Human Adequity In Arthur Koestler's Darkness At Noon

For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human’ artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity. However bad a priest, the whisky priest cannot change what he is, any more than the lieutenant can give up his quest to hunt him down or the mestizo escape from the role of Judas, who will betray the priest for his pieces of silver. Identity for them is fixed and ‘eternal’. Such power as each of them wields brings with it no glory. If such attributes

Blood is the price of what he considers to be socially progressive and ameliorative. God, and His Church, never do anything except make people tolerate poverty. As in the other great political novel of this period, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), the question raised is whether the ends justify the means to achieve them. For Koestler, ends cannot be separated from human adequacy of the means to achieve them. For Greene, the interest lies in the beliefs aroused by the ends, and the emotions which inspire them. The lieutenant in his willingness to massacre is fired by hate, and hate is “just a failure of imagination” (131). The Whisky-Priest, for all his weaknesses, does not suffer from such a failure, either in his love for his child or in his willingness to accept the inadequacy of human imagination in relation to the love of God; the taste of God’s love is like the “smallest glass of love mixed with a pint-pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love” (199). The priest can see that such love might even look like hate. No one is ever freed from the threat of this