God's Image: The Betrayer and the Betrayed in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory
Rent from DeepDyve"But at the center of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery—that we were made in God's image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in the prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex."1 These are the thoughts of the whiskey priest whom the half-caste accompanies on the way to Carmen. In this compelling novel set during the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico beginning in the 1920s, the author dramatizes one of the essential truths of Christianity: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1, 26:27). The nameless protagonist of Greene's novel undergoes a continual stripping, started before the moment the reader encounters him in front of the General Obregon and continuing till the morning of his execution. From his superior attitude as a flourishing young priest, to his security, his health, to the little elements of his trade (the altar stone, the breviary, the wine, the attaché-case) the suit, the family, [End Page 106] the money, the paper with his last speech, the brandy—the priest abandons them all. But this severe purification only strengthens the core of his faith truly identified as a mystery. There are two levels on which this mystery works: the priest, in his continual conversion, keeps on discovering Christ's image among the people he meets and tries to help others see the same reality; simultaneously, as an alter Christus, the priest is reflected and contrasted partially, in subtle ways, in some of the secondary characters of the novel—Mr. Tench, the lieutenant, the American gangster, but also the half-caste (or mestizo, as he is also called). If the reader finds it easier to discover in the dentist the parody of the doctor of souls which the priest is; or is surprised at the monastic rigor displayed by the lieutenant but absent in the weak minister of God; or follows the parallel roads of James Calver and of the fugitive priest, both wanted by the authorities, looking at each other as brothers from their respective pictures in the office of the lieutenant until they get to see each other face-to-face in the Indian hut, any correspondence between the betrayer and the betrayed would seem far fetched (see 156). This article closely analyzes the relationship between the mestizo and the priest as two images of God, but also as a subtle but nevertheless real mirroring of one another.
The whiskey priest is not given a name by the author. In fact, two of the three priests in the novel do not have names. As alteri Christi, the protagonist and his replacement transcend their personal identity and exist in virtue of their indelible office, which is sufficiently identified when they are addressed as "father":
"If you would let me come in," the man said with an odd frightened smile, and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy, "I am a priest."
"You?" the boy exclaimed.
"Yes," he said gently. "My name is Father—" But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name.
(221–22) [End Page 107]
The third priest in the book, Padre José, is set apart from the other two by his name because he has abandoned the priesthood and has begun a civil life as a pensioner of the state. Everyone—but...
