When the Church is “too fleshy” for an Adulterer
Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”
Athanasius said that the Incarnation is where God became man so that man could become God. He made it sound like such a comfort–a shortcut to Heaven. But to be human is to have a body, and to have a body is to be at war.
God became man so that He could fight alongside us. And now when we look at a crucifix and hear the Gospel story of Christ’s agony in the garden, Christ submitting to beatings, Christ abandoned on the Cross–we have no excuse. If Christ was able to experience human passion and pain and resist temptation in pursuit of God’s will, then so can we.
To live in a corruptible body in hope of resurrection is to live in constant tension between our present desires and our future destiny. This is the tension that Graham Greene captures in The End of the Affair.
Greene’s novel is about Maurice, a writer who has an affair with his neighbor’s wife Sarah. When she abruptly cuts off their relationship, he obsessively follows her until he reads her journal and learns that Sarah has begun to believe in God and promised Him never to be with Maurice again.
Sarah’s journal is tempestuous and reminds me of St. Augustine’s Confessions. She is passionate and restless, and caught Henry, her husband, and Maurice, her lover. Her reputation haunts her, “I’m a fake and a b***” (75). Her struggle through the story hints at her growing understanding of God’s Incarnation and its effect on her life.
Henry, and Sarah’s marriage to him, is flat and passionless. He is not a bad man, but desire has no place in his life. He works in government and is concerned with commissions and committees. He is anti-materialistic and believes only in the mind, rules, and bureaucracy.
Maurice, Sarah’s lover, thinks that God is like Henry–a two dimensional rulebook. Maurice says “I find it is hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air” (5). When Maurice pursues Sarah, he believes he has the same advantage over God as he has over Henry–Sarah loves his body and their love is physical as well as emotional and intellectual. He beats Henry, and thinks he can also beat the statue of the man hanging on the Cross, “She loves us both…but if there is a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win” (104). Meanwhile, Sarah complains that the Church is too “fleshy.” It’s not that she doesn’t like the body (her relationship with Maurice is “fleshy”), but it’s because an embodied God can compete with Maurice for her love.
Sarah’s affair with Maurice is a surrender to her desires–the ones that Henry can’t fulfill. The relationship is the crux of her struggle because it leads her to use her body sinfully, but it also teaches her to love and that love requires embodiment. Her affair pulls her closer to God than the marriage license signed in her civil union. Sacrament is form and matter. Her relationship with Henry is one of form; her relationship with Maurice is one of matter. Both are incomplete on their own, but our desires, not our logic, are often God’s first point of entry to our hearts. But that road is twisted and difficult because our desires also so easily led to sin. Following her desires led her to an affair, which she can’t continue while seeking God. Without the context of marriage, the physical love, which originally pointed her to God, becomes an all-consuming idol. So Sarah is torn between her promise and her passion.
Sarah accepts the tension. She gives up her affair. Unable to be in a relationship where love can point her to God, she lets her pain lead her to Him. She embraces the Cross, knowing that the end of her suffering may not happen until the Resurrection. That’s a hope that takes all her strength to cling to. And when she can’t hold on any more, God intervenes with death.
Henry wants to honor Sarah’s wishes for a Catholic funeral, but Maurice insists on cremation (which at the time the Church forbade because of the bodily Resurrection). Maurice fights the Resurrection because it means that Sarah could find happiness somewhere other than a relationship with him. Like the Pharisees putting a guard around Jesus’ tomb in case rumors of Resurrection spread, Maurice insists on destroying Sarah’s body. For the Resurrection is about the body’s redemption.
The story doesn’t end with Sarah’s funeral. Signs of her presence remain and Maurice faces the possibility that competing for Sarah’s love with a God that redeems both the body and the soul is a losing battle. An atheist steals a lock of her hair and experiences a strange healing. A sick child borrows her old storybooks and recovers. The body whose passion tormented her has been glorified. As Maurice thinks over Sarah’s life and death, he realizes,
For if this God exists…and if even you–with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell–can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us (159).
The end of the affair is the beginning of Sarah’s marriage to God–the union we’re all called to. It begins with the Cross, but it ends with resurrection. C.S Lewis wrote that, “Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.” Sarah didn’t reject Maurice to become a puritan renouncing normal desires. She left him to become–however reluctantly–a saint destined for glory.
