The Effects of the Sacraments in Brideshead Revisited

On the Homiletic & Pastoral Review website, Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, O. P., writes about the Anointing of the Sick/Extreme Unction that Lord Marchmain receives at the end of Charles Rider's story of his interactions with the family at Brideshead:

Several of the details in this description are inaccurate: anointing of the sick is given with blessed oil of the sick, not chrism; priests anoint with their own hands, not cotton balls, but the power of the sacrament is described with consummate skill. Lord Marchmain is moved by the sacrament to accept salvific sealing with the cross of Christ. His life finds its reconciliation by being finally blessed by the power of the cross which he had been fleeing for years. The image of the rending of the veil (cf. Matt 27:51) evokes the power of Christ’s death which is present, the unveiling of the merciful presence of God, and the tremendous change that the sacrament brings to Lord Marchmain’s soul. Lord Marchmain dies soon afterwards—his desperate fear of death is no more. In embracing the reality of Christ’s cross, in accepting his own sinfulness as forgivable, he has entered the freedom he has always sought.

Fr. Mackay takes on a tremendous dignity as the instrument of Christ’s mercy in this sacrament, truly acting in the person of Christ the head of the Church. His return to his jocular, simple personality in the subsequent paragraphs is so striking as to almost be funny. This contrast says something very true and also very comforting about the priestly vocation. The priest bears Christ, it is true, and images Christ, but the power on which he ultimately relies is the power of Christ himself. No matter how holy and good a priest is, there will always be a “gap” between his human limitations and Christ’s perfection, but it is a gap which Christ’s power will always bridge in the sacraments.

Even the prayer of Charles is significant. Describing the anointing of the sick the Catechism says: “By celebrating this sacrament the Church, in the communion of saints, intercedes for the benefit of the sick person, and he, for his part, through the grace of this sacrament, contributes to the sanctification of the Church.”26 Although the intercession of the Church for the sick is primarily expressed through the prayers of the priest, Charles and Julia, as baptized Christians, contribute by their prayers. In turn, Lord Marchmain’s acceptance of grace also impacts his family. Participating in the deathbed scene leads Julia to abandon her intentions to marrying Charles, and eventually brings Charles to the faith.

Read the rest there. This is an excellent teaching example of the effects of the Sacraments. If we cooperate with them, they change us and infuse us with Grace!

Evelyn Waugh, RIP--But Brideshead Lives On!

Of course, Evelyn Waugh lives on too, in eternal life, but as we mark the 50th anniversary of his dead in 1966, Harry Mount writes about the ongoing fascination of Brideshead Revisited for The Catholic Herald:

Evelyn Waugh’s life and work still captivate us. It’s not hard to understand why – he is one of the prose stylists of the age, and one of its funniest writers. His comic gift is all the greater for being shot through with pleasing melancholy and joyful malice.

The curious thing is that, of all his books, it’s Brideshead Revisited that enchants the public more than any other. Waugh obsessives, including me, prefer A Handful of Dust – for its macabre chill – or Scoop, for its mixture of comedy and eternal accuracy about the ridiculous side of journalism.

But it is Brideshead that dominates the popular vision of Waugh; Brideshead that was a huge hit in America after it came out in 1945; Brideshead that was made into the excellent Granada series in 1981, and the third-rate film in 2008.

Waugh was clear about the main point of Brideshead in his 1959 preface to the revised edition. “Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.” And, it’s true, Catholicism provides the spine of the book.

Charles Ryder begins, at his own admission, with “no religion … The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth.”

By the end of the book (spoiler alert), Ryder is kneeling before the tabernacle in Brideshead’s chapel, saying a prayer, “an ancient, newly-learned form of words”. The implication is that he is about to become a Catholic. Lord Marchmain receives the sacraments on his deathbed. Sebastian ends up in a monastery. A devout Julia separates from the divorced Rex Mottram, and backs out of marriage to Charles, who has already been married.

So, yes, Catholicism is the central theme of the book – but it is only one of several themes. Even Waugh acknowledged that religion is concealed below them. He said to A D Peters, his literary agent, “The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won’t recognise it.”

Read the rest there.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in the peace of Christ. George Weigel, reviewing a biography of Waugh in two volumes by Martin Stannard for First Things, quotes the dearly departed: “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.” Weigel also quotes Father D'Arcy, who received Waugh into the Church:

Few [converts] can have been so matter of fact as Evelyn Waugh. As he said himself, “On firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion I was admitted to the Church.” All converts have to listen while the teaching of the Church is explained to them”first to make sure that they do in fact know the essentials of the faith and secondly to save future misunderstandings . . . . Another writer came to me at the same time . . . and tested what was being told him by how far it corresponded with his experience. With such a criterion, it was no wonder that he did not persevere. Evelyn, on the other hand, never spoke of experience or feelings. He had come to learn and understand what he believed to be God’s revelation, and this made talking with him an interesting discussion based primarily on reason.

Pray for him. As St. Thomas More noted in his Supplication of Souls, prayer for the dead is never wasted.

Best Books Read in 2015, Part One

On-line journals and blogs are posting their books of the year for 2015, like this column from The Catholic World Report. So here's part one of my list of the best books I read in 2015:

Near the end of the year, I re-read long snippets of Brideshead Revisited, picking up the book to find the passages on Rex Mottram's attempted conversion for this submission to the Eighth Day Institute blog. Once you pick up that book, it's always hard to put it down, so I ended up breezing through it again.

Earlier in the year, I explored some aspects of the American Civil War dealing with death and theology, and enjoyed Mark A. Noll's explanation of the position of Catholics in the USA during Antebellum and after:

The lecture/chapter introducing Continental and American Catholic theologians commenting on slavery in America introduces some difficulties too. Catholics were in no position (see 5) above) to influence American culture, but they still had a problem when they did side with the American Evangelical Abolitionists, because that group was also very much in favor of the Italian antipapal forces working to take away the temporal kingdom of Pope Pius IX: "For American Catholics to show loyalty to the pope in his contemporary political turmoil was to invite the suspicion of those Americans who were most vocal in supporting the pope's opponents." When Catholics spoke against slavery, their arguments were rejected because the abolitionists believe that Catholics themselves were slaves, "abject slaves to their priests, bishops, and popes" and could not experience political liberty! Noll comments that the "Know-Nothings of the American Party were extreme, but they nonetheless represented a great swath of American opinion in their views . . ."

But on the Continent, Noll finds a "richer commentary", from what he terms "liberal" and "conservative" Catholics, both of whom argued that only the Catholic method of scriptural interpretation could guide Christians when facing new moral issues. Noll offers several examples from two major Catholic periodicals, the "Historical and Political Newspaper for Catholic Germany" and La Civilta cattolica (the Italian Jesuits' "Catholic Civilization") of their critiques of both the industrial North and the slave-holding South. These journals stated the opposite of what the abolitionists believed: only with Catholicism can one truly be free!

After talking about the "Whig interpretation of history" for years, I finally read Herbert Butterfield's famous analysis of The Whig Interpretation of History:

Butterfield uses the example of Reformation History under the whig theory throughout his essay: Protestantism defeated Catholicism and so now we have a better world. If Catholicism had won, we would be stuck in the Middle Ages, because of course the Catholic Church would always have prevented progress! It would have always been against science, freedom, development of peoples, etc. One might almost think that Butterfield was a Catholic from the way he defends the Catholic Church from this view of history, but no, he was a Methodist.

What Butterfield proposes for the historian to do is find out and tell--like a travel guide for people who will never travel to the places she describes--what life was like in the past. He wants the historian to describe the past, not judge it for its influence on the present.

Since I made two presentations on St. Thomas More in 2015, I read more both about and by More, including some of his apologetic works, including The Supplication for Souls, his defense of the practice of prayer for the dead in purgatory, which was

More's answer to Simon Fish's Supplication of Beggars, in which Fish told Henry VIII that he was not in control of his country which is filled with poor beggars because of the priests whose demand for alms to pray and say Masses for the dead--a classic zero-sum view of salvation economy. According to Fish, if people are giving alms for prayers they aren't giving alms for the poor. More writes his answer representing the Poor Souls in Purgatory, who beg for prayers and penance from the living as they suffer for the effects of their sins on earth after death. . . .

Fish wants all the priests in England to be tied to carts, dragged through the streets, beaten, forced to marry, and get jobs. More asks, on behalf of the Poor Souls, how is this to be enforced, even if Henry would issue such commands. Are women to be forced to marry former priests? What jobs will they do? How will Fish prevent this sudden influx of unemployed priests from increasing the number of the poor? Has Fish really figured out the financial situation? What about all the poor the clergy and the Church assist everyday? What about the people the clergy employ--the builders, carpenters, laborers, etc? Where will they find employment? . . .

More takes each point of Fish's argument and counters it, several times revealing More's experience of legislation and his knowledge of the courts and the law to expose Fish's errors. There is none of the personal invective so often highlighted in discussions of More's apologetic or polemic works. More does employ exaggeration, mockery of Fish's ignorance, irony, and sarcasm. He offers scriptural examples and arguments from the Fathers, appealing to the authority of the Church through the centuries against these new views of Christian doctrine from Luther and Tyndale.

He ends the Supplication with pleas from the Poor Souls for prayers. They also advise the living on how to prepare for death by recounting their own regrets. They warn against preparing more for the funeral arrangements and less for death and judgment. They regret that they relied so much on comforts and luxuries in this life and did not do penance for their sins to expiate the temporal punishments that remained even after they repented and confessed their sins. They beg for our prayers and promise theirs for us once they are in heaven.

I found More's great final dialogue, written in the Tower of London, to be most insightful, faithful, and humane: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. I had two reasons for recommending this book. First: because we all face tribulation at some point in our lives and More offers good advice for how to deal with it. And:

Second, because reading this dialogue, which Gerard Wegemer calls one of More's greatest works in the introduction, helps the reader appreciate the wit and wisdom of Thomas More. Throughout the text, he demonstrates his knowledge of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. He also displays great experience both in secular life and in the spiritual life, understanding the realities of public life and the depths of private life. More knows the weaknesses of humanity: one example is his description of sinners kept awake by the thought of their sins and the need to amend their lives. Finally, they turn over their pillows, plump them up a little, get comfortable, and go back to sleep! More is also aware of the pitfalls of power and influence; no matter how much power and control a statesman may achieve, unless he is the monarch, there will be someone else who tells him what to do and how. Even as he fulfills his ambition to achieve higher and higher rank, he still encounters setbacks and tribulations.

By using the dialogue form, writing a fictional conversation between two characters, More thoroughly explores the themes of suffering and comfort. He also displays his humor through funny stories about people, like the nun who talks so much that her visiting brother can't get a word in; or the doctor who can cure others but not himself; or the prisoner who notes the incongruity of a visitor who locks herself in every night in her own house being upset that he is locked in his cell every night, or the man who plans to please him self during his life, planning to say words of repentance at the last moment to safe himself: his last words are "Well, I'll be damned", etc.

If we read this dialogue for its autobiographical insight, it shows us that Thomas More--just as he did in The Sadness of Christ and just as he told Cromwell and his daughter Meg--was distancing himself from worldly cares and preparing for death. He was thinking about Jesus in His Passion and how he should imitate his Savior. Many of the anecdotes are about his family, including his wife Alice and adopted ward, Meg Giggs, so he was thinking about them too.

Finally for this post, I must mention how valuable I found the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Sir Thomas More, which I did not review on my blog, but referenced often in developing my two presentations this year. From the publisher:

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of a major figure of the modern world. Combining breadth of coverage with depth, the book opens with essays on More's family, early life and education, his literary humanism, virtuoso rhetoric, illustrious public career and ferocious opposition to emergent Protestantism, and his fall from power, incarceration, trial and execution. These chapters are followed by in-depth studies of five of More's major works – Utopia, The History of King Richard the Third, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and De Tristitia Christi – and a final essay on the varied responses to the man and his writings in his own and subsequent centuries. The volume provides an accessible overview of this fascinating figure to students and other interested readers, whilst also presenting, and in many areas extending, the most important modern scholarship on him.

More books (but no more More) tomorrow.

Waugh's Interviews



(Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy)

Francis Philips writes about Evelyn Waugh in The Catholic Herald, referring to a televised interview he gave in 1960:

Then I came across Fr Tim Finigan’s blog last year about Evelyn Waugh’s “Face to Face” interview with John Freeman in 1960. Never having watched this encounter before, I found it very revealing of the man who could write the mordant satire referred to above. Waugh smiled from time to time as he (briefly) explained a point, but only with his lips; his eyes remained cold, watchful, wary – indicative, as Freeman must have realised, of a gifted, complex and deeply private man who understood his own nature and failings and felt not the slightest desire to share this knowledge with the BBC.

Freeman was a model of patient, self-effacing and sensitive enquiry; a disembodied voice focused on his subject and unvaryingly courteous, even though Waugh refused to expand on any tentative avenues of enquiry. Asked whether he missed the life of the city (Waugh was then living at Combe Flory House in Somerset), he replied “I live in the country as I like to be alone”, indicating that further questions in this line would not be approved. . . .

 There were no revelations, confessions, psychologising or the kind of celebrity chumminess that has characterised interviews in a later age. When Freeman tried to probe him on his conversion, Waugh refused to be drawn; he had realised that “Catholicism was Christianity” at the age of 16, had ignored religion for the next decade and reprimanded Freeman for suggesting that his faith might have brought him comfort or solace: “It isn’t a lucky dip”, he replied, adding in an aside that was not picked up on, that it was “the essence”.

Waugh converted in 1930. In 1949 he explained in an interview that his conversion followed his realization that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God.” Doubtless, if Freeman had quoted this on “Face to Face” Waugh would have declined to expand. But it indicates much about the intellectual clarity and emotional intensity with which he looked at life.

Julian Jebb interviewed Evelyn Waugh for The Paris Review in 1962, and seemed to have about the same luck, although there are some gems:

INTERVIEWER

It is evident that you reverence the authority of established institutions—the Catholic Church and the army. Would you agree that on one level both Brideshead Revisited and the army trilogy were celebrations of this reverence?

 

WAUGH

No, certainly not. I reverence the Catholic Church because it is true, not because it is established or an institution. Men at Arms was a kind of uncelebration, a history of Guy Crouchback's disillusion with the army. Guy has old-fashioned ideas of honor and illusions of chivalry; we see these being used up and destroyed by his encounters with the realities of army life.

 

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that there was any direct moral to the army trilogy?

 

WAUGH

Yes, I imply that there is a moral purpose, a chance of salvation, in every human life. Do you know the old Protestant hymn which goes: “Once to every man and nation / Comes the moment to decide”? Guy is offered this chance by making himself responsible for the upbringing of Trimmer's child, to see that he is not brought up by his dissolute mother. He is essentially an unselfish character.

 

And this exchange on characters in fiction:

 

INTERVIEWER

E. M. Forster has spoken of “flat characters” and “round characters”; if you recognize this distinction, would you agree that you created no “round” characters until A Handful of Dust?

 

WAUGH

All fictional characters are flat. A writer can give an illusion of depth by giving an apparently stereoscopic view of a character—seeing him from two vantage points; all a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not information of a different order. . . .But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.

 

INTERVIEWER

Does this mean that you continually refine and experiment?

 

WAUGH

Experiment? God forbid! Look at the results of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.

The "best Catholic novel of the Twentieth Century"

Father Robert Barron states that Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited should receive that title. Allow me to parse the phrase: It is a novel; the author is Catholic; it was written in the 20th century; it is set in the 20th century; it is about a Catholic family and the protagonist's interactions with each member of that Catholic family; it is well-written, plotted, and filled with fascinating characters; it seems to fit the bill.

Charles Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte at Christ Church in Oxford and becomes his friend (and more?); Charles becomes the lover of Julia, the confidante of Cordelia, the antagonist of both Lady Marchmain and her eldest son, Bridey (the former because of his relationship with Sebastian, particularly his aiding and abetting Sebastian's alcoholism; the latter because of his relationship with Julia, particularly his leading her into "living in sin"), and finally the witness of Lord Marchmain's reconciliation to Jesus and His Church.

Through all the evocation of Oxford, the beauty of Brideshead, the curiosity of a Catholic noble family in Anglican England, all the tangle of relationships and conflicts, Waugh stated that real theme of the novel was the operation of God's grace in the Marchmain family and by extension, Charles, as he is a member of that family. Although none of the characters achieve a worldly happy ending, each of them receives grace:

Lady Marchmain remains true to her Catholic faith: she makes mistakes in handling the faults of others around her (her husband's infidelity, her son's drunkenness, etc), but she is faithful. She is not perfectly good; but no one in the novel is perfectly bad, either. She is like Bridey, staunch and strict: we don't really like her, but she has integrity.

Lord Marchmain returns home to Brideshead and home to the Church, and through his conversion, he brings Julia back to the Church: she feels the twitch upon the thread and knows that she cannot commit adultery with Charles. Whatever else Lady Marchmain else accomplished, Julia knows her Catholic faith, like Sebastian, she has the vocabulary of Catholicism, as when she acknowledges that she cannot choose a lesser love (Charles) instead of God!

Sebastian finds grace even in his drunkenness; Cordelia, who shares some of her mother and her brother's attributes, is my favorite character in the novel. She is the one who sees the dangers Charles and Julia face and also appreciates the holiness that Sebastian finds as the doorman at a monastery in Northern Africa. I always enjoy reading the scene in which Cordelia tells Charles the story of Sebastian's life at the monastery. She sees with eyes of faith the grace that Charles misses, even in her, when she accurately states his impression of her after returning from the Spanish Civil War: "thwarted"--because then she turns the term right back on him. She has prayed for his conversion and she works for her father's return to the Faith, because Cordelia believes in heaven and wants to go there after death: she is simple and profound.

Finally, Charles himself experiences conversion: he recognizes the grace that Lord Marchmain has received, and that it is "no little thing"; through that sign of Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, Charles realizes that there is a God--and he can even accept Julia's decision with a kind of bitter regret, yet understanding. The last scene, in the chapel Lord Marchmain built for his Catholic wife, demonstrates Charles' conversion and faith.

I do think Brideshead Revisited is the best Catholic novel of the twentieth century; it may be one of the best Christian novels on the twentieth century as it depicts the providence of God working in one family's, one man's life. Waugh's special insight is that he understands the human person in the fullest Catholic sense--fallen, redeemed, receiving God's grace and love all unmerited and yet participating in that grace with free will; he depicts the sacramentality of the Catholic Christian life. And although Waugh is dealing with very serious matters--life and death; love; eternal salvation or eternal damnation--there is a brilliant sense of humor and of the absurd (Rex Motram's attempt to become Catholic; Mr. Samgrass trying to keep up with Sebastian; Charles at home with his father during the summer break, etc).

If you haven't read it, I think you should; I reread it every other year. The 1981 Granada tv series is a good supplement; avoid the recent movie adaptation like the plague, or like Mr. Samgrass.