The Tarnished Soul

Jeremy J. Armstrong
EN 342—Modern British Literature
Dr. Paula Friedman
http://jj-killerbunnyblog.blogspot.com/
The Tarnished Soul
5 May 2009

I chose prompt five to guide this term paper because I felt an affinity with the whisky priest’s struggle with faith and the modern questioning of “man’s relationship to God.” The Power and the Glory was the piece of literature I most identified with this entire semester (Sense and Sensibility notwithstanding of course). The intertextual parallels with Biblical imagery were especially appealing in such a tragically flawed and epically human priest searching for meaning essentially alone with his faith. I chose Nietzsche and the pre-Vatican teachings on grace and absolution to serve as viewpoints to which Green was responding with the whisky priest. This novel highlighted the existence of faith despite all evidence to the contrary. I also read this story as a response to the nihilistic elements of modernist thought especially prevalent in the early 20th century. The whisky priest recognized the divine in the often deformed face of the human condition. His maturation stands as a testament to the power of faith to meet the needs of the emptiness of the “reasoning human mind” which kills even hope (Greene 141).


A lost man journeys from somewhere to nowhere without a friend in the world or place to lay his head. There is no time or place to mark his passing. He is every man and no man. He walks to save the world and to damn the world. He feels the weight of his own inadequacy and the pressure of God’s immensity. He turns to unoriginal sins to make the pain go away. He turns to God to make the suffering of living meaningful. Through his abandonment and sorrows, he learns to see the face of God in humanity. This is the story of one man as far from sainthood as a man can possibly be, yet he finds the beauty in living that makes life worth enduring. The question of God’s existence may never be answered satisfactorily in our age of cynicism, but this lone man’s struggle with faith is at the heart of an authentic existence and modern literature’s relationship to man.

The lone man’s solitary struggle with the crushing forces of existence is a hallmark of modern literature. Jean Paul Sartre wrote of the “annihilating nothingness” of the modern age’s nihilism and he “argues relentlessly that we are responsible for everything we do and everything we are” (Calhoun 245). This condemnation to freedom stalks the whisky priest as he wanders about hoping God will “send them someone more worthwhile to suffer for” (Greene 135). The whisky priest is condemned not only by society’s judgment of his moral shortcomings but also the Church he serves that he can no longer approach for solace. He condemns himself to a fate that he will not confer on the mestizo who betrays him or the lieutenant who orders his execution. This exclusion from grace embodies the heart of his relationship with God and understanding of love. He would not condemn his most vicious enemies to the fate which he imposes on himself. Following the suffering servant model of Christ, the whisky priest willingly takes on the sins of the present world’s condemnation to atone for the sins of his past.

The whisky priest unquestionably accepts who and what he is when he giggles: “This was human dignity disputing with a bitch over a bone” as he sinks to the depths of despair and poverty (144). The whisky priest cannot comprehend Franciscan values of reverencing all of creation when he is faced with his own survival versus that of a mongrel dog. He understands that “her life had no importance beside that of a human being” (144). Through his descent into the depths of despair, the whisky priest finds the inestimable worth of the human person and the dignity of the soul often obscured by crushing poverty. This descent is crucial in framing the whisky priest’s evolving attitude towards God and faith after his smug beginnings as an ambitious social climber in a minor parish.

This scene also symbolizes the existential struggle facing humanity’s struggle against its bestial nature following the horrific catastrophe of World War I. Nietzsche wrote of the “splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory” that seemed to comprise the base of the conqueror’s morality dominating the early 20th century’s philosophy and literature (40). This victor’s right resulted in the untold loss of millions of lives in the fields of Flanders and trenches of Germany during World War I and the atrocities of genocide and total war in World War II. Conqueror’s morality helped justify the means of throwing men by the thousands into barbed wire and machine gun nests to gain a few hundred yards of emaciated mud. The lieutenant embodied this conqueror’s morality when he “was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes” (Greene 58). Philosophers and writers suffered the psychic blow of the insignificance of human life in the face of devastating military losses and totalitarian ideology. Men were discarded as so many pawns upon a chess board on a scale unknown in the history of mankind. As artists grappled with this reality, traditional faith in literature was assaulted with all the force of Panzer tanks and mustard gas on the battlefield.

The human side of faith was often ridiculed for its weakness and frailty in the face of such loss (not much different than in our day), and bad representatives of faith were often held up as examples of how God was no longer present in a world that had lost scale and meaning. The intellectual landscape had become “a vacant universe and cooling world” (Greene 58). Nietzsche’s view of the “profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty” seemed unleashed on the world while traditional religion had ceased answering the 20th century demands for meaningful answers for suffering and why these horrors were allowed to occur by a loving God (42).

In this universe of meaningless coincidence, the priest as an archetype is often portrayed as a ridiculous man, the leftover remnant of a superstitious era, an absurd lifestyle no longer practical. The priest has no place in a world run by power politics, scientific advancement, technological progress and global economic forces. The priest has no moral authority in a world that has disposed of God as inadequate to address humanity’s deepest longings. Those longings are no longer important as they are not measurable and observable. Responding to whether God was obsolete or not, Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “God is dead,” and the literature of the era took up the absence of sacred meaning as an anthem and emblem of the world having changed irrevocably (125).

With the death of God, God’s servants became tragic clowns on the heath. Priests as literary characters became caricatures of faith—exposing faith’s limitations and shortcomings instead of serving as conduits to divine grace and reconciliation with God. Priests became as obsolete as a God who would “punish the innocent with more life” (155). They became relics of a bygone era no longer of use in an enlightened state.

The whisky priest stands as the shambling wreck of the absurdity of traditional religious faith in answering modern questions. He is Nietzsche’s Madman from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He sins mortally and consistently. He mocks the very possibility of forgiveness and grace of which he is an agent. The whisky priest had even “lost the faculty” to repent of his sins by his own admission which would have prevented him from obtaining absolution under Catholic doctrine. This is also an immense sin of hubris as all sins are forgivable except sins against the Holy Spirit whose grace he was denying by this refusal (Greene 128). Despite his failings (maybe because of them), the whisky priest is able to realize the human face of God in those he is called to serve. After burying the Indian child, the whisky priest describes an authentic relationship with God as “wanting to be with Him, to be near Him … wanting to protect Him from yourself” (173). He realizes his own unworthiness to have God because he could never live up to the Christian ideal of self-surrendering love. If the whisky priest were to answer Nietzsche’s Madman, he would respond, “We must kill God because of our own unworthiness and jealousy and smallness of spirit, but we weep over His sacrifice for us in the depths of our sin and pray for His forgiveness as we have since we first crucified Him.”

At the heart of the whisky priest’s conversion is his belief in the transformative power of love. He admonishes the pious woman with the gospel of love: “They were bad priests to do a thing like that. The sin was over. It was their duty to teach—well, love” (125). His belief in the power of the transformative power of life was poignantly clear in his over-riding love for his daughter despite the eternal risk to his immortal soul. According to pre-Vatican theology, remaining unrepentant for a mortal sin prevented a soul from returning to a state of grace. The whisky priest jeopardized his soul—not only through his own sins—but also through his unwillingness to seek absolution for those sins. His personal theology placed the emphasis on love—an all-conquering love that could only exist between him and his conception of a forgiving God of Love who partook of suffering willing to bring lost humanity back to a personal relationship with God and secure in a place in God’s kingdom.

The whisky priest parallels the priest that heard the nameless man’s confession in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, another modernist portrayal of the trial of faith in a “man victimized by life itself” (Camus i). Camus’s priest reflects on the nameless murderer’s plight, “These stone walls, I know it only too well, are steeped in human suffering. … I am speaking from the depths of my heart—I know that even the wretchedest amongst you have sometimes seen, taking form against that grayness, a divine face. It’s that face you are asked to see” (Camus 148-149). That face of God “taking form against that grayness” is what the whisky priest experiences in his prison experience. The whisky priest rebukes the pious, old woman’s hypocrisy, “It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty” (Greene 130). The whisky priest has moved beyond the trappings of sanctity and learned that God is real and present in the poor, suffering humanity he encounters through his lonely journey towards his fate. He has moved beyond the intellectual understanding of faith to the true inner reality of faith. He no longer can rest on his position to ensure him authority or his theological arguments to prove his intellectual superiority. The whisky priest is alone with God. In his spiritual solitary confinement, he finds the old man resting his head on his shoulder, the murderer asking for him to hear his confession without the formal Act of Reconciliation, the cleaning of the cells’ feces and vomit. He finds the sacramental power of life to answer his question of meaning and value. He sees the underlying divinity in the distressed face of God present in the exquisite suffering and indomitable beauty of the image and likeness of God on earth.

Another important evolution in the whisky priest’s relationship to God is his broken understanding of his own frailty. After the jefe and beggar finish the last of the wine, the whisky priest laments that he sees, “All the hope of the world draining away” in the last dregs swallowed with bureaucratic disregard for the spiritual aspect that was present in the wine (113). This mockery of Holy Communion highlights the unworthiness of all those who approach the altar of God with false pride in their hearts much as the whisky priest sees himself as a minister of God’s Body and Blood. Even in this sham of the Eucharistic celebration, grace is present. The jefe admits the disguised priest as “the soul of his country” which foreshadows the mysterious workings of faith and conversion present in the whisky priest as he approaches his road to perdition (113).

This draining of the cup also corresponds to the “cup of His wrath / Who drained to the dregs / the bowl of staggering” which is often used to foreshadow Christ’s suffering before being crucified on the Cross on Golgotha (Isaiah 51:17). This verse shows the visceral connection the whisky priest feels to his faith, the physical quality of Christ’s life and ministry and excruciating death that the whisky priest is now facing as a true believer in Christ’s message of all-encompassing love. Biblical allusions litter this novel. The whisky priest’s ministry to the crowds in prison and village closely resemble Jesus’ public ministry in the New Testament. The priest’s mule journey towards the capitol mirrors Jesus triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The priest’s love of the sinner in himself and his fellow man while hating the sin embodies Christ’s Golden Rule to love others as you love yourself. He is even able to love the face of his Pilate when he looks at the lieutenant and says, “You’re a good man,” after receiving the five pesos as alms that will cover the price for Mass (140). This forgiveness of the man whose sole mission in life is to eradicate the priesthood in Tabasco astonishes even the most cynical observer of Christian forgiveness.

Modernism tried to answer the absurdity and superstition of primitive religious faith in the light of scientific reason and technological advancement. The lieutenant voices the loss of the fragile faith which makes suffering worthwhile, “Life was never going to be again for them what it was for me [devoid of] the dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger” (220). The lieutenant laments the loss of the very thing he eradicated in much the same way that Judas mourned for Christ’s death before committing suicide. Life appears suddenly filled with “an appalling sense of loneliness” (217). In the midst of this desertion, the new Father appears and Luis bows to the return of heroic faith in the face of persecution regardless of how insignificant and absurd those instruments of faith appear in the light of reason. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Through the whisky priest’s sacrifice, Luis is able to see a flawed person acting heroically despite his personal failings and shortcomings. The whisky priest becomes more than he is through the faith working in him. His sacrifice saves Luis’s soul through this final act of witness to the truth which is the literal translation of martyrdom.

The whisky priest is not a hero. He begged that God would send someone more worthwhile to tend his flock. Still, God chose him for this ministry, and his faith ensured that he stayed true to his vocation despite his sins and personal weaknesses. While his life was far from saintly, his death provided a witness for the transformative power of faith in the light of a loving God who can save even the most wretched soul. This final sacrifice allows the light of the divine to shine even through the most tarnished of human souls for the greater power and glory of God.

Works Cited
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Calhoun, Cheshire and Solomon, Robert. What is an Emotion?—Classical Readings in
Philosophical Psychology. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Random House, 1946.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Good and Evil, Good and Bad.” On the Genealogy of Morals.
Translator Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translator Walter Kaufman. New York:
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New American Bible. New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1991.