39 pages • 1 hour read
The Heart of the Matter
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Themes
The Centrality of Anti-Institutional Religion
The central questions of The Heart of the Matter revolve around issues of religion. Graham Greene, like the protagonist Scobie, was a Protestant convert to Catholicism. There are fundamental differences between the two Christian denominations. Many of these tensions are epistemological in nature, or relating to knowledge. While Protestantism views the Bible as self-sufficient and the exclusive authoritative source of religious knowledge, Catholicism views the scriptures of the Roman Catholic Church as equally authoritative. In other words, Catholicism places more emphasis on mediated learning through the institutional hierarchies of the Church and its theological and legal codes. At the top of this hierarchy is the pope, or supreme religious figure, which Protestantism rejects as anti-democratic. After all, Catholic means “universal,” hence the Catholic Church sees itself as a universal authority. These differences are important for understanding the role of religion in Greene’s self-described Catholic novel.
Through Father Rank, The Heart of the Matter explores a version of Catholicism that places less emphasis on law and doctrine, and more emphasis on private, individual belief. Scobie’s suicide, per Church teachings, should guarantee his eternal damnation. Yet, Father Rank hints at the possibility of another outcome. He says to Louise, the Church might know all the rules, but not “what goes in a single human heart" (254). In his profound commitment to responsibility and duty, and having engaged in egregious, immoral behavior, Scobie thus personifies both the saint and the sinner. Scobie is unable to solve the problem of theodicy, perhaps facilitating his headfirst descent into pure heresy. But the ultimately incomprehensible quality of God and the ways of God’s mercy allow for a more flexible belief that is less dependent on strict Church dogma.
In one of his more revealing monologues, Scobie wonders whether if one knew the “facts” would one still “feel pity […] if one reached what they called the heart of the matter” (111)? Scobie alludes to “an impression of remoteness, security, freedom,” which might represent a more accommodating God-believer relationship. This relationship would be less oriented around religious duty and responsibility—or in Scobie’s case, pity—and more around love. In this more antinomian, or anti-legalistic, conception of religion, love is more potent than ritual, sacrament, and dogma, which Louise upholds with more authority than Scobie. Louise even remarks that “missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin” (191), an obligation that feels increasingly meaningless for Scobie given his more profound spiritual doubt.
The Difficulty of Discerning Truth From Lies
Many of the characters in The Heart of the Matter have an excruciating relationship with truth-telling. Scobie harbors self-delusion over his commitment to the truth. He writes Helen a letter in which he claims he loves her more than God. Remarkably, this is the moment Scobie thinks his lying begins, despite his continuous dishonesty around his various illicit entanglements. Furthermore, Scobie feels that he never lies in his diary. For Scobie, his diary, full of half-sentences and mundane, bullet point-like details of his daily schedule, represents the ultimate truth. But Scobie contradicts this by using his diary to feign a heart illness and ultimately cover up his suicide. Psychologically, Scobie’s second monologue appeals to his conscience to stop “play-acting,” but amid his moral crisis, Scobie is no longer able to discern fact from fiction.
Yusef, meanwhile, is a criminal and black marketeer who needlessly orders the death of Scobie’s servant, Ali. He represents the opposite of truth and morality but continuously tells Scobie that he “wants to speak the truth to you” (138). Yusef is also a confidant for Scobie, representing an almost priest-like figure. He tells Scobie he has a “friendship for you in my soul” (82). Reflecting on the perverse comfort he feels around Yusef, Scobie thinks, “at least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help” (222). Through Yusef, spiritual guidance is understood through falsehood and criminality. Likewise, Wilson lies about reading poetry and makes a living in espionage, yet he violently demands “truth” from everyone else. He also becomes despondent over the ease with which he is able to tell lies. Reflecting on how his profession is to lie, Wilson feels a “nausea of self-disgust” at how his “private life was taking the same pattern” (154). Like with Scobie, there is with Wilson a public-private interplay that contains emotional, spiritual, psychological, and bodily consequences.
Helen is perhaps the character most honest about truth and lies. Recognizing the impracticality of it, she asks Scobie, “why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time” (162). However, there is an obvious benefit to lying for Helen, given her illicit affair with Scobie. In isolation, her question forces readers to consider whether there is any point in the truth, given how easily it is bent. In the context of religion, this question of whether action or belief reigns supreme assumes greater salience.
The Consuming Nature of Pity and Responsibility
Scobie feels an overwhelming sense of pity and responsibility that consumes his entire being. He experiences pity and responsibility as spiritual suffering that stems from what Greene later identified in Scobie as “monstrous pride.” For Scobie, love and passion withers, but pity is permanent. Helen might scorn Scobie’s pity, but “pity smouldered like decay at his heart” (163). Greene also employs physiological imagery to portray Scobie’s debilitating sense of pity. Asking God to kill him, Scobie carries “suffering with me like a body smell” (234). Similarly, his extramarital affair with Helen is also an extension of pity. Rather than love, Scobie feels responsibility to both Helen and Louise, which is what primarily drives his actions. But this responsibility is also a possible death sentence. Sleeping next to Helen in bed, Scobie thinks of her as “a bundle of cannon fodder” (148). Later, when he kisses her, Scobie refers to the kiss as “a pain under his mouth like the beating of a bird's heart” (235). Pity and responsibility appear to give Scobie both life and death.
Given Scobie’s God complex, in which he views his suicide, as a Christ-like act, it is useful to view pity also as a metaphor for love. God creates human beings out of love and returns them through death, allowing human beings to experience God’s love even more intimately. Through somewhat perverse psychological reasoning, Scobie kills himself to save Louise and Helen, the objects of his pity. However, this also tortures Scobie as he feels he is “desecrating” God due to love (or pity) (207). Thus, Scobie is well-intentioned but doomed. As Greene notes in a reflection on Scobie, “Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn't safe when pity's prowling around” (Quoted in Bergonzi, Bernard. A Study in Greene. Oxford University Press. 2006).
The Unreliability of Written Language
Related to the theme of truth-telling is Greene’s exploration of written language. For the characters of The Heart of the Matter, there is no consensus on the utility and reliability of books and the written word. Both Scobie and Louise tell Wilson that he reads too much poetry and, as a result, doesn’t understand truth. Wilson himself wonders whether love exists outside the “printed page” (199).
Scobie, for his part, doesn’t “read that sort of book” (236). At one moment, Scobie asks Louise to read him poetry, and he is drawn to the verses about how one's “falling” can never fall through the “gentle hands” of God (248). These stanzas strike him as truth, but he spurns that notion because it is poetry. Instead, Scobie prefers the seemingly neutral and objective diary genre. Yet despite his intentions to express nothing but the plain truth, his diary entries are everything but the truth. They are selective fragments of Scobie’s psyche that are used duplicitously to stage a natural death. As Louise says of Scobie, he has “selective eyesight” (64). He sees the truth he wants to see and represents it subjectively, if formulaically, on the page. His extremely formulaic and ostensibly objective approach to writing does not detract from its inherent unreliability. Moreover, Scobie writes letters that disappear while stealing and discarding illegal, albeit innocuous, military correspondence. Similarly, Robinson, the bank manager, says he reads too many books: “It's a doctor who's put me right, not the books” (210).
There is immense murkiness over the issue of the written word, which assumes greater symbolism when analyzed through the prism of religion. One denominational difference between Protestantism and Catholicism is their hermeneutics—that is, how to interpret scripture. One must ask how to approach scriptural exegesis if the written word is unreliable. This issue of textual reliability and interpretive subjectivity is especially important in Christianity, in which many believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, not the actual word of God, thus implying human authorship. This fact contains certain theological and legal implications while raising hermeneutical questions over who has the right to interpret scripture and how to do it.
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