Brideshead Revisited

I recently discovered a tape of a talk by an east coast English professor (Thomas Howard). It was a talk he gave in April of 1990 at Princeton Theological Seminary entitled “The Dilemma of the Christian Novelist in the Twentieth Century.” He suggested that America and much of the first world could be described not only as “post-Christian” but even “post-atheist” where God is not even a viable category for people to rail against. There is only a spiritual blank in many lives that cannot even be articulated.

This he suggested presents a huge challenge for writers who seek to write truth about a world that includes God. How do you talk about God in any authentic way that doesn’t sound like soap box proselytizing? Not only do people dismiss Christian faith, they no longer grasp even the categories.

Then he went on to talk about a number of brilliant writers with faith that he felt struggled to retain God as real even as they wrote not for a Precious-Moments-Christian-Bookstore crowd but for the broader public. He discussed Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor at some length, and then mentioned another name… someone I had never read: Evelyn Waugh. Waugh turns out to be an Englishman, and Thomas in passing suggested that he wrestled most with faith in his book, Brideshead Revisited.

I went hunting and found a used copy at Second Look Books on the South Hill, and during Spring Break spent some time meeting Waugh through the ensemble of characters he creates in the book.

I found the story haunting and melancholy and the characters both winsome and offensive as their privilege and longing and selfishness slide into debauchery. Faith does burn through the book, but not as some two-dimensional Sunday School cut-out. Faith is seen by several key characters as inescapable and fearsome—both hope and haunting even to the point of torture at times.

Yet even as I try to sort through Waugh’s story personally, I would commend it to you to read. I’m troubled by the God he portrays, but the faith struggles faced by Sebastian and Julia and Charles in the story are moving and, ultimately I think, food for the journey.