RonPrice
07-15-2011, 01:39 AM
In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to the revised edition in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith. I have remained a Baha’i all my life.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 in the end, a common enough experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; and 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, 1987 and 1992, resp., W.W. Norton & Co., NY., V.2, p.492.
Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
Is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made…..and then
begins the delicious process of….
exploring it limitlessly.”1….This is
perhaps the most succinct and
sufficient description of the process
of conversion ever written for man.
Waugh's own conversion from the "absurd
caricature" of ultra-modernity to the "real
world" of Catholic orthodoxy was greeted
with astonishment by the literary world &
caused a sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in these last
30 years know any of this?....I did not until
today &, wanting to know something about
how this television series came into existence
in these last thirty years: ‘81-’11…..I learned
a thing or two from a little research/reading.
1“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."
Waugh concluded this press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.
Ron Price
14 July 2011
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 in the end, a common enough experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; and 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, 1987 and 1992, resp., W.W. Norton & Co., NY., V.2, p.492.
Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
Is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made…..and then
begins the delicious process of….
exploring it limitlessly.”1….This is
perhaps the most succinct and
sufficient description of the process
of conversion ever written for man.
Waugh's own conversion from the "absurd
caricature" of ultra-modernity to the "real
world" of Catholic orthodoxy was greeted
with astonishment by the literary world &
caused a sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in these last
30 years know any of this?....I did not until
today &, wanting to know something about
how this television series came into existence
in these last thirty years: ‘81-’11…..I learned
a thing or two from a little research/reading.
1“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."
Waugh concluded this press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.
Ron Price
14 July 2011