Jessica Sequeira has published an article in The Harvard Advocate on Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel. Or, rather, on the alleged death of the Catholic Novel. While she raises some interesting points, her eulogistic pessimism, which seems largely based on the common secular assumption that Catholicism holds little power or certainty anymore, even for Catholics, seems entirely premature. The death of Catholicism (and Catholic art and literature) has been proclaimed before, for centuries now, yet it always seems to find a new path through the jungle.
Here’s an excerpt:
Greene’s “heavy scene”—the use of realist techniques to depict a world already condemned to sin—represents the farthest extreme toward which the Catholic novel can tend. At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls “the heart of light, the silence.” Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given this mystery ready-made. So assured was Greene of the world’s inherent guilt that he had no need to refer to morality directly, and could keep it as the profound, silent center around which he wrapped his melodramatic plots.
Today’s would-be Catholic writers have no recourse to that kind of certainty, and they sag under the strain. One can still enjoy Greene’s work, but only in the way that one savors a sacramental wafer: as a precious, blessed fragment of something long since departed.
I don’t think Greene was nostalgic for religion, but he was nostalgic about loss.