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PARTISAN REVIEW
him live." God obliged him, it seemed, by taking away his faith-the
thing, of course, he loved best-and restoring the boy to life. (The
boy, by the way, had been deprived of
his
faith by his rationalist father;
that was why he hanged himself-in despair.)
It is a striking idea, this drastic bargain with God, and typical
of Graham Greene's peculiar, sensational Catholicism. The truth is
that this is the type of bargain ordinarily compacted with the devil.
God does not have the power, at least in Catholic belief, to take faith
away; faith can only be lost by the free will of the individual. The
devil can take your faith away, if you consent to listen to
him.
But
God would be shocked by the suggestion.
If
the priest's faith was lost,
therefore, it must have been the devil who took it. But who, then,
restored the boy's life? It must have been God, since the devil does
not have the power to raise the dead. Or perhaps the boy was not
dead at all, which was the rationalist view of the matter, and the
appearance
of death was one of the devil's counterfeits. But in that case
there was no miracle. God's purpose, moreover, in working miracles,
insofar as His purposes can be known to man, is to strengthen faith;
a priest in real life who raised the dead by prayer would find his faith
fortified. By this standard, the play's miracle is self-defeating; one be–
liever, the priest, is lost from the fold, and no one is converted. Toward
the end of the play, it is true, the priest regains his faith. "I left him
praying," says the newspaperman, who has regained
his
faith also. But
it is not specified how, through what agency, the priest got his faith
back; it simply came.
This whole affair of the miracle will not stand any critical testing,
including that of orthodoxy. As a Catholic, Graham Greene himself
must know (or does he?) that the bargain he describes is diabolical–
a version of the Faustian compact. Yet it is just this he trades on, as
a playwright; it is what the audiences eat up. Without the "daring"
scene of the drunken priest, living in peril of damnation, abandoned by
God and berated by his housekeeper, the play would be a failure. With
it, the play is a mild success at the box-office and considered very
chic, among people who are not themselves religious but who recognize
that religion is
a
la mode,
together with psychiatry, while Bertrand
Russell is "out."
Here, as in
The Cocktail Party,
another fashionable success, there
appears to be an unholy alliance between religion and psychiatry. Like
Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, Dr. Kreutzer, the therapist of
The Potting
Shed,
is presented as a stand-in for God. "I never give a patient up."
He repeats this three times, with an air of profound emphasis, in case
