by Christopher Carson (June 2026)
Graham Greene described his vocation as the exploration of “the dangerous edge of things.” Flannery O’Connor, who had less patience with euphemism, said that she wrote about “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”[1] The two formulations are not interchangeable, and the difference between them is the subject of this essay; but they converge upon a single conviction, which is that grace, when it consents to appear in fiction at all, appears as an interruption. It is not the slow ripening of moral character that the nineteenth-century novel preferred to dramatise, nor is it the consoling immanence of the liberal Protestant imagination, for which the divine is always already present and asks only to be noticed. It is something nearer to what Karl Barth, in the prophetic period of the Römerbrief, called the senkrechte von oben, the perpendicular from above, the Word that descends vertically and judges everything it touches.[2]
I borrow the phrase in full knowledge that I am committing a small theological theft, and that the owner would have prosecuted. Barth’s perpendicular never passes through the creature; it falls upon the creature from a height that nature can neither anticipate nor assimilate, and the whole burden of his quarrel with Brunner was to deny that the natural order furnishes so much as a foothold for the ascent. Neither Greene nor O’Connor would have owned the doctrine, and O’Connor, whose Thomism was a great deal more exact than her admirers have generally noticed, would have rejected it root and branch, since for her grace works precisely in and upon matter and leaves its fingerprints there. What I am conscripting from Barth is the geometry and not the theology: the angle of descent, the suddenness, the affront to the reader who has been trained to expect that the supernatural, if it exists, will at least have the courtesy to arrive gradually. The geometry is shared. The metaphysics that the two novelists place beneath it could hardly be more opposed to the Swiss, and that opposition is the hinge on which what follows turns.
What separates Greene from O’Connor is the manner of the perpendicular’s descent, and the degree to which each is willing to let the reader see it land. Greene’s grace arrives sacramentally, through the worn liturgical machinery of a Church he never quite trusted and never quite escaped, and it arrives hidden, oblique, indistinguishable to the naked eye from ordinary defeat. O’Connor’s arrives through disfigurement, through what she called, choosing the violence of the words with care, the “large and startling figures” demanded by an audience nearly deaf to the supernatural and more than half blind to it. The difference is in part temperamental and in part a matter of the readership each addressed: Greene wrote for a postwar Europe in which Catholicism survived as a residual cultural fact, a furniture of guilt; O’Connor for an American South in which a febrile Protestant fundamentalism had so deformed the Christian categories that only the grotesque could hammer them back into their original shape. But the deepest difference is neither temperamental nor sociological. It is epistemic, and it concerns whether grace, having struck, is permitted to be recognised.
I. The End of the Affair and Wise Blood
The fulcrum of The End of the Affair is Sarah Miles’s vow, extracted from her under the duress of a V-1 strike with her lover apparently dead beneath the rubble: “I love him and I hate You. I don’t want to love You. I don’t want to be Your enemy. Let him be killed, let him be killed, and I will believe.”[3] The bargain is theologically incoherent, since one cannot strike a covenant with a God whose existence one is in the very act of denying, and Greene knows this perfectly well. He insists that the vow binds her anyway, and that it binds her precisely because its incoherence is of no interest whatever to the One who overhears it. Her later journal entry registers the trap closing with a diction that is forensic, almost the diction of the courtroom: she has caught Him out, He is responsible for her, and she will therefore have to be responsible to Him.[4] The reciprocity is unbearable, and Greene allows the rumours of posthumous healing to gather about her death without once endorsing them, leaving the reader holding a hagiography that the saint herself would have been the first to refuse.
Wise Blood offers an inversion so ferocious that the very machinery of comparison begins to seize. Hazel Motes preaches the Church Without Christ with a vehemence equal in its intensity to belief, though its content is a pure negation: he does not need to believe in Jesus, he does not need to believe in anything at all. O’Connor understood, as Greene perhaps did not, that the surest index of grace’s pursuit is the strenuousness of the flight from it, and that a man who has genuinely ceased to believe does not preach unbelief on the bonnet of a rat-coloured car until his voice gives out. Motes’s Pauline cadences — where you come from is gone, where you are is no good unless you can get away from it[5] — are symptomatic rather than ironic. The self-blinding with which he ends, an act for which the critics have proposed Oedipal, Pauline, and penitential glosses by turns, is best read not as a symbol but as a capitulation: the body confessing what the mouth has spent the length of the novel denying. O’Connor’s letters supply the gloss she intended. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote to the correspondent she called “A.” in 1959, “but many wills conflicting in one man.”[6] Motes’s wills have at the last reached their terrible agreement.
II. Brighton Rock and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Brighton Rock closes upon one of the most contested sentences in twentieth-century Catholic fiction. Rose, having confessed to a priest in whom Greene has invested an almost insupportable weariness, is told that one cannot conceive, nor can the priest, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.[7] The authority of the words is institutional and not personal; the priest speaks not as a wise man, for he is plainly not one, but as a functionary of an apparatus older and stranger than himself, and the distinction is the whole of Greene’s ecclesiology. He declines to narrate Pinkie’s last instant, leaving only the old Catholic commonplace of the mercy sought and found between the stirrup and the ground,[8] the suggestion that even the damnable may, in some final and unwitnessed second, be received. The scandal here is doctrinal before it is dramatic. It offends because it refuses the moral arithmetic by which the reader, and Rose herself, would so much prefer to settle the account.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” stages the identical scandal with the doctrinal mediation stripped away. The Grandmother, whom O’Connor refused to let her interpreters dismiss as a merely silly and contemptible woman, reaches toward the man who is about to kill her and tells him that he is one of her own babies, one of her own children.[9] The gesture costs her her life, and O’Connor was immovable in her correspondence that this is the centre of the story and not a sentimental lapse within it: she preferred to think, however unlikely it might seem, that the old woman’s gesture, like the grain of mustard seed, would grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart.[10] The Misfit’s own verdict, that the old lady would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,[11] is offered not as the author’s epigram but as the Misfit’s diagnosis, and as a diagnosis it is correct as far as it reaches. What he cannot see is that somebody has at last shot her, and that the bullet has produced the very woman he describes.
III. The Power and the Glory and The Violent Bear It Away
Greene’s whisky priest, the most fully realised of his sacerdotal failures, arrives at sanctity by a route that his Church does not formally recognise and his confessor would never have approved. The interior monologue near the end has been quoted so often that the quotation has worn smooth the strangeness it ought to convey: it seemed to him that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint, that it would have needed only a little self-restraint and a little courage, and that he was like a man who had missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place.[12] The figure of the missed appointment is the Augustinian sero te amavi, the lament of one who loved late, loved Beauty so ancient and so new too late; Greene secularises the regret without for a moment secularising its object. The priest is shot in a condition of disordered grace, having heard a last confession that he had no business hearing in any canonical sense and every business hearing in an evangelical one, and the gap between those two senses is the whole of Greene’s subject.
Tarwater’s drowning of the idiot child Bishop in The Violent Bear It Away is the most theologically demanding scene O’Connor ever composed and the one most reliably misread. The act is at once a murder and a baptism, and the simultaneity is not a literary effect but a precise theological claim, the claim of ex opere operato: that the validity of the sacrament depends not upon the worthiness or the disposition of the minister but upon the form, the matter, and the intention. Tarwater pronounces the words. The water is real. The intention, however hopelessly entangled with homicidal rebellion against the dead great-uncle who marked him for the prophet’s office, includes within itself the sacramental aim he has spent the whole book attempting to drown along with the child. The cry that closes the novel, that the Lord had commanded him to go and warn the children of God of the terrible speed of His mercy,[13] has been read as ironic, but the irony cuts only against Tarwater and never against his author. “Terrible speed” is O’Connor’s own gloss upon the perpendicular from above. Grace, in her work, does not persuade. It overtakes.
IV. The Heart of the Matter and “Revelation”
Major Scobie’s suicide is the crux upon which Greene’s reputation for heterodoxy has always turned, and the crux on which, by his own admission in Ways of Escape, he was himself never entirely at peace.[14] The novel had taken its epigraph from Péguy, that the sinner stands at the very heart of Christendom and that no one is so competent in the matter of Christianity as the sinner, unless it be the saint,[15] and the whole architecture of Scobie’s damnation, or his salvation, is built upon that vertiginous sentence. The final ellipsis, the “Dear God, I love…” that breaks off before its object,[16] has been construed as completion, as failure, and as the soul’s last unfinished sentence handed up to a God who, in the Catholic imagination, finishes what the dying cannot. Here the honest critic must set the strongest objection at its full strength rather than at its most convenient. Bruce Bawer has put it with a bluntness that does the argument a service: that Péguy’s aphorism, pressed by Greene into the harder corollary that the greater the sin the nearer the sinner stands to sanctity, ceases to be subtle and becomes, taken to its term, monstrous, for if we are required to believe such things, then what precisely are we to feel about Hitler?[17]
The objection has force, and my own thesis, that grace is the strangeness which refuses all moral accountancy, is exposed to it more than to any other. The answer is not to soften Péguy but to read Greene against the easy charge that has dogged him since the beginning. He has been called a Jansenist so often and so lazily that the label has acquired the authority of a fact, and it is very nearly the reverse of the truth. Jansenism, the gloomy misreading of Augustine that drew Cornelius Jansen toward the severity of Calvin, narrows the company of the elect and shuts the gate; its God is sparing of grace and lavish of justice. Greene’s entire scandal runs the other way. His error, if it is one, is the laxist’s and not the rigorist’s: a mercy so wide and so strange that it seems to leave no soul demonstrably outside it, which is the temptation of the Jesuit casuist and the precise opposite of the Port-Royal gloom. Evelyn Waugh saw this with great clarity, and disapproved of it, when he objected in his review that Greene had contrived to make damnation impossible to assert and salvation impossible to deny.[18] That is a complaint of excessive latitude, not of harshness. Roger Sharrock long ago set the temperate baseline for reading these books as a developing oeuvre rather than a tract, and Mark Bosco has since shown how thoroughly Greene’s Catholicism functions as the pattern worked into the carpet, visible only when one steps back far enough to see the whole.[19] The pattern is not Jansen’s. It is Péguy’s, and behind Péguy it is the thief’s, promised paradise from the adjoining cross with no time left for satisfaction or amendment.
Even so, the reclassification disposes of the wrong charge. To call Greene a laxist rather than a Jansenist answers the taxonomist and leaves the moralist untouched, for Bawer’s grievance was never that Greene had filed his theology under the wrong heresy but that the theology was offensive on its face, a calculus in which transgression accrues toward sanctity and the blacker the sin the brighter the eventual halo. The grievance must be met on its own ground, and the ground is the very phrase that Waugh chose, with the interrogative malice of a man who knew his liturgy, to head his review. O felix culpa is not a licence and was never meant for one. The Exsultet sings of the happy fault that merited so great a Redeemer, and the liturgy was careful, as the careless reader is not, to bless the culpa and not the iniquitas.[20] What is called happy is the fault as condition, the inherited fracture of the will that Paul anatomised at Romans 7 and whose remedy he named at Romans 5, where sin abounded and grace did the more abound; what is emphatically not called happy is the discrete wicked act, chosen and savoured, which no tradition older than sentimentality has ever proposed to celebrate. The fortunate fall is fortunate as the disease is fortunate that brings the physician to the house, and the gratitude runs to the physician and to the summons, never to the disease. Greene, sobered after whatever long night had taken him prowling the harbour quarters of Mombasa, would have drawn the distinction without prompting, and so, I suspect, would Bawer himself had the question been put to him in those terms; for the distinction is not recondite, it is merely easy to lose in the dark. This is why the thief and the dictator do not occupy the same ledger, and why the Hitler whom Bawer summons is a phantom of the argument and not a consequence of it. The thief is offered paradise in the unwitnessed final second, with nothing behind him but the fault and nothing before him but the mercy; he brings no merit, least of all the merit of his crimes, and Greene’s whole wager is laid upon that second and not upon any sum in which atrocity might be entered as a credit. The difference between the thief and the tyrant is the difference between a deathbed and a policy, between the bare cry of the fallen creature and the cold administration of evil as a programme, and a mercy that receives the first has said nothing whatever about endorsing the second.
There is a further reason that Greene attracts the charge of valorising sin, and it is temperamental before it is doctrinal. A world-weariness lies over the whole of his work, a buried melancholy that O’Connor, who had every earthly warrant for melancholy and refused it, simply did not share. What she possessed instead, through the long humiliations of the lupus that killed her at thirty-nine, was intransigence and defiance raised to a high literary art, and in this she stood far closer to Waugh, notoriously unbending, contemptuous of cant, committed to the Church above every other loyalty and most of his friendships. Greene had neither the confidence of those two nor the zealous intransigence that confidence breeds, and lacking it he made allowances, not for humanity only but for himself. He wished to be saved despite his unbelief, and the wish is the most Augustinian thing about him: credo, Domine; adiuva incredulitatem meam, Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. He could arraign the Church and frequently did, but the arraignment had the heat of a lover’s quarrel and never the chill of apostasy. In the end Greene was less the ideologue than the humanist, less the wielder of the Pauline sword that divides asunder than an apostle of the divine mercy almost against his own judgment, persuaded of that mercy by something deeper in him than the doubt he wore on the surface, and unwilling, having claimed it for himself, to deny it to anyone else.
O’Connor’s “Revelation” performs the same theological labour and performs it with none of the same diffidence. Mrs. Turpin’s nightly bookkeeping, her elaborate ordering of the classes of humanity and the careful placement of herself a rung above the white-trash and below no one who matters, is interrupted in a doctor’s waiting room by a college girl who hurls a textbook into her face and pronounces over her a diagnosis whose theological accuracy is hidden inside its rudeness: go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.[21] The vision that descends upon her at the pig-parlour that evening, of a vast horde of souls rumbling up toward heaven with the respectable and the virtuous brought up at the rear of the procession and their virtues being burned away,[22] is one of the very few places in O’Connor where the eschatology becomes pictorially explicit. Mrs. Turpin’s furious demand to know who God thinks she is[23] is addressed to heaven and answered by heaven, and the answer is the vision itself. It is worth noticing how little consolation comes with it. The woman is granted sight and is denied comfort, and the whole of O’Connor’s pastoral theology lives in that distinction.
The two scenes answer one another across the diptych, and the manner of the answering is the whole of the difference between their authors. Scobie’s ledger is the same ledger as Mrs. Turpin’s, the accountancy by which a soul ranks itself among its neighbours and totals its own deservings, and both books exist to overturn it; but Greene overturns it in the dark and O’Connor in a blaze of noon. Where Greene withholds Scobie’s last act and forbids us the verdict, O’Connor flings open the western sky and makes Mrs. Turpin watch her own respectability burned off her like stubble, and she does not spare the reader the spectacle because she does not think the reader can be trusted to infer what he has not been compelled to see. The confidence is total, and it is the confidence of a woman who held her doctrine the way Waugh held his and would no more have hedged it than she would have apologised for it. Her bookkeeper is granted the one thing Greene will never quite grant his, which is certainty about what has happened to her, even as both are denied the comfort that certainty is so often mistaken for. It is here, if anywhere, that the harmony between the two writers reaches its limit and ought not to be forced past it. They share a structure and not a temper, a method of assault upon the same complacency and not a single mind behind the assault; beneath the common refusal of the moral ledger lie two genuinely different accounts of what the creature is and what its end must be, O’Connor’s built four-square upon a Thomist confidence in being that Greene, for all his Catholicism, never possessed and perhaps never wanted. The convergence is real, but it is a convergence of tactics and not of souls, and the essay that pretended otherwise would be tidier than the truth.
V. Residues
The residues differ as the methods differ. In Greene what remains, after the last page has turned, is the apparatus itself: the confessional box, the muttered Latin formula, the priest who is no better than his penitents and is therefore, in exactly the Donatist sense that the Church condemned and Greene instinctively grasped, no worse a conduit of the sacrament for his unworthiness. His characters are saved, if they are saved at all, obliquely and against their visible merits, and the reader is left in the condition that Greene plainly considered the only honest one, uncertain and melancholy and quite unable to forecast the verdict. The grace is real and it is hidden, and the hiddenness is not a defect of Greene’s art but its governing principle.
In O’Connor what remains is the wound. Her people are blinded, drowned, shot through the chest, gored by a bull, insulted past the last barricade of their self-regard. Here the older criticism went badly wrong, and the correction matters. The grotesque in O’Connor is not, as the early reviewers supposed, a mannerism imported from the Southern Gothic cupboard, nor is it the symptom of a Manichaean recoil from the flesh, the charge most often pressed against her by readers who mistook the violence done to matter for a contempt of matter. Susan Srigley has made the decisive reply: that O’Connor’s art is sacramental and incarnational to its foundations, that its Thomistic and Maritainian sources commit it to the goodness of created being, and that the grotesque holds a mirror to a deformed age rather than dividing the spirit from the body it is busy maltreating.[24] Ralph Wood has traced the same orthodoxy through her sense of providence and her hard acceptance of limit.[25] The wound, in other words, is the sacrament; it is the place where grace, having passed through the body, has left a mark that cannot be argued away, and it functions in her fiction exactly as the wounds of the risen Christ function in the Johannine narrative, as the evidence offered to a doubting hand.
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Conclusion
It is tempting to harmonise the two writers along the familiar axis of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, to set O’Connor’s sound Thomism against Greene’s suspect Jansenism and to leave the matter there; and the temptation should be refused, because the axis is false. Once the lazy label is removed from Greene, the surprising truth is that the two stand on the same side of the line. O’Connor is sacramental and so, beneath the gloom and the whisky, is Greene; her grace and his alike pass through matter and through the worn institutions of the Church, and neither author will permit the comfortable conclusion that any soul has been finally weighed and found wanting. The real division between them is not doctrinal but epistemic, and it concerns the legibility of grace. O’Connor’s grace is made legible by force. The figures are large and startling precisely so that they may be seen by an audience she judged to be nearly blind, and she will grant Mrs. Turpin her vision and the reader the crow-filled tree, even if she grants no one any comfort. Greene’s grace is illegible by design, hidden in the interstices of failure, withheld from sight at the very moment of its operation, so that he draws the curtain at “between the stirrup and the ground” and refuses to tell us what happened on the far side of it.
Each is a solution to the same problem, which is the deafness and the blindness of the modern reader, the long discipline by which the secular imagination has taught itself to mistake the quietness of grace for its absence. O’Connor distrusts the reader’s eyes and so she enlarges the figures until they cannot be missed. Greene distrusts the enlargement itself, suspecting that a grace made too visible would be a grace falsified, and so he leaves us in the dark with the apparatus and the wager. Both, in their separate registers, force upon us the single question that the age has spent a century learning not to ask: whether the visitation, when at last it comes, will be recognised in time, and whether the recognition will be suffered to make any difference at all.
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[1] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 33–34, 118.
[2] Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (2nd ed., 1922); for the “vertical from above” as the governing figure of the dialectical period, see also Church Dogmatics II/1. The conscription here is of Barth’s geometry against his rejection of natural theology, on which see his Nein! to Brunner (1934).
[3] Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 78.
[4] Greene, The End of the Affair, 142.
[5] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 19, 113.
[6] Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 307.
[7] Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010), 274.
[8] Greene, Brighton Rock, 277. The phrase descends from William Camden’s epitaph for a man thrown from his horse: “Betwixt the stirrup and the ground / Mercy I asked, mercy I found.”
[9] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), [p. to confirm].
[10] O’Connor, Habit of Being, 389–90.
[11] O’Connor, Complete Stories.
[12] Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 210. The Augustinian source is Confessions X.27: “sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi.”
[13] Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 242.
[14] Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 124–26.
[15] Charles Péguy, epigraph to The Heart of the Matter, from Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet (1911): “Le pécheur est au cœur même de chrétienté… Nul n’est aussi compétent que le pécheur en matière de chrétienté. Nul, si ce n’est le saint.”
[16] Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 255.
[17] Bruce Bawer, “Graham Greene: The Catholic Novels,” The New Criterion (October 1989). Bawer’s objection is here given at its strongest because the thesis of this essay is the more answerable for having faced it. The phrase O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem belongs to the Exsultet, the Easter Vigil’s praise at the blessing of the paschal candle, of Ambrosian provenance and not Pauline; Waugh took it, with the question mark, for the title of the review cited at note 18. The doctrine it reflects is Pauline: Rom. 5:20, ubi autem abundavit peccatum, superabundavit gratia, read against the divided will of Rom. 7:19. The deathbed cry is not Paul but the father of the possessed boy, Mark 9:24.
[18] Evelyn Waugh, “Felix Culpa?,” Commonweal 48 (16 July 1948): 322–25.
[19]Roger Sharrock, Saints, Sinners and Comedians: The Novels of Graham Greene (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Mark Bosco, S.J., Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. ch. 1.
[20] Bruce Bawer, “Graham Greene: The Catholic Novels,” The New Criterion, Vol. 8, No. 2 (October 1989), 24–32. Bawer’s objection is here given at its strongest because the thesis of this essay is the more answerable for having faced it. The phrase O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem belongs to the Exsultet, the Easter Vigil’s praise at the blessing of the paschal candle, of Ambrosian provenance and not Pauline; Waugh took it, with the question mark, for the title of his review in Commonweal 48 (16 July 1948): 322–25. The doctrine it reflects is Pauline: Rom. 5:20, ubi autem abundavit peccatum, superabundavit gratia, read against the divided will of Rom. 7:19. The deathbed cry is not Paul but the father of the possessed boy, Mark 9:24.
[21] O’Connor, [p. to confirm].
[22] O’Connor, [p. to confirm].
[23] Complete Stories, [p. to confirm]; the line is “Who do you think you are?” in the pig-parlour scene, later than the waiting-room episode at note 20.
[24] Susan Srigley, Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), drawing on Jacques Maritain’s account of the “habit of art” in Art and Scholasticism.
[25] Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
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Christopher S. Carson, J.D., M.A., formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, is a criminal defense attorney in private practice in Milwaukee.
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