Angry Enough to Die
Graham Greene's best novel stars a furious Jonah.
For a character in what many consider a fable, Jonah’s anger is legendary. While he’s less kinetic (and as it were, fiery) than strong man Samson, the Unwilling Prophet packs plenty of wrath. Rhetorically speaking, and with words that leave an aftertaste, Jonah shoves his own columns over in the end.
Foiled, spent (and if we believe the fable, heat-stricken), Jonah peers over the city of Nineveh. A few days ago, it was wicked and slated for destruction. Now, it’s repentant, and even worse, God used him to save. The very thought of forgiving notorious pagans who wreaked savage violence on his own people fills Jonah with rage.
“O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”1
When God asks him if he has a right to be angry, Jonah scorches everything in five words: “I am angry enough to die.”
God, himself, existence—the words are a flamethrower, a curse on everything in sight.
The whiff of suicide brings Chesterton to mind. In Orthodoxy, he explains that suicide, like martyrdom, goes right to the heart of things.
“A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One [The Martyr] wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.”2
That Jonah gets there by way of self-pity shouldn’t escape us—not in a time when resentful self-pity sparks massacres, anoints criminals, and pads political careers.
While Jonah does not end his life, we can see him as a foil to the archetypal Christian martyr: someone like Stephen, who accepts death with his eyes and heart fixed on Heaven. In anti-martyr fashion, Jonah longs for death out of spite and grievance, to end his suffering.
Of course, Jonah has no exit. While it doesn’t excuse him, the prophet has no moves left. Unlike God, he can’t forgive. He can’t judge and punish Nineveh himself; when God forgives, he’s robbed of seeing it happen. Having traveled far from home and spent time in the belly of a great fish—talk about layovers—he’s a washed-up foreigner. A castaway without status or resources in a hostile land. Rejecting being (to use Jordan Peterson’s word) is Jonah’s only stab at having his way.
As human nature goes, that’s not surprising.
Nor is the fact that all God has to do is flick Jonah’s forehead—sending a worm to devour the plant Jonah uses for shade does the trick—and the emotional-spiritual pus comes oozing out.
Stopping here doesn’t do the book of Jonah justice. God’s mercy, omnipotence, and perfect resourcefulness in spite of human participants who cut and run are fine discussion themes. As a foil to fuming Jonah, the repentant Ninevites (real or imagined) give a foretaste of Matthew, chapter three:
“Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.”3
That the same, angsty, judgey God of Israel (if you listen to those who haven’t read the Old Testament) would come to Earth and die in Nineveh and Jonah’s place blows the lid off. Whether we’re out in the city, or up on the hill watching the show, is our situation before the cross, the empty tomb, and God himself any different?
Still, Jonah’s last words set us up for a quick game of leapfrog.
We see them, aimed at God, in the final thoughts of a fictional character some six thousand years later—Londoner Maurice Bendrix, protagonist of Graham Greene’s cynical, miracle-infused masterpiece The End of the Affair.
Playing Leapfrog
At a glance, Maurice Bendrix is no Jonah.
As Graham Greene characters go, he’s a captain of modernity—successful, single, a rising novelist, a member of the London elite who carry on as the German blitz unfolds around them. Charming, cunning, and with no ties to God or religion, he’s master of his own ship.
Like Jonah he’s selfish, but he doesn’t need a God-ordained mission to stink up his life. As the title suggests, Maurice just ended a two-year affair with his best friend’s wife, Sarah—an affair that filled him with an obsessive, jealous hate when Sarah became a believing Catholic and refused to divorce her husband.
Without spilling too much detail (this novel is a gem, so another, fuller column will have to do it justice), Maurice’s hatred turns to anger at existence after Sarah dies. When Sarah dies from pneumonia—as it turns out, she was baptized at birth, and a near-death experience that threatened Maurice prompted her conversion—a trail of small miracles follow behind her.
Finding her diary, Maurice learns of the conversion. When Father Compton, a priest she corresponded with, shows up to insist on a religious burial, he bares his fangs.
“Henry said with embarrassment, ‘I’m sorry, father.’
‘You don’t need to be. I know when a man’s in pain.’
I couldn’t get through the touch skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’
‘You’re a good hater,’ Father Compton said.”4
Like Jonah, hate and anger form a kind of swansong, bringing us full circle to what Maurice tells us on page one is a ‘record of hate.’ But one key difference makes the comparison—while Jonah talks to God the entire time, atheist Maurice Bendrix begrudgingly, defeatedly talks to God at the very end.
Though something of a playboy, Graham himself was a believing Catholic. His masterful twist is a jab at atheism—tipping Maurice, who can’t deny the miracles, into a hateful belief in a God that doesn’t exist.
In the last few pages, Maurice returns to Sarah’s diary. Directing his thoughts to the woman he could never fully possess and now cannot touch, it’s not long before he’s punching upward:
“For if this God exists, I thought, 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 eye sand 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, leap. But I won’t leap.
I sat on my bed said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. I know your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest. I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.”5
As the fable from six or ten thousand years ago, a deflated prophet squinted, crossed his arms, and murmured likewise.
The sequel doesn’t beat the original very often. But in this case, Graham makes man’s adversarial struggle of his plan versus God’s plan—that is, his struggle with God and all existence—a little more personal.
The novel ends with Maurice taking his friend Henry to the pub (Sarah’s Henry, the one he robbed). His last words are a first, cynical prayer—and they make us smile.
“Walking there beside Henry toward the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”6
Too bad, Maurice.
However things go, no such luck, for even the demons believe and shudder.
When the worst thing God can do to a flawed, but nonetheless immortal being is say as you wish we know our time is borrowed.
What’s left unsaid, as much here as with Jonah, is God’s insatiable appetite for keeping us in the story. Hate him or love Him, the house always wins—and as far as houses go, our Father’s is more generously laid out than we could ever imagine.
In the Bullpen:
Guest writer Noelle McEachran tackles C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man …a book on education taken from three famous lectures in 1943. Tune in for Noelle’s take on how Lewis’s work candidly predicts the ‘Abolition of Women’ at the hands of third wave feminists.
From the sound of that, Lia Thomas should check it out.
Until next time.
Jonah, Chapter Four: 1-3
Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy’. Pages 72-73
Matthew, Chapter Three: 31
Graham Greene, ‘The End of the Affair.’ Page 151
Graham Greene, ‘The End of the Affair.’ Page 159
Graham Greene, ‘The End of the Affair.’ Page 160