The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene
Penguin (2004). 160 pp.
Graham Greene’s short novel, The End of the Affair, chronicles the adulterous relationship between the perennially jealous and dissatisfied Maurice Bendrix and his lover Sarah Miles. At first pass this might not seem like fertile soil for a story about God’s redemptive love—indeed a distinctly Augustinian story of God’s redemptive love. But anyone familiar with Greene’s “Catholic” novels will be aware of how effectively Greene is able to mine the messy complexities of life—even our mortal sins—with a view to God’s redemption.
The setting is England, World War II. The plot unfolds in series of flashbacks, principally told through the first person account of Bendrix. Greene’s narration is masterful here, and the time-shifting between scenes is an effective means of carrying the story forward. The novel opens in the middle of the narrative, with Bendrix perplexed as to why Sarah has abruptly abandoned him after a German rocket attack in which they were both nearly killed. The only conclusion he can reach is that she has left him for another lover. (The idea that she has left him to return to her husband never crosses his mind). Bendrix eventually hires a private investigator to identify Sarah’s new attachment. This leads to the procurement of Sarah’s journal, in which Bendrix discovers that the other lover is none other than God.
The power and beauty of the book is found in Bendrix’s reading of Sarah’s diary. Here we encounter Sarah’s surprising and, indeed, tortuous journey into faith. Sarah’s conversion has come on the heels of what she thinks might be the miraculous resurrection of Bendrix from the dead. The rocket attack had left Bendrix lying prone and seemingly lifeless in the ruble. Sarah is sure he is dead. She returns to their bedroom and prays to the God she doesn’t believe in that God would save him; that if he does, she will give up Bendrix forever. Into the room walks Bendrix, and thus begins the end of the affair. But for Sarah, it is just the beginning of her affair with God.
In truth, Sarah’s affair with God had already begun before the rocket attack. Sarah loves Bendrix, but is dismayed by her lack of capacity to assure Bendrix of her love. This despair cracks open the door of Sarah’s soul to the possibility that just maybe there might be a love that transcends the weakness and vicissitudes of human frailty. Just prior to the rocket attack she writes in her journal,
Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him, and that I will love him forever….I know he is afraid of the desert that would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same….What could one build in the desert? Sometimes after a day when we have made love many times, I wonder whether it isn’t possible to come to an end of sex, and I know that he is wondering too and is afraid of that point where the desert begins. What do we do in the desert if we lose each other? How does one go on living after that?
He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could live peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede from sight. For a lifetime perhaps.
If one were to believe in God, could he fill the desert? (p. 72)
The question of God haunts Sarah like a specter. She has come to the growing realization that she cannot make Bendrix happy, no matter how much she loves him and gives herself to him. And she has come equally to realize that he can never make her happy. As Sarah looks at Bendrix lying in the rubble, she recalls, “Even the half-happiness I gave him was drained out of him like blood. He would never have the chance to be happy again,” (pp. 75–76). The best they can offer each other always falls short, and is doomed to end with the inevitable arrival of death. And it is here, in her dissatisfaction with her own capacity to make Bendrix truly happy that Sarah is compelled to pray for Bendrix’s happiness apart from her.
Give him a chance. Let him have his happiness. Do this and I’ll believe. But that wasn’t enough. It doesn’t hurt to believe. So I said, I love him and I’ll do anything if you’ll make him alive, I said very slowly, I’ll give him up for ever, only let him be alive with a chance… (p. 76).
Sarah does not go easily into faith. She regrets immediately the vow she has made and tries numerous means to get out of it. Yet for reasons that even she herself cannot at first quite understand, she clings tenaciously to her wavering belief in God. Her diary reveals a conflicted soul, longing for the warmth and comfort of “corrupt human love,” yet clinging to the hope that there is a God of love and happiness that somehow stands above all of her inabilities to love and be loved.
And it is here we see Greene’s Augustinian genius. Sarah is not drawn to God simply for want of her own need of love; even more desperately she longs for Bendrix to know and rest in a love that she herself cannot provide. Sarah clings to faith in large measure because she has come to believe that God is the only hope for Bendrix’s happiness. “You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it to him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more,” (p. 99). For Sarah, to lose faith in God is to lose faith that Bendrix can ever be happy.
And thus it is Sarah’s love for her adulterous lover that drives her to belief in God, and this in turn, to chastity.
Michael Gorra, in his excellent introduction to the novel, captures the remarkable irony of Greene’s seminal insight: “Sarah Miles does enjoy [sex] and, and without guilt, but still finds herself surprised into a faith in God that enjoins her from ever again sleeping with her lover Bendrix…. At the same time, the book suggests—and for its date, scandalously—that she has been led to that belief by sex itself. Erotic experience has brought her to a state of grace. Or as the cover of Time would say, in a story on the novel’s publication, ‘Adultery can lead to sainthood.’” And as scandalous as it seems, Time was right.
Sarah has come to realize that her love for Bendrix can only be justified and completed in God’s love for Bendrix. Sarah’s is the shadow love, the corruptible and incomplete love. The best she will ever be able to give Bendrix is a “half-happiness.” It is because she truly loves Bendrix that she casts him upon the love of God, trusting—praying—that God will give to Bendrix what she can only falteringly approximate. Sarah has come to realize that love, if it exists at all, begins with God, and must, in the end, return to God. This is Greene’s greatest achievement in the novel.
Greene has captured, in the form of a novel, Augustine’s true and basic insight that all human longing is—at its root—a longing for union with God. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” the great African Bishop once prayed. For Augustine, this basic insight is true of all desire, but perhaps even most true of sexual desire, for sexual desire is typologically related to our spiritual desire for God in Christ. Augustine saw the “corrupt human love” of sexual union as a prefiguring of the incorruptible love of God. And so, for Augustine, “It is of Christ and the Church that it is most truly said, ‘And the two shall become one flesh.’” The temporal earthly marriage is but a shadow of the heavenly eternal marriage. And the joy of sexual union between a man and woman is but a foretaste of the joy that awaits the wedding supper of the Lamb. However much the Christian tradition has at times been uneasy about sex, the best of the Christian tradition has always known that sex points beyond itself to the glorious inheritance of the saints. As one of Steinbeck’s characters said, “There’s a capacity for appetite that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.” But Augustine reminds us, along with Greene, that what can’t be satisfied with cake (or sex) can be satisfied with Christ. Sarah has come to realize this not only for herself, but even more deeply for Bendrix.
The End of the Affair is a profound, multi-layered book about the complexities of faith and doubt and love and happiness. There is more to Greene’s novel than Augustinian typology; the epistemology of belief is another major theme, and in this respect Greene is perhaps less successful (see the excellent analysis of Gorra in his introduction). Yet insofar as Greene’s book is an apologetic for the way that finite human love points to, is justified, and completed, only in the infinite love of God, The End of the Affair must be judged an outstanding success.
Gerald Hiestand (PhD, University of Reading) is the Co-Founder and Board Chair of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He has over 15 years of pastoral ministry experience and currently serves as the Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL. He is the editor and author/co-author of several books, including The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision. He is also a founding member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the CPT.
