The Role Of Faith In Graham Greene's Brighton Rock

It is the dialectic of good set in motion by their surrender to evil which shapes the destinies of Greene’s characters. In Brighton Rock, we get the impression that Greene is fascinated by his own religion but at the same time he hates it too, he has a sense of aversion for his own religion. Pinkie frequently alludes to his religion in the same tone as to sex. John Atkins in his book Graham Greens says: “I sometimes suspect that Greene joined the Catholic Church because it is the only respectable organization that is not beastly to tarts” (96). In Journey Without Maps, Greene says that he avoids those aspects of his Catholic religion which he does not like such as damnation. Here, Greene seems to be influenced by the thoughts of Kierkegaard

Faith means complete surrender. To make movements of faith one must shut one’s eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd and take the risk of jumping into the abyss. He approaches God in fear and trembling as Kierkegaard’s Abraham. Kierkegaard observes, “Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the finite passion of the individual’s inwardness and objective uncertainty” (182). Marcel too insists on the inefficiency of the rational proofs of the existence of God and the significance of the blind intuition which powerfully promotes hope and faith. In his book, Metaphysical Journal, Marcel says, “Faith needs to triumph over the state of self-division which is bound up with the condition of existence of a finite being” (237). According to Paul Tillich, faith is the courage of despair. It is not a place where one can live, it is without the safety of words and concepts, it is without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. He remarks in Dynamics of Faith, “Living faith includes the doubt about itself, the courage to take this doubt into itself and the risk of courage”(102). Thus faith is an attitude of trust and commitment in mystery, though faith goes beyond what is known, it is not arbitrary nor its way of taking the world is totally unfounded. Faith takes its rise from some

It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. One’s very selfhood depends upon this repetition, for according to Anti-CHmacus, the self “is a relation which relates itself to itself” (The Sickness Unto Death 21). But unless this self acknowledges a “power which constituted it”, it falls into despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore in order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in “the power which posited it”. There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical system. There is only the individual’s own repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e., the repetition of the faith is the