Among Catholic Novelists, there is perhaps none who captures the ordinary quotidian difficulty of living a Christian life according to Catholic principles as well as Graham Greene. What Greene makes us see is that compassion and principled morality often tug us in different directions. Sometimes our sins bring comfort to others. Sometimes our virtues bring them pain.  This paradox is the mainspring of tension in The Heart of the Matter.

For Major Scobie, the senior policeman in a corrupt port town in an African colony during World War II, the first temptation to compassion begins when his wife, weary of her life in that unbearable place, pesters him to send her to live with friends in South Africa. To raise the money for this compassionate act, the formerly upright and uncorruptible Scobie makes a deal with a local diamond smuggler. This leads Scobie down a path of destruction where, at every turn, it seems he cannot return to his faith and to the church without inflicting pain on the people he loves. Greene writes, “Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin.” His return to grace would inflict more suffering on those he loves than he is able to bear, and so compassion drives Scobie down the road towards damnation.

This, I suppose, is what is meant by the phrase, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” To avoid hurting others, Scobie plunges deeper and deeper into sin. It would be comforting to believe that any pain that must be borne for the sake of virtue is only borne on our own shoulders. Greene shows us that this is not so, and that others too may suffer for our virtue. 

There are no easy answers in Scobie’s desperate wrestling with God, but the novel exposes a profound truth about the nature of Christian life and its trials. A truth that would benefit us to encounter in fiction before the day comes when we have to face it in the flesh. 

The Heart of the Matter was part of the Catholic Literary Revival of the Twentieth Century, of which we now tend to remember Brideshead Revisited, The Power and the Glory, and the works of Flannery O’Connor. The Heart of the Matter is in many ways a grimmer novel than any of these. Scobie does not find a way out of his dilemma, and his life ends with a sin for which the only recourse is the ultimate Divine mercy. And yet it gets to the very heart of the problem of living the Christian life, of struggling with the demands of principle when they seem to contradict all that love and compassion would have us do. 

Catholics and non-Catholics alike will find much to ponder and much to sympathize with in Scobie’s terrible struggle with God. Catholics and non-Catholics will perhaps come away with different feelings about the story and its outcome, but both, I fancy, will come away profoundly moved and more deeply wise about the nature of moral struggle. Highly recommended.