Ash Wednesday
By: JOHN J. FLYNN III
Graham Greene limned the interplay of sin and grace so skillfully in his novels that the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar reportedly said that Greene, a Catholic himself, had created a mystique of sin. But there was nothing venerable or attractive about sin in Greene’s novels; all the sin is pitiable, and the acts and events overhung by a cloud of futility, however thinly lined the cloud with the silver of vague hope. Greene was a brilliant stylist, one of the best of the 20th Century, though his mastery of style is not often enough acknowledged. One of his contemporaries, another Catholic, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, said Greene really had no style at all, a somewhat ironic assessment given Greene’s superiority, as between them, as a stylist. You can judge for yourself: Here is Greene’s description of an Ash Wednesday in Havana, Cuba, many decades ago, the explicitly religious a single iron thread in the tapestry of the whole perfectly rendered scene:
He walked home. The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a night-club were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago. Women passed him in the street marked on the forehead with ashes as though they had come into the sunlight from underground. He remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. (Our Man in Havana, 1958.)
There is no complementarity of sin and grace. Sin is negation, a purely oppositional force, only to be overcome by grace, and neither harmonized nor synthesized with it. If Greene created a mystique of sin, have we not done something similar in the coining of such phrases as “felix culpa,” the idea that original sin is a “happy fault” because of the Redeemer it drew to earth? No, there is no mystique of sin in Greene’s novels, inhabited by sinners half-blind, unable yet to find the One whose breath they breathe. Instead, the mystique, which undeniably fills the pages of his novels like an atmosphere, is the mystique of mercy, of compassion, and the hope of forgiveness.
