Anyone familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Brideshead Revisited will most likely have gathered the reference in the title. The words come at the end of a long, gruelling struggle between a wayward, sensual woman and her conscience. Just a few hours earlier, she was preparing to finalise an adulterous relationship and marry her lover. But something has happened, and she realises that to do so would be the ‘one thing unforgivable: … to set up a rival good to God’s’.
Throughout the novel, we watch Julia Flyte’s progress from a slightly brazen young girl, through a bad marriage outside the Church to finally abandoning her putative husband in favour of a family friend, Charles Ryder, who likewise abandons his wife and children to enjoy two years of an apparently blissful adulterous cohabitation in Julia’s paternal home, Brideshead.
Living in Sin
What brings her conversion to a head? Her elder brother Bridey, who himself has just become engaged to a widowed woman with children. When Julia asks her brother why he did not bring Beryl, his wife-to-be, to Brideshead so they could meet her, Bridey answers unsympathetically: ‘I couldn’t possibly bring her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both — I have always avoided inquiry into the details of your ménage — but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.’ At these words, Julia storms out of the room, and we find her at the fountain, where Charles is trying to console her, saying her brother is just a ‘cold-blooded old humbug.’ Julia stuns him, responding: ‘No, it’s not that. He’s quite right… All in one word, one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime…. Living in sin, not just doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting…. Living in sin, with sin, always the same…’
We discover that what has pierced Julia so deeply, carving such a deep wound in her heart, is the expression that captures what her life has been for so many years: living in sin. But her pain is not from the insult. Her pain is that she knows her brother is right. She has been living in sin for years, first with Rex, then with Charles, and now on the verge of making her adulterous union definitive. ‘Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. “Poor Julia,” they say, “she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived,” they say, “but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.”’
In just a few words, through the feminine character he has so masterfully created, Waugh has given as precise a definition of living in sin as any theologian ever did. To live in sin is to have so left the realm of reason as to take up life with sin, not being able to live without it. While the gravity of sin as such never seems to have dawned on Julia, the realisation that she has organised her entire life around it leads her to grasp how mad and foolish she has been. Still, despite this insight, her conversion is not complete. The saving serum has been injected, but still, she resists and attempts to move on with her foolhardy plan. This is where the event of her father’s death takes place.
Lord Marchmain, too, has been an adulterer. He left his wife – a very virtuous Catholic wife – many years ago to take up with a mistress in Italy. At this supreme moment, even though his own thoughts are far from conversion, his children want him to see a priest. Bridey introduces Father Mackay, whom the dying man promptly sends away. But when the end is imminent, and Bridey is away, Julia is the one who cannot bear to see her father die as a heathen and has the priest summoned again. As the last rites are being administered, even her lover Charles, heretofore a total heathen, asks for a sign that the dying man has indeed been forgiven. At that supreme moment, Lord Marchmain musters enough strength to slowly make the sign of the cross. ‘Then I knew,’ Charles narrates, ‘that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom’.
The sign given was none other than the sign of the cross, the sign of mercy and forgiveness, and the veil was rent from top to bottom. The veil that separates earth from Heaven was rent, pouring out the grace of mercy and salvation upon this dying soul. But simultaneously another veil was rent: grace rends the veil that was hiding from Julia the utter wickedness of her life. From that moment, Julia knows she cannot continue with her mad, adulterous plan. It’s over.
Shortly after her father’s death, a few hours later, sitting on the stairs, she explains this to Charles, who too, amazingly, has understood the significance of the event for their life together, or rather, not together: ‘I can’t marry you, Charles; I can’t be with you ever again…. I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean: starting a life with you without Him. …. I saw today there’s one thing unforgivable – like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with – the bad thing I was on the point of doing that I’m not quite bad enough to do: to set up a rival good to God’s.’
The Idolatry of Sin
This magnificent drama, for which we will be ever indebted to the author, is an opportunity to reflect upon what sin really is and what means God uses to extricate us from it if only we are willing. St Augustine would tell us that sin is any thought, word or deed which is contrary to God’s eternal law. St Thomas, however, would take Augustine’s thought much further. He tells us that “sin is nothing else than to stray from what is according to our nature” and that “we do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good”. In other words, there is, written into our hearts, a law whose very existence is to be grounded in the nature we have received from God, and to act in contradiction with it is to not only offend God but to dissolve our own good, which God wants for us. We might say that God’s commandments are the recipe for happiness, and to disobey them is to dissolve not only our relationship with God but even with ourselves. It is to take up a life, as Julia tells Charles, ‘with you, but without Him’. This is why there can be no peace of heart in the midst of a sinful life. It is as if the sinner is continually rejecting God and choosing the creature; it is injecting a deadly poison, in very small doses, into the heart with every mortal sin.
Julia had been doing this for many years, but whereas, up to then, she knew she was misbehaving, it finally dawned on her that she had not only been sinning; rather, sin had become her life. She does not just sin and get back on her feet; she is, in the strict sense, a sinner, in the very same sense that the Pharisees referred to Magdalene who had interrupted their dinner to weep at the feet of Jesus: ‘And the Pharisee, who had invited him, seeing it, spoke within himself, saying: This man, if he were if a prophet, would know surely who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, that she is a sinner’ (Lk 7:39). She is a sinner, so much so, that sin has come to define her; it defines a woman who sells her body for money, but it also defines lovers who take up living together so that their sin can be continual and, as it were, definitive. It also defines anyone who knowingly sets him/herself up in any intrinsically disordered situation. They lose God’s grace, they lose their peace, and ultimately, if they do not repent, they lose their immortal soul.
It is this realisation that causes Julia to turn her life around. To be a bad girl and to get punished, well, I can live with that, she reasons. But to know what I know and to have seen what I just saw, and still to turn away from God, this would be to set up a rival to God, a rival good to God’s good. It would be to lock myself up in my tiny little world in which my god is my lover, but in which I lose the love of the true God. That is idolatry, and that I cannot do.
The Rending of the Veil
Virtually all of humanity had taken this path of setting up a rival good to God’s. But God did not abandon us. He sent His Son to die the horrible death of the cross to redeem us, to give us a chance to get out of the pathetic, false, rival good that had deprived us of the eternal good of God.
How does the grace of the cross reach us? It reaches us through the Church and through her sacraments. This is precisely why the determining factor in Julia’s and Charles’ conversion is the reception of the last sacraments. It is the moment of the rending of the veil. It is because the sacraments are there that grace is there. Through the sacraments, we are brought into living contact with eternity. Without them, we would have no access to God.
It is because Lord Marchmain’s children were taught their catechism that Julia, even sinful Julia, who had made so many grave mistakes in her life, must make sure her father has the priest there at the end. She cannot bear the thought of him dying like a heathen and going to Hell. This realisation shows her that the absolutely incredible grace of dying reconciled to God after a life lived in sin is not something she can make light of. She knows it is a miracle of grace and that this is her chance, perhaps her last chance. She has stifled her conscience for too long, but no more.
Conversely, another great author of the same period, C. S. Lewis, conveys the drama of a person who has little by little stifled his conscience and finds himself on the brink of death and damnation: ‘Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment too trivial to waste on a blue-bottle, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet (for the moment) unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul. So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way’.
This startling passage shows us the great importance of not resisting the grace of God when it comes and not letting it pass without allowing it to touch us deeply and move us to turn back to God while we have time: ‘So full of sleep are they at the time when they leave the right way’. Julia, however, was not asleep, not now. She sinned, yes, but she did not stifle her conscience; at this supreme moment, she took the grace and allowed it to transform her.
The Ongoing Drama
Thus, is also revealed the supreme importance of handing on the faith to the next generation, which will provide the major players at the hour of our own demise, when we will be hovering between life and death, between light and darkness, between salvation and damnation. Lord Marchmain reaped the fruits from the seed his loving, abandoned wife had sown, and thanks to her prayers and those of his faithful children, he was saved in the end.
But Julia, too, knows that it is thanks to the prayerful intercession and atoning penance offered by others, especially her mother, that she had seen the light: ‘Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it with her through the empty streets, where the milkman’s ponies stood with their forefeet on the pavement; mummy dying with my sin eating at her more cruelly than her own deadly illness’. In the end, Julia asks Charles, ‘Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of mummy, nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian – perhaps Bridey and Mrs Muspratt – keeping my name in their prayers, or it may be a private bargain between me and God that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end.’
‘Keeping my name in their prayers’: the naming in prayer of someone who is far from God, if it is done perseveringly, can obtain the grace of conversion for them. We must never give up praying for those we love, but we must not count on a deathbed conversion for ourselves. Julia realises this. She sees clearly that to neglect the grace of the present hour would be to run the risk of final despair. ‘God is not mocked’, writes St Paul (Gal 6:7).
But there is one final aspect to this great Catholic mystery. Unlike many partisans of the Reformation – we mustn’t forget that the novel is situated in England, where Catholics are a minority – the story of one’s life with God is not over and done with at the moment of our conversion or baptism. There is no ‘Accept Jesus as your personal Saviour and you are saved’. In such a life, all is said and done then; there is no story to tell. But it is a fake narrative that abandons souls to the boring, mundane, cheap thrills of life without a compass, sails or rudder and deprives them of the energy to grow up and take their responsibilities before God. For us Catholics, salvation is an ongoing drama. Our baptism made us children of God, but like any children, we often fail our Father and need to be reprimanded; sometimes, we even run away as Julia did. What took place at our baptism won’t save us if we do not learn to develop a wholesome relationship with God. For God is the true Lover, and for His part, He does not abandon us, nor does He allow us to live as spoilt, thankless, rotten children who can go on playing their no longer innocent games and ignore Him.
There are moments in our lives when these truths hit home, and then we must act. One of those times, provided by Holy Mother Church, is the annual observance of Lent. It is the propitious time to examine our conscience, to check and see if we have not set up a rival good to God’s, and if we have, to seek, through Holy Mother Church, the mighty means of recovering God’s grace and pardon, now, while we have the time, and are not at the mercy of a moment of consciousness that we may not have, or the help of a frail human being who may not be there at our last hour.