Uncertainty
Travelling across the Spanish countryside, Monsignor Quixote and Sancho Zancas encounter a statue with an “aggressive head and pointed beard.” Its “hooded eyes express the fierceness and the arrogance of individual thought,” and as the two men draw near the statue the name Unamuno drops from Quixote’s lips. Quixote’s companion Sancho, a Marxist, is stirred as well, and admits that in his dreams he often finds himself back in Unamuno’s lecture-room hearing the words: “There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer. Who knows? Without this uncertainty how could we live?”
Throughout Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote (1982), Quixote and Sancho find themselves discussing their respective faiths. Quixote comes to recognize and appreciate “how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith.” The two men find that in dealing with existential questions, both are united in their uncertainty, and in this way Greene seems to be presenting uncertainty as that neutral ground wherein understanding and friendship become possible.
As a materialist, Sancho views reality as that interplay of biological and socioeconomic forces. He places rational certainty in this, while Quixote, viewing certitude as an enemy of faith, views doubt as essential to fostering faith. Mark Bosco, in Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005) notes how Greene here presents doubt as “a profoundly humanizing act” forcing a person beyond the epistemologically narrow categories of what is real towards the metaphysical claim of what is true.
Both Greene and Unamuno, another critic argues, were themselves “torn between rationalism and the affective religious sense; both struggled between dogma and faith; and both believed that those who are in agonic struggle can be spiritually alive and attain true faith.” Greene admits his own familiarity with Unamuno, stating that Unamuno’s work had worked its way through they cellars of his own unconscious by the time he had completed A Burnt-Out Case in 1961.
Here Greene introduces his central character, Query, as a person who has lost his faith. The portrait bothered Evelyn Waugh, and in a series of letters back and forth, Greene concludes one saying: “If people are so impetuous as to regard this book as a recantation of faith I cannot help it. Perhaps they will be surprised to see me at Mass.” Greene explained that he had wanted to give expression to various states of belief and unbelief, and when Waugh took issue with Greene’s manner of division, Greene responded that deep friends though they were, perhaps they simply “inhabited different wastelands.”
Greene would clarify that while he had no issue with the “piety of simply people who accept God without question“ he did have issue with “the piety of the educated, the established, who seem to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who have ceased to look for Him because they consider they have already found Him.” Greene would note how “perhaps Unamuno had these in mind when he wrote ‘those who believe that they believe in God, but are without passion in their hearts, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not in God himself.’”
What Unamuno calls the tragic sense of life requires (rather than is inhibited by) passion, anguish, uncertainty, doubt and despair. The human person years for something more, but the intellect seems not to hold the solution: “Whatever absurdity you can dig out of my books, I will still have faith,” the Monsignor tells the Marxist. But, faith “in what”? Monsignor Quixote answers “in a historical fact. That Christ died and rose again.” Sancho responds that this is the greatest absurdity of them all.
On 10 February 1959, Graham Greene wrote the following in his Congo journal: “How often people speak of the absurdity of believing that life should exist by God’s will on one minute part of the immense universe. There is a parallel absurdity we are asked to believe, that God chose a tiny colony of a Roman empire in which to be born. Strangely enough, two absurdities are easer to believe than one.”
K.
Kelly Wilson is a Seminarian for the Archdiocese of Winnipeg (Manitoba). Besides Vox Nova, he writes at his blog Musings.
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Have you read the introductory section of Benedict’s Introduction to Christianity? It seems his reflection on doubt in that piece would be an interesting point of comparison in this discussion.
Great post, Kelly. It ties with what I posted yesterday and what I was writing while you posted it. The whole theme is right: the piety of the people is important. They don’t presume to have the fullness of faith, so they are capable of being led by the mystery which transcends human reason. Those of us who are educated, however, tend to end with our education, tend to confuse our mastery of the past and the theological expressions of the saints as attaining some fullness of truth. The apophatic side is lost. We really need to doubt — because it is when we doubt ourselves we are free to have conversion of heart.
I changed the timestamp of my most recent post to give yours prominence, because I think my voice is often heard too much and you need to have yours heard. And it really ties in well with what I’ve written, so again, well done!
Brett, I’ve read bits and pieces, but I have a copy upstairs and I’ll check it out, and perhaps take up your challenge.
Henry, thanks for the consideration, and the kind words.
What Brett mentioned above:
“However vigorously the non-believer may assert that he is a pure positivist who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty whether positivism really has the last word. He is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, he remains threatened by the question whether belief is not after all the reality which it claims to be.
Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non-believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief.
— both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt.
Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer.”
Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger (1968)
“…the tragic sense of life requires passion…” I passionately agree. Without that passionate awareness faith becomes a ritualistic expression of dogma and reinforced with a structure of laws built to defend it from imploding from within and guarding it against assaults from the outside. It dresses itself in symbols of the divine so as to serve the intellect that the power of its reason is the cement that forms and binds the faithful together.
Back in the last century Marxism was taken seriously as a world view.
Those were the days when the US media did a great job cheerleading the Marxist efforts and nursing a scotoma that prevented us from seeing it’s truer, dark side.
Now that we have the Internet, and everyone can find out that Marxism was a bloody, murderous lie, it’s rather irrelevant outside the ever constricted ambit of the hard core left, and of course our friends here on Vox Nova.
But tell me, for serious intellectuals, what are some ideologies in the modern age which, unlike Marxism, have the credibility to enter into SERIOUS dialogue with the truths of Catholicism?
Don’t get me wrong, I think you’ve written an outstanding essay, and I agree with the thrust. But by contrasting Church teaching against Marxism, you’d might as well be talking about typewriters and fountain pens, horseless carriages, etc. Old stuff, irrelevant, and pretty meaningless to those of us who stay current.
While you’re reading Pope Benedict, you might try The Dialectics of Secularization, where he writes sentiments very similar to what you’re getting at, without getting suckered by — let’s face it — the hippie’s pathetic nostalgia for Marxism.
Jeff, can you tell me what you think this post is about?
You say you agree “with the thrust” of my post, but my sense is you’ve missed something important. I’d rather give you the benefit of the doubt, so take another shot.
You seem to give a nod to the wisdom of Greene, who… “would clarify that while he had no issue with the “piety of simply people who accept God without question“ he did have issue with “the piety of the educated, the established, who seem to own their Roman Catholic image of God, who have ceased to look for Him because they consider they have already found Him.””
This seems to express (your opinion?) that uncertainty is needed for faith to flourish properly. And radical traditionalists (like Waugh, frankly) are striving to grasp something (certainty) that actually constricts their lived experience as God intends it.
That’s what I thought your thrust was. Apparently you have pre-emptively judged my view incorrect, which is sad.
As to my comment on Marxism: the plot of the novel as you described it is a dialectic between a Catholic and a Marxist. Pardon me if I went way out there on a limb to consider that a pretty transparent hermeneutic key (not THE key, but a key for interpreting a subtext). The snideness of my remark was based on two things, I think: first, I find the romantic fetish for Marxism on the part of some Catholics outdated. Second, I while I’m sure Greene’s novel fleshes it out in detail, I notice that the friendship between the Catholic and the Marxist, as you described it here, seems to highlight the concession to doubt on the part of the Catholic, but not on the part of the Marxist. So it occurs to me: how does a Marxist express doubt or uncertainty about their ideology? I don’t know, because frankly I HAVE NOT SEEN a Marxist express self-doubt or critical analysis of their ideology.
Now I’m sure it’s possible there are Marxists out there who feel compelled to join a Junior Achievement class, or grant the premise of Capitalism just to question their own beliefs. I do believe in miracles, after all. I’m a Catholic.
Greene is a wonderful writer. Waugh is a bitter Vatican I clinger.
And the only people who disappoint me more than vulgar radical traditionalists are marxists.
I hope this clarifies my jab at — yes — your very fine essay.
I love Unamuno, and say far too little about him in my writing. This is a lovely little essay…
Sam
Jeff, nobody has pre-emptively judged you. You’ve left the comment. I’ve called for clarification.
You do so by returning to your observations about the romantic fetish for Marxism, which in my mind has nothing to do with the POST I‘ve written. Nor is the post about a contrast between the Church and Marxism, which you, imagining it to be, find as relevant as talking about typewriters and fountain pens.
I am having difficulty sorting through what I see as irrelevace, in order to get at a point you’re making which presumably is related to the topic.
Actually, I do see your point. This isn’t supposed to be a discussion of Marxism. Forget my last post.
Let’s part by letting me again sincerely say your article is a much needed message, and was a pleasure to read.
Peace to you.