Knowing the Worst

By Sean Johnson

Named not by the author but by his readers, “Greeneland” is the darker, more desperate reflection of our own world in which many of Graham Greene’s novels are set. Anyone who has ever set foot there will know it again at once. It feels like a Charles Dickens novel minus the children, wealthy philanthropists, and general optimism—a world dominated by what Greene himself once called “the Fagan darkness.” I have spent so much time there that even the faintest whiff of Greeneland can set my pulse racing—I am overcome with images of hunted men, beleaguered priests, foreign locales, and Carol Reed movies. It is also the very last atmosphere I want to encounter in a biography of Greene. Measuring by this standard alone, Richard Greene’s The Unquiet Englishman is the best to come forth in some time.

Any biography that invokes a world crafted by Graham Greene is a biography too much in the shadow of the man himself. Some accounts of his life fall prey to this for the rather excusable reason that they are literally of Greene’s own making. A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape are probing, as autobiog- raphies go, but pointedly selective. Not that Greene spared the lurid details—his then-fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis prompted surprising candor about private matters, even of a sexual nature, in A Sort of Life. Yet he was extremely protective of details surrounding his increasingly unhappy marriage and the religious conversion that had accompanied it—much to the frustration of his Catholic readers.

When Greene (feeling pressure to let someone else tell his story) selected Norman Sherry to write his “official” biography, it was largely on the strength of Sherry’s promise “to keep away from the personal . . . but if the work begins to move in a biographical direction you will be free to censor it.” Sherry’s first volume is not quite as discrete as he promised, but Greene’s shadow hovers over the entire project.

Greene’s concerns for privacy anticipated a prurient interest in his personal life, and his fears were confirmed when the unofficial biographies began appearing. Some early books about Greene were little better than tabloids in their preoccupation with his romantic entanglements, and even the more serious studies could get bogged down in looking for correspondences between Greene’s love life and his fiction. This temptation seems forgivable when the subject, Greene, made a career writing spy thrillers and dramas revolving around love affairs. And yet, while a fictional life might be justly reduced to its most sensational details, the same is rarely true of a genuine human existence.

Richard Greene (who probably has the phrase “no relation” printed on his business cards by now) takes this truth as his polestar and wastes no time announcing the fact:

Even as this biography narrates, with much new detail, the key events and patterns in his private life, it swings the balance away from obscure details of his sexual life, which have captivated earlier biographers, to an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents of his time.

The “new detail” comes courtesy of several memoirs by people close to the author, as well as troves of letters, discovered or published since the last serious attempt at a Greene biography. There were no better hands for these new materials to fall into than Richard Greene’s. As editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (2008), he is already deeply familiar with Greene the author, and the supremely valuable practice of aggregating a myriad of fragmentary sources and synthesizing from them a comprehensive and coherent narrative of a life. Of course, any biographer can adopt such a method, but in Richard Greene the practice rises to the level of instinct, sometimes leading him to valuable material far removed from the writings or affairs of the primary subject and serving him well in his project of presenting a balanced, whole (Graham) Greene.

One of the more gratifying fruits of the biographer’s method is, at last, a happy conclusion to a notorious episode in the author’s life—the Shirley Temple libel case. Long before he was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, young Graham Greene was paying the bills by writing movie reviews. He hadn’t been at it for long when he was slapped with a lawsuit over his review of (wait for it) Wee Willie Winkie. In the review, Greene accused the studio behind the film of exploiting the child actress in order to appeal to adult male audiences with prurient tastes. Though the slander was not against Temple per se, her lawyers jumped at the chance to sue Greene for libel and eventually won after an acrimonious and very public court battle.

When Temple met the aging Greene decades later, well into her celebrated career with the U.S. foreign service, they quickly became friends. Drawing from memoirs she wrote shortly after that period, Richard Greene suggests one basis for the easy friendship was that her own recollection corroborated Greene’s “view of the studios as full of sexual menace for child actors.” In that light, the early episode—sometimes attributed to the brash pen of a young writer—can be better understood as one of Greene’s early forays into the humanitarian arenas where he would spend most of his adult life.

Admittedly, Greene is a bit like the famous lovers in Dante’s second circle, blown about by the wind of unfettered affections. Richard Greene advocates, though, for a charitable reading of the novelist as a man in the grips of some form of bipolarity—a disorder better understood today than it was even at the end of Greene’s life. While “journalists looking for easy copy have sometimes condemned Graham Greene’s character,” he suggests “the disasters, especially of his marriage and sexual life, are generally more pitiable than culpable.” He does not contend that culpability should give way entirely to pity (the novelist himself had little patience for the kind of pity that distorted reality) but does want the writer’s detractors to recognize that his sins brought him more pain than pleasure. “Indeed,” he adds, referring to Graham Greene’s professional and personal preoccupation with suicide, “his survival itself is something of a triumph.”

The Unquiet Englishman does more than its predecessors to show that Graham Greene’s vices and virtues share a single source. The heedless affections that led him into adultery also led him into the thick of the twentieth century’s worst humanitarian crises with little concern for his own safety. These affections, and the ferocious loyalty that often undergirded them, can be summed up in Greene’s own concept of involvement. “Greene used the term ‘involvement’ to describe a kind of loyalty, passion, and commitment that can overtake a person who observes suffering and injustice—as a character remarks in The Quiet American, ‘Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.’”

Greene dodged Haitian hit squads, ducked gunfire on Vietnam battlefields, and rode a donkey across the worst wastelands of Mexico because of an insuperable instinct to “take sides.” In the cases of the Marxist revolution in Mexico and the Spanish Civil War—two upheavals that saw the progressive parties brutally oppressing Catholics—he had to take sides against those parties with which his own liberal politics would formally have aligned him. It is a mark of his integrity that no one and nothing commanded more of Greene’s loyalty than the church in which he himself often felt like a “displaced person.”

Richard Greene is to be commended particularly for his affectionate attention to (Graham) Greene’s later years. He offers thoughtful critical treatments of late novels including The Honorary Consul and Greene’s most underrated success, Monsignor Quixote. Quixote is both an inventive retelling of its classic namesake and a tribute to one of the author’s most intimate friendships. In the later decades of his life, Greene began taking yearly trips through Spain with

Father Leopoldo Duran, who became his friend and confessor. The complete correspondence of Greene and Duran is among the newly-available source material informing this biography. These letters reveal the aging Greene—who had all but excommunicated himself in the heyday of his adulteries, not going to confession or receiving communion for years at a time—as a penitent and unexpectedly pious old man. Each year the pair would visit the ancient Trappist monastery of Oseira, which features prominently in the mystical conclusion of Monsignor Quixote. When he first saw it in 1976, Greene “was impressed by its austerity, and wrote in the guest book: ‘Thank you for these moments of peace and silence. Please pray for me. Graham Greene.’”

One of my favorite literary serendipities is that the Whiskey Priest of The Power and the Glory fails to escape by boat to the city of Vera Cruz (“true cross”), but stumbles instead into martyrdom—the truest cross. Greene’s own end boasts a similarly happy coincidence. When the blood disease that claimed his life entered its final stages, he was admitted to hospital. There the man who had taken Thomas as his baptismal name (in honor of his abiding doubt) received communion and last rites before finally succumbing on April 3, 1991. The hospital’s name: Hospital de la Providence (“the hospital of providence”).

Richard Greene weaves a complex narrative, to which Graham Greene’s own concept of “involvement” is more integral than any singular besetting sin. He doesn’t whitewash Greene’s failings, and doesn’t ignore the connection between life and art, but also never loses sight of “the central narrative of Graham Greene’s life—how politics, faith, betrayal, love, and exile become great fiction.” Richard Greene brings us to the place described by the pitiable Scoby in The Heart of the Matter: “Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.” Finally, a biographer leaves us knowing the best, too.

As the pandemic progressed and stay-at-home orders were issued, we reconfigured, with breathtaking haste, the sinews and the tendons of society in order to permit the continuation of everyday life, at a distance. Foregoing the consideration of other possibilities, commonplace routines were upended, with the near wholesale substitution of in-person interactions for online equivalents. In doing so, we unwittingly forfeited the long-established means by which members of a society build trust, mutual respect, and affection. As image bearers of a relational God we depend upon a steady stream of opportunities to engage with one another: every seemingly insignificant interaction is in fact an occasion to fulfill our role, projecting the imago dei and receiving it in turn. Our unchecked endorsement of online meetings and contactless collections ushered in new levels of autonomy, unlikely to disappear post-COVID-19. And so we find ourselves embracing a new reality of the virtual meeting and curbside pickup—both of which leave us feeling strangely alone.

To be sure, this rapid transition to “distanced living” does not represent the sum total of our response to the crisis. Certainly, it was the most immediate. But there are surely more protracted inflections, the details of which are still being worked out. If the impact of the events of 2020 adheres in any way to the contours of history, we may see an increased uptake in higher education in the coming months. Studies have shown that during periods of societal and financial hardship, the population responds by returning to school. When the outlook is bleak, the market value of education goes up.

As one whose daily bread derives inferentially from student intakes, you might think that such a trend would give me cause for celebration. However, again, I believe there are valid reasons to be apprehensive. While the desire to learn should be commended, careful attention must also be given to the proposed educational path. The means are as important as the end. When deciding upon a new educational venture, due consideration must be given to the “what” and the “how,” understanding that true learning is bound up in both. What is it I intend to study? And how will I go about the task? Or, more pertinently, what is this course offering? And how will it achieve the stated goal? It is with respect to this point that many well-intentioned students have faltered, and the trends of 2020 are set only to exacerbate their mistakes.

The time-honored tradition of education in the Western world has been that which seeks both to train and instruct. From Plato, to Aristotle, to the apostle Paul, and St. Augustine, all understood the necessity not only of equipping the student with new knowledge, but of shaping him into something which he is not. The child’s immature mind must be shaped and strengthened before it can be informed. Indeed, until very recently, all reputable institutions of education deemed the task of instruction vanity until serious strides had been made in the way of training. For this reason, the first years of formal learning were given to catechizing, memorization, recitation, and exams. Little was asked of the student in terms of opinion, or argument. He was not yet ready for such things. First, he must be trained. He must receive a cultural heritage—a value system—and to such a degree that it formed his mind into something new. Only when the pupil’s character had been sculpted via the rigors of disciplined study was he ready to harness new knowledge, debate with fellow students, contribute to his field, and instruct others in turn.

With the rise of industrialism at the turn of the twentieth century, educational patterns began to change. The dogma of an increasingly mechanized society eventually infiltrated the classroom: efficiency was paramount, productivity the goal. In due course, less value was attributed to the formation of character. The task was deemed too arduous and convoluted in light of the burgeoning demand for output. So education became almost exclusively about the acquisition of knowledge. To be sure, the responsibility for such changes does not reside exclusively with the schools. Educational boards were all but held hostage to the demands of a consumeristic age. If they offered anything but the most basic qualification deemed necessary for employment, via the path of least resistance, their days as an institution were surely numbered.

This trajectory persisted into the twenty-first century as the trend was augmented by the technological age. Learning that previously necessitated a teacher, a classroom, and the expenditure of much ink was aptly replaced by an almost robotic interaction between the student and a screen. As computers quickly assumed a position of indispensability in the learning environment, the illusion that true education can be accomplished via non-relational transactions was perpetuated. The shift in 2020 to “distanced living” will almost certainly force another stride along this path. The ease with which we sacrificed a multitude of interpersonal exchanges for autonomous imitations will raise new questions for teachers. Why not follow suit? Why persist with antiquated methods if more “efficient” means are available?

Certainly, it could be argued that the shift I have been describing has not been altogether detrimental. Graduates today are generally equipped for the task demanded of them. The universities have not failed them insomuch as their students are able to join the workforce, contribute to society, and pursue meaningful careers. If such is the case, then we need not worry too much about the future. The pandemic presented an opportunity, so we have responded, and in a manner that may one day be celebrated. However, the consequences of privileging instruction over training are numerous, and the weightiest ramifications are perhaps the most subtle.

When a student has received an education tantamount to mere data acquisition, and no effort has been made to shape his character, his mind is a plateau void of any contours. His soul lacks anchor points by which evaluative judgments are made. He has no frame of reference, and thus sits as an impressionable island with little understanding of cultural heritage and why things are the way they are. While he may be able to produce, he is ill-equipped to contribute (in the truest sense). In accordance with the industrial age of which he is a product, he has become a gearwheel in a system that does not ask for his opinion because he is incapable of offering it.

What I am describing need not be interpreted as a tragedy. The uneducated graduate will likely secure a well-paid job. He may even be content. Along the way he may garner some anecdotal semblance of truth so as to inform his perception of the world. From this he may then derive a rudimentary system of ethics, by which he construes an illusion of competence to make moral decisions for himself. But even if, by chance, the young scholar is able to fill something of the void that his overpriced education has failed to address, there remains a significant gap that he will struggle to close by himself.

Stated plainly, the untrained mind lacks an objec- tive value system. He does not have a framework by which to make properly informed assessments of the things around him. Pertaining most immediately to the realm of aesthetics, he is prone to label every pang of appreciation as mere subjectivity. He enjoys Elgar but he does not understand why. He loves walking round the Louvre, but can’t explain his pleasure. He renders his enjoyments as somewhat whimsical: they work for him, but there is certainly no need for others to follow. He has no road map by which he might trace out the path of beauty—his is a world wherein value is arbitrary and declarative affirmations of glory are meaningless. Worse still, the student cannot explain why he finds other things to be innately ugly. Consequently, he surrenders his judgment as personal opinion: “I find modern architecture to be disagreeable, but I’m not saying that you should too.” This lack of objectivity as it relates to value is one of the greatest casualties when education neglects the formation of character, and such is our situation today.

When an individual lacks an objective value system, certain things follow as a matter of course. First, the world around him becomes inescapably dull. He does not have a measuring rod by which to perceive splendor, and thus the lofty becomes akin to the benign. The aesthetic world flattens into a level playing field: Beethoven no longer trumps pop music, and the sitcom is as compelling as Shakespeare. Indeed, in recent times this phenomenon has been further augmented such that now the simple regularly wins favor over the beautiful. Since an appreciation of the latter demands a focusing of the mind, we choose the way of entertainment, purposefully avoiding the rigorous pursuit of more wonderful things. Why endure Mahler’s Ninth Symphony when three minutes of Beyoncé will suffice? Yet the superficial does not satisfy. We have made ourselves into perpetual consumers who are forever hungry. True accents of brilliance have been muffled by our inability to form objective value statements.

A second consequence is perhaps more disconcerting: the untrained mind lacks courage. Since the student has no system by which to attribute value beyond his capricious fancies, he struggles to identify which battles are worthy of the fight. He may assume a particular responsibility very well, until pressures come his way. At such a time he is ill-disposed to make the decision: “Stay at my post, or retreat?”

If he cannot gauge the task’s objective worth, in the heat of battle he may well run. C.S. Lewis made this argument at a time when war was a reality for most young men in Europe. Writing in 1943 on the importance of true education, he explains that to diminish objectivity in the realm of aesthetics is to raise “men without chests.” The student’s propensity to render affirmations of beauty as subjective opinion appears harmless, until a lack of courage is seen as its inevitable subsidiary.

Coincidentally, a positive illustration of this principle can be drawn from the same period of history by way of the British prime minister Winston Churchill. A cursory engagement with any one of his many biographers quickly makes plain the dogmatic valor shown by Churchill at that time. The contemplative reader cannot help but feel immense gratitude for his resolve during a time of the utmost crisis. Additionally, he may also think to question: From where did such gallantry derive? What was the source of Churchill’s resolve to fight, and resist the pressure of so many around him to capitulate to Hitler? More than a few have given attention to the prime minister’s education for an answer.

Certainly, he was by no means an exemplary student. But in some measure, Churchill’s boyhood was one of training. His mind had been shaped by a value system that affirmed beautiful things as worthy of his attention. A particular highlight of his time at Harrow was winning the headmaster’s prize for reciting from memory The Lays of Ancient Rome: 1,200 lines of poetry recounting heroic endeavors from the Empire. It surely isn’t anecdotal to suggest a line of correlation between this kind of training and the objectivity with which Churchill approached the war. For him, surrender wasn’t an option. The battle was worthy of the fight. Why? Because his estimation of democracy, liberty, and peace did not derive from subjective meanderings of the mind, but from a cultural heritage that had been marked upon his soul.

The argument I have been tracing so far is not new. Many have gone on record before me to advocate for the role of training in education. Still more have expressed discouragement at the subjectivity that plagues our culture and the havoc it wreaks in so many areas of life. At this point, my hope is to draw attention to the responsibility created by these issues for the church. The people of God have a role to play, elders and laymen alike. We must address the loss of objective value for at least two reasons.

First, the deficiency of which I have been speaking hinders Christians from fulfilling their responsibility to make manifest the gospel. As the preaching of God’s Word has succumbed to the utilitarian pressures of our age, ministers invariably strive to give “practical application” from every juncture of the text. Earnest church members spend their energies during the week in an attempt to comply, understanding at some level that Christ has called his followers to live an excellent life. However, for as long as exhortation and appropriation are confined to the realm of individualistic moralism, the question of beauty becomes increasingly foreign.

The lack of an objective value system prohibits the truth from informing every corner of life: the pursuit of leisure, the enjoyment of stories, the topic of conversation at the dinner table. If the activity in question is deemed morally acceptable, no further judgment can be rendered, and well-meaning disciples are hindered in their ability to ordain the gospel. Indeed, without proper training the church member is just as likely to derive his sense of value from the affirmations of society as he is from Scripture. Occasionally these might be right. Yosemite is glorious; the Grand Canyon is spectacular. The advertisement for a cheap get-away should not be altogether ignored. However, most often they will be wrong. Twenty-three reviews of popcorn by the sixteen-year-old YouTuber should be discarded. Time is short, and this contribution is not worthy of our attention. in the morning she entertains the idea. Why? Because she has no reason not to.

As a result, the professing adherent to Christian orthodoxy willingly recites an age-old creed, he persistently conforms to a prescribed system of ethics, but in every other respect, his life looks the same as his agnostic neighbor. Though the teaching of truth and ethics should not be sidelined, it is an attendant responsibility of the church to recover an objective value system. Such is necessary for true Christian living, and somewhere along the way it has been lost.

Second, the church should be concerned to understand matters of beauty because the horizon is bleak. Western civilization has chosen the path of secularism, and at some point congregations in America will be made to feel the consequences of post-Christian thinking. The outworking of this, Sunday by Sunday, is difficult to predict. But surely it will demand a clearer articulation of the gospel and an expanded understanding of how one may draw strength to press on. Leaning on C.S. Lewis again, he points out that the soldier fights not because he knows the truth per se, but because he understands the value of that truth. Syllogisms alone do not save the day. But beauty breeds valor.

For the pastor this will necessitate delineating a rubric of majesty that extends far beyond those tasks we are prone to label as “ministry”: discipleship, evangelism, counseling, etc. The single mother of three needs encouragement. She shows up on a Sunday not knowing how to keep going. The week ahead promises to be lonely, much the same as the last few. Her children are too young to acknowledge her burden, much less shoulder it with her. To be sure, their crying at night does not cause her to question the gospel. But it does raise doubts about her choices. Secularism has not esteemed her role. The public sphere attributes little value to the labors of parenting. Her friends regularly suggest she put the children in daycare and take a part-time job to pay for it. At 2:00 a.m.

This mom is not in need of an argument for why the trinitarian understanding of God is correct, over and above Islam’s Allah (though certainly there is a place for such a sermon). Rather, what she needs is a vision for the beauty of childrearing. She needs a framework that begins with the divine relationship between the Father and the Son and extends all the way to her Wednesday evening reality of three tired children and no help. The pastor must equip her with a blueprint that attributes worth to spoon-feeding oatmeal at 5:00 a.m., building towers whose sole purpose is to be knocked down, and singing solo nursery rhymes because no one else in the room knows the words. She needs a sense of objective value that addresses her struggle. Understanding what beauty is and where it comes from will equip her to go about the business of another week.

As society progresses towards a yet-less-Christian version of itself, holding to biblical convictions will prove to be an increasingly difficult task. The local church must train its members to live. Followers of Christ must know the gospel, the imperatives of our faith, and the means by which we make value judgments. The language of beauty must become familiar. The means of deriving a roadmap from biblical truth to arbitrary, mundane tasks should be intuitive. Only then will the church be positioned to stand in a postmodern age which champions utility, subjectivity, and “tolerance.”

The means of accomplishing such a task is not straightforward. As I have already mentioned, throughout the history of Western education, a high priority has been placed on training. Great efforts have been made to shape the soul over several years, equipping the individual with a sense of heritage and cultural worth as determined by the test of time. Today, the classroom has rejected this approach to learning, and most local churches will not be able to fill the gap. With limited time and resources, the tyranny of the urgent prevails; couples need counseling, unbelievers need the gospel, Sunday’s order of service must be approved, and there probably should be a prayer meeting at some point.

It is important to note, however, that there is another route towards an objective value system—one which is readily accessible to Christians. Notwith- standing the value of an education that esteems training, there are certain things that the optative and the Parthenon do not explain. Indeed, the authoritative blueprint for matters of beauty and aesthetics is the Bible. Therein, a theological rubric is given by which all affirmations of glory may be tested. Initially, such a claim may appear logically strained. We usually turn to Scripture to derive a system of truth, and ethics. Seldom do we consider it as a commentary on objective value, particularly with regards to such things as music, art, and literature. However, this assessment speaks more of our unwillingness to think than of the limits of God’s Word. When rightly pursued, a multitude of biblical doctrines inform our understanding of the world around us, teaching us what is valuable, what is not, and how we can decide between the two.

Central among such ideas are the images of God, the Trinity, and the divine attributes. A proper consideration of each will instruct us not only in terms of right behavior, but also with regard to pleasure. By way of example, we find in the Godhead qualities such as unity, diversity, complementarity, and restraint. Incidentally, we perceive these same characteristics as present in an orchestral score: a multitude of instruments, each pursuing a unique line of music and yet forming a composite, harmonious whole. No one musician is overbearing; everyone assumes his rightful place so as to produce a taxonomy of sound that is intuitively agreeable. Thus, with steadfastness, history has declared the music of Beethoven and Mozart to be beautiful. By contrast, we need not feel the burden to speak similar words of affirmation to the amateur rock band. Theirs is a sound that is not balanced. The various instruments struggle to work together as each player fumbles his part and values his own contribution too highly. The resultant sound bears few if any fingerprints of trinitarian congruence. With grace and humility, we are allowed to say that this is ugly.

Though we must not forsake the teaching of truth and morality, to stop there is to render a disservice to Scripture. God intends for the Bible to inform our understanding of the world, and this extends to the realm of aesthetics. As the privileged stewards of his Word, the church should understand beauty. It is our responsibility to harness an objective value system, not merely because the days are evil and the church has been found wanting, but because Scripture provides a blueprint. We will not be taught such things in the secular classroom. But all is not lost: the church has the Word. May pastors, elders, and laypeople attend to the task of learning. May our study of the Bible be formative, impressing upon our souls an objective understanding of divinely ordained things. May we have chests, perceiving beauty, understanding worth, and fighting the battles that are worthy to be fought.

Paul Twiss is originally from the UK, is married to Laura, and has six children. He is a faculty member at The Master’s Seminary in California, and is in the final stages of a PhD in Old Testament at Queen’s University, Belfast.