HIDEOUSNESS REVISITED
Vietnamese Wood Carving: Half Buddha, Half Demon. Public Domain.
Tara Isabella Burton's recently published two-part article in Earth and Altar explores the aesthetics of hideousness through an analysis of the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Part I and Part II). Burton captures the aesthetic tension of hideousness, and her article tugs on important threads in Christian thinking about beauty: after all, Christians worship not just a resurrected God but a crucified one. The woundedness and ugliness, yes ugliness (see Isaiah 53), of Christ has to be reckoned with, even if, as Burton concludes, grace is greater.
Burton focuses her analysis on the character of Julia Marchmain in Brideshead, particularly the moment in the novel when Julia decides not to divorce her philandering husband Rex in order to marry the once-married-now-divorced Charles because, as she says, to do so would "set up a rival good to God's." (1) Her choice is, in Burton's analysis, the central act of renunciation in the novel. Burton characterizes Julia's choice as an aesthetic one — a choice for suffering for the sake of suffering — and contrasts it with grace, which is characterized by quiet goodness rather than dramatic flourish. This puts grace, says Burton, beyond the category of the aesthetic because it does not demand suspense, suffering, or any kind of narrative catharsis. It is simply a foregone conclusion to the end of the story. By emphasizing the prodigality and inevitability of grace, Burton has, indeed, identified the real motive and energy of the Christian faith. Yet, while I agree with Burton's central thesis — that suffering cannot be a choice for its own sake but must, ultimately, be caught up by grace — I find myself wanting to revisit both Brideshead and hideousness in order to probe the relationship between ugliness and grace further. To do so, I offer three questions that I hope will press, productively and charitably, on Burton’s article.
The Ugliness of Sebastian
Would Burton's analysis of Brideshead, and of these two categories, have been different had she chosen to consider the character of Sebastian alongside Julia? The beautiful Sebastian is hopelessly alcoholic and estranged from his overbearing family, marred by internal and external wounds, some self-inflicted and some inflicted by others. In his suffering, he takes in and ministers to the selfish, cowardly Kurt, and by the end of the novel, Waugh figures Sebastian as saint-like because of his self-diminishing gifts to Kurt. Sebastian seems to be the most lost, the most maimed, figure in the Marchmain family, but he is also portrayed as the most compassionate. What do readers do with this? Is the transformation of his beauty to hideousness merely aesthetic for Waugh? Is he a mere image?
My sense is that Waugh by no means meant for Sebastian’s ugliness to function as purely aesthetic. Rather, I sense that Sebastian, not Julia, is the beating heart of Waugh's argument for grace in the novel. By standards of moral conduct, Sebastian does not merit reward. He is completely at the mercy of his sin and suffering. By worldly standards of money and power, Sebastian is a complete failure — a mess of a man who chooses to be dependent upon the charity of others and to be used up by a drifter. And yet, Waugh is besotted by Sebastian’s purity of heart. This is the strange paradox that drives the novel, I believe. Sebastian is hideous, but his ugliness does not exist for its own sake. Instead, Sebastian’s ugliness and beauty are as inextricable as his compassion is from his passion — he who has suffered much, loves much; he who has loved much, suffers much. In the Gospels, the ones who receive mercy are the wounded, the one with the issue of blood, the prostitute, the diseased, the criminal, the one who has nothing to give Christ but love. Thus, Sebastian’s beauty and ugliness are integrated and, in my reading of the novel, startlingly, appallingly true to the human experience of sin and grace in this world.
The Ugliness of Faith
My second question asks how we might reread Julia’s decision. Burton initially characterizes Julia’s Catholicism as beginning and ending with her choice to renounce Charles. By the end of her article, however, she sees Julia’s choice for suffering as secondary to the outpouring of grace that she experiences in the quiet life of service she proceeds to live when she joins Cordelia, her devout younger sister, to nurse the war wounded in Palestine. As Burton writes, Julia’s initial “no to the world’s sin has been transformed into a yes to its goodness.” (3)
While Burton is certainly right to resist pietistic approaches to Christianity that aestheticize suffering for its own sake, I am not yet wholly convinced that Julia’s choice to reject marriage to Charles does this. Is it fair to erase her choice to suffer, as halting and incomplete as it initially was, with the quiet grace of her later life? Mightn’t that set up a strange dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the world-as-it-is or in God’s mysterious economy? Does that really do justice to Julia’s decision? Julia’s choice, I believe, is not a mere act of self-deprivation. The act of divorce itself does not trouble Julia. No. For Julia, her decision to renounce Charles is less about divorce itself, or marital faithfulness, than it is about setting Charles up as a rival god for the rest of her life. She recognizes this moment as her point of no return. Her turning away from Charles is not an attempt to save herself or to merit God’s salvation. Instead, her renunciation is a recognition that she cannot serve two gods. She must “choose this day” for God, one tiny, faltering step towards him that opens an abyss between her old life and her future life. (3)
Perhaps what Waugh sees and teases out for the attentive reader through Julia’s story is the way faith itself is inhabited by the perpetual and inextricable rhythms of renunciation and abundance, by suffering and flourishing, by crucifixion and resurrection. Faith is comprised of renunciation and grace, the former no less confounding and necessary than the latter. Julia's later, quiet goodness, therefore, does not contrast to her initial choice to suffer, or relegate it to play-acting, but, rather, emerges from it and alongside it. Indeed, every decision for faith, if we are honest with ourselves, comes with some kind of self-denying role-play — a holy hypocrisy that enables us to act out the thing we have seen and loved in Christ before that thing is wholly and deeply ours.
The Ugliness of Christ
My final question asks how scripture provokes us to think about ugliness. Assuming I have not misunderstood Burton's thesis, her suggestion that grace "collapses" narrative and therefore cannot be aesthetic (while hideousness must be) forgets that Christ's abundant grace is carried, as George Herbert imagines it in "The Bag," within his overflowing wounds. Indeed, Christ's humanity, a kind of divine wounding, is perpetual and eternal. Likewise, and even more viscerally, Christ's crucifixion wounds, we are told in scripture, are permanent. Doubting Thomas is invited to “thrust” his hand into Christ's wounds. (4) When we see Christ, we will see him in his glorified body, and the physical imprints of his suffering will not have been erased by his glorification. Neither, dare I say it, will ours be.
How do we reconcile these pivotal and uncomfortable truths with Burton's deus ex machina of grace? If Burton is right that “grace breaks storytelling laws wide open” because it does not demand “a narratively satisfying amount of suffering,” then we might assume that grace itself does not demand any suffering. (5) We might think that if grace demands suffering, then our salvation is not freely given but earned. Seeing grace this way risks missing the rich and true integration of suffering and healing that is evident again and again in the scriptures. In the scriptures, grace demands both nothing and everything. This, I think, is the lesson that Julia learns in Brideshead, even if it takes her a long time. She has to give up Charles not because she wants to win God but because she realizes that he himself is, in the final analysis, worth more to her than she thought. Sebastian, likewise, moves to grace’s two-fold rhythm. He lives by the free hand of the monks who care for his physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds. They love him completely and cherish him fully, just as Sebastian once loved and cherished the infamous Kurt. Grace asked nothing and everything of him.
Both Julia and Sebastian carry their wounds with them to the end of the novel. To me, this is, perhaps, the greatest triumph of Brideshead Revisited as a distinctively Christian novel. Waugh looks at the bare-naked exposed bone of human hurt, and, without flinching, allows it to remain exposed. Waugh’s argument for grace, therefore, is not the erasure of self-abnegation or suffering but a reminder that our cavernous human need is united to the unutterable blessedness of the incomprehensible God.
Narrative and Grace
Narratively speaking, grace doesn’t collapse story. It breaks convention. It does not break convention for its own sake — that would be a deconstructive error. Instead, grace functions much like poetic license, which playfully breaks established conventions in order to highlight them. When the rules are broken suddenly and surprisingly, the form becomes more obvious and more compelling. Grace, therefore, is the surprise, the eucatastrophe, the shiver of delight that intersects our lives. It is the unexpected break or catch in the poetic line that transposes it to a new key. It is the miracle of a healthy babe born in a remote Roman outpost to a couple of refugees taking shelter in a livestock shed.
Knowing how the story ends does not obviate the need for the telling: we still have to “live and move and have our beings,” as the incarnate Christ did and does. (6) The eschatological promise of “radical hope” (7) does not make our present suffering less painful, and it does not even mean we will suffer less, but it does mean that the broken, ugly places in our lives are radically integrated into the life of the arriving Christ who comes, wounded and glorified, to “make all things new.” (8)
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 393.
Burton, “On Hideousness, Part II”
Joshua 24:15
John 20:27; the King James Version uses the word “thrust” while other well-known translations use the words “place” or “put.”
Burton, “On Hideousness, Part II”
Acts 17:28
Burton, “On Hideousness, Part I”
Revelation 21:5
