Platonic Eros and Catholic Faith in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

Style is the substance of the subject called unceasingly to the surface.

victor hugo, postscriptum de ma vie

Brideshead Revisited is conspicuous in its integration of stylistic excellence and theological depth. In an essay written in April of 1946, Waugh describes the two most characteristic aspects of his work in Brideshead and thereafter: "A preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relationship to God."¹ The novel's lush, ornamental style is therefore of a piece with its philosophical and theological themes. Thomas Prufer says that the heart of Waugh's achievement in the novel is "to have made a work in which the integrities of both art and faith are respected in their interaction."² Brideshead Revisited beautifully interlaces these two aspects, artistic style and philosophically informed theology, and this successful integration makes Brideshead a classic of both English literature and Catholic culture.

Let us say a word about the nature of "style" before we move to an analysis of Waugh's magnum opus. We should not understand style in such a way as to exclude the structure or form of a work of art. Rather, it would be more accurate to see the structure of a novel as a dimension of what we have called its style. In Brideshead, the structure (or shape) of the novel provides the artistic space within which Waugh's displays of linguistic excellence and evocative prose can be active. Concerning the importance of structure for a writer, Waugh says, "I believe that what makes a writer, as distinct from a clever and cultured man who can write, is an added energy and breadth of vision which enables him to conceive and complete a structure."³ Aristotle says the soul of an eye, if it had one, would be its sight, and we can add that the soul of a writer, as writer, is the ability to see and to complete a structure or form.⁴ The ability to display a particular story through the mediation of a coherent structure is that which makes the writer to be a writer, and thus the most important aspect of his style is his ability "to conceive and complete a structure."

Just as we should see that the structure of a novel is not dissociated from its style but rather is the most fundamental dimension of it, so too we must see that an author's style, including the structures he achieves, is not unrelated to the themes (or content) of the work. To be an artist is to be able to create structures that mirror the content the artist wishes to display in the work itself, so the style and structure of a great novel unify the work as a whole in order to manifest the nature of that which is discussed in the novel. There is an important distinction between what is said and how it is said, but the manner of the saying assists the listener in understanding what is manifested in the saying of it. In the hands of a great artist, the structures themselves of the art assist in displaying the themes to be discussed. According to Waugh, the themes explored in Brideshead are "the workings of the divine purpose" and "the operation of divine grace,"⁵ and I wish to claim that his style and the structure he achieves in Brideshead are correlated to and disclosive of these themes.

Having recalled the relationship between style, structure, and theme, I now formulate my thesis: first, a major theme in Brideshead is the nature and ultimate end of eros, therefore Plato's Symposium can help us understand Brideshead; second, the structure of the novel, which is its stylistic backbone, is the ascent that Charles Ryder experiences, an ascent made possible by the dawning of the distinction between charm and beauty as he moves from his naive and untutored love of art through his successive relationships with Sebastian and Julia Flyte, all of which culminate in his acceptance...