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Sixty days in one day. One thousand
five hundred fifty-six days in one month. And 36,892 days in three years. By
his own meticulous accounting, this is the amount of time Mr. William Ferraro
has spared himself from purgatory since investing in a personal secretary to
attend to the price of his soul. But not just any secretary would do—Miss
Saunders’ credentials testify to her saintliness. A former head girl at the
nearby Convent of Saint Latitudinaria, three-time recipient of the same
convent’s annual piety award, and long-time Child of Mary, Miss Saunders is
more than qualified for her job of getting Ferraro as many indulgences as
possible. In this way, the wealthy London entrepreneur “look[s] after his own
salvation,” albeit “in a more independent fashion” than that of his mentally
ill wife, who has spent the last ten years trading good wine and strong whisky
for emergency access to a resident liquor-loving Dominican (24).
In
his “Special Duties,” Graham Greene paints a character whose businesslike
approach to secular life extends to his spiritual life. Ferraro, whose days
consist of little more than spending his fortune on costly paintings in order
to reduce his own death-duties, thinks he can work out his salvation in the
same manner as his finances. After discovering that Miss Saunders has routinely
forgone her spiritual duties to carry on a romantic affair, Ferraro immediately
sets to work replacing her with a more reliable employee. Such a shocking lack
of self-awareness reflects Ferraro’s profound misunderstanding of his Catholic
faith, a notion Greene highlights throughout by his own sacramental
imagination. However, unlike those in orthodox Catholic literature, Greene’s characters
are pervaded by an inverted notion of sacramentality. Rather than symbolizing a
deeper inward truth, in “Special Duties” an outward appearance of depth is instead
reflective of a shallower, superficial reality.
Greene’s
portrayal of Ferraro immediately reveals that his apparent concern for his soul
is in reality more businesslike than pious, but this initial transparency is
perhaps less visible in Miss Saunders. Even the alert reader is quite likely
surprised when her piety is exposed as a fantasy—that is, unless he took
immediate notice of the inverted sacramental imagination. A reader with this in
mind cannot help but feel more and more cynical with every passing paragraph. In
every case throughout the short story, descriptions and actions of devotion are
subsequently proven to be false. The more pious the description, the more
impious the expectation of reality becomes.
As
in the Tantum Ergo, in “Special
Duties” sensuum defectui—that is, the
senses fail. When Ferraro asks Miss Saunders if she pays close attention to the
conditions of the indulgence to be gained, she replies that being in the
necessary “state of grace” is “not very difficult” in her case (26). Later,
after witnessing her extra-marital affair, Ferraro muses that “not even the
conditions for an indulgence had been properly fulfilled,” let alone the
indulgence itself (29). In a similar manner, the convent’s awarding of piety
prizes also reflects Greene’s notion of the superficial. Even to unchurched
ears, the idea of convents handing out piety awards should sound bizarre. Degree
of holiness is something that can only be measured from the inside; judging
piety externally must then out of necessity constitute a human attempt to play
the divine. In other words, there is a lack of fides supplementum—that is, of faith to supplement human deficiency.
The
other side of Ferraro’s mansion is also not immune to this distorted notion of
sacramentality. Ferraro’s wife always has at her service a priest to attend to
her, should any given day be her last. However, the resident priests seem more
intent on gaining the material services she provides than on giving the
spiritual services they were ordained to provide. Yet again, Greene portrays as
inauthentic someone ordinarily capable of being an effective channel of the
authentic. The person who should be a transmitter of God’s grace is instead reduced
to an interferer with the divine.
The
superficiality that plagues the characters in “Special Duties” is a result of profound
misunderstandings of the Catholic faith. Most glaring is Ferraro’s ignorance
regarding the proper understanding and correct use of indulgences. An
indulgence is not a “get-into-heaven-free card,” nor does it provide license to
do whatever one pleases while on earth. Rather, an indulgence is the
remission—either partial or entire—of temporal punishment due to sins already
forgiven. Furthermore, the number of days attached to an indulgence does not represent
the time off purgatory awarded to the recipient; it corresponds instead to the
approximate length of an equivalent penance in the early Church. Nowhere is
this mischaracterization of indulgences greater than when Ferraro expresses his
delight at gaining “five plenary indulgences and 1565 days” during April,
utterly unaware that a single plenary—meaning “full and complete”—indulgence is
alone sufficient for remission of all purgatory time (26).[1] In
addition, Ferraro would have never sent Miss Saunders to another city for “a
mere sixty days’ indulgence” if he had known that simply saying “my Jesus,
mercy” reverently is worth one hundred (26).[2]
One has to wonder, too, what Ferraro would have done to himself had he known
that indulgences in the name of others can only be applied posthumously.
In
some ways, then, Greene is using the character of Ferraro to satirize the effect
of taking aspects of the “Catholic worldview” to an extreme. While Catholic
teaching stresses the importance of the community, Greene’s writing hints that this
should not come at the cost of striving for individual holiness. While
indulgences are an encouraged form of reparation for sin, they are meritless without
a proper desire to amend one’s life. And while the Protestant understanding of
“saved by faith alone” is deficient, equally so is Ferraro’s understanding of
salvation “by works alone,” much especially works commissioned as by a
contractor and recorded as by an accountant.
To
foster such an understanding, Greene masterfully paints several new critical
techniques into the background of his short story portrait. Specifically,
Greene’s characters’ appearances, words, and actions repeatedly combine
throughout the story to create irony, ambiguity, tension, and paradox. Ferraro’s
dialogue to Miss Saunders, for example, is as ironic as it is hypocritical. His
half-hearted admittance, “If I were less occupied here, I could attend to some
of these indulgences myself,” comes on the very day that he cannot find
anything better to do than visit Miss Saunders as she attempts to gain them
(26). His similar dismissal of gaining indulgences for his wife—“We are taught,
Miss Saunders, to pay first attention to our own souls...I employ you to look
after mine.”—reveals the insurmountable contradiction on which the story’s entire
plot, theme, and tone is founded (27).
“Special
Duties” is also littered with phrases that suggest multiple meanings. For
example, the fact that Miss Saunders says “I was late home last night” to
explain the missing indulgences for the month of June could indicate two
possibilities (26). On one hand, she truly was late coming home because she was
away at another church gaining a plenary indulgence. Alternatively, she was home
late because she was visiting her lover, in which case the listing she manages
to produce is as authentic as her piety sincere. Such ambiguity thus highlights
a prevailing tension between Miss Saunders and Ferraro and, by extension,
between religious fervor and complacency. Miss Saunders is complacent in her
feigned fervency, reinforcing her double life as both saint and deceiver.
Ferraro, on the other hand, is fervent in his commercialized complacency,
reinforcing his own double life as both Catholic and Pharisee.
Ultimately,
Greene’s purposefully-inverted Catholic imagination is the epitome of paradox—a
sacramental paradox, that is. The outward sign no longer corresponds to an
inward reality. Rather, the actual inward state of being is entirely opposed to
the characteristic portrayed. In the same way that we would in conventional
Catholic literature search for the deeper meaning behind an ordinary symbol,
Greene forces us instead to expose the superficiality behind the symbol of
depth. In “Special Duties” such a
Catholic imagination is rooted in misrepresentations of every sort—from
indulgences to salvation to faith and works. But what, we might ask, is at the
root of all this misunderstanding? Ignorance alone cannot explain Ferraro’s
endeavor to work out his salvation with calculator and pocketbook rather than
“with fear and trembling.” It cannot explain Miss Saunders’ motivation in accepting
her shameful position in the first place. And it certainly cannot explain
Ferraro’s plenary failure to recognize the errors of his ways, for by
definition ignorance repeated is insanity.
Graham
Greene, perhaps, would shift the focus from the man and the woman to the
Creator of man and woman. When the former yield their lives to participate in That
of the Latter, the two co-operate to create a divinized self-awareness, a
sacrament. But when the former place themselves on center-stage, the lip
service paid to the Latter—if He is remembered at all—can only create a mortal unawareness, a pseudo-sacrament—a great
façade.
[1] Aside
from performing the indulgence itself, there are several conditions that must
be fulfilled in order to gain a plenary indulgence. Perhaps the most difficult
requirement of the person seeking the plenary indulgence is that he be free
from all attachment or desire to sin, even venially. Thus depending on the
person, a plenary indulgence may in practice be very difficult to gain. This
seems to be especially true for Greene’s character Ferraro.
[2] Raccolta
61.
