The Power and the Glory

“‘You know nothing,’ the stranger said fiercely. ‘That is what everyone says all the time—you do no good.’ The brandy had affected him. He said with monstrous bitterness, ‘I can hear them saying it all over the world.’”

The whisky priest, Mr. Tench’s “stranger,” wallows in bitterness and self-pity. The alcohol only augments his already intensely conflicted emotions: His faith wavers even as he risks his life to tend to the spiritual needs of the villagers and other believers.

“The children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was.”

The lieutenant, in contrast to the whisky priest, never wavers in his belief that life without the Church will inevitably be better: Children won’t grow up in the shadow of the Church’s authority, tainted by greed and corruption. He intends nothing less than to help build a new world order, wherein children will no longer live in ignorance and poverty. Ironically, he functions as a priestlike figure in bringing this message to the people.

“Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.”

Padre José, in contrast to the whisky priest, renounced his vows and married after the government outlawed the Catholic Church. While this affords him a measure of security, it renders him a figure of ridicule. The children mock him with those “little shameless voices,” and Padre José mourns his loss of authority and respect. He considers himself a martyr as much as the whisky priest denies his own martyrdom.

“She was very young—about thirteen—and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn’t got at her yet; she had a false air of impregnability.”

The omniscient narrator describes Coral Fellows, the daughter of Captain Fellows, who cares for the whisky priest when he shows up at her family’s banana plantation. Her boldness and fearlessness are ultimately no match for the bleakness of life and the inevitability of death: While the novel never explicitly details the incident, Coral is apparently killed as the American fugitive escapes the police. She serves as a kind of surrogate daughter to the whisky priest, whose own daughter scorns him.

“‘Oh, let them come. Let them all come,’ the priest cried angrily. ‘I am your servant.’ He put his hand over his eyes and began to weep.”

Again, the whisky priest vows to fulfill his duties as a prelate even as his own well-being and safety are at risk. He serves even as he doubts his fitness to do so. Given that he has fallen into the sins of pride and despair (not to mention sexual temptation), he questions whether it’s appropriate for him to say Mass or hear confession at all. His own faith is often tenuous at best. Still, he can’t bear to abandon a soul in need—but whether out of pride in his self-sacrifice or out of genuine mercy is difficult to discern.

“An enormous temptation came to Padre José to take the risk and say a prayer over the grave. He felt the wild attraction of doing one’s duty and stretched a sign of the cross in the air; then fear came back, like a drug.”

While Padre José has ostensibly relinquished the trappings of his vocation, it still calls to him. When he comes across a family mourning the death of a child, he wants to pray. Tellingly, the pull of duty moves him the most; it’s also what motivates the whisky priest, even in his fallen state. The simile “like a drug” suggests the narcotic power of fear that ultimately holds Padre José back.

“He was quite prepared to make a massacre for their sakes—first the Church and then the foreigner and then the politician—even his own chief would one day have to go. He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.”

The lieutenant again harbors messianic feelings about destroying the old world in order to bring about a new one. After the corruption has been washed away, he and the children, in their innocence and purity, can forge a new civilization. The religious overtones are abundantly clear.

“It had been a happy childhood, except that he had been afraid of too many things, and had hated poverty like a crime; he had believed that when he was a priest he would be rich and proud—that was called having a vocation.”

The whisky priest remembers his childhood and how he came to the priesthood: He has much to atone for. His motivation to become a priest was less a desire for religious clarity than a result of greed and pride. These are the sins that eventually lead him far from grace.

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit. She was without protection—she had no grace, no charm to plead for her; his heart was shaken by the conviction of loss.”

This is how the whisky priest sees his own daughter, Brigitta: She represents lost innocence and original sin, even in her very conception; she’s inspired by forbidden fruit. When the whisky priest looks at her, he sees “his own mortal sin look back at him” (67). She physically embodies his spiritual damnation.

“They toasted each other, all three sitting on the bed—the beggar drank brandy. The Governor’s cousin said, ‘I’m proud of this wine. It’s good wine. The best Californian.’ The beggar winked and motioned and the man in drill said, ‘One more glass, your Excellency—or can I recommend this brandy?’”

The whisky priest needs alcohol, not only for his own physical maintenance but also for his spiritual duties: Wine is necessary for the sacrament. Thus, he desperately tries to convince the governor’s cousin to drink the brandy rather than the wine. He has paid for both, but because the transaction is illegal, he must acquiesce to the bootlegger’s demands. The wine is consumed in a distortion of religious rites, as the governor’s cousin drunkenly “confesses” his memories.

“He tried to think of his child with shame, but he could only think of her with a kind of famished love—what would become of her? And the sin itself was so old that like an ancient picture the deformity had faded and left a kind of grace.”

As he’s being arrested, the whisky priest thinks of his daughter, Brigitta. Rather than remembering her as the embodiment of his own mortal sin, he instead begins to recognize his deep and unwavering love for her. The simile in this passage compares the sin to a picture that has faded so much that the defects have worn away. Ironically, he begins to understand unconditional love as the result of his sinful actions.

“It was like the end: there was no need to hope any longer. The ten years’ hunt was over at last. There was silence all round him. This place was like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that time was short.”

The whisky priest has been thrown into a cell crowded with other prisoners. It’s a microcosm of the larger world, with its miseries and desires. He finds peace in the chaos, savoring life as death hovers ever so close. He may be physically detained, but he seeks spiritual freedom.

“That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins—impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity—cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.”

The whisky priest begins to accept that his mortal sin—Brigitta’s conception—is what ultimately teaches him to love. This line of reasoning upends conventional notions of morality and faith: One must sin in order to understand redemption. Like Christian in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress or Redcrosse in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the whisky priest learns that the journey leads one astray on the way to discovering the elusive truths behind the mysteries of life.

“It was an odd thing that ever since that hot and crowded night in the cell he had passed into a region of abandonment—almost as if he had died there with the old man’s head on his shoulder and now wandered in a kind of limbo, because he wasn’t good or bad enough. […] Life didn’t exist any more: it wasn’t merely a matter of the banana station. Now as the storm broke and he scurried for shelter he knew quite well what he would find—nothing.”

Like the journey in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the way forward is often filled with despair and nihilism. As the whisky priest seeks respite, he must combat feelings of desolation and abandonment: He has forgotten the peace that momentarily came upon him when he thought he was facing death.

“They were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed—if you could call this empty plateau in the mountains a public place.”

The whisky priest sees the crosses over the makeshift cemetery where the Indigenous woman places her dead child on the ground. These symbols of hope and redemption spur him onward until he finally collapses on the grounds of a church. He has crossed the border into a state where the laws are permissive regarding religion. He has made it through limbo into a (temporary) paradise.

“He could hear authority, the old parish intonation coming back into his voice, as if the last years had been a dream and he had never really been away from the Guilds, the Children of Mary, and the daily Mass.”

The whisky priest travels throughout the village, interacting with the people without fear, without persecution. The habit of authority that comes with being a servant of the Church returns quickly to him. However, it also presages his fall, this memory of his pride: His reprieve will be short-lived.

“They passed the white-washed church—that too belonged to a dream. Life didn’t contain churches.”

In fewer than 20 pages, the whisky priest’s dream of restoration has been destroyed by the uncanny return of the mestizo. His destabilizing presence always reminds the priest of his precarious status: The betrayer must lead the martyr to his doom. The reality resides in the bleakness of the lieutenant’s anti-religious world, while the churches of the whisky priest’s past are but dreams. The secular triumphs over the religious.

“He had been glad in a way to turn from Miss Lehr’s gate—he had never really believed that he would ever get back to parish work and the daily Mass and the careful appearances of piety, but all the same you needed to be a little drunk to die.”

The whisky priest readily accepts this reality: The modern world is nothing if not a lesson in nihilism, disbelief, and death, ideas that recur among the author’s many works. Alcohol functions as a salve to the depredations of this world, a measure of courage in the face of certain death.

“He had heard men talk of the unfairness of a death-bed repentance—as if it was an easy thing to break the habit of a life whether to do good or evil.”

The whisky priest appears to disagree with this conclusion. If someone is to repent at the last moment, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate cowardice. Instead, it would represent a hard-won break with the habits of one’s life. Thus, he’s dedicated to helping the American fugitive transition peacefully, despite the man’s protests. In addition, this excerpt compels the reader to consider the priest’s thoughts and actions in light of his own fate—always ambivalent yet still imbued with hope.

“‘Well, we have ideas, too,’ the lieutenant was saying. ‘No more money for saying prayers, no more money for building places to say prayers in. We’ll give people food instead, teach them to read, give them books. We’ll see that they don’t suffer.’”

The lieutenant believes that the government, in contrast to the Church, can provide the people with what they really need: the physical and mental resources to develop and thrive. For the whisky priest, however, without the possibility for redemption, those needs are meaningless, a life with only an end in spiritual death.

“That other priest was right. It was when he left I began to go to pieces. One thing went after another. I got careless about my duties. I began to drink. It would have been much better, I think, if I had gone too. Because pride was at work all the time. Not love of God.”

The whisky priest charts his downward spiral into drink and despair. His isolation after all the other priests fled (or, like Padre José, renounced their faith) allows the whisky priest to neglect his duties in favor of more fleshly pleasures. He has no one to hold him accountable. At the same time, however, he indulges in pride as he tells himself that he alone stayed to fulfill his duties. This calls into question his motivations throughout the novel, raising the question of whether what drives him is still that same sense of pride or a longing to atone.

“He wished he had promised the priest nothing, but he was going to keep his word—because it would be a triumph for that old corrupt God-ridden world if it could show itself superior on any point—whether of courage, truthfulness, justice.”

The lieutenant, despite his rejection of religious sentiment, still measures himself by the same yardstick: The religion with which he grew up informs his secular worldview. In addition, he’s guilty of the sin of pride.

“He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint.”

Regret and a feeling of worthlessness dominate the whisky priest’s last thoughts. This in itself might be a form of redemption: He wishes to please the God he tried (and perhaps failed) to serve. He wants to have accomplished good work in the world. The selflessness of being a saint, rather than serving one’s own interests, seems simple to him now.