In our thoroughly unchurched modern society, we have been conditioned to make decisions for almost any reason other than that of personal faith. We are told to do things for our own good, or for the good of society, or for the betterment of humanity, or for the health of the earth, but everything in mass culture — the novels we read, the films we see, the shows we watch — tells us not to consider our actions in light of our religious convictions (if we have any to start with).

Yet faith — dogma, even — was not always so thoroughly estranged from everyday life. Seventy years ago, British novelist Graham Greene took one of his periodic holidays from writing his rotation of thrillers and other so-called entertainments — he had, by then, already written The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), and The Third Man (1949) — to write the fourth, and the most compelling, in a series of novels that reflected the Roman Catholic faith to which he had converted at the urging of his soon-to-be wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, in 1926. Greene’s Catholic novels, including The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948), are among his greatest achievements, but it is The End of the Affair, from 1951, that stands out to the modern reader.

At the center of the World War II–era novel set in London is a beautiful, enigmatic Englishwoman named Sarah Miles, who, discontented in her marriage to an entirely unexceptional civil servant, Henry, is stirred by a love affair with the narrator, writer Maurice Bendrix. Yet the book is less a portrait of that romance than a study of Sarah’s renunciation of it for reasons of faith: Progressing from a state of religious disbelief to religious conviction, she holds true to a promise she made to God that she would end her affair with Bendrix. That Greene is alert to how much Sarah sacrifices for her newfound faith — and to how much fruit that faith bears — is part of what makes the novel so strange and surprising today.

What is shocking to the modern sensibility is not that Sarah gives something up but that she does so in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; if the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the modern Left is all too happy to ask us to sacrifice those things that give life meaning and pleasure, but only if such sacrifices are made on the altar of something temporal — say, “the science.”

Even in Greene’s age, though, the decision to frame the relationship between Sarah and Bendrix — and its dissolution — in spiritual terms was far from the norm. “Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James,” writes biographer Richard Greene (no relation) in his recent book The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene. “Whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions.”

Of course, for the end of the affair to land with the intended impact, Greene had to convincingly suggest something of its ardor. Here, he tapped his own experiences. The novel is widely understood as a fictionalized retelling of Greene’s years-long affair with Catherine Walston. In his biography, however, Richard Greene notes that the novel incorporates details of an earlier affair with another woman, and that “while the novel is correctly called a roman à clef, the elements drawn from life merely mark out the broad territory in which the act of imagination occurs.”

Greene seems to have transposed his own musings from adulterous relationships to Bendrix’s inner monologues. “She had always called me ‘you,’” Bendrix says early on. “‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you? . . .’” At another point in the book, when poring over Sarah’s purloined journal entries, Bendrix marvels at having been the object of her desire: “How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.”

Of course, the novel does not concern itself with the question of whether Sarah leaves Bendrix — the answer is settled in the title — but why she leaves him. Greene turns the book into a sort of mystery story: After his own relationship with Sarah has seemingly concluded, Bendrix is on the receiving end of Henry’s ongoing anxiety over her fidelity, and Bendrix, far too eagerly, nominates himself to engage a detective agency to ascertain whom, if anyone, she is seeing. Although Bendrix expresses some mixed feelings about his encounters with the officious, overly deferential Detective Parkis — “It was as if in my attempt to trap Sarah (but for what purpose? To hurt her or to hurt myself?) I had let a clown come tumbling into our intimacy,” Bendrix says — the investigation does produce Sarah’s journal, which allows him to gain a fuller picture of why she terminated their affair.

Greene backtracks two years from the main action, to June 1944, when Bendrix and Sarah, in the throes of the affair, are interrupted by a bomb blast tearing through Bendrix’s apartment building. In the aftermath, Sarah rushes after Bendrix, whom she finds flat on the floor beneath the weight of the building’s front door. She is certain that her lover has perished. “I touched his hand: I could have sworn it was a dead hand,” she writes in her journal, but, perhaps at a loss for anything else to do, she returns to his room to solicit the help of the God in whom her belief is sketchy.

“Let him be alive, and I will believe,” Sarah writes, in a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, as bracing as anything in Joyce, in which she recounts her prayer. She ups the ante of her promise: “So I said, I love him and I’ll do anything if you’ll make him alive, I said very slowly, I’ll give him up for ever, only let him be alive with a chance, and I pressed and pressed and I could feel the skin break, and I said, People can love without seeing each other, can’t they, they love You all their lives without seeing You.” Sarah finds that God has accepted her terms: Bendrix reappears, among the living and upright, in the doorway. She goes on: “And then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.” (“Oh, God,” she says, in a version of this episode seen from Bendrix’s perspective, “you’re alive.”)

Bendrix has his answer — Sarah had cut him out of her life because she wished for him to live and the wish was granted — but Sarah, too, has hers: Ultimately persuaded by this miracle, she haltingly, believably reaches a state of belief. “I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God,” she writes in her journal. That does little good for the lovers, who try to get back together; Bendrix, not beholden to any prayer, pursues Sarah anew after reading her journal, and Sarah, far more reluctant to tempt fate, goes so far as to ask a priest whether she can convert to Catholicism and still marry Bendrix. (She is rebuffed, and, besides, she is later revealed to have already been baptized in the church.) In the end, the couple is defeated first by Sarah’s resolve and then by her death from tuberculosis, a fate no less jolting for having been artfully telegraphed in the little cough Greene gives her.

Yet Greene transmogrifies the tragedy of Sarah’s death into a case for her sainthood. The disfigured face of Mr. Smythe — a hateful “rationalist” with whom an edging-towards-belief Sarah has a series of seriocomic “lessons,” classes she undertakes out of pity for the man more than anything else — is said to have been cured after having been kissed by her. The surest evidence that Sarah’s sacrifice has helped spread the Gospel on earth is the tortured condition in which we find Bendrix in the final pages; his fulminations against God — how could He rob Sarah of life? How could He deny the two of them bliss? — are a case of “Thou dost protest too much.”

To read The End of the Affair today is to be reminded of a time when a mainstream novelist could imagine, and admire, a heroine willing to pay a steep price for her faith. In Greene’s universe, God is something to be argued with, to wish to be freed from, and, sometimes, with the help of fictional characters as deep and wise as Sarah Miles, to admit the reality of.