Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption

78 pointsposted 8 days ago
by bryanrasmussen
(libertiesjournal.com)

35 Comments

philsnow

8 days ago

> Why, oh why, must the love stories fail?

Well, Julia's (and then Charles's) love for God prevails, in the end.

On the face of it, it's not a story where the guy gets the girl, as such. However, there is a sense where Jesus is the bridegroom of the Church, and thus it is that kind of story, just not the way that readers expect (well, as Oliver points out, until they read the title of the section "The Twitch on the Thread").

lo_zamoyski

5 days ago

In Catholic theology, God is the ultimate end of Man. The created order, with all its good and beauty, can be understood as a sign that points to God.

Marriage under a Catholic understanding has both a natural and a supernatural end. The natural end is procreative, but the supernatural end is that of a friendship in which husband and wife help each other on their journey toward Heaven.

In Dante, we see Dante's love of Beatrice lead him to God. He never marries her, but through her beauty and his love of her, she becomes a kind of icon through which Dante is led toward virtue and the divine. Eros draws him upward, but he is purified by agape. Agape purifies eros. The willing of the good of the other, self-sacrifice, surpass the satisfaction of one's desires and purify them.

(Incidentally, this is why, in this theological light, vile perversions like pornography become even more horrifying and dark. There is a sense in which one is also participating in an act of desecration.)

giraffe_lady

8 days ago

I really like this book and while not catholic I'm close enough that the experiences and decisions of the characters are comprehensible to me, which probably helps.

The article mentions this briefly but many don't, and they downplay it significantly even here. The first act of this book is extremely homoerotic. Like it is a clear depiction of a chaste but certainly romantic love between these two young men. But it is also a friendship based on normal-for-the-time-and-place male camaraderie and college antics.

It's a nuanced and sophisticated depiction, not apparently trying to make any moral or ethical point about it and the book has a small but devoted following among contemporary gay men for this. Nor is this even plausibly deniable as a "sappho and her friend" type accident on the author's part, since homosexuality is pretty explicitly (though euphemistically) referenced elsewhere in the book. IMO one of the best depictions of a romance of its kind in modern literature. It's fascinating that it's here.

danielhanlon

8 days ago

How unexpected - beautifully written! It's almost surprising that the quoted passages are so familiar - I hadn't realised how affecting they are. Whilst loving the book I can't consider Brideshead Revisited without thinking of the wonderful 1980s Granada TV adaptation. I didn't dare watch the more recent film, lest it spoil the tableaux of the original.

coyotespike

5 days ago

The Granada TV adaptation apparently was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and they simply read out loud parts of the book where they hadn't filled in the script - "a book on film." I loved it.

musictubes

8 days ago

Liberties is a great journal. It covers a lot of intellectual ground and is unapologetically Liberal in all senses of the word. Every issue has political and historical commentary, art (literary, film, dance) criticism, and poetry. It’s like a denser Harper’s.

googlryas

5 days ago

Why does HN lie? There are comments in this thread saying they were posted "18 hours ago" (eg from giraffe_lady), but I am positive I read these comments 3 days ago on the same thread.

mattmanser

5 days ago

Might be some thread merging, dang sometimes does it, or might be a newish automatic feature I haven't heard about.

Oddly, if you search the story name it says it was actually posted 3 days ago, but directs tot his thread:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

You can email them and ask, email's in the faq. They do respond.

detaro

5 days ago

it's a boost feature, which basically resets the clock for a story (and since the ranking algorithm is influenced by newness a lot, it pushes it back up)

giraffe_lady

4 days ago

Dang was just proud of me for not calling anyone a coward or heretic in this one and wanted to make sure everyone saw.

K7mR2vZq

8 days ago

[dead]

dhosek

8 days ago

His journey doesn’t really follow that pattern though. The Loved One, a deeply iconoclastic satirical novel came after Brideshead.

throwaway2562

8 days ago

What of it? The Loved One (1948) was a bit of a squib at best, tonally a throwback to the earlier Waugh. It’s not very good (imho) so you can see why Terry Southern - who had not much taste - liked it enough to make a film of it, also unsuccessful.

The Sword of Honour Trilogy written over the next decade or so is much more representative of the later Waugh: the original article has sketched him out correctly.

The general continuity in Waugh’s life and writing is contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect sense in that light.

The diaries are worth reading too. He really was quite an unpleasant fellow, as well as a fine writer.

giraffe_lady

7 days ago

> The general continuity in Waugh’s life and writing is contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect sense in that light.

I'm christian and this describes the most troublesome converts. Both in the trouble they cause the rest of us and the trouble they experience themselves.

The thing they miss, and also maybe you, and also probably Waugh, is that religions are in one sense much older but in another much more serious and experiential sense they are modern.

They are practiced by modern people, with modern patterns of thought, navigating modern problems in modern ways. The wisdom may be ancient but your life isn't, your belief isn't. You can't go home again, you can't swim in the same river twice, you can't prevent the fall, you can't put the family back together, you can't practice the religion of st anthony or even of your great grandfather. A modern person can only practice a modern christianity and this includes catholicism.

Now, I still think you are right about waugh there. He did have contempt for modernity and did probably turn to catholicism to escape it. But I don't believe he found what he was looking for, because it simply isn't there to be found.

Charles Taylor explores this problem/contradiction/experience in incredible depth in A Secular Age. I wish waugh had been able to read it but I wonder if he would have.

geye1234

7 days ago

I'm responding a bit late to this.

The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true. And therefore so is (the object of) Christians' belief. And so therefore, a 'modern Christianity' is an oxymoron.

I happily claim to practise the religion of St. Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing (God's Self-Revelation in the God-Man Jesus Christ), and our wills pursue the same thing (Union with the Divine Nature). The reason for belief and the goal of religious practice is the same in St. Anthony's case as in mien.

As for Waugh, he believed that 'modernity', taken to mean the beliefs that inform contemporary thought and behaviour, was contemptible. (Obviously, if we took 'modern' to simply mean 'contemporary', this would make no sense. 'Modern' is a notoriously ambiguous word.)

dragonwriter

7 days ago

> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

"The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time, and for any given time and group of Christians tend to include a mix of teachings that are held by those Christians to be fundamental and eternal, and teachings that are held by those Christians to be applicable in the current context (the latter tend to be presented as an application of the former to the perceived current circumstances, but may or may not be the result of applying any rational process to explicitly held eternal beliefs to any specifically articulated beliefs about the modern world.)

Your objection seems to be grounded in claims about the "teachings of Christianity" that are empirically untrue of the actual teachings of actual Christianity as it has actually existed in the material world. They may apply to some abstract ideal of Christianity, but in that case a "modern Christianity" could still exist as a concrete Christianity that more closely approached the abstract ideal than current concrete forms.

geye1234

7 days ago

That's fair. Let's replace 'Christianity' with 'the Catholic Church', since what you say undoubtedly applies to Protestantism, and in a less obvious way to Eastern Orthodoxy. And remember, I'm saying 'timeless if true'; the 'true' part is assumed for the purpose of this argument.

dragonwriter

7 days ago

As someone who has been Catholic most of my life, it certainly applies just as much to the Catholic Church (even to there being diverse beliefs within the Church at any given time, and certainly to change over time.)

geye1234

7 days ago

Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change. Again, if it changes, then it isn't true. I'm not (here) arguing that it's true; only that in order to adhere to it, one must hold that it doesn't change. That, obviously, doesn't imply that every member of the Catholic Church believes the same thing. Nor does it imply that practice will look different in various times and places, although practice will always have the same goal (Union with the Divine Essence) and therefore be in essence the same thing.

EDIT: "will look different" should obviously be "will not look different"

dragonwriter

6 days ago

> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change

Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.

> Again, if it changes, then it isn't true.

If it changes, and it was claimed to be a universal constant, than either the before- or after-change version isn't true, sure, that's trivially true.

geye1234

6 days ago

I said

>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

To which you said

> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time

> Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.

The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation. Individual Catholics or churchmen may believe all kinds of things, some contrary to revelation and/or each other, but that's something distinct. What has manifestly changed?

dragonwriter

6 days ago

> The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation.

No, even in the view of the official teachings of the Catholic Church, the teachings of the Catholic Church include, but extend well beyond, revelation.

If the teachings were only what was understood to be unquestionably part of the content of revelation, then there would be no teachings which were not dogmas.

geye1234

5 days ago

Yes, that was a bad way of putting things on my part. You are correct. Better would be "the basis of the Catholic Church's teaching, and the primary part of its teaching, is revelation".

To return to the main disagreement:

>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.

> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time

The teaching of the Catholic Church, insofar as it is proposed as being part of Revelation, or as following logically therefrom, is timeless and unchanging. One reason is that Revelation is primarily about God (it's His Self-Revelation), who can't change.

Again, the fact that different Catholics believe different things (contrary to Revelation or each other), or that some teachings that are not proposed as being part of Revelation change over time, is irrelevant to this.

Obviously, if you claim Revelation is an "abstract ideal", then you are implicitly claiming it's false, or doesn't exist, which is an entirely different argument.

Are there any teachings that are proposed as part of Revelation, or as following logically therefrom, that have manifestly changed over time?

dctoedt

5 days ago

> Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't change.

The "God can't change" part seems a bit above our paygrade, no?

Not to mention: Who are we to say that God wouldn't reveal things to us gradually — and maybe in a changing way?

EXAMPLE: We still teach our kids that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Later, we refine the teachings.

lo_zamoyski

5 days ago

This misunderstands the theology and metaphysics very profoundly.

The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity. Change presupposes imperfection and, therefore the potential for perfection, i.e., full actualization, but God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is pure act with no potential left to actualize. God is fully dynamic, but this is quite different from change. He may appear to change from our temporal perspective as events are distributed in time, but from an eternal perspective, all is actualized, "simultaneous", so to speak.

W.r.t. gradual revelation, that is exactly what Scripture is a record of. A Catholic reading will demonstrate that revelation is in the business of slowly revealing to Man who God is (at least that which cannot be known through unaided reason; quite a bit can be known through reason alone), preparing him for the culmination of public revelation in the Incarnation of the Logos, something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And furthermore, the Catholic Church recognizes the development of doctrine, which you could call a refinement and deepening of understanding of what has been revealed. I like the analogy to mathematics, even if it is imperfect: all the theorems that follow from a set of axioms are in a sense already in the axioms, and so mathematics is in the business of unpacking them.

However, this gradual revelation and development of doctrine, in order to be authentic, cannot contradict what was known previously, at least to a certain accuracy, if not precision. Of course, here is where people can get tripped up by analogical devices and literal-mindedness. Scripture is written using the idioms, paradigms, and language of the people who wrote it and for whom it was written. That means that some of the language may not agree with strict scientific descriptions of the 21st century. However, when that does occur, you will note that the sense is not the reference: when the Bible speaks of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west in order to communicate some theological truth, it is not making astronomical claims about the sun and the earth. It is using this language as instruments to communicate something, often by analogy. In fact, analogy is essential to theology, something captured in the concept of the analogia entis. Univocal or equivocal approaches to the subject of God have been the source of numerous heresies.

dctoedt

5 days ago

> The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity.

Is that so? Just because some people can't conceive of a mutable God, it doesn't mean it's impossible by definition. (Quantum mechanics was equally "inconceivable," until it wasn't.)

For the sake of argument, let's assume that God exists. Of course it's not our place to proclaim that God does change — that's above our paygrade, too. But to purport to categorically rule out the possibility is not just Dunning-Kruger arrogance, it's blasphemy.

Our discussion brings to mind chapter 38 of the Book of Job. We can summarize it (profanely) as God's saying to Job, in essence, "Who the f*ck are you to question me?"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...

geye1234

4 days ago

It is, actually, necessary that God can't change. It is not _solely_ an article of Faith, but it's additionally something that someone without the light of Faith can know, although some pretty abstract thinking is required.

Most people think of the God of monotheism as a kind of super-angel. They think of Him as omnipotent, eternal, etc etc, but still something that exists in the same way that everything else exists. We say of a stone, a plant, a human being or an angel "it exists", and therefore, they think, we can say the same about God. This is the wrong way of thinking about Him, and it causes a lot of confusion (and it allows the Dawkinistas to put forth puerile arguments like "one god fewer"). It makes existence out to be something that God has, and therefore something that is, in itself, independent of Him. And if something is independent of God, then it would be higher than He is, and be something that He relied on, and that would mean He wouldn't be God.

It is instead much better to say that God is Being, and that everything else exists only in a derivative way. Everything else has being, but God is Being.

Pantheists and other monists argue that the universe itself is being, and that it can't ultimately change (the appearance of change is an illusion, they say). Their argument, to summarize horribly, is that anything other than being is non-being, and non-being can't do anything, since it doesn't exist. An acorn can't change into a tree, because that would imply that prior to the change the tree "is not", and that which is not can do nothing. The tree must therefore have always existed. Thus all change is an illusion.

They're mistaken insofar as they're talking about the visible universe -- change is absolutely real -- but what they say is roughly true for God. He can't change, because there is nothing that is Being apart from Him. Everything outside Him exists only derivitavely. This doesn't imply pantheism, because the things outside Him have real existence, but it is a kind of lesser existence.

A rough analogy: Light can't be dark. Other things can share in light without actually being light (noun), but they can't make light be dark. God is Being, and other things can share in his being but can't make Him non-being. Any change in Him would involve His going in some way from non-being to being. But non-being can't do anything, or become being. This is a very rough sketch of why God is immutable. This stuff requires some seriously abstract and non-quantitative thinking and isn't easy.

Job 38 doesn't imply that we can know nothing about God, only that we can't fully comprehend Him.

giraffe_lady

6 days ago

> I happily claim to practise the religion of St. Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing

Well, and me too. But also you should read the book I mentioned. I'm not qualified to summarize it but others have. It has been extremely valuable to my spiritual life.

geye1234

6 days ago

Thanks. I've heard good things about Taylor and I will try to check it out one of these days.

cafard

8 days ago

Paul Fussell (I think) said that one should read Waugh's letters rather than his diaries: he wrote the letters in the morning, sober, and wrote the diaries at night, drunk.

TheOtherHobbes

4 days ago

A similar contempt for modernity was popular in Germany in the years before BR was published.

IMO he revealed far too much truth in Decline and Fall, and the rest was hopeful damage limitation.

I'm not surprised he drank a lot.

ewgoforth

8 days ago

The movie is pretty good too. Jonathon Winters in a dual row.

dhosek

8 days ago

Oh God no, that movie is a horrid mess. It’s why Waugh’s novels were never adapted by Hollywood studios after that.