Intellectuelle

It did seem to me that he was either trying to exorcize his Catholic upbringing or reclaim it

Just a point of clarification: Waugh didn't have a Catholic upbringing. He was a convert to Catholicism. You could read Brideshead as his extended fantasy about what it WOULD have been like to grow up in a recusant family.

Actually, though, the novel is all about grace and sacrament. It's about people being moved by small acts of grace to return to the faith, and it's about the power of sacraments. There's a reason that the climax of novel is that "deathbed" seen in which the dying lord, though unable to speak, finally gives a sign of his faith. He is enable to repent through the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. His repentence, brought about by the grace of the sacrament, leads his daughter to realize the reality of the sacrament of marriage. Her refusal, in the end, to run off with the narrator isn't just a refusal of sin but an acceptance of the reality of marriage.

Note, too, that the narrator has actually converted to Catholicism by the end of the book. He doesn't openly state this, but he reveals it through casual phrases about his changed understanding about the Catholic family. His encounter with their struggles between sin and grace was, presumably, part of what lead him to Catholicism too.

Finally, I think the point of the "lapsed" family members' struggling is that they wouldn't have struggled with their Catholic upbringing so much if they weren't aware of the truth in it. In this regard, Waugh is world's away from the "I used to be Catholic" novels of James Joyce, etc. Stephen Dedalus of Portrait struggles with Catholicism because it is beautiful and he's drawn to the beauty in it. The "lapsed" protagonists of Brideshead Revisited struggle with their Catholic past precisely because, deep down, they still believe it to be true. Because Waugh agrees with them on the truth with Catholicism, and the book is actually an argument for Catholicism as the answer to the modern read. I think this is clearer if one reads Vile Bodies first. There is absolutely no hope in that book. There IS hope in Brideshead Revisited, but it is all offered through the grace of God found in the Catholic Church. Very pro-Catholic indeed!

I haven't read the book, but the conversation interests me because of personal family situations. My father was lapsed Catholic- or ex-Catholic, who stood as an atheist during most of his life. As a born again Christian I both prayed and tirelessly conversed/argued/counseled with him. It is that part about the struggle being with a view of bedrock truth. I don't know if it is so much truth, it might be. It seemed ( and this is only my own take of my own experience) more like fear. Fear of moving away from the doctrines of damnation while consciously rejecting them. A subconsious holding onto the fear.

In my fathers case we went in circles- if he approached the idea of Christ- it became the doctrine of the Catholic church... as soon as that happened all thought shut down and rejection took over.

Do resentful( and thus lapsed) Catholics need to forgive their upbringing? Many Catholics are powerful thinkers, yet the ones who reject faith can't seem to think around that oftentimes ( now I am talking about conversations with other Catholics). They can't seem to grasp the idea of grace, at all. This is not conclusion, but confusion on my part.

Of course, as a Protestant I come from a different direction looking at this. Can a Protestant look at such books, which reveal the struggle internecine within the Catholics, as the Catholics do?

Is the book looking at the larger picture of good versus evil, and that becomes interpreted by the different readers, secular, Protestant, Catholic according to their various views of how to handle the inner conflicts of good and evil?

I feel stupid now- not having read the book . I just wonder about some of these questions. Coming from a stricter sort of Reformed faith early on - there was no taking lightly things like adultery, etc... there was lots of guilt and struggle. Both sides of family had these very struggles with both a history of converted Catholics, and Reformed Protestantism.

shoot...maybe I need to read the book now.

oh one more thing. In all th enavel gazing I just wanted to say the original post is very interesting and I especially appreciated TeresaHT. Her insights were most thought provoking -really gave some light on things that I guess I had been wondering about down under my surface for quite sometime.

I hope you all can forgive my personal obsessing on the blog here....

Thanks for the biographical correction, Teresa. I didn't bother to look up any information on Waugh.

I do admit that, while intriguing and compelling, the whole story was something of a muddle for me, maybe partly because I'm bringing evangelical preconceptions to the story.I have my own assumptions and beliefs about salvation, repentance, and sin, and having grown up in a non-sacramental church (Baptist), I find it hard to understand some of the veneration for the sacraments that the characters in the novel (and my Catholic friends) experience. I'm more like the agnostic narrator in this area; it all seems like magical thinking to me.

Very interesting, though. What exactly is the tipping point? When can a person be said to have True, Saving Faith? By a hand sign of assent? If he speaks the correct words (as did the second character I mentioned)? If his faith is proved by works as James indicates?

I come back to a sort of semi-Calvinist view of the grace of God. I am saved by his grace through Christ, not by any works of my own, no matter how impressive or feeble.

Lovely comment, Teresa!

Sherry, you might find this memo by Waugh about Brideshead interesting. (Notethe Guardian editor has introduced two errors into the text! “…childless Brideshead [Sebastian]” is not Sebastian but Brideshead, and “Lord [Marchmain]” is also Brideshead, not Lord Marchmain. Typical Guardian.)

In the memo, Waugh summarises the novel in a much-quoted sentence:

The novel deals with what is theologically termed, “the operation of Grace”, that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.

Sorry - I should have mentioned that the Waugh memo above is full of spoilers!

Sherry, Christians all believe in sacraments- they just have different ideas about the process of how God acts through them. We speak of baptism ( that is one that Baptists teach quite abit upon) and marriage, communion, and all these are ways that God interacts with us in specific ways, and whenever God interacts with us grace is involved.

The language and sometimes specific beliefs differ among the types of Christianity. The view on communion was one of the greatly divisive aspects of the Reformers with Catholicism. But both believe that God acts with grace through communion, one believes it is with symbolism and one believes it is tangibly conveyed .

Sherry- Just a P.S. If you're not already familiar with Ian Ker's The Catholic Revival in English Literature, you might find that interesting. Ker begins with the Victorian period, but is mostly concerned with 20th century Catholic writers. He's got a good essay on Waugh, IIRC.

Teresa, thanks for the comments and for the book suggestion. My list is so long now that I may never get there, but I think I'd enjoy reading such a book. When we all get to heaven, I'll be the one over in the corner, reading, ---or else the one who's asking for directions to the heavenly library. :)

Ilona: I called Baptists "nonsacramental" because traditionally Baptist have called baptism and the Lord's Supper, the two "sacraments" they do observe, ordinances, not sacraments, to distinguish them and Baptist beliefs about them from the beliefs that Catholics and other Protestants hold about the sacraments. Baptist generally believe that neither of these ordinances (commands of Jesus to the church) conveys grace to the believer; they simply remind him of the grace of God in Christ.

My daughter has been trying to convince me that there's more there in the Lord's Supper, particularly, than meets the eye, so to speak. However, I, like Sebastian in the book, have a background and foundation of teaching that I find it hard to get around. I mostly believe that God was and is incarnate in Christ, not in the Lord's Supper, and that baptism is a sign and symbol of the spiritual rebirth of a believer in Christ.

Maybe that distinction seems picky, but it explains why some of the characters in Waugh's book were very concerned that the dying father receive the last rites, whether he wanted them or not. Whereas a Baptist would be much more concerned with whether or not he made some verbal or nonverbal sign of belief in Christ before he died.

I'm not trying to debate, just to explain why some of Waugh's book was interesting, but a bit foreign, to me. I understand the concepts, but I don't really believe them.

You could debate if you wanted to ;) I don't find that offensive, but you didn't seem like you were debating, anyway.

"why some of the characters in Waugh's book were very concerned that the dying father receive the last rites, whether he wanted them or not. Whereas a Baptist would be much more concerned with whether or not he made some verbal or nonverbal sign of belief in Christ before he died."

I have seen this in real life. Most of the Evangelical types of faith would most likely line up with the Baptists on that. The interesting thing to me is how the Catholics have changed.

Some of my fathers family are very devout Catholics- and when we were together in his last days I offered to have them call a priest to administer the last rites, if it seemed good to them. They chose to leave things as they were. I don't know why. As it ended my husband and son prayed with my father on his last night- but by then he had lost power of speech. But it did surprise me that they didn't have a priest attend. Their entire theology was very different from what I expected. Perhaps this is evidence of Catholicism in a flux- at least on the level of the membership. Officially it is more conservative. My family members aren't nominal Catholics though- a number studied in seminary for the priesthood - although they chose marriage instead and didn't become priests...but they know their theology.

I wish there was a way we could know for sure where the heart is, but sometimes I think I should really be glad I am unable to know that. It is more than feeling it isn't my place- it is knowing that my sense of possibility and grace is so much more constricted than God's is... and I don't know whether we can bear to know some things in this life....

Interesting discussion. I think whether one's impression as a reader on whether Waugh is being negative or positive about Catholicism is necessarily coloured by one's own background. I read the novel as a Protestant, so as Shelly says "I understand the concepts, but I don't really believe them." Or at least, I don't think about theological concepts in the same way.

I remember one of my classmates doing an essay on Brideshead for our A-Level coursework and her take on it was that it was about the inevitability of Catholicism. (Incidentally, her family was mixed - her mum was Catholic and her dad an Anglican vicar. I think that probably coloured her approach.) So each member of the family, brought up Catholic, inevitably returns to the religion of their family, each in their own way.

I'm not sure about Rider's conversion, I'd have to go back and reread to be sure. Yes, he knows more about Catholic ideas by the end of the novel, but he also knows the people better. But then that would fit my friend's idea about inevitability.

Ilona, I wasn’t sure of the answer to your question about anointing a lapsed Catholic in extremis, so I emailed a well-known Catholic apologist and he was kind enough to answer here.

Short answer: Nothing has changed; it’s a mainly a question of whether it’s arguable that the person in question “would have at least implicitly asked for the sacrament” when able, and in case of doubt, one should err in favour of administering the sacrament.

However, perhaps some Catholics today would be inclined to give prior statements rejecting Catholicism more weight than previous generations. And I do think that overall there has been a loss of the sense of the supernatural and hence of sacramentalism in the last decades.

Lapsed Catholics come in a lot of varieties, so it’s hard to generalise. My father was lapsed, too, but not, as far as I can tell, resentful. He just never said anything about it at all as far as I can recollect. When I was lapsed, I wasn’t the resentful type either, just completely indifferent. The stereotypical resentful lapsed Catholic, reacting to a repressive, Jansenist upbringing – I really only know that through literature. I’ve met a few people my age or younger who claim terrible repressive Catholic upbringings but I usually find that hard to believe. (The other sort of resentful lapsed Catholic I’ve met is the now-Protestant who claims never to have heard the gospel as a Catholic. It generally turns out that they either come from a family of ‘cultural Catholics’ with virtually no exposure to actual Catholicism, or else they define the gospel in terms of specific Protestant doctrines. Or both.)

Pigwotflies, I would agree with your friend that the inevitability of Catholicism is a major theme in the novel. The second half of the book is entitled “A Twitch Upon the Thread”, the meaning of which is made explicit by Cordelia at some point. She quotes from a Father Brown story by G.K. Chesterton, saying “But God won't let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk – I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ (the thief) ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’”

(You can find the original Chesterton story here.)

Charles does become Catholic, too. It’s fairly subtle in the novel, but Waugh confirms it in plenty of sources, including the memo I linked above.

Atlantic, thanks for looking into the questions on the practices.
It is difficult to generalize about peoples reactions to faith of any type, I think. You are right about not finding lots of the repressive types of experience in Catholics now, resentments come from any number of things. Online I ran into numbers of former Christians who had (self-described) fundamentalist upbringings or church experiences who showed the most resentment. Even speaking of atheism there is no singular definition... but I guess the generalizations come in assessing the larger patterns that people take in grappling with understanding their place with God and in life.

Those are the themes that make for classic literature, and this discussion just highlights, for me, how we bring ourselves to what we read, yet not in so much a way as to mold what the author has said of it ( who has his own take in the writing).

I think Western Christians in general apply the relativity of their culture to ideas of the supernatural, and that gives the flexibility that we see sometimes, but sometimes it is the effect of better understanding a concept such as grace, that has more flexibility in it (to explain the lessening of adherence to rites, etc). But there is the additional facet ( mentioned several times) of simple ignorance of the tenets.

Sort of related to that is the opposite of the atheist (who negates everything, or attempts to), and that is brought up with the reference to Chesterton. I have a quote by him that bears alot on what we see today:

“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”

Is this now more prevalent than the person who struggles with their upbringing? A spiritual gullibility? Did the book have examples of that? I would think that anything rooted pre-WW2 had a struggle between held beliefs more of the struggle of antithesis, and so centered around the resolve of those conflicts. Would Waugh's characters have the same outcome today, you think?

I do think what Sherry said bears on interpreting the message of the book- about understanding the doctrinal concepts - this tends to arise alot in Protestant/Catholic discussion on topics. Maybe a blind spot is how much is resident in discussions between people in general, we think everyone has the same general understanding on the premises, or we just don't consider it much at all, when we actually have very diverse views of what is taking place.

I'm a little embarrassed that I've said so much in a discussion on a book I haven't read. I guess it just brings up many topic questions that I've thought alot about in reference to my father. I gained lots from the answers in this conversation... so that's something ;)

It's not a long book. :) When you start it, there's a summary and very detailed annotations here.

Re the Chestertonian sentiment (he didn't actually say it), although I'm sure it's more common today, there was an awful lot of it going round then too. But you won't find it in Brideshead. In Brideshead, characters are either Catholics or nothing / nominally Church of England.

I'm trying to imagine Waugh's characters simply existing in 2006 and failing miserably. The "twitch upon the thread" resonates with me, though.