Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption
libertiesjournal.com
libertiesjournal.com
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").
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true. And therefore so is (the object of) Christians' belief. And so therefore, a 'modern Christianity' is an oxymoron.
I happily claim to practise the religion of St. Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing (God's Self-Revelation in the God-Man Jesus Christ), and our wills pursue the same thing (Union with the Divine Nature). The reason for belief and the goal of religious practice is the same in St. Anthony's case as in mien.
As for Waugh, he believed that 'modernity', taken to mean the beliefs that inform contemporary thought and behaviour, was contemptible. (Obviously, if we took 'modern' to simply mean 'contemporary', this would make no sense. 'Modern' is a notoriously ambiguous word.)
"The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time, and for any given time and group of Christians tend to include a mix of teachings that are held by those Christians to be fundamental and eternal, and teachings that are held by those Christians to be applicable in the current context (the latter tend to be presented as an application of the former to the perceived current circumstances, but may or may not be the result of applying any rational process to explicitly held eternal beliefs to any specifically articulated beliefs about the modern world.)
Your objection seems to be grounded in claims about the "teachings of Christianity" that are empirically untrue of the actual teachings of actual Christianity as it has actually existed in the material world. They may apply to some abstract ideal of Christianity, but in that case a "modern Christianity" could still exist as a concrete Christianity that more closely approached the abstract ideal than current concrete forms.
EDIT: "will look different" should obviously be "will not look different"
Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.
> Again, if it changes, then it isn't true.
If it changes, and it was claimed to be a universal constant, than either the before- or after-change version isn't true, sure, that's trivially true.
>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.
To which you said
> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time
> Revelation may not change, but the actual concrete beliefs of the Catholic Church manifestly do.
The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation. Individual Catholics or churchmen may believe all kinds of things, some contrary to revelation and/or each other, but that's something distinct. What has manifestly changed?
No, even in the view of the official teachings of the Catholic Church, the teachings of the Catholic Church include, but extend well beyond, revelation.
If the teachings were only what was understood to be unquestionably part of the content of revelation, then there would be no teachings which were not dogmas.
To return to the main disagreement:
>> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.
> "The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time
The teaching of the Catholic Church, insofar as it is proposed as being part of Revelation, or as following logically therefrom, is timeless and unchanging. One reason is that Revelation is primarily about God (it's His Self-Revelation), who can't change.
Again, the fact that different Catholics believe different things (contrary to Revelation or each other), or that some teachings that are not proposed as being part of Revelation change over time, is irrelevant to this.
Obviously, if you claim Revelation is an "abstract ideal", then you are implicitly claiming it's false, or doesn't exist, which is an entirely different argument.
Are there any teachings that are proposed as part of Revelation, or as following logically therefrom, that have manifestly changed over time?
Here is an article[0] explaining papal infallibility that touches on some of these things in greater detail for those interested.
[0] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/11/papal-fallibility.ht...
The "God can't change" part seems a bit above our paygrade, no?
Not to mention: Who are we to say that God wouldn't reveal things to us gradually — and maybe in a changing way?
EXAMPLE: We still teach our kids that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Later, we refine the teachings.
The immutability of God is a necessary theological conclusion. If God changes, then He isn't God, by definition. It would be a metaphysical absurdity. Change presupposes imperfection and, therefore the potential for perfection, i.e., full actualization, but God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is pure act with no potential left to actualize. God is fully dynamic, but this is quite different from change. He may appear to change from our temporal perspective as events are distributed in time, but from an eternal perspective, all is actualized, "simultaneous", so to speak.
W.r.t. gradual revelation, that is exactly what Scripture is a record of. A Catholic reading will demonstrate that revelation is in the business of slowly revealing to Man who God is (at least that which cannot be known through unaided reason; quite a bit can be known through reason alone), preparing him for the culmination of public revelation in the Incarnation of the Logos, something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And furthermore, the Catholic Church recognizes the development of doctrine, which you could call a refinement and deepening of understanding of what has been revealed. I like the analogy to mathematics, even if it is imperfect: all the theorems that follow from a set of axioms are in a sense already in the axioms, and so mathematics is in the business of unpacking them.
However, this gradual revelation and development of doctrine, in order to be authentic, cannot contradict what was known previously, at least to a certain accuracy, if not precision. Of course, here is where people can get tripped up by analogical devices and literal-mindedness. Scripture is written using the idioms, paradigms, and language of the people who wrote it and for whom it was written. That means that some of the language may not agree with strict scientific descriptions of the 21st century. However, when that does occur, you will note that the sense is not the reference: when the Bible speaks of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west in order to communicate some theological truth, it is not making astronomical claims about the sun and the earth. It is using this language as instruments to communicate something, often by analogy. In fact, analogy is essential to theology, something captured in the concept of the analogia entis. Univocal or equivocal approaches to the subject of God have been the source of numerous heresies.
Is that so? Just because some people can't conceive of a mutable God, it doesn't mean it's impossible by definition. (Quantum mechanics was equally "inconceivable," until it wasn't.)
For the sake of argument, let's assume that God exists. Of course it's not our place to proclaim that God does change — that's above our paygrade, too. But to purport to categorically rule out the possibility is not just Dunning-Kruger arrogance, it's blasphemy.
Our discussion brings to mind chapter 38 of the Book of Job. We can summarize it (profanely) as God's saying to Job, in essence, "Who the f*ck are you to question me?"
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2038&versio...
Most people think of the God of monotheism as a kind of super-angel. They think of Him as omnipotent, eternal, etc etc, but still something that exists in the same way that everything else exists. We say of a stone, a plant, a human being or an angel "it exists", and therefore, they think, we can say the same about God. This is the wrong way of thinking about Him, and it causes a lot of confusion (and it allows the Dawkinistas to put forth puerile arguments like "one god fewer"). It makes existence out to be something that God has, and therefore something that is, in itself, independent of Him. And if something is independent of God, then it would be higher than He is, and be something that He relied on, and that would mean He wouldn't be God.
It is instead much better to say that God is Being, and that everything else exists only in a derivative way. Everything else has being, but God is Being.
Pantheists and other monists argue that the universe itself is being, and that it can't ultimately change (the appearance of change is an illusion, they say). Their argument, to summarize horribly, is that anything other than being is non-being, and non-being can't do anything, since it doesn't exist. An acorn can't change into a tree, because that would imply that prior to the change the tree "is not", and that which is not can do nothing. The tree must therefore have always existed. Thus all change is an illusion.
They're mistaken insofar as they're talking about the visible universe -- change is absolutely real -- but what they say is roughly true for God. He can't change, because there is nothing that is Being apart from Him. Everything outside Him exists only derivitavely. This doesn't imply pantheism, because the things outside Him have real existence, but it is a kind of lesser existence.
A rough analogy: Light can't be dark. Other things can share in light without actually being light (noun), but they can't make light be dark. God is Being, and other things can share in his being but can't make Him non-being. Any change in Him would involve His going in some way from non-being to being. But non-being can't do anything, or become being. This is a very rough sketch of why God is immutable. This stuff requires some seriously abstract and non-quantitative thinking and isn't easy.
Job 38 doesn't imply that we can know nothing about God, only that we can't fully comprehend Him.
Well, and me too. But also you should read the book I mentioned. I'm not qualified to summarize it but others have. It has been extremely valuable to my spiritual life.
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.