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Unbelieving Believer
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11678 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
2,512 Words |
| Author
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
When a man ceases to believe in the biblical God, G.K. Chesterton wrote, he does not believe nothing, he believes anything. Few contemporary writers, I venture to say, appreciate this truth as fully as Brian Moore does.
Born to a Catholic family in Belfast in 1921, Moore seems to have entertained doubts about his inherited faith at an early age. Certainly, he despised the Catholic schools he attended and the priests, like the lamentable Father Connally in his recent Lies of Silence, with whom he came in contact. During the Second World War, when he joined the British Ministry of War Transport, Moore accompanied Allied Occupation Forces into North Africa, Italy, and France, happy to escape the narrow, sectarian world of his fathers. He knew, already, that he would never return to Northern Ireland--an "ugly, troubled place"--or to the Catholic faith.
At war's end, Moore served with the UNRRA economic mission in Warsaw and worked as a freelance reporter in Scandinavia before immigrating to Canada, where he worked for the Montreal Gazette and began to crank out pulp stories and novels. At the same time, however, he developed serious literary ambitions. In the mid-1950s, he published two novels--The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Feast of Lupercal that established him as a writer of promise and a man with a score to settle.
The protagonists of both works are victims of a Catholicism that hems them in on every side, reducing the scope of their humanity. Deprived of their freedom to turn away from the church and follow the dictates of conscience, they repress their heterodoxies and libidos. For the young Moore, his readers could not but infer, the Catholic religion was the principal enemy of human emancipation.
Far from being religiously unmusical--the term is Max Weber's--Moore soon concluded that he could not continue to condemn or pity those who embraced, or submitted to, the Catholic faith without examining the lives of those, like himself, who sought other avenues for their will to believe. That such a will was ineradicable Moore has never doubted, and it is testimony to his honesty that in the series of novels he wrote during the 1960s and '70s, he recorded his growing disillusionment with what he was beginning to recognize as quixotic quests for a substitute religion.
Rather like James Joyce, another Irish Catholic rebel and exile, Moore had believed that artistic creation and sexual commerce could be regarded as sacramental
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