ON HIDEOUSNESS, PART ONE
Vietnamese Wood Carving: Half Buddha, Half Demon. Public Domain.
Editor's Note: this article Is the first of a two-part series. Check back this Friday to read Part Two!
When I was a young teenager, I used to hang out in the New Age section of the local Barnes and Noble. I’d sit on the carpet, a pile of spell books and spiritualist guides beside me, and work my way through promises of divine immanence. One of these books, Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch, purported to be a channeled dialogue between (as the title suggests) the author and God Himself. The thrust of the book, such as I remember it, was that Christianity — and world religions more generally — had severely perverted the divine message: a promise of boundless, universal love transformed by repressive dogma and jeremiads of hellfire into a harbinger of terror. Rather, God tells Walsch, there’s nothing we have to do. We are perfect just as we are. But isn’t that too good to be true, Walsch asks God?
God’s answer has stuck with me for years. Why shouldn’t God be too good to be true?
I’ve spent a large portion of my life, and my career, critiquing the kind of contentless intuitionalism of books like Walsch’s. The idea that we are perfect as we are, that there is no difference between a happy life, a self-actualized life, and the good life, that our moral and ethical and spiritual commitments make no demands on us — all these, I think, are the tenets of a particularly noxious wellness culture, one that places not just the self’s fulfillment, but the most shallow elements of our self-hood, at the heart of our theological anthropology. It is a trap into which I have often fallen at various times in my life, convincing myself that certain kinds of financial or personal or even aesthetic achievement could stand in for the real work of being a person in the world, or else that as long as I was a half-way decent human being (which is to say, I didn’t kill anybody), I had done my duty vis-a-vis God. It is the moralistic therapeutic deism described, and critiqued, by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton as a foundational flaw in modernity: a pure psychologization of the good.
But during and since my conversion, I have been vulnerable to another no less insidious tendency. This tendency is the romanticization of what I want to call the hideous, a sense — visceral, aesthetic, perverse — that what offends us must be good, that what God wants must always destroy us.
It is the intersection of a genuine, and indeed healthy, suspicion of worldly morality with a more noxious fetishization of the Christian as a kind of occultist: the only one capable, in a world for which we have so little love, of seeing what is truly good and truly evil. It is the Gothic shiver at the uncanny and the transgressive: a delight in hellfire, say, or else a smug certainty that the demands of orthodox Christian sexuality are necessarily incompatible with queer love, precisely on the grounds that God is not too good to be true. It is Dorothea Brooke — pious but naive — in George Eliot’s Middemarch, anticipating with joy the feeling of renouncing horseback-riding as a luxury. It is Romanus Cessario, O.P., defending in 2017 the 1858 papal kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara -- a Jewish child baptized by his nursemaid without his parents' consent, and subsequently claimed by the Vatican -- in the pages of First Things, on the grounds that Christians “pledge a higher loyalty that they honor in ways that seem incomprehensible to the world.”
Hideousness is religious extremity for extremity’s sake. It is the reification of our own horror as a herald of the good. It is treating the fear of God like a thrill at a particularly gory horror movie: it is congratulating ourselves that we, and we alone, are clear-eyed and capable enough to withstand it. It is Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat rather than the imitation of Christ.
I think often, when I think of this tendency, of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, a book — perhaps tellingly — I loved most in my teens. The novel’s infamous climax hinges on the decision of the cradle Catholic Julia, who has never been particularly religious up to now, to abandon her plan to marry her lover, Charles, after her divorce from a husband she does not love. Julia is, of course, perfectly free — on legal grounds — to divorce the bloviating Rex; she is also perfectly free to be with Charles. Her wealth and class shield her from any significant social consequence. Still, she finds, she cannot go through with it. Some “twitch upon the thread,” some inchoate sense of her marriage, however miserable, as an unbreakable sacrament, prevents her. Her own temporal happiness, she realizes, comes second to God’s judgment.
She cannot, she tells Charles, stifle her awareness that what they are about to do would be a sin so grave as to be unpardonable.
“The worse I am,” she explains to Charles, in their final exchange, “the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw to-day there was one thing unforgivable--like things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable…the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's...[if] I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.”
The first time I read Brideshead, when I was seventeen – still more of an occultist than a Christian – Julia appalled me. Her decision seemed at best tragic, at worst perverse. After all, I’d thought, there was nothing to be gained in terms of human happiness by renouncing Charles. Both Julia and Charles had already divorced their spouses; their spouses planned to remarry, almost certainly more happily. Meanwhile, Charles and Julia would be forced to live empty lives, apart from one another. Sure, Julia doesn’t anticipate eternal misery — “I’m not one for a life of mourning,” she tells Charles in their final exchange — but she doesn’t exactly expect happiness, either. She ruins both their lives.
Over time, however, my opinion changed, influenced, no doubt, by the years I spent in the heady and nostalgic Anglo-Catholicism of Oxford. Julia’s decision became for me perversely romantic, even punk. Her rejection of Charles, the sheer arbitrariness of the notion that she might choose her own unhappiness for no reason but the conviction of her own soul read to me as a kind of holy abnegation. It seemed to be a decision to reject the mores of conventional, British society, with its high tolerance for hypocrisy and its country-house parties where lovers are housed in tactfully-adjoining rooms. In rejecting Charles, Julia also rejects normalcy: the values of this world, those “rival goods”, that take her focus from God. Her self-abnegation recalls not so much those of, say, medieval Catholic saints, but the existential martyrdom of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, premiered just one year prior.
“I spit on your happiness!,” this Antigone tells Creon, rejecting his numerous offers of clemency. “I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may…You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now!”
Julia’s choice, like Antigone’s, is fundamentally a no, rather than a yes; a rejection not just of sin itself, but of a worn-out culture well-accustomed to accommodating it. ("Living in sin,” Julia envisions her future with Charles, “with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful.”)
Long before my conversion, Julia’s choice was for me among the most striking — and most alluring — visions of Christian strangeness: the idea that the Christian life, that Christian concerns, not just can but must stand at odds with the prevailing world; even, at times, at odds with the things we think make humans happy.
Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to tease out Julia’s strangeness, her otherworldliness, from the far more temporal kinds of otherworldliness we see in the novel. Julia, indeed the whole Marchmain family, are already set apart, for Charles and for the reader, by virtue of their class. Their Catholicism is inseparable from their rarefied status as Recusant aristocrats. They are set apart by grandeur of the house of Brideshead itself, which — as do great Gothic haunted-house novels from Rebecca to Fall of the House of Usher — grants spiritual force to sanguine lineage. They are set apart by the nostalgic, idyllic strangeness of Oxford, full of strawberries and teddy bears and trips to see the ivy. Waugh is never fully clear whence the cause and effect: are they other because they are Catholic, or are they Catholic because they are other?
