Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption
35 comments
·April 11, 2025philsnow
lo_zamoyski
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
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
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
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
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.
K7mR2vZq
Waugh's journey from satire to orthodoxy mirrors many tech careers—from disruptive iconoclasm to seeking deeper principles. His ability to maintain literary excellence while embracing traditionalism reminds us that technical maturity often involves integrating seemingly contradictory values rather than merely overturning established systems.
dhosek
His journey doesn’t really follow that pattern though. The Loved One, a deeply iconoclastic satirical novel came after Brideshead.
throwaway2562
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
> 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.
cafard
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
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.
googlryas
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.
detaro
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
Dang was just proud of me for not calling anyone a coward or heretic in this one and wanted to make sure everyone saw.
mattmanser
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.
> 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").