A friend of mine gave me a box full of Evelyn Waugh books about a two months ago. I brought them home, reached deep into the musty box and pulled out Brideshead Revisited. I had never read the book. My only previous exposure was the movie poster at the local Borders books.
From the opening page I was captivated. I must admit that, at times, my somewhat redneck sensibilities were shaken… what is with this bunch of flaming homosexuals?! But the plot continued to draw me into its impressive unfolding of God’s grace amidst hard providences. This is not evangelical happy-clappy. I was floored by the eucatastrophe, the transcendent mix of sorrow and joy which inspires us to tears as we consider the greater glory of our heavenly inheritance, even against the competing claims of various earthly allegiances, some noble (family, inheritance, tradition, aristocracy) some vain (the pleasures of the bottle, the flesh, and the “new”.
Where is the body of Protestant literature that grasps the deep, biblical piety that Waugh expresses in Brideshead Revisited? Could it be that evangelical culture cannot stand to much reality? Although Reformed Protestants embrace our Augustinian heritage, do we embrace the tragic implications of earthly loves inextricably tied to the fortunes of the city of man even as we struggle to reorient our hearts toward our higher allegiance to the Heavenly City? Where is the literary proof? Where is the Protestant sense of the tragic?
Brideshead begins and ends amidst the wasteland. World War II with all its centralizing destructions was shredding the very fabric of the world that protagonist Charles Ryder finds himself to drawn toward and repulsed by. But the wasteland is not only the product of the external forces of war and modernity, but spiritual rebellion and the excess of our baser desires. The world is broken. Our lives are broken. Even great families fall. Great estates are lost. Even our most noble earthly loves are fixed upon things passing away. All is vanity. Everything is dust. BUT… even in the midst of wasteland, God grace shines forth and Christ’s rule over tragic providences is affirmed. He will fix all that is now broken.
Good stuff. Read the book.
What if John Updike and Marilyn Robinson were our Reformed counterparts to Waugh? Granted, it’s not as grand or glorious, but there is something deeply Protestant and Reformational about both novelists.
Homophobe.
Nice post. Brideshead has been one of my favorite novels for a long time.
I’ve wondered sometimes if the Protestant shyness about tragedy might share the same root as our acceptance of certain Enlightenment narratives about progress (maybe a sort of cultural antinomianism?).
I think Waugh’s harshest judgment falls on the Age of Hooper, i.e. modernity come into maturity, which I believe is really the central point of the novel. Reviewers often try to ascribe unrepentant nostalgia to Waugh, which always surprises me. The whole point of the first half of the novel (Et Ego in Arcadia) is that death was right there with the pre-war modern, despite their idyllic manor life. The profligacy of the intra-war years was like the time just before the Flood — eating, drinking, like there is no tomorrow. The older and wiser Charles Ryder knows this, even before he is converted.
Parts of the novel can leave a slightly bitter, or tragic, taste. Since the redemption occurs at the very end for most of the characters, there is little time to realize the sweetness of the salvation. Further, Waugh’s RC faith does require some time of purgation, hence the suffering to which each character is consigned.
But still, even if we dismiss with the idea of purgation, it seems like we need to figure out a way to deal with fallenness in our own Protestant narratives. Antinomianism is simply a bad story. RCs Waugh and O’Connor and Greene understood that. And, imho, many of the best Protestant storytellers come from a Yankee Puritan background (Melville, Updike, Robinson, and Buechner are good examples). I doubt that’s a coincidence.
I was also thinking of Melville as well as Hawthorne. Robert Frost fits well into this category as well.
I will have to read Updike and Robinson.
What interests me is Davey’s comment about purgation. The Reformed Confessions are just as strong about purgation as is the RC Catechism. We just place it on this side of the afterlife. Suffering and the cross are central to Luther’s theology of the cross, yet far removed from the experience of much modern Protestantism.
Darryl- homophobe? Come now. Gay dudes are the only ones that ever hit on me. My only phobia is why I am throwing off their gay-dar.
Bill, what about Steinbeck’s EAST OF EDEN? It’s profound, and it wrestles with free will and predestination.
We are putting together an interesting list and I will have to do some reading.
DGH- what would make literature “deeply reformational”? I suspect and emphasis on the alienation that flows from desacralization of nature and the centrality of the individual?