Quas primas: The Institution of the Feast of Christ the King

For the feast day of Christ the King, which was a couple of Sundays ago (November 22^nd), we read the encyclical, Quas primas, by Pius XI, written in 1925, on the institution of the Feast of Christ the King.  Here are some of my thoughts.  You can read the encyclical here.   

 

First, Pius lays out the scriptural justification of the title and feast:

8. Do we not read throughout the Scriptures that Christ is the King? He it is that shall come out of Jacob to rule,[3] who has been set by the Father as king over Sion, his holy mount, and shall have the Gentiles for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession.[4] In the nuptial hymn, where the future King of Israel is hailed as a most rich and powerful monarch, we read: "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the scepter of thy kingdom is a scepter of 2 righteousness."[5] There are many similar passages, but there is one in which Christ is even more clearly indicated. Here it is foretold that his kingdom will have no limits, and will be enriched with justice and peace: "in his days shall justice spring up, and abundance of peace...And he shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth."[6]

 

9. The testimony of the Prophets is even more abundant. That of Isaias is well known: "For a child is born to us and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, God the mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace. His empire shall be multiplied, and there shall be no end of peace. He shall sit upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom; to establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and for ever."[7] With Isaias the other Prophets are in agreement. So Jeremias foretells the "just seed" that shall rest from the house of David - the Son of David that shall reign as king, "and shall be wise, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth."[8] So, too, Daniel, who announces the kingdom that the God of heaven shall found, "that shall never be destroyed, and shall stand for ever."[9] And again he says: "I beheld, therefore, in the vision of the night, and, lo! one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven. And he came even to the Ancient of days: and they presented him before him. And he gave him power and glory and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him. His power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed."[10] The prophecy of Zachary concerning the merciful King "riding upon an ass and upon a colt the foal of an ass" entering Jerusalem as "the just and savior," amid the acclamations of the multitude,[11] was recognized as fulfilled by the holy evangelists themselves.

 

10. This same doctrine of the Kingship of Christ which we have found in the Old Testament is even more clearly taught and confirmed in the New. The Archangel, announcing to the Virgin that she should bear a Son, says that "the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end."[12]

 

11. Moreover, Christ himself speaks of his own kingly authority: in his last discourse, speaking of the rewards and punishments that will be the eternal lot of the just and the damned; in his reply to the Roman magistrate, who asked him publicly whether he were a king or not; after his resurrection, when giving to his Apostles the mission of teaching and baptizing all nations, he took the opportunity to call himself king,[13] confirming the title publicly,[14] and solemnly proclaimed that all power was given him in heaven and on earth.[15] These words can only be taken to indicate the greatness of his power, the infinite extent of his kingdom. What wonder, then, that he whom St. John calls the "prince of the kings of the earth"[16] appears in the Apostle's vision of the future as he who "hath on his garment and on his thigh written 'King of kings and Lord of lords!'."[17] It is Christ whom the Father "hath appointed heir of all things";[18] "for he must reign until at the end of the world he hath put all his enemies under the feet of God and the Father."[19]

 

Paragraphs ten and eleven make the case for Christ as king from New Testament, but what really makes the argument solid is the justification presented from the Old Testament prophets, mostly in paragraph nine.  Let me quote P9 in its entirety.

 

9. The testimony of the Prophets is even more abundant. That of Isaias is well known: "For a child is born to us and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, God the mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace. His empire shall be multiplied, and there shall be no end of peace. He shall sit upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom; to establish it and strengthen it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth and for ever."[7] With Isaias the other Prophets are in agreement. So Jeremias foretells the "just seed" that shall rest from the house of David - the Son of David that shall reign as king, "and shall be wise, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth."[8] So, too, Daniel, who announces the kingdom that the God of heaven shall found, "that shall never be destroyed, and shall stand for ever."[9] And again he says: "I beheld, therefore, in the vision of the night, and, lo! one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven. And he came even to the Ancient of days: and they presented him before him. And he gave him power and glory and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him. His power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed."[10] The prophecy of Zachary concerning the merciful King "riding upon an ass and upon a colt the foal of an ass" entering Jerusalem as "the just and savior," amid the acclamations of the multitude,[11] was recognized as fulfilled by the holy evangelists themselves.

 

Those numbers are footnotes, which I’m not going to provide but you can find them in the text.  Christ is the son of David, and perhaps more importantly the fulfillment of the typology presented in the Old Testament.  As David is the great King of Israel, Christ stemming from David’s lineage is the great King of heaven and earth.

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I found paragraph 18 to be extremely powerful.  It starts off with a quote from Pope Leo XIII.

 

18. Thus the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men. To use the words of Our immortal predecessor, Pope Leo XIII: "His empire includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith; so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ."[28]

 

So Christ is not just the King of Roman Catholics or the King of Christians.  He is the King of all.  Pope Leo XIII must be thinking of Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians:

 

 …though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.  Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that

Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Phil 2:6-10)

 

When we refer to Jesus Christ is Lord, we do mean king.  A king is the highest lord of a nation, and Jesus is “King of Kings, Lord of Lords.”  The paragraph continues.

 

 

Nor is there any difference in this matter between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the salvation of the individual, in him is the salvation of society. "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved."[29] He is the author of happiness and true prosperity for every man and for every nation. "For a nation is happy when its citizens are happy. What else is a nation but a number of men living in concord?"[30]

 

Christ as King then is at the crux of salvation of the individual, the prosperity of society, and the happiness of people.  It is through the authority of His divinity that upholds everything.  That’s powerful stuff.  The paragraph continues, now focused on the responsibility of earthly kings.

 

If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. What We said at the beginning of Our Pontificate concerning the decline of public authority, and the lack of respect for the same, is equally true at the present day. "With God and Jesus Christ," we said, "excluded from political life, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away, because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated. The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation."[31]

 

Earthly rulers then (and I would imagine that would include today’s presidents and legislators) must act in “reverence and obedience” to Christ the King in order to derive legitimate authority.  Otherwise illegitimate authority leads to an unstable society.  That last sentence, a quote I think from one of Pius XI’s earlier encyclical, deserves repeating: “The result is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation." 

 

If Pope Pius XI wrote that in the 1920’s, can you imagine what he would say today?  Society without Christ, let alone as Christ as King, has no foundation.  Since the 1920’s society has tottered and fallen several times.  We are no better today.  Actually we are worse.

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The first sentence paragraph 19 I think sums up why acknowledging Christ as king is so important: “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”  But why actually have a feast day of Christ the King?  Pius acknowledged earlier that Christ has been revered as king since Christ walked on earth.  What does having a feast day accomplish?  He explain in paragraph 23.

 

21. That these blessings may be abundant and lasting in Christian society, it is necessary that the kingship of our Savior should be as widely as possible recognized and understood, and to the end nothing would serve better than the institution of a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ. For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year - in fact, forever. The church's teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man's nature. Man is composed of body and soul, and he needs these external festivities so that the sacred rites, in all their beauty and variety, may stimulate him to drink more deeply of the fountain of God's teaching, that he may make it a part of himself, and use it with profit for his spiritual life.

 

In other words, it takes a feast day to promulgate the word, to instruct those not learned, and to work the notion into the rhythm of life.  It takes a feast day to transfer it from an intellectual concept into the heart and soul.  It becomes a spiritual concept as well as an intellectual one.

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With paragraph 30 Pius outlines the expectations of instituting the Christ the King feast day. 

 

30. We would now, Venerable Brethren, in closing this letter, briefly enumerate the blessings which We hope and pray may accrue to the Church, to society, and to each one of the faithful, as a result of the public veneration of the Kingship of Christ.

 

And then he provides three paragraphs, each with an expectation of a benefit.  Let me just sum them in a sentence each:

Par 31: By honoring the dignity of Christ with the feast, men will in turn respect and give due freedom to the Church from the power of the state.

Par 32: By creating the feast nations will be reminded that their ultimate allegiance and obedience is to Christ.

Par 33: The faithful will through the feast will gain great strength and allow Christ to reign in their hearts.

As I think over these three, I have to say society has roundly failed in the first two.  Across the world countries have limited and denied religious freedom, especially to the Catholic Church.  Look at the Covid restrictions of recent times on religious services, of which they have not been denied to other forms of gatherings.  In fact I was struck by this sentence in paragraph 31: “The State is bound to extend similar freedom to the orders and communities of religious of either sex, who give most valuable help to the Bishops of the Church by laboring for the extension and the establishment of the kingdom of Christ.”  Ha!  Think of the Obama administration’s limiting of the freedoms to the Sisters of the Poor!  Even in this country we have been limiting religious freedoms.

And as to nations having obedience to Christ, well the almost one hundred years now since the encyclical we have not seen it.  Well, shortly after the encyclical we had the Second World War, the Cold War, and now the rise of terrorism.  There have not been too many nations since the encyclical that have been obedient to Christ.  Of course in due time the work of grace from this encyclical can change hearts and the world.  I pray that it be so.

As to strengthening the hearts of the faithful, I can tell you it had a wonderful effect on me.  I had not known the details of Christ the King feast.  Indeed, it has enlarged my understanding of Christ in my heart.  What a great encyclical.

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My final Goodreads review.

At only eleven pages, this is a great short read.  Why do encyclicals now have to be a hundred to two hundred pages?  Short and elegant is beautiful and clear, and Quas primas is certainly that.  In English, the title translates roughly to “That Which is First,” and what is first is Christ kingship.  The encyclical by Pope Pius XI in 1925 established the feast on the last Sunday in October (later moved to the final Sunday of the Church year, the Sunday before Advent) of Christ the King.

The encyclical acknowledges that Christ as King is at the crux of salvation of the individual, the prosperity of society, and the happiness of people.  It is through the authority of His divinity that upholds everything.  From that essential premise, earthly rulers then have an obligation to acknowledge Christ as their ultimate guide, and only by such allegiance can they derive their true authority.  “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.”  Acknowledging Christ is king is the first step of allowing Christ to reign in one’s heart.

Establishing the feast day, then to Pius, is critical to acknowledging the graces that flow from such reverence.  It takes a feast day to promulgate the word, to instruct those not learned, and to work the notion into the rhythm of life.  It takes a feast day to transfer it from an intellectual concept into the heart and soul.  It becomes a spiritual concept as well as an intellectual one. 

Pius hoped the feast would strengthen the hearts of the faithful, and I can tell you it had a wonderful effect on me.  I had not known the details of Christ the King feast.  Indeed, it has enlarged my understanding of Christ in my heart.  What a great encyclical.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 6

This is the sixth and last post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.  

Post #5 here.     

My final Goodreads review.

I’m torn between four and a half and five stars.  I rounded to five.  Waugh’s gorgeous prose is the deciding factor. 

What is this novel about?  I can’t help feeling that the central, controlling concept of the novel is displacement.  There is in the novel the displacement of Edwardian England by the force of the First World War.  We see this through the lives of Lord and Lady Marchmain, Charles’ father, and the deaths of Lady Marchmain’s brothers.  There is the displacement of inter war England by the Second World War.  Lives are displaced, Charles enters the army, and Brideshead castle is damaged and the furniture is packed away upstairs.  There is the displacement of the upper classes as middle and lower classes gain in status.  We see this in Hooper and Mottram.  And there is the displacement of something in each of the main characters which fractures their sense of being.

For Sebastian, the displacement seems to have occurred in childhood.  At first I seemed to be drawn to some sort of causal link between some event in his childhood that could be at the root of his unhappiness and alcoholism.  Waugh even gives us possible suggestions for that causal link: a father who abandoned his family when Sebastian was a child, an overbearing mother, a Catholicism that constricts his freedom, fear of responsibility, which is akin to fear of growing up, and perhaps, as many dramatizations of this novel seem to imply, an unfulfilled homosexual desire.  Now it may be all of these things or it may be none.  The novel is not intended to be that kind of psychological examination.  The mystery of Sabastian’s nature leads the reader to try to solve the mystery, but Waugh makes sure it’s unsolvable.  What the reader is left with is the fact of displacement from a happy, Edenic time to a fallen state.  This is still psychology—all studies of human nature must involve psychology (there was psychology as early as in the writing of Homer’s Iliad; there’s psychology in Adam and Eve)—but not as we think of psychology in the 20^th century sense.  Call this displacement, Catholic psychology.

For Charles his Edenic moment is in that summer with Sebastian at Brideshead.  It is at this time he feels the near freedom of adulthood but still the wonder of a boy.  He explores a beautiful world, lives an epicurean life-style, and shares Sebastian’s friendship, a friendship based on mutual love.  Though they are a bit older than just mere boys, I’m convinced their friendship and love is boyish and platonic.  It would have to be for the novel to make sense.  Though not everything they do is holy, such friendship is ultimately holy, a grace that works in their hearts.

And then a displacement comes.  Sebastian sinks into alcoholism.  He cannot bear to live with his family.  Perhaps boyhood ends.  Perhaps pubescent longings mature into sex drives.  Perhaps the responsibility of adulthood—the responsibility that led Lady Marchmain’s brothers to die in WWI—pulls Sebastian and Charles away from that love.  But a displacement occurs.  Sebastian leaves England altogether and Charles becomes a semi-famous though mediocre painter. 

Such displacement leaves a hole in their being.  They try to fill it.  Sebastian with alcohol and a needy lover.  Charles with his work, lovers, a wife, and an affair.  Displacement incurs a longing to return.  His affair with Julia, who happens to look very much like Sebastian, is an attempt to return to that holy love of that first Brideshead summer.  Sebastian was “the first” not because there was sex involved but because with Sebastian Charles had found holy love.  Julia too has her own displacement.  She finds grace in her young womanhood.  She wants to marry Catholic, but the events of life just displace her away from that.  In the midst of their affair, Julia asks Charles if he had forgotten Sebastian and Charles tells her, “He was a forerunner.”  And then Charles thinks about that, contemplates it deeply. 

“Perhaps,” I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—“perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.  (p. 349)

That thought is at the heart of the narrative.  Let me complete his thought in this way: “Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols” of a greater love of a distant home where we were as full of our being as God created us to be.  That's what I think he means in direct prose.  Call that place heaven, our true home, and call our journey in this life a striving to return, a journey to return to heaven, to return to our full being, a return to our true home.  The name of the novel even provides an association of it: Brideshead > Bridegroom > Christ > Heaven.  Revisited > Return > Home.  The novel is a return to Brideshead, which is a return to home, a home with all the pregnant meaning that Waugh has put into it.  This is why nostalgia figures so in the novel.  It is a longing to go home.

It is no coincidence, then, that the novel’s climax is with Lord Marchmain’s return to Brideshead.  Having been displaced by the First World War, and subsequently self-displaced from his family and ancestral home, in the end he returns home.  In one sense it completes the circle of his life, and, then having reconciled with God and his Catholic faith, he goes on to his eternal home.  When he makes the sign of the cross, he fully returns home and the displacement of twenty-something years has been righted.

This longing to return home is the grace that works on all the characters.  Allow me to paraphrase one of Jesus’s sayings:  “If you make my word your home, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32).  Displacement is the first experience when we are born.  It is beyond our memory, but the sense of that memory remains.  It is a memory of being loved, the mystery of being loved, which leads us to home in all its metaphorical senses.  Remembering this sense of home leads us to a deeper longing, the longing to be complete.  The sense of nostalgia is an inkling to a greater desire, the desire to be free and to reach our eternal home.  This is what I think this novel is about.

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Some really fine excerpts to highlight Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful prose.

Form the Prologue, the opening paragraphs:

When I reached “C” Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

 

Here love had died between me and the Army.

 

Here the tram lines ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow could doze in their seats until roused by their journey’s end. There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten their caps before passing the guard-room, quarter of a mile in which concrete gave place to grass at the road’s edge. This was the extreme limit of the city. Here the close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the hinterland began.  (p. 2-3)

 

From Book 1, Chapter 1, Chares and Sebastian drive out to the country.

 

At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine—as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together—and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-gray smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

 

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.” (p. 24-25)

 

From Book 1, Chapter 2, Charles looking back at his first year at Oxford.

 

In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. “I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”; that was enough then. Is more needed now?  (p. 47-48)

 

From Book 1, Chapter 4, Charles reflecting on his summer with Sebastian.

 

The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor—the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. (p. 87)

 

From Book 2, Chapter 2, Charles becomes infatuated with Julia.

 

That night and the night after and the night after, wherever she went, always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.

 

This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape. 

 

She had no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls laboriously carved in China; a little problem troubling her mind—little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering, dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of colored chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.  (p. 207-208)

 

From Book 3, Chapter 1, Charles reflects on his ten years since last at Brideshead.

 

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time.

 

These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.

 

For nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became an architectural painter.  (p. 260-261)

 

From Book 3, Chapter 3, Charles reflects on his two year relationship with Julia.

 

It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in which she sat—she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her, forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy—until at length we had gone early to our baths and, on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged; the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk spanned the terrace.

 

I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered flames.  (p. 318-319)

 

From Book 3, Chapter 5, Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead.

 

Julia gave a little sigh of surprise and touched my hand. We had seen him nine months ago at Monte Carlo, when he had been an upright and stately figure, little changed from when I first met him in Venice. Now he was an old man. Plender had told us his master had been unwell lately: he had not prepared us for this.

 

Lord Marchmain stood bowed and shrunken, weighed down by his great-coat, a white muffler fluttering untidily at his throat, a cloth cap pulled low on his forehead, his face white and lined, his nose colored by the cold; the tears which gathered in his eyes came not from emotion but from the east wind; he breathed heavily. Cara tucked in the end of his muffler and whispered something to him. He raised a gloved hand—a schoolboy’s glove of gray wool—and made a small, weary gesture of greeting to the group at the door; then, very slowly, with his eyes on the ground before him, he made his way into the house.

 

They took off his coat and cap and muffler and the kind of leather jerkin which he wore under them; thus stripped he seemed more than ever wasted but more elegant; he had cast the shabbiness of extreme fatigue. Cara straightened his tie; he wiped his eyes with a bandanna handkerchief and shuffled with his stick to the hall fire.

 

There was a little heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set which stood against the walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a mere excuse for the elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which, perhaps, no one, not even a weary footman, had ever sat since it was made; there Lord Marchmain sat and wiped his eyes.  (p. 364-365)

 

From the Epilogue, Charles goes to the chapel to pray, the final lines of the novel.

 

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought:

 

“The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

 

“And yet,” I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding “Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes,” “and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

 

“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”

 

I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room.

 

“You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” said the second-in-command.  (p. 408-410)

Happy Thanksgiving 2020

In what has to be the worst year in memory, we should still count all our blessings and thank All Mighty God. Someone sent me this beautiful prayer of blessings that seems to originate from the Dominican.  That's Dominican in the Order of St. Dominic.

Edit: Here is my little Thanksgiving present for you all.  It's a great article by Fr. Dwight Longenecker tilted "The Theology of Thanksgiving."  Here are two paragraphs to grab your interest.

"The Thanksgiving meal celebrated by the pilgrims, the settlers in Canada and earlier by Spanish settlers in Florida had its roots in well-established European harvest time traditions. When I moved to England I was delighted to find that, although they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving as such, most Anglican parishes celebrated Harvest Festival in the Autumn. The church would be decorated with autumn flowers, colorful pumpkins, squash and everyone would bring tinned goods to be distributed to the poor. Some of them joked that this was their Thanksgiving — giving thanks that they had got rid of all those troublesome Puritans. So still the English celebrate harvest festival — a medieval custom which somehow survived the stripping of the altars. This treasured tradition, however, has deeper roots which the Protestants first rejected, then forgot.

For, of course, in Greek the word ‘Thanksgiving’ is ‘Eucharist’, and the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass has its roots in the Jewish thanksgiving sacrifice called the todah which is Hebrew for ‘thanksgiving and praise.’ Anyone familiar with the Old Testament religion may know about sacrifices such as the holocaust offering, sin offering or burnt offering, but not many will be aware of the todah."

There's a lot more.  

Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers.  May God bless you all.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 5

This is the fifth post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.   

 

Book 3, Chapter 2

Charles has his gallery exhibition in London.  Meanwhile he furtively conducts an affair with Julia.  Anthony Blanche shows up at the exhibition, and he and Charles go out to a gay bar for lunch where Anthony is completely honest and tells Charles his paintings are charming but completely uninspired.  Meanwhile the international crises which will culminate into WWII occur in the background, involving Rex.  Charles and Julia are deeply in love.

Book 3, Chapter 3

It is two years later, and Charles and Julia have continued their affair, are very much in love, and it has become common knowledge, even to their respective spouses, that the two are a committed couple.  At dinner with Bridey one evening, Bridey tells them he is engaged to be married to a middle-aged woman, a widow and devout Catholic with three children.  He also tells Julia that he cannot bring Beryl to meet them at Brideshead because of the adulterous affair that is manifest to all between Charles and Julia.  Julia breaks into a fit of tearful hysteria, not over Bridey’s rudeness, but over its truth of her living in sin.

Book 3, Chapter 4

The two divorces are in process without the two opposite spouses offering much resistance.  Julia meets Beryl and finds her a bit different than Bridey described.  All the while the political and international events are coagulating into what will become the Second World War.  In November Cordelia returns home from serving as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.  We learn that she had tried and left a convent, and has now dedicated her life to service.  While in Spain she heard that Sebastian was ill, and so took a trip over to Tunis where Sebastian resides at a monastery.  She nursed him and learned of his life: seven years with Kurt, mostly together in Greece and then Germany, where Kurt was arrested and ultimately killed himself.  Sebastian went back to Morocco and then to Tunis at the monastery where the monks reluctantly took in the alcoholic.  There he lives a holy life despite the alcohol.  Cordelia speculates that he will eventually die there because of his deteriorating health. 

### 

Book 3, Chapter 5

As the two divorces make their way through the courts, as the international situation continues to reach a crises, Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead in January of 1939 for what is surely his final months of life.  He is ready to hand over the property to his eldest son, but upon meeting Bridey’s new wife he is so revolted that he changes his will and leaves it to Julia.  By Easter Lord Marchmain’s health has significantly deteriorated, and the three children against protestation from Charles bring in a priest, Fr. Mackay, to give Marchmain last rites.  To everyone’s embarrassment, Marchmain dismisses the priest summarily.  By mid-July Marchmain is near death.  Julia brings back Fr. Mackay, who asks for a sign of repentance from Marchmain, and with his last strength makes the sign of the cross.  A few hours later, Marchmain dies.  Through the giving of last rites, Charles has suddenly become a believer.  Julia too has experienced grace of returning to faith, and tells Charles that, despite her deep love for him, she cannot marry him.

Epilogue

Charles returns to the scene of the Prologue as soldier entering Brisdeshead as a place to quarter his company.  As Charles surveys the house, he notices the damages done by soldiers of other companies quartered there, including damage to his artwork, all of which culminates to a shameful disrespect for the estimable manor.  Nanny Hawkins still is upstairs, and Charles sits and has tea with her, talking of what’s become of the Brideshead family.  Bridey, Julia, and Cordelia have all ended up in Palestine.  Finally Charles enters the chapel, which has been restored, the red sanctuary lamp now lit, kneels, and prays. 

### 

I can’t help feeling that the central, controlling concept of the novel is displacement.  There is in the novel the displacement of Edwardian England by the force of the First World War.  We see this through the lives of Lord and Lady Marchmain, Charles’ father, and the deaths of Lady Marchmain’s brothers.  There is the displacement of inter war England by the Second World War.  Lives are displaced, Charles enters the army, and Brideshead castle is damaged and the furniture is packed away upstairs.  There is the displacement of the upper classes as middle and lower classes gain in status.  We see this in Hooper and Mottram.  And there is the displacement of something in each of the main characters which fractures their sense of being.

For Sebastian, the displacement seems to have occurred in childhood.  Earlier in this discussion I gave it a sort of “psychological” connotation.  What drives Sebastian is still psychological but not in the sense I meant it earlier.  Earlier I seemed to be drawn to some sort of causal link between some event in his childhood that could be at the root of his unhappiness and alcoholism.  Waugh even gives us possible suggestions for that causal link: a father who abandoned his family when Sebastian was a child, an overbearing mother, a Catholicism that constricts his freedom, fear of responsibility, which is akin to fear of growing up, and perhaps unfulfilled homosexual desire.  Now it may be all of these things or it may be none.  The novel is not intended to be that kind of psychological examination.  The mystery of Sabastian’s nature leads the reader to try to solve the mystery, but Waugh makes sure it’s unsolvable.  What the reader is left with is the fact of displacement from a happy, Edenic time to a fallen state.  This is still psychology—all studies of human nature must involve psychology (there was psychology as early as in the writing of Homer’s Iliad; there’s psychology in Adam and Eve)—but not as we think of psychology in the 20^th century sense.  Call this displacement, Catholic psychology.

For Charles his Edenic moment is in that summer with Sebastian at Brideshead.  It is at this moment he feels the near freedom of adulthood but still the wonder of a boy.  He explores a beautiful world, lives an epicurean life-style, and shares Sebastian’s friendship, a friendship based on mutual love.  Though they are a bit older than just mere boys, I’m convinced their friendship and love is boyish and platonic.  It would have to be for the novel to make sense.  Though not everything they do is holy, such friendship is ultimately holy, a grace that works in their hearts.

And then a displacement comes.  Sebastian sinks into alcoholism.  He cannot bear to live with his family.  Perhaps boyhood ends.  Perhaps pubescent longings mature into sex drives.  Perhaps the responsibility of adulthood—the responsibility that led Lady Marchmain’s brothers to die in WWI—pulls Sebastian and Charles away from that love.  But a displacement occurs.  Sebastian leaves England altogether and Charles becomes a semi-famous though mediocre painter. 

Such displacement leaves a hole in their being.  They try to fill it.  Sebastian with alcohol and a needy lover.  Charles with his work, lovers, a wife, and an affair.  Displacement incurs a longing to return.  His affair with Julia, who happens to look very much like Sebastian, is an attempt to return to that holy love of that first Brideshead summer.  Sebastian was “the first” not because there was sex involved but because with Sebastian Charles had found holy love.  Julia too has her own displacement.  She finds grace in her young womanhood.  She wants to marry Catholic, but the events of life just displace her away from that.  In the midst of their affair, Julia asks Charles if he had forgotten Sebastian and Charles tells her, “He was a forerunner.”  And then Charles thinks about that, contemplates it deeply. 

“Perhaps,” I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—“perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.  (p. 349)

 

That thought is at the heart of the narrative.  Let me complete his thought in this way: “Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols” of a greater love of a distant home where we were as full of our being as God created us to be.  That's what I think he means in direct prose.  Call that place heaven, our true home, and call our journey in this life a striving to return, a journey to return to heaven, to return to our full being, a return to our true home.  The name of the novel even provides an association of it: Brideshead > Bridegroom > Christ > Heaven.  Revisited > Return > Home.  The novel is a return to Brideshead, which is a return to home, a home with all the pregnant meaning that Waugh has put into it.  This is why nostalgia figures so in the novel.  It is a longing to go home.

It is no coincidence, then, that the novel’s climax is with Lord Marchmain’s return to Brideshead.  Having been displaced by the First World War, and subsequently self-displaced from his family and ancestral home, in the end he returns home.  In one sense it completes the circle of his life, and, then having reconciled with God and his Catholic faith, he goes on to his eternal home.  When he makes the sign of the cross, he fully returns home and the displacement of twenty-something years has been righted.

This longing to return home is the grace that works on all the characters.  Allow me to paraphrase one of Jesus’s sayings:  “If you make my word your home, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32).  Displacement is the first experience when we are born.  It is beyond our memory, but the sense of that memory remains.  It is a memory of being loved, the mystery of being loved, which leads us to home in all its metaphorical senses.  Remembering this sense of home leads us to a deeper longing, the longing to be complete.  The sense of nostalgia is an inkling to a greater desire, the desire to be free and to reach our eternal home.  This is what I think this novel is about.

###

My Reply to Kerstin:

Kerstin wrote: "Has Charles found peace in the end or a place for a new beginning? He goes off to war and that's not very reassuring."

 

Well, he's certainly depressed but I have a hope that when it's all said and done, he and Julia will marry. From what I can tell I think annulments are valid for both their marriages. Now will Julia feel it is proper, I don't know. Maybe not. But Charles is Catholic now. Julia has returned to the faith. Sebastian has found holiness. Cordelia will be holy. Lord Marchmain is redeemed. Lady Marchmain is in heaven and hopefully reconciled with Sebastian and her husband. In time everyone's soul projects to be in heaven, though life on earth will entail suffering. It projects to be a happy ending.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "Manny wrote: "he and Julia will marry."

 

Oh, no, certainly not that. Apart from the fact that if it is not on the page it did not happen, Julia refusing Charles is her choosing which world she is t..."

 

Oh I realize it's not on the page and it's all pure speculation, and really any version of speculation goes against the author's wishes.

He ended the novel at a point and that is that.

 

But to speculate, and it's not from some romantic conviction I may have. Waugh invested about half the novel in their relationship and then it falls apart in a dozen pages, maybe less, from against the desires of both. It's not too far a leap to project and speculate that the obstacles that prevent their union might be overcome. Charles has become Catholic - which he wasn't when they split - and the war will be over and Brideshead will return to normal and annulments are very possible. After all the word "annulment" came up earlier in the novel. It's planted there. It's not even a question of happiness. It's a question of settling the chaos. Bringing order to an unsettled situation. Revisited in the title is a return. Will the return end where the author leaves it or is it not likely a return again will occur ahead in time?

 

After all the parallels suggest it. Lord Marchmain dies in the faith. Sebastian finds his holy sanctuary. Bridey his Catholic wife and family, Cordelia her charitable works. Order has settled on each of their situations. It's not that big a leap to project the same for Charles and Julia.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "Waugh does not, like some earnestly evangelical Christian authors, try to present the Catholic world as a place of good happy contented people making good life decisions and saying their prayers. Rather, the Catholic world is one of enchantment, one in which there is more to the world that what the five senses can perceive."

 

I certainly agree with that. The only quibble I have is your word "enchantment." Is it enchantment or supernaturally charged? Your use of the word enchantment suggests that it is wonderful and heavenly and conducive to happiness. I think you brought up Tolkein as an allusion for Waugh's Catholic world view, and with that I can understand your use of the word enchantment. But I don't think Tolkein is Waugh's model for his Catholic world view. I think it's T.S. Eliot. In T. S. Eliot's Catholicism (yes, I know, Anglo-Catholicism) the world is supernaturally charged and that supernatural affects our psyche in a way that's just not there in Tolkein. At least from my reading of him. I think your use of "enchantment" leads you to minimize the psychology that is going on in the novel. I think T.S. Eliot's Catholicism fits better with the unhappiness of following one's Catholic faith fully. It's Tolkein who presents some happy shire and a Utopian existence.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "If Waugh's vision here is open to criticism, I think it would be that he bundled a set of specific aesthetics and social structures into his vision of the Catholic world as if they were a necessary part of it. I think there is some merit in that criticism, but at the same time, one could argue that part of seeing the world whole is going to be the opportunity for a more profound aesthetic experience. "

 

Yes it is open to criticism. Part of Waugh's vision of Catholicism it seems is inextricably linked to some medieval social structure of aristocrats and lower classes. You could say that comes from TS Eliot too. I assume the implication being the aristocracy have some sort of divine right to their place. Yes, there is a division in worldviews, but I would characterize it more as a feudal worldview (which to Waugh seems to be the Catholic worldview) in conflict with the capitalist/modern worldview of the rising middle classes which we see in Hooper and Mottram. No, I will have to disagree. I think displacement is a very apt term for the novel. The grace overcomes the displacements. The grace is operating to overcome displacement. That doesn't contradict Waugh

My Comment:

One other thing I will criticize Waugh for. After thinking about this for a while now, I think Waugh believes alcoholic drinking is actually a grace. Remember I said his values on drinking are not in line even with the society of his day, not to mention ours. As I've thought about this, I think he really thinks the drinking is part of the graces that flow from God. Perhaps he may even think of the drinking as a sacramental. Just look over the novel and see how many times drinking an alcoholic beverage is mentioned, and one has to be drunk from all the drinking they do on those occasions. It's a lot of alcohol. Charles and Julia are drinking champagne while the ship is pitching all over and everyone is seasick. I think every chapter has alcohol in it. I think there is more to it than just the surface drinking. I think Waugh intends drinking to be loaded with symbolic meaning. Waugh was known to being a drinker and maybe an alcoholic too. I do not think the Catholic Church sees drinking to the level of being drunk as a grace.

 

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "This is a pattern that is repeated for many characters, and Waugh announces the theme very explicitly when he has Lady Machmain read Chesterton's Father Brown story with the line about a twitch upon the thread."

 

I see nothing of what I speculated that would violate anything in that explanation of a "a twitch upon the thread." You seem to forget or not address that Charles is now Catholic. If Julia returned and got annulments - of which, again, was planted earlier in the novel - then their marriage would be a Catholic marriage. The twitch to return to Catholicism is not violated.

 

If Waugh intended to make the point that Julia and Charles must go on for the rest of their earthly lives carrying this cross (and he may well have intended that) then he should have shut the lid on all possibilities. But as I have pointed out, he left the possibilities open. His dramatic structure calls for the possibility and it would have been very easy for him to end the novel with the situation categorically closed. If it was important to him to make that point it would have been incumbent on him to do so.

 

Was this a failure on Waugh's part? Few novels are perfect. I don't see Waugh as James Joyce or William Faulkner. He did not create perfection here. I tend to start with a work as perfect to the author's intent. But to paraphrase DH Lawrence, once a novel has left an author's hands, he no longer has a say. It's the novel itself that speaks. It's all speculation on what happens after, but the lid is not shut closed on a Charles and Julia uniting in a Catholic marriage.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "This is a highly dissonant note. We instinctively want to think -- and so much inferior Christian literature is devoted to promoting the thought -- that being in harmony with God means being in harmony with the world in this life; that becoming Catholic will make you happy in this world. This is the prosperity gospel, in short, and it is heretical. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." "Take up your cross and follow me.""

 

I said no such thing. I despise prosperity gospel. You keep thinking that is my point, and it is not.

My Comment:

As it happened, yesterday [September 13^th] was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom and as I was reading about him I found this perfectly suited quote:

 

“Let there be no drunkenness; for wine is the work of God, but drunkenness is the work of the devil. Wine makes not drunkenness; but intemperance produces it. Do not accuse that which is the workmanship of God, but accuse the madness of a fellow mortal … For what is more wretched than drunkenness! The drunken man is a living corpse. Drunkenness is a demon self-chosen … ”

 

Waugh's later self criticism on this was warranted. And yes, I do enjoy a good drink myself. I am not a teetotaler

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: ""Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last words spoken between Julia and me..."

 

Charles never speaks to Julia again, therefore he certainly does not marry he."

 

It's first person narration where Charles is speaking in 1943. We are speculating beyond the ending of the narration. That is the current status as of 1943. It could not imply a future status because Charles is not a soothsayer.

 

Well, we've both made our points. I am not convinced by your reading and you are not convince by mine. We actually agree more than you think. So be it. There's no point in pursuing this further.