| What Graham Greene identified as the "religious dimension" in his novels is not limited to Catholicism or any institutionalized religion. Rather, as Greene undertakes a spiritual search in the novels from Brighton Rock to Monsignor Quixote, he develops two aspects of the religious dimension: a narrow doctrinal sense reflecting orthodox belief in the teachings of a church, philosophy, or ideology and a broader spiritual sense found in a personal, non-dogmatic affirmation of human or divine love. Equally important, if the novels from 1938 onward are viewed as a whole, they suggest a philosophical progression through four distinct ontological traditions: the Catholic, existential, humanistic, and mystical. These in turn serve as contexts for Greene's spiritual quest, as he determines the contours of the religious dimension in each of the thirteen texts and finds the spiritual vision, or a spiritual consciousness of unity and love that lies beyond the religious dimension, in Monsignor Quixote. Developing the religious dimension in the novels, Greene first decenters dogma of any kind, then argues that doubting one's doctrinal sense beliefs is necessary for religious growth, and finally depicts love as the central force that revolutionizes life as well as the energy that stimulates individual spiritual evolution. In all, however, as Greene tests and defines the parameters of the religious dimension, the doctrinal sense dominates in the Catholic and existential traditions, balances with the spiritual sense in the humanistic series, and then is overshadowed by the spiritual sense in the mystical tradition, thereby making it possible for a spiritually evolved character like Monsignor Quixote to achieve the spiritual vision by entering a realm of transforming love that resembles Chardin's "divine milieu." In the end, because he remained faithful to the spiritual search he undertook at the beginning, Greene's depiction of the journey from the religious dimension to the spiritual vision not only undergirds the fictive world of his novels, but also establishes a primary thread of unity that distinguishes his work in the novel. |
