ON HIDEOUSNESS, PART 2
Vietnamese Wood Carving: Half Buddha, Half Demon. Public Domain.
Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.
The Marchmains are far from the only characters in Catholic fiction, particularly twentieth-century Catholic fiction, for whom the religious, the aesthetic, and the rarefied tolerance for the hideous converge. Graham Greene — another of my favorite writers, albeit, like Waugh, a writer to whom I can never be fully reconciled — was a master of this sort of equivalence. In his seaside-thriller Brighton Rock, for example, the good-hearted, vaguely agnostic Ida (who is, of course, middle-class), is set against the infinitely more complex and aristocratic Catholicism of both the saintly Rose and her sociopathic criminal husband, Pinky, for whom the consciousness — both as terror and as appeal — makes Ida’s ordinary morality (including, say, a repugnance at murder), impossible. (“I know one thing you don’t,” Ida tells Rose, imploring her to leave Pinky for her own sake, “I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school.” Rose inwardly concludes: “the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods--Good and Evil.”)
Against such a paradigm, Julia’s decision becomes more complicated. It is a rejection of sin, to be sure, but it is also an aesthetic act of becoming; she, like her father — a lapsed convert who returns to the Church on his deathbed — is entering into the inheritance of Brideshead. Her embrace of the hideously unworldly quality of her unhappiness is also an embrace of spiritual aristocracy, and of a life aestheticized.
There is something distinctly pagan, after all, about the way that Julia sets up what she calls her “private bargain” with God. She does not, at the time, intend to live a more virtuous, we might even say more Christian, life; she says as much. Her Catholicism begins and ends — or so it seems in the moment — with this act of renunciation. An uncharitable reader might accuse her of holding to this flamboyantly challenging element of her faith precisely because it gets her off the hook for participating in the more ordinary, less narratively satisfying, less novelistic elements of living out gospel work.
There is no room in Julia’s formulation for radical hope; no room, either, for a grace that does not take the form of exchange. Her conception of God, in her final exchange with Charles, involves a kind of fairytale logic, literal magical thinking.
Julia gives up what she wants most, and so gains salvation. God will not despair of her, not because Julia has accepted God’s love, or God’s grace, but because Julia has made a meet and fitting sacrifice. It is aesthetic Pelagianism: Julia, not Christ, saves herself on the cross of her self-abnegation.
That is not to say, of course, that Julia makes the wrong choice — I’m still inclined to say she chose rightly. But the way she describes her choice to Charles, the way her choice is inextricable from her identification with her aristocratic family (after all, her first bout of guilt immediately follows her brother telling her that his wife will never visit her home as long as she’s living in sin). It is inextricable from a sense of the Christian life as governed by the narrative logic of fairy-tales, that grace is subject to aesthetic laws. At its core, this Christian hideousness owes more to the Romantics and to Nietzsche than it does to Jesus Christ: centering the wrenching emotional experience of being enchanted, the psychological pull of sanctified unhappiness, over the less obviously thrilling gospel truth. The Christian, like one of Joseph Campbell’s heroes, becomes the one who endures, not for the sake of God, nor his fellow man, but for an internalized narrative of psychic strength.
But the Christian world is not fairyland. It is enchanted, to be sure, but that enchantment is not the enchantment of fairy-tales - an enchantment of devil’s bargains and ancient magic and outcomes somehow earned.
The incarnation of Jesus Christ, not as an instantiation of a fairy archetype but as a real human being, in a particular place, at a particular time in history, the radical and transgressive entering of God into our world, demands a different vision of enchantment: one in which there is no magic but God’s love for us, which is at the heart of creation and incarnation alike. Grace is not something that can be bargained for, nor can it won. It does not come to the hero at the end of a furious gauntlet battling monsters; it does not require a journey into the lands of the dead; it does not demand a narratively satisfying amount of suffering.
Hideousness, in other words, is at its core an aesthetic category; grace is not and cannot be aesthetic. It is too abundant, too freely given. It does not satisfy our craving — its own kind of curiositas — for expected outcomes, for stories tied up neatly, endings too good to be true. It is, quite literally, the deus ex machina of our life’s narratives.
Grace breaks storytelling laws wide open, even as the kenotic incarnation of God Himself breaks apart the hierarchies of human power. Valleys are low; mountains high. A king rides into Jerusalem on an ass. People are saved who do not seem to “deserve” it; the faith of the saved is, as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us, “known to God alone.”
Grace, after all, does not make for a suspenseful story. The end is known already; God’s victory is already assured. Salvation is not just for the saintly, or for those who sacrifice, or for those who suffer. The Christian life may demand suffering or sacrifice of us, of course, but it may also demand of us lives that seen from the outside might be unremarkable, even boring, the small daily work of living in the world the way Dorothea Brooke ends up: having “lived faithfully a hidden life,” resting, Eliot tells us, in an unvisited tomb. It is the refusal of grace to conform to our own mortal categories, to fall upon the right sort of people, to be won only by those who by virtue of spiritual aristocracy deserve it, that render it the real offense to our reason. It is in its abundance, not in its absence, that we find — as Greene put it — the “appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
Years after first reading Brideshead, it is not Julia’s renunciation that speaks to me. It is a few offhand lines in the novel’s final pages, when the elderly Nanny Hawkins tells Charles Ryder a little about Julia’s fate during World War II. We learn that she and her sister Cordelia have gone to help with the war effort in Palestine, that she has taken in a priest whose home was bombed, that she has a “kind heart.” If grace has entered Julia’s life, in the moment of her renunciation, it is not to allow her to be tragically bad, saved only by her one world-rejecting act.
It is to transform her, too, into one of those unheralded people because of whom — as Eliot writes — “things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been.” There is nothing hideous about Julia’s quiet usefulness; there is nothing rarefied about it, either. We do not know whether or not Julia is happy; what we do know is that Julia is, at last, part of the world, rather than set loftily apart from it. Her no to the world’s sin has been transformed into a yes to its goodness, and with it the appallingly strange goodness of God.
I think, often and critically, of that book I used to read in Barnes and Nobles. I reject now, more than I ever did at seventeen, the promise of an easy God, one whose goodness always concords with my personal psychological contentment. But I do not reject the feeling of radical hope those words gave me, however ill-defined; a feeling that defends me against the aesthetic pull of Christian hideousness. It is the hope of Abraham, preparing to sacrifice Isaac, and yet believing that God’s goodness will restore him, that God’s goodness will raise the valleys and move mountains, that God’s goodness will collapse narrative itself. It is the hope that God knows how to tell stories better than we do.
