The Heart of the Matter

“Why do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn't time to disguise itself? Nobody here could talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.”

Scobie reflects on what he perceives to be a strict divide between the temporal and spiritual worlds. This divide, which religion historian Mircea Eliade has delineated as the “sacred and the profane,” is a hallmark of secular Christianity. Throughout the novel, Scobie struggles with the problem of theodicy and feels that in the temporal world God’s justice is absent. This is a key moment in Scobie’s nascent spiritual crisis.

“A man was surely entitled to that much revenge. Revenge was good for the character: out of revenge grew forgiveness.” 

This reflection from Scobie is one of many proverbs of despair expressed in his monologues. It sheds light on Scobie’s deeply pessimistic and gloomy nature, while also alluding to an important motif: forgiveness and mercy. Mercy is an attribute of God on which Scobie’s big gamble depends. Like many of Scobie’s religious pontifications, this passage reflects a perversity in how it links God’s mercy to revenge.

“They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.” 

One of Greene’s most interesting literary techniques is how he blurs the narrative perspectives through murky third-person accounts. This passage could be a monologue from Scobie in which he expresses self-criticism, or it could be an authorial denunciation of Scobie’s character. This mode of writing is important for analyzing the psychologies of Scobie and Wilson. This particular axiom also illustrates the depths of Scobie’s emotional depravity in his spurning of sentiment as a sign of guilt.

“The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being—it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

Scobie places superficial value on truth-telling. He largely sees himself as someone who tells the truth, while recognizing equally a “vain struggle to retain the lies” (48). This particular musing is in relation to his wife, Louise, whom he does not love, yet he pretends to out of his sense of responsibility. As Scobie’s moral crisis violently unfolds, his inner conflict manifests an important message: that truth and knowledge do not lead to “the heart of the matter,” but rather compassion does.

“It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company, crouched under the rusting handcuffs in the locked office, reading the reports from the sub-stations. Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.” 

Scobie scolds Louise for not having any conception of the meaning of peace. Louise tells Scobie he will find peace once she goes away, which Scobie scoffs at. For Scobie, peace is symbolized by a coldness and a glacial “destructive” mass. This is one of several instances where Scobie’s death is foreshadowed.

“Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.” 

This passage is striking on two levels. First, it raises the question of what the “unforgivable sin” refers to. Normally, this refers to suicide. But in line with his cynical fatalism, Scobie conceptualizes human goodness as an unreachable goal amidst inevitable sinning, a hallmark of Christianity’s Fall of Man doctrine. The Fall of Man refers to the original sins of Adam and Eve leading to a permanent state of human guilt and disobedience. Second, this passage symbolizes Scobie’s dual personification of the sinner and the saint in which goodwill is associated with damnation and evil is decoupled from sin and despair.

“Love isn't a fact like age and religion.” 

Louise scolds Wilson, who is six years younger than her, for his romantic idealism and naiveté. In this exchange, Louise reveals her piety and steadfast belief in the institution of the Church. It is revealing that she says “religion” is a fact instead of “God” which would have a slightly different connotation. Moreover, age difference is important to Louise, who frets over public appearances.

“Although they could touch each other it was as if the whole coastline of a continent was already between them; their words were like the stilted sentences of a bad letter-writer.” 

Scobie’s love for Louise has completely dissipated. Their shared romantic moments are described as “formal,” in which an “unreality cloaked their movements” (89). In this way, their emotional distance is both physical (“coastline of a continent”) and metaphysical (“unreality”). Furthermore, Greene describes this superficial romance as a kind of writer’s block, demonstrating the unreliability and non-factual qualities of both love and the written word. 

“There's one case of blackwater and a few cases of fever, but most are just exhaustion—the worst disease of all. It's what most of us die of in the end.” 

This passage comes from an exchange between a doctor and Perrot, the District Commissioner. A group of colonial administrators, including Scobie and Wilson, have arrived at Pende to oversee rescue operations for a group of shipwrecked survivors. Interestingly, this proverb of despair does not come from Scobie; it comes from the colonial doctor, who shares Scobie’s pessimism. Colonial society is portrayed as uniformly miserable.

“And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created.”

Scobie’s crisis of faith reaches a pivotal point in his observations of the shipwreck tragedy and the immense human suffering. Scobie is unable to accept theodicy, or the theological defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence amidst the existence of evil. Further, this monologue highlights the motif of mercy, and how religious institutions purport to know how God extends love and mercy to believers through legal dogma.

“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.”

Scobie’s cynicism is also a reflection of his ego. The psychoanalytical aspects of the novel lend themselves to a Freudian reading which privileges the survival techniques of Scobie's superego. Happiness is effectively egotistical self-preservation. Moreover, through Scobie, readers observe how suffering is transformed into a means of salvation. In part, the idea of inane happiness is also a consequence of the times, considering the enormous destruction of human life following two world wars. 

“The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn't known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” 

One of the central conflicts in the novel is between “the matter” and “the heart of the matter.” This tension manifests in various ways, but it is particularly noteworthy for what it suggests about religion. Scobie is torn between God’s rules and God’s mercy, and between his private belief and the demands of the Catholic Church. Crucially, it is not knowledge (“the matter”) gained through books and following religious statues that leads to salvation, but rather empathy and mercy (“the heart of the matter”).

“Letter-writing never came easily to him. Perhaps because of his police training, he could never put even a comfortable lie upon paper over his signature. He had to be accurate: he could comfort only by omission.” 

This passage helps elucidate the theme of the unreliability of language, particularly written language. As with the Tower of Babel reference, language, miscommunication, and deception are inherently linked. In the novel, mail correspondence is routinely lost, stolen, or manipulated. Scobie’s diary entries are full of terse, factual details which contain no real information about Scobie’s emotional or psychological state.

“Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought, He even suffers in public.”

This quote perfectly exemplifies the heresy in Scobie’s monologues. God, as an extension of Christ, is described as a “popular demagogue” who is “too accessible” (141). The notion that God is too accessible for Scobie in a church setting in which he is reciting Hail Marys is slightly ironic considering his anti-institutional proclivities. However, as with Scobie’s other third-person monologues in which the distinction between Scobie’s voice and the narrator’s is blurred, it is not entirely clear who “He” is. Scobie experiences competing, contradictory monologues and also develops a God complex, further muddying the narrative waters.

“When they are dead our responsibility ends. There's nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.” 

Scobie is tormented by a debilitating sense of responsibility. It is his unbreakable commitment to duty and responsibility that leads Scobie down the path of destruction. However, it is not clear whether this is an example of Scobie’s goodness or pride. This uncertainty is at the heart of Scobie’s portrayal in the saint-sinner paradox.

“Intelligence, to Wilson, was more valuable than honesty. Honesty was a double-​edged weapon, but intelligence looked after number one.”

This quote from Wilson demonstrates his ease with lying and deception. Intelligence here has two meanings. Literally, it denotes Wilson’s profession in espionage and intelligence-gathering. But symbolically, intelligence represents folly. In this sense, Wilson might understand “the matter,” or the surface-level external knowledge, but remains ignorant of interior truth, or “the heart of the matter.”

“Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.” 

Scobie experiences pity as ceaseless suffering that he carries with him in a spiritual, psychological, and bodily sense. In a Freudian analysis, it is important that Scobie feels only one’s self is unpitiable. Using ego psychology, Scobie’s suicide is a natural corollary of his pitied superego. In other words, for his superego or conscience to survive, Scobie must self-terminate.

“He thought: I'll go back and go to bed, in the morning I'll write to Louise and in the evening go to Confession: the day after that God would return to me in a priest's hands: life will be simple again. Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin.”

Here, Scobie considers following standard Church rules just as Louise urges. In orthodox Catholic thought, following these rituals will lead to contrition and repentance. However, for Scobie, virtue appears as a sin. Sacrament, ritual, the Church, and confession—Scobie sees all of this as pointless and an obstacle to his fate.

“The priests told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentant despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws, and was it less possible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind the stone? Christ had not been murdered—you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail.” 

This passage represents Scobie’s ultimate heresy. He justifies his suicide on the grounds that Christ was the first suicide. From here, there is no turning back. However, Scobie is able to bet on heresy precisely due to his own God complex, which, like his sense of pity, is a manifestation of what Greene calls his “monstrous pride.”

“The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers—we Catholics are damned by our knowledge.” 

Scobie struggles to reconcile his actions with his beliefs. As a Catholic, he is aware of the Church’s teachings on adultery. Helen, by comparison, doesn’t believe in religion and, as a result, is less tormented by their actions. In this sense, Helen is a consequentialist. Consequentialism is an ethical theory that moral goodness depends primarily on consequences rather than intrinsic value. Scobie, contrarily, is haunted by knowledge, but he is perhaps not self-aware enough to fully realize its follies.

“But he had no love of evil or hate of God. How was he to hate this God who of his own accord was surrendering Himself into his power. He was desecrating God because he loved a woman—was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility?” 

Scobie desecrates God because he has committed adultery and does not feel contrition. Further, he in resigned to kill himself in his perverse version of atonement. While Scobie’s second monologue attempts to intervene, Scobie’s pride and God complex remain resolute: He feels he can yet save Helen and Louise, the objects of his pity, through a Christ-like self-sacrifice.

“This is what human love had done to him—it had robbed him of love for eternity.” 

Scobie feels checkmated. His temporal love has compromised his eternal happiness. Yet as seen in Scobie’s final moments before death, Greene suggests a turn to God. Scobie says aloud, “Dear God, I love…” (249). Evidenced by his second monologue and final utterance, it appears God’s love does not stop chasing Scobie. Despite what Scobie thinks and what the Church says, readers cannot know what happened in Scobie’s heart at that moment.

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.” 

This quote is derived from an intra-monologue exchange between Scobie’s two voices. Scobie believes he can assure Louise and Helen a “short suffering” (242). This attitude leads to Scobie’s destruction. The language also suggests a passivity and fatalism in Scobie’s sense of futility. There are no self-corrective acts, even if others, like Louise and Helen, can be saved.