Toward the Heart

In both England and the U.S. last week, a bestselling novel was causing religious controversy. The novel: Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (see BOOKS).

The argument was over Author Greene's intention--and accomplishment. Greene is a Roman Catholic convert, with a convert's intensity: he recently voiced the hope that the Church may be driven underground, to find there a revival of spiritual force. Was his new book expounding a heresy or defending the faith? Had he made his "hero" a damned sinner or a shining saint--or merely a nice guy who didn't know how to get along with women? And what, exactly, did he mean by "the heart of the matter"?

Is He Damned? Henry Scobie, the principal character in the story, was deputy police commissioner during wartime in a tiny, fetid port on Africa's west coast. He seemed like a dull, plodding Briton; he was also a serious Catholic. Something happened to his integrity: he betrayed his professional honor, his wife, his best friend, and finally his God. At the end he decided that the only way out was suicide.

When one of his debt-ridden colleagues had hanged himself, Scobie had insisted to the local priest that this suicide might be forgiven because, being a non-Catholic, the man did not know what he was doing. "If you or I did it, it would be despair--I grant you anything with us. We'd be damned, all right, because we know, but he doesn't know a thing." Scobie believed that his own suicide would eternally damn him--shut him off forever from the presence of God.

Scobie believed in God but he could not altogether trust Him. In a significant dialogue with the voice of God in his conscience, he desperately opposed God's will with his own: "I know what I'm doing. I'm not pleading for mercy . . ." And the voice replied: "So long as you live ... I have hope . . . Can't you just go on, as you are doing now?" But Scobie answered, "No. That's impossible." And, with the most careful deliberation, he planned--and carried out--his suicide, cunningly making it appear like death from natural causes.

Is He a Saint? What is Greene trying to' say? That Scobie is a sinner whose story should evoke horror? Or (as Catholic Author Evelyn Waugh supposes) that Scobie is almost a saint?

Sentimental humanists (who do not believe in either saints or sinners) would say: Scobie was a "sinner," yes. But might not his sins have been purged by an earthly purgatory of suffering? And did he not try to repent the final sin of all? When the poison he had swallowed brought a great cloud down over the room, Scobie was trying to make an Act of Contrition. And just before his body thudded to the floor, he managed to say aloud, "Dear God, I love . . ."

The final words of the book, spoken between Scobie's wife and his priest, seem to indicate where Author Greene's feelings lie: "Father Rank said, 'It may seem an odd thing to say--when a man's as wrong as he was--but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.' 'He certainly loved no one else,' she said. 'And you may be in the right of it there, too,' Father Rank replied."

Is He Saved? Henry Scobie may have loved God but he was a long way from sainthood. For the saints are most marked by the very thing Scobie rejects--complete self-surrender to the mercy and will of God. St. Francis loved God's creatures, but he did not pity them. He had the freedom to love because he placed himself (and all others) utterly and trustfully in the hands of God.

Is Sinner Scobie saved--who pitied God as he did his wife and mistress, who did evil hoping vainly that good would come of it? What can a human being know about God, and God's forgiveness? Not much, Graham Greene implies; the Church has its well-tested rules of thumb, but the Church cannot comprehend God, it "doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart." Here Author Greene seems to lead the reader to the heart of the matter--and leave him.

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