[HN Gopher] Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption
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Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-04-11 15:29 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (libertiesjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (libertiesjournal.com)
| musictubes wrote:
| Liberties is a great journal. It covers a lot of intellectual
| ground and is unapologetically Liberal in all senses of the word.
| Every issue has political and historical commentary, art
| (literary, film, dance) criticism, and poetry. It's like a denser
| Harper's.
| K7mR2vZq wrote:
| Waugh's journey from satire to orthodoxy mirrors many tech
| careers--from disruptive iconoclasm to seeking deeper principles.
| His ability to maintain literary excellence while embracing
| traditionalism reminds us that technical maturity often involves
| integrating seemingly contradictory values rather than merely
| overturning established systems.
| dhosek wrote:
| His journey doesn't really follow that pattern though. _The
| Loved One_ , a deeply iconoclastic satirical novel came after
| _Brideshead_.
| ewgoforth wrote:
| The movie is pretty good too. Jonathon Winters in a dual row.
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh God no, that movie is a horrid mess. It's why Waugh's
| novels were never adapted by Hollywood studios after that.
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| What of it? The Loved One (1948) was a bit of a squib at
| best, tonally a throwback to the earlier Waugh. It's not very
| good (imho) so you can see why Terry Southern - who had not
| much taste - liked it enough to make a film of it, also
| unsuccessful.
|
| The Sword of Honour Trilogy written over the next decade or
| so is much more representative of the later Waugh: the
| original article has sketched him out correctly.
|
| The general continuity in Waugh's life and writing is
| contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect
| sense in that light.
|
| The diaries are worth reading too. He really was quite an
| unpleasant fellow, as well as a fine writer.
| cafard wrote:
| Paul Fussell (I think) said that one should read Waugh's
| letters rather than his diaries: he wrote the letters in
| the morning, sober, and wrote the diaries at night, drunk.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > The general continuity in Waugh's life and writing is
| contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect
| sense in that light.
|
| I'm christian and this describes the most troublesome
| converts. Both in the trouble they cause the rest of us and
| the trouble they experience themselves.
|
| The thing they miss, and also maybe you, and also probably
| Waugh, is that religions are in one sense much older but in
| another much more serious and experiential sense they are
| modern.
|
| They are practiced by modern people, with modern patterns
| of thought, navigating modern problems in modern ways. The
| wisdom may be ancient but your life isn't, your belief
| isn't. You can't go home again, you can't swim in the same
| river twice, you can't prevent the fall, you can't put the
| family back together, you can't practice the religion of st
| anthony or even of your great grandfather. A modern person
| can only practice a modern christianity and this includes
| catholicism.
|
| Now, I still think you are right about waugh there. He did
| have contempt for modernity and did probably turn to
| catholicism to escape it. But I don't believe he found what
| he was looking for, because it simply isn't there to be
| found.
|
| Charles Taylor explores this
| problem/contradiction/experience in incredible depth in A
| Secular Age. I wish waugh had been able to read it but I
| wonder if he would have.
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| Thank you. I will explore.
| geye1234 wrote:
| I'm responding a bit late to this.
|
| 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.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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, 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.
| geye1234 wrote:
| That's fair. Let's replace 'Christianity' with 'the
| Catholic Church', since what you say undoubtedly applies
| to Protestantism, and in a less obvious way to Eastern
| Orthodoxy. And remember, I'm saying 'timeless _if_ true
| '; the 'true' part is assumed for the purpose of this
| argument.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| As someone who has been Catholic most of my life, it
| certainly applies just as much to the Catholic Church
| (even to there being diverse beliefs within the Church at
| any given time, and certainly to change over time.)
| geye1234 wrote:
| Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's Self-
| Revelation and therefore can't change because God can't
| change. Again, if it changes, then it isn't true. I'm not
| (here) arguing that it's true; only that in order to
| adhere to it, one must hold that it doesn't change. That,
| obviously, doesn't imply that every member of the
| Catholic Church believes the same thing. Nor does it
| imply that practice will look different in various times
| and places, although practice will always have the same
| goal (Union with the Divine Essence) and therefore be in
| essence the same thing.
|
| EDIT: "will look different" should obviously be "will not
| look different"
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God's
| Self-Revelation and therefore can't change
|
| 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.
| geye1234 wrote:
| I said
|
| >> 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?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The teaching of the Catholic Church just is revelation.
|
| 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.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Yes, that was a bad way of putting things on my part. You
| are correct. Better would be "the basis of the Catholic
| Church's teaching, and the primary part of its teaching,
| is revelation".
|
| 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?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Precisely.
|
| 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...
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Catholicism teaches that Divine Revelation is God 's
| Self-Revelation and therefore can't change because God
| can't change._
|
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| This misunderstands the theology and metaphysics very
| profoundly.
|
| 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.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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&ver
| sio...
| geye1234 wrote:
| It is, actually, necessary that God can't change. It is
| not _solely_ an article of Faith, but it's additionally
| something that someone without the light of Faith can
| know, although some pretty abstract thinking is required.
|
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > I happily claim to practise the religion of St.
| Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing
|
| 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.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Thanks. I've heard good things about Taylor and I will
| try to check it out one of these days.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| A similar contempt for modernity was popular in Germany in
| the years before BR was published.
|
| IMO he revealed far too much truth in Decline and Fall, and
| the rest was hopeful damage limitation.
|
| I'm not surprised he drank a lot.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I really like this book and while not catholic I'm close enough
| that the experiences and decisions of the characters are
| comprehensible to me, which probably helps.
|
| The article mentions this briefly but many don't, and they
| downplay it significantly even here. The first act of this book
| is _extremely_ homoerotic. Like it is a clear depiction of a
| chaste but certainly romantic love between these two young men.
| But it is _also_ a friendship based on normal-for-the-time-and-
| place male camaraderie and college antics.
|
| It's a nuanced and sophisticated depiction, not apparently trying
| to make any moral or ethical point about it and the book has a
| small but devoted following among contemporary gay men for this.
| Nor is this even plausibly deniable as a "sappho and her friend"
| type accident on the author's part, since homosexuality is pretty
| explicitly (though euphemistically) referenced elsewhere in the
| book. IMO one of the best depictions of a romance of its kind in
| modern literature. It's fascinating that it's here.
| philsnow wrote:
| > Why, oh why, must the love stories fail?
|
| Well, Julia's (and then Charles's) love for God prevails, in the
| end.
|
| On the face of it, it's not a story where the guy gets the girl,
| as such. However, there is a sense where Jesus is the bridegroom
| of the Church, and thus it is that kind of story, just not the
| way that readers expect (well, as Oliver points out, until they
| read the title of the section "The Twitch on the Thread").
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| In Catholic theology, God is the ultimate end of Man. The
| created order, with all its good and beauty, can be understood
| as a sign that points to God.
|
| Marriage under a Catholic understanding has both a natural and
| a supernatural end. The natural end is procreative, but the
| supernatural end is that of a friendship in which husband and
| wife help each other on their journey toward Heaven.
|
| In Dante, we see Dante's love of Beatrice lead him to God. He
| never marries her, but through her beauty and his love of her,
| she becomes a kind of icon through which Dante is led toward
| virtue and the divine. Eros draws him upward, but he is
| purified by agape. Agape purifies eros. The willing of the good
| of the other, self-sacrifice, surpass the satisfaction of one's
| desires and purify them.
|
| (Incidentally, this is why, in this theological light, vile
| perversions like pornography become even more horrifying and
| dark. There is a sense in which one is also participating in an
| act of desecration.)
| danielhanlon wrote:
| How unexpected - beautifully written! It's almost surprising that
| the quoted passages are so familiar - I hadn't realised how
| affecting they are. Whilst loving the book I can't consider
| Brideshead Revisited without thinking of the wonderful 1980s
| Granada TV adaptation. I didn't dare watch the more recent film,
| lest it spoil the tableaux of the original.
| coyotespike wrote:
| The Granada TV adaptation apparently was a sensation on both
| sides of the Atlantic, and they simply read out loud parts of
| the book where they hadn't filled in the script - "a book on
| film." I loved it.
| googlryas wrote:
| Why does HN lie? There are comments in this thread saying they
| were posted "18 hours ago" (eg from giraffe_lady), but I am
| positive I read these comments 3 days ago on the same thread.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Might be some thread merging, dang sometimes does it, or might
| be a newish automatic feature I haven't heard about.
|
| Oddly, if you search the story name it says it was actually
| posted 3 days ago, but directs tot his thread:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| You can email them and ask, email's in the faq. They do
| respond.
| detaro wrote:
| it's a boost feature, which basically resets the clock for a
| story (and since the ranking algorithm is influenced by newness
| a lot, it pushes it back up)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Dang was just proud of me for not calling anyone a coward or
| heretic in this one and wanted to make sure everyone saw.
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