"God save us from the innocent and the good"

One reason it was so difficult to marshal an effective response to the neocon agenda is that it overthrew the prevailing notion of how the American political temperament was divided. Since the 1960s, the left has been cast as the faction of idealists, while the right has laid claim to skeptical realism. The left believed itself to be fighting against the odds to make the world a better place, while the right considered itself a bulwark against naive attempts at social engineering that failed to account for the incorrigible aspects of human nature.

But the scheme to "liberate" Iraq cast everyone against type, and in the scramble to construct a new rhetorical response to the fantasy of a forcibly democratized Iraq, the battle against going to war was lost. Even now, every time the president needles his opponents by stating that the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein out of power, a trippy sensation of Alice-in-Wonderland reversal sets in.

The role religion plays in Greene's moral universe also makes his fiction freshly pertinent, now that faith has become both a tacit and overt factor in foreign policy. Greene's private-label Catholicism saturates his politics, but it couldn't be further away from the triumphal Christian soldiering advocated by George W. Bush. The choice, Greene's fiction reminds us, isn't just between judicious secular internationalism and evangelical crusading, two approaches that barely speak each other's language. People of faith, Greene proved, can (and should) take a more self-questioning tack; God's most important battle takes place inside an individual soul.

Of course, Greene's Catholicism was unconventional. His own attitude might have been best expressed by the immortal Aunt Augusta in "Travels With My Aunt," when she was quizzed by her baffled and bedazzled nephew. "'Are you really a Roman Catholic?' I asked my aunt with interest. She replied promptly and seriously, 'Yes, my dear, only I just don't believe in all the things they believe in.'" (Sometimes one of the things Greene didn't quite believe in was God himself.)

Admittedly, it's hard for a secular reader to fully credit some of the more tortuous religious writhings in Greene's Catholic novels. For Scobie, the police official in "The Heart of the Matter," the nadir of his life comes when, in order to hide an adulterous affair from his wife, he must take communion without having been purged of the sin by confession. He can't successfully confess to the sin because he doesn't fully repent of it or intend to stop seeing his lover. Taking communion in this impure state is the ultimate catastrophe; he is eternally damned. His despair at this propels him to suicide, an even worse sin.

George Orwell, reviewing the novel, didn't think much of this spiritual psychodrama. He suspected Greene of glamorizing damnation and was far more interested in how Scobie reconciled his faith and much-vaunted reluctance to cause pain with his job as "an officer in a colonial police force." In truth, the bits of "The Heart of the Matter" that describe the complicated relationship between the colonial British and the West Africans they rule are far more interesting than the torments of Scobie's lugubrious and weirdly pleasureless love life. (The critic James Wood has remarked that it's curious that a man who so clearly relished and avidly pursued sex should write novels in which nobody seems to enjoy it very much.)

Nevertheless, even at its worst, the relentless self-examination that constitutes Greene's notion of a life in faith claims a limited number of victims. At its best, it leads to what used to be a mainstay of Christianity: the practice of good works and the sacrifice of self for others. The "whiskey priest" in "The Power and the Glory" lives like a miserable, hunted animal in order to serve believers in a Mexico where their faith has been outlawed. In today's America as embodied by George W. Bush, religion serves the private goal of personal redemption (God got Bush off the sauce), and provides a public justification for dictating everybody else's behavior. For Greene, Christianity is a matter of considering one's own sins; for too many American Christians, it's a license to police the sins of others.

Next Page: With his "wide campus gaze" and his copy of "The Role of the West," Pyle could be a 2003 neocon

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