The Catholic belief that suffering and persecution lead to godliness is a major aspect of Brideshead Revisited. The novel centers around the experiences of Charles Ryder and his interactions with the Marchmain family, an aristocratic family of English Catholics who view themselves as outsiders because of the historical persecution of Catholics in Britain. Brideshead Revisited suggests both that Catholics are legitimately persecuted, because they do not conform, and that they deliberately seek out suffering because this brings them closer to God. However, in the novel, it is those for whom suffering is deep, genuine and spontaneous—rather than those who try to martyr themselves—who receive God’s graces.
The members of the Marchmain family feel that they are social outsiders in Britain. Catholics were historically persecuted in Britain, which was a majority Protestant country, and anti-Catholic laws existed there until the 19th century. It is implied that, because of this historical separation from other people, the Marchmain family feel that they are different, even though this is not obvious from the outside. This is implied when Sebastian tells Charles that Catholics are “not like other people” and that “everything that is important to them is not important to other people.” British anti-Catholic sentiment is reflected when Charles’s cousin Jasper tries to advise Charles on how to “get on” socially at Oxford. Jasper warns Charles away from “English Catholics” and attaches several prejudiced stereotypes to this group. This implies that English Catholics experience a degree of social persecution in Britain, and that characters like Sebastian are not judged on their individual merit but rather on their religion and upbringing. Society persecutes those who differ from the majority. This is represented through the character of Anthony Blanche, who is a friend of Sebastian’s at university, and who is picked on because he is foreign, went to Catholic school, and, it is heavily implied, is homosexual. Anthony’s experience suggests that British society is intolerant to those who stand out and who do not conform to mainstream standards of religion and behaviour.
However, although persecution is painful, it is an important idea in Catholicism because it is associated with martyrdom and the Catholic saints. Lady Marchmain, who is a devout Catholic, takes pride in the fact that she has suffered: her husband has left her, and two of her children, Julia and Sebastian, reject Catholicism. She feels that her suffering likens her to Catholic martyrs or saints, religious figures who were killed for their beliefs. Lady Marchmain tells Charles that, although she used to feel guilty because she was rich, and therefore had more than other people, she now realizes that it is a bigger blessing to be poor, because the poor suffer more, and therefore are closer to God. She views her wealth as a trial sent to test her faith and to make it harder for her to achieve holiness. This suggests that Lady Marchmain desires suffering and sees herself as a martyr or victim, even though, in many ways, this is not the case. Although Lady Marchmain feels persecuted, she works hard to stay within a close social circle—or “clique,” as Anthony describes it—of Catholics. This choice supports the idea that the emulation of martyrs is an important idea in Catholicism and suggests that Lady Marchmain deliberately separates herself from others because she wishes to be exceptionally holy, and she knows that to do this, one must stand apart from the crowd. The novel suggests that Catholics like Lady Marchmain strive to be exceptional, and to stand out from the majority rather than trying to blend in or conform.
However, it turns out that it is not the most devout characters (like Lady Marchmain) who are blessed with divine grace or spontaneous conversion, but rather those characters who do not seek it. Although anyone who repents and receives the sacraments can convert to Catholicism or receive God’s grace, Waugh suggests that those who are truly blessed are those who are fallen or who have sinned. This is in keeping with the Christian idea that it is repentant sinners God loves most as they are the most difficult to reach and the least likely to return to, or find, their faith. Holiness through suffering is not something which can be contrived or manufactured—as Lady Marchmain tries to do—but must instead be something spontaneous and miraculous. Sebastian’s sister Cordelia, who goes abroad to become a nun and nurse people in a warzone, supports this idea when she tells Charles that her older brother, Brideshead, wanted to be a priest but had no “mission.” Without a “mission,” Cordelia says, there is no point in striving to make oneself holy because the effort will be contrived. Both Brideshead and Cordelia wish to make sacrifices for their faith, but both are ordinary people. Although Cordelia does a great deal of good with her charity work, it is implied that she is only a practical relief worker and not a particularly spiritual or saintly nun.
The religious transformations wrought on characters like Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain, who all convert to Catholicism before the novel’s end, are portrayed as genuinely miraculous because they are all non-believers. These characters have lived sinful lives according to the Catholic faith, and they return to God after periods of intense suffering: Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, after he has wrestled with his own mortality; Julia after her divorce and split from Charles; and Sebastian after his alcoholism. Unlike Lady Marchmain, Brideshead, and Cordelia, they have not tried to be pious but, instead, are deeply flawed individuals who are reluctantly brought to God. This is most strongly affirmed through the final conversion of Charles, who has always been an agnostic and hostile to the idea of Catholicism. His experiences suggest that those who are holy or saint-like are not always the people one would expect, and that suffering and persecution in a Catholic framework are the best paths to spirituality and to God.
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Suffering, Persecution, and Martyrdom Quotes in Brideshead Revisited
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her gray spring time, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor.
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.
“This is no way to start a new year,” said Sebastian; but this somber October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.
Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.
Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.
But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body, and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was transfixed with the swords of her dolors, a living heart to match the plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.
No, I said, not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less. Hooper.
