“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…”
This line from the last page of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1944) interprets the movement of the novel as a hidden unfolding of revelation, conversion, and salvation. The young agnostic Charles Ryder is befriended at university by a confrère who is of the English Catholic nobility. Through their friendship Charles is pulled into the orbit of a once proud Catholic family now rushing inexorably towards its dissolution. Moving through stages of fascination, bewilderment, and revulsion, Charles is drawn ever deeper into the drama of a classical culture of aristocratic and religious consciousness relentlessly assailed by the leveling forces of secular modernity.
When he first arrives on the scene of the family estate, Brideshead, Charles appears as the finest young representative and product of the modern saeculum, who views the religion of the family as “an enigma” and a “foible.” He would have been nothing other than a disinterested observer in a museum of days-gone-by if it were not for his friendship and admiration for the youngest son, Sebastian, whose brand of joie de vivre is characterized by both a childlike carelessness and a childlike faith. “My dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all”, says Charles, “I mean about Christmas, and the star, and the ox and the ass, and the three kings.” “Oh yes”, Sebastian answers back, “I believe all that. It’s a lovely idea.” Charles is amused and then incredulous: “but you can’t believe things because they’re lovely ideas!” Sebastian without taking offense simply replies “But I do. It’s how I believe.” Through his friendship with Sebastian Charles is seduced into a world of aesthetic delight—fine wine, exquisite baroque art and architecture, idyllic Italian vacations, and the pagan-seeming mysteries of the Catholic religion symbolized by the Brideshead chapel with its enigmatic, ever-burning flame, a spiritual phenomenon which is both invitation and veiled threat.
As the drama unfolds Charles appears increasingly as a pawn for the diverging aims of each of the family members: Julia’s apostasy, Cordelia’s relentless Faith, the oblivious and tone-deaf conservatism of Bridey the eldest son, Sebastian’s descent into post-adolescent alcoholism, Lord Marchmain’s marital and religious unfaithfulness, and Lady Marchmain’s desperate attempt to keep the family together through an imperious discipline that masks a pure but broken heart. All along emerge subtle foreshadowings of the final cataclysm that will bring about both the temporal destruction and the spiritual salvation of the family. But the meaning of the past and even of the present moment is never clear until the final revelation.
And this is the way of Prophecy. The prophetic utterance is not merely an issue of prediction, yet in so far as it contains prediction it is not simply about the future, but rather about the meaning of the present moment with respect to a future unfolding. More than just temporal continuum, divine history is the story of man’s life with God and the meaning of that story. The prophet is the one who speaks for God into the moment in order to bring to light, or to remind us about, that meaning. The words of the prophet are spoken into the present but are not wholly understood in the present. They cannot be, since the story is not yet complete and therefore the meaning of history and so the prophetic word must remain in suspension. Prophecy ties together past, present, and future and makes it possible for those living under its warnings to see themselves as truly part of history and not alienated from it by the passage of time and death.
The prophetic word is equally a mystery to the prophet himself. On the one hand, he is given possession of a clear vision of reality and speaks a clear word. On the other hand, his words echo beyond the moment and beyond his own comprehension. Down the ages they are contemplated and re-spoken in new contexts, their meaning becoming broad and deep and pregnant with ever greater mystery and foreboding, until the time in which their ultimate significance is unveiled and the unity of history in the Divine Providence is reestablished in human consciousness.
In the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, both prophecy and fulfillment are paired for our communal recollection. The prophet Isaiah comes to Ahaz, king of Israel during a time of looming war and threatening destruction. A sign is given to the king by the prophet, on the one hand a simple message of timely divine deliverance albeit given through an arresting image: “Behold, a virgin (almah, Heb. “young woman”) shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel, God-with-us.” In other words, “in about the time it takes for a woman to conceive and bring a child to term, God will deliver Israel from the threat of the Syrians.” Israel indeed makes a defense pact with another neighboring kingdom and invasion is staved off for a time. Yet the form of the prophecy remains, is startling and suggestive, and therefore buries itself into Hebrew consciousness and gradually morphs into a very form of words which characterize the coming of the Messiah, the ultimate deliverer of Israel from the bondage of sin and death, the one who will bring everlasting peace not only to Israel but through her to the whole of the world—past, present, future.
For the one who is attached to the divine “thread”, every step of his life is pregnant with the prophetic. He may be more or less aware of this and yet there are moments in which the presence of the Divine Hand could hardly be more clear to him. The Christian thinks of his life as caught up in divine history, such that every step is part of a single movement with meaning and direction and relation to the whole. Christian consciousness is not of the pagan or modern sort, mere personal achievement or failure lined up day after day, one by one, until death and oblivion. Think rather of traversing a spiral staircase. With each step I am brought closer to my goal, each step an aspect of progress, but also each step related not merely sequentially to what has come before, but also vertically to past and future (all the more so the past as I climb the staircase for my past changes as I climb). I am making a true ascent and the meaning of the ascent is dramatic at every step because of each step’s importance with respect to the whole and to the progression. I can not always be immediately aware of the significance, but I can be assured that past, present, and future are woven into a meaningful whole for which ascent and arrival are the reason and end. Even when forgetfulness threatens, and our progress seems more like clumsy stumbling than a walk with graceful composure, we can do nothing else but walk, onward and upward, in the divine providence.
This consciousness is persistent for the Christian even when she fancifully imagines she is “running from God.” It’s the Roaring Twenties, and Waugh’s Lady Julia Flyte rebels against her devout and stoic mother in the name of personal liberty. Yet at the moment in which she feels she is farthest from God she finds that God is closest to her. God has not left her alone in her apostasy, and her realization that God loves her enough to make her miserable without him is what saves her for faith.
Faithful Cordelia expresses the insight thus, in reflection upon the tragedy of her family.
“D’you know what Papa said when he became a Catholic? ‘You have brought back my family to the faith of their ancestors.’ The family haven't been very constant, have they? There's him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won't let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk—I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’”
God placed his mark upon Israel. “Behold, a virgin shall conceive…” No matter hard-hearted they would become, no matter how blind and “perfidious” in their apostasy, in their chasing after “strange gods”, he could and did bring them back with a “twitch upon a thread.”
“And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:30-33 KJV).
Brideshead Castle first appeared to Charles Ryder as a symbol of an adventure of beauty and intrigue, of youthful desire and aesthetic pleasure. But in the end it had become for him the sign of the Divine Presence in the world—his world, and ours. We are the inheritance of the divine commitment to mankind. Now is the season to remember again the story, the pattern, the shape of our destiny—past, present, future—so as to rekindle the “small red flame” of our faith for the long climb up the spiral staircase.
Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis.