What is Power? What is Glory? - In the context of Graham Greene's novel 'The Power and the Glory'

Like Lawrence and other disillusioned travellers, Graham Greene was shocked by the sharp contrast between the promising image and the grim reality of Mexico during his travels. ‘The Power and the Glory’ by Graham Greene portrays Eliot’s vision of a “cactus land”, peopled by souls who are lost, who find themselves surrounded by shattered images of a forsaken faith. The novel draws a parallel with T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’. The hollow men wander about in a desolate landscape, trying to remember the line after “For Thine is the kingdom” in the Lord’s prayer. The phrase happens to be ‘The Power and the Glory’.

According to Shelden, “The hollow man in Greene’s novel finds that he is the last representative of God in a land, which recognizes neither His Power nor His Glory.” The images of seediness present throughout the novel presents before us a closed world of sin, suffering and death which defines and is defined by the protagonist inescapably caught in it.

‘The Power and the Glory’ is a story of a priest whose martyrdom lies in his consciousness of his own weakness, his own sin. Stripped of his vocation, the priest is an old Greene hero, isolated and bewildered. A fugitive from justice, he is aware of his own inadequacies, “O God forgive me – I am a proud, lustful, greedy man.” As the novel progresses we find that the whiskey-priest’s life becomes a series of missed opportunities, as he finds himself bound to his own callings.

The novel prepares us from the very beginning for the very transformation of the priest from a sinner to a martyr. His career is a contrast to Pinkie’s in ‘Brighton Rock’. While Pinkie descends and is brutalized, the priest ascends and is humanised. Moving in a world saturated with decay and corruption, the priest discovers the image of God. Basically, this novel is a narrative of human weaknesses triumphing over death into martyrdom, regarding which Greene has left his readers questioning and controverting.

In the opinion of T.S. Eliot, “The glory of man lies not merely in his capacity for salvation, it is true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation.” In a similar way, the novel evokes the agonizing confusion of life in the twilight region between salvation and damnation.

                                          “Between the idea

                                                    And the reality,

                                            Between the motion

                                                    And the act

                                            Falls the shadow.”   (The Hollow Men - T.S. Eliot)             

For Graham Greene, as far as the characters were concerned, the question of them being right or wrong, good or bad, was immaterial. What mattered was their capacity for damnation, to obtain the grace of God.

‘The Power and the Glory’ refers on one hand, to the tussle between “the power of the state” and “the glory of the Church”, while on other hand, it refers to the whiskey-priest, who under the most degenerating of circumstances, exercises his religious power to reach the glory that is nothing short of sainthood. The characters in Greene’s novels are not abstract ideas, but men in real life. By embracing martyrdom, the priest purifies the state of the Church in a diseased and decaying country.

After the whiskey-priest is assassinated, another priest arrives in the town, suggesting that the institution of the Catholic Church cannot be done away with – it is the Power and Glory of God which survives. It is the divine grace which works in a mysterious way and lifts souls fit for damnation, like that of the whiskey-priest, to sainthood.