“Merely hints and symbols”? Kierkegaard and the Progressive Oracles of Brideshead Revisited

Douglas Lane Patey argues Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is a conversion story that renders Ryder’s journey to belief as one of successive devotions: to art, to romance, to Christ. While this first-person tale focuses on narrator Ryder, his spiritual progress is marked by minor characters who intervene to predict the fruit of his artistic labors and worldly loves. Brideshead features a trio of oracles who offer apt diagnoses of Ryder’s shortcomings. The cumulative force of their accuracy helps move Ryder to Christian conversion. Moreover, these seers trace, in the first of Waugh’s novels to deal with his Catholicism, a path that conforms to Kierkegaard’s three stages of life. Each of these prophets—of art, of love, of faith, respectively—helps disclose the poverty of Ryder’s understanding of the aesthetic, ethical and religious; thus their prophesies guide him to that trust in God that Kierkegaard, like Waugh, sees as our proper end.