohibe el alcohol y declara ilegal la Iglesia Católica y todas sus representaciones: sacerdotes, iglesias y hasta las cruces en las tumbas.

n  Si Dios fuera igual a un sapo, uno podría librar de ellos al mundo; pero ya que Dios era como uno mismo, no servía de nada estropear las figuras de piedra: sería preciso suicidarse entre las sepulturas.n

Green nos introduce dentro de las vida de uno de los sacerdotes que no huye, y que no se casa como otros para escapar el ser fusilado. Y que, definitivamente, no es un santo. Un sacerdote que permanece anónimo a lo largo de la novela, y que constituye durante su jornada todo un estudio de lo Humano: patético, miserable, alcoholico... pecador. ¿Es más fácil ser virtuoso en la miseria, cuando no hay nada que perder? Cosa que se contrapone a ese enrevesado mestizo que juega a Judas. O los indios que son los únicos que siguen creyendo, a su manera, o tal vez sea una medida supersticiosa en una tierra donde la vida parece valer tan poco.

Mientras que por otra parte juega con el extranjero perdido en otro país, viviendo de esperanzas que sabe que nunca se realizarán. O de esos padres de una niña que es para ellos una extraña.

El policia que persigue algo indefinible, que claramente no es la figura en que concentra sus esfuerzos; y que no es un Javert porque representa también una medida más humana y contradictoria.

Y el absurdo. No me digan que eso no forma parte de nuestras vidas, con eso lo de las botellas de licor. Y el amor por el morbo; con el jovenzuelo sintiendo interés por martires fusilados.

¿Me gustó? No.
Pero mejor hacen ustedes el intento de delucidarlo por sí mismos.

n  Cuando uno mira con detención a un hombre o a una mujer, siempre llega a sentir piedad…; ésa es una cualidad que la imagen de Dios trae consigo. Cuando miráis las arrugas junto a los ojos, la forma de la boca, el modo de crecer el pelo, es imposible odiar. El odio no es más que un fracaso de la imaginación.n

This is a powerful little book. It shows the best and worst of dogma, as well as the cowardice and bravery of being human and living up to a standard, whatever that standard may be.
The unnamed Whisky Priest is everything good and bad the human race. He's flawed, full of guilt & sin and still he struggles to do right and find his way. He holds mass and confessions, absolving others of guilt and sin.....but there's no one to absolve his guilt & sin. He will suffer always. Yet, he faces himself and becomes a martyr for all, in a quiet, almost unnoticed way.
The Lieutenant is also everything good and bad on the Governmental side. He truly believes the Church must be destroyed as it is destroying the peasants by robbing them of their few pesos. But in doing so, he feels no compunction in killing the peasants. Which is worse: to live in poverty or to not live at all?
A powerful story.

This is the first Greene novel in which its partial extract to read in an English literature course eventually introduced me to know Graham Greene and I had to learn to enjoy reading him more from his other works. It's a pity I can't recall the exact pages due to such a long time, 43 years ago. A bit embittered, I did my best to keep reading, struggling with this formidable hardship and learned to gain more light on those new words, idioms, phrases, etc. used in the novel. It was a kind of tough adventure in which I had since found challenging, literarily speaking.

Some lines scribbled on its end page suggested that the wordy novel essentially required my concentration on the background of every character because it had then evolved from rather complicated structures; therefore, I might have liked him more if I had had some able advisors to solve what I was in doubt.

I still recall my impressions on his strikingly amazing words and sentences used in this novel due to the rarity, in other words, I had then never read/heard them before. I couldn't help underlining them in red ink and thought they would be useful in my written or spoken English later. For example:

The man swung his hammock back and forth. He said, 'It's better to be alive and poor than rich and dead.' (p. 84)

The priest got up again and drank more water. He wasn't very thirsty; he was satisfying a sense of luxury. (p. 162)

He said, 'Pride was what made the angels fall. ...' (p. 196)

Endnote:
Today (2016.9.5) around noon I vaguely recalled reading part of the studied text revealing a scene of a place in rural Mexico where the priest staring at a swarm of the flies in the heat of the sun stays temporarily while on the run. I hope to find it out soon. This means I have to reread the whole story from the beginning from such an ancient friend.