We blogged an earlier review/description of the new collection of Graham Greene writings that had originally appeared in The Tablet. But we’ve got to blog this one, too – by David Lodge. The review also treats another new book on Greene, although that’s not made clear in the beginning. Anyway:

In the eyes of many Catholics, these novels were subversive, even heretical, but in 1950 Greene contributed to The Tablet a remarkable defence of the Assumption against those, especially Anglican theologians, who were dismayed by its definition as a dogma of faith in that year. It is a brilliant piece of polemic, making use of literary allusion, and invoking the Incarnational theology which Greene had used to powerful rhetorical effect in his novels: "The statement that Mary is the Mother of God remains something shocking, paradoxical, physical." The article is defensive towards other Churches and faiths, and infused with Cold War hostility to Soviet Communism.

Never again would Greene present himself as such a convinced Catholic. His novels became increasingly secular in subject matter, their world-weary heroes sceptical about religion and sympathetic to postcolonial revolutionary Marxism. Greene intimated that he was no longer a practising Catholic, and described himself as "a Catholic agnostic" – even a "Catholic atheist". In a remarkably candid interview in The Tablet with John Cornwell in September 1989, Greene, just 18 months away from death, distinguished between belief, which he found increasingly difficult, and faith, to which he still clung, often in rather superstitious ways, like his habit of saying a Hail Mary every time his plane left the ground, or his fascination with the stigmatic Padre Pio. He was apparently untroubled about the irregularity of his sexual life, but revealed surprisingly that he still sometimes confessed to and took Communion from his friend the Spanish priest Fr Leopoldo Duran. To Cornwell’s final question, on what religion finally meant to him, he replied: "It’s a mystery … which can’t be destroyed … even by the Church." The essay by the American Jesuit Alberto Huerto published in The Tablet shortly after Greene’s death was a rather unconvincing attempt to claim that the source of these puckish and in some respects self-contradictory reflections belonged to the Catholic mainstream. My own opinion is that Greene never had a consistent attitude to either religion or politics, but was capable of adopting and articulating with equal persuasiveness quite incompatible points of view as his mood or situation determined. That was one reason why he was a great writer.