In many ways, Charles Ryder is in the long run converted to the Catholic faith more through beauty than its dogmas.

This battle over the soul lies at the heart of Waugh’s novel. By this account, many things in life can be enjoyed, but the necessarily vital thing, salvation through repentance of sin and accepting God’s loving forgiveness, refuses to be accepted. Waugh goes on to qualify this type of despair as it manifests in spiritual rebellion of the good, writing that “Sloth is the condition in which a man is fully aware of the proper means of his salvation and refuses to take them because the whole apparatus of salvation fills him with tedium and disgust” (58). More fundamental to sloth is refusing the love of God-our refusal to enjoy God’s love. As Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung writes in her book Glittering Vices,

Though we take sloth to mean something akin to laziness, the vice sloth-traditionally one of the seven “capital” or head vices-is really a “lack of love” in the Christian tradition. Our contemporary notions about sloth fail to see the richer meaning present in the Christian tradition on the vices. Though we can call it a “Catholic” novel, it is also a potent engagement with vice, namely the often misunderstood vice known as sloth. In this way, the Flyte’s Catholicism is taken with a critical eye while its dogmas, as well as the faith of the Church’s members, becomes a matter of questioning. He becomes the intimate friend of Sebastian Flyte, his Oxford classmate, but later is close with other members of the Flyte family, namely Sebastian’s sister Julia. Brideshead is told through the witness of Charles Ryder, a largely secular and jaded figure drawn into the world of the aristocratic Catholic Flyte family. In this way Waugh begins to trace some of the transitional contours between the Christendom and Apostolic ages. This is largely because the novel deals with the rise of the modern era, the decline of institutional Christianity, and the admixture of sin and grace in each character we meet. Though Brideshead follows the immensely wealthy and eccentric aristocratic family, the average reader-say, an American commoner-still feels much sympathy with the novel’s characters. Waugh’s prose is witty, his characters vivid, and their situations often poignantly tragic and somehow hilarious. We could put it in the Mount Rushmore of Catholic literature if the novel weren’t also so distinctly English, which is part of the story-the Church in England past and present. Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is perhaps one of the fictional literary works which most integrates the Catholic imagination, to live and think imaginatively with the Church.

Brides head revisited