The existence or nonexistence of God or some other supreme deity is something that Bendrix and Sarah are initially indifferent about when they begin their passionate love affair in The End of the Affair. To them, it doesn’t matter whether or not God exists; they are entirely wrapped up in each other, even though Sarah is still married to a kind but passionless man named Henry. However, when Sarah discovers Bendrix’s lifeless body stuck beneath a door after one of the air raids that plagued London during World War II, she suddenly turns to God, promising that if Bendrix is allowed to live, then she will stop cheating on her husband and start believing in God. Just at that moment, Bendrix walks into the room, and, true to her word, Sarah ends their relationship. Two years later, after hiring a private detective to follow Sarah, Bendrix gains possession of her diary and learns the truth about why she broke up with him and her new belief in God. Shortly thereafter Sarah dies, leaving Bendrix to grapple with his own budding belief in—but hatred for—God. The literal end to the affair between Bendrix and Sarah, then, is the beginning of a spiritual journey that transforms their lives entirely. In The End of the Affair, Green explores the acceptance of faith as an inevitability, albeit a sometimes painful and personally devastating one.
Bendrix writes that “[Sarah] believed in God as little as I did.” This mutual unbelief is significant as it implies that Bendrix and Sarah both believe that their adulterous relationship is not a sin, and which therefore makes it easier for them to continue without spiritual fear for themselves. After Sarah’s death, Bendrix asks Henry if he’s beginning to believe in God. Henry, mildly offended, says, “Of course I’m not.” This shows that Henry, too, was, at best, indifferent about the idea and found it somewhat ridiculous to think that he would ever become a believer.
However, a handful of Sarah and Bendrix’s comments, as well as Mrs. Bertram’s (Sarah’s mother) revelation about Sarah’s childhood baptism, reveal that the seeds of faith were always there, ready to grow into something more meaningful. For instance, Bendrix claims that he has a “personal devil” that provokes him into teasing other people. The belief in any kind of devil (a negative force) would imply a belief in a positive force such as God, casting doubt on Bendrix’s claim that he is atheistic. And even though she writes in her diary that the vow she made with God for Bendrix’s life was made to “somebody [she didn’t] really believe in,” Sarah evidently nursed some small hope that God existed. That hope could only have existed alongside some latent belief that there was somebody she could pray to for help. After Sarah’s death, Mrs. Bertram reveals that she had Sarah secretly baptized as a Catholic when she was just a toddler and claims she “always had a wish that it would ‘take,’” although she never told anyone about it. Sarah, then, had always technically been part of the Christian faith, and the same spirit that prompted her mother to baptize her could have had a greater influence in Sarah’s life than she recognized.
Ultimately, as the drama and pain associated with the ending of Sarah and Bendrix’s relationship increases, each character accepts God as a reality. However, the story depicts this acceptance not as a heartwarming and welcome experience but as a painful one that life has forced upon each of the characters. In her diary, Sarah writes, “I’ve caught belief like a disease” as she describes how her newfound belief in God is preventing her from breaking her vow to him. In likening religious belief to catching a “disease,” Sarah implies that her new faith is something that threatens her happiness and health rather than something that positively impacts her life. After Sarah’s death and having read of her spiritual journey in her diary, Bendrix tells God, “I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.” Even though Bendrix implies that he still doesn’t believe God exists, the fact that he is talking to God in the first place—and harbors hatred toward him—shows that he actually does accept God’s existence, whether consciously or not. Once again, though, religious belief is depicted in negative terms, as Bendrix’s belief hinges on hatred, as it was God who caused him to lose Sarah. In the end, even though he accepts God, Bendrix wants to live a Godless existence. This is shown in the book’s final lines when Bendrix prays to God to “leave [him] alone for ever.” So even as the novel presents belief in God as an inevitability, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the book’s characters go on to dedicate their lives to God and become upstanding religious people.
For Bendrix and Sarah, the acceptance of God as a reality is a painful experience, but one that was bound to happen. Sarah was baptized as a child, and, as her mother hoped, it eventually does “take” when Sarah faces her worst fear: the possibility of Bendrix’s death. For Bendrix, whose life is entirely bound up in his relationship with Sarah, accepting God becomes inevitable after learning that God is the reason Sarah left him. For both of them, accepting God is linked with the idea of losing each other and any possibility of finding happiness together in the future. With this, the novel suggests that acknowledging God’s existence can be a largely negative and painful experience, thus illustrating the darker side of faith.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Faith, Acceptance, and the Divine ThemeTracker
Faith, Acceptance, and the Divine Quotes in The End of the Affair
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? […] If there is a God who uses us and makes us his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.
A vow’s not all that important—a vow to somebody I’ve never known, to somebody I don’t really believe in. Nobody will know that I’ve broken a vow, except me and Him—and He doesn’t exist, does he? He can’t exist. You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.
But was it me he loved, or You? For he hated in me the things You hate. He was on Your side all the time without knowing it. You willed our separation, but he willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn’t anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more.
[…] turning as I left the church and seeing her huddled there at the edge of the candlelight, like a beggar come in for warmth, I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
I wanted her burnt up, I wanted to be able to say, Resurrect that body if you can. My jealousy had not finished, like Henry’s, with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me. How I wished I could send Parkis after her to interrupt their eternity.
I though, I’ve got to be careful. I mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her. This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. […] She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
‘Oh, she doesn’t belong to anybody now,’ he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was—a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint’s her bones could be divided up—if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn’t everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.
Sarah had really believed that the end began when she saw my body. She would never have admitted that the end had started long before: the fewer telephone calls for this or that inadequate reason, the quarrels I began with her because I had realized the danger of love ending. We had begun to look beyond love, but it was only I who was aware of the way we were being driven. If the bomb had fallen a year earlier, she wouldn’t have made that promise. She would have torn her nails trying to release me. When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food. […] I thought, she wanted me to have a second chance and here it is: the empty life, odourless, antiseptic, the life of a prison, and I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change: what did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life?
I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now. I’m sure. I’ve never been sure before about anything. When you came in at the door with the blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.
There had been a time when I hated Henry. My hatred now seemed petty. Henry was a victim as much as I was a victim, and the victor was this grim man in the silly collar.
Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead. I had committed myself: without love I would have to go through the gestures of love. I felt the guilt before I had committed the crime, the crime of drawing the innocent into my own maze. The act of sex may be nothing, but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. I was safe, but who could tell to what neurosis in this child I might appeal? […] I implored Sarah, Get me out of this, get me out of it, for her sake, not mine.
It’s just a coincidence, I thought, a horrible coincidence that nearly brought her back at the end to You. You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and the blood. If I began to believe that, I could believe in the body and the blood. You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her. You won in the end, You don’t need to remind me of that, but she wasn’t deceiving me with You when she lay here with me, on this bed, with this pillow under her back. When she slept I was with her, not You. It was I who penetrated her, not You.
‘[…] I know when a man’s in pain.’
I couldn’t get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’
And I thought, hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself. […] Nothing—not even Sarah—is worth our hatred if You exist, except You. And, I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? O God, if I could really hate you…
I thought, you’ve failed there, Sarah. One of your prayers at least has not been answered. I have no peace and I have no love, except for you, you. I said to her, I’m a man of hate. But I didn’t feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you—with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell—can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, but shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. […] I sat on my bed and said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. […] I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. […] With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
