Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, is a poetic image, a sub-creation which allows us to feel the desires of a man and the disappointment of them. Charles Ryder is that man, and he is a seething, writhing mass of misdirected desires, for moments of strawberries and champagne with the "right" person, for acceptance, popularity, wealth, status, Sebastian, Julia, recognition of his worth, the leaves in the jungle...a spiral of crescendoing and descending desires, some more lofty than others. If we think of Plato's Ladder of Love, Charles is not ascending neatly, following the philosophical prescription of Diotema, through love of material bodies, to thoughts, to thought-structures, to Truth and Beauty; he ascends and descends wildly, buffeted, a reed in the wind, and gets more and more bruised in the process. His--and our--soul is at stake.
Charles, a needy, emotionally-abandoned child inside, first desires the world that Sebastian inhabits; Sebastian desires Charles' love. In this fundamental tension of desires is the the true heart of this novel, and I believe the deeper poetic image of this book is found through this lens Waugh gives us. Through Charles, through our being dragged maddeningly up and down the Ladder of Love, the desire for hierarchical beauties, through this kaleidoscope of seething desires, and their disappointments, one-by-one, Sebastian comes into true focus, and finally, Sebastian is lost in the light that is revealed in his suffering, and Charles finally ascends the Ladder to Beauty Itself, at least as close as we can get in this life.
We are led first to desire the "halcyon" Oxford, that repository of knowledge and youth, the youth of the world before the Great War that seared the very conscience and heart of humanity; Charles is all aglow with ascent through study, through art: he is an idealist; his desires are abstract and it seems that he has skipped over the "material bodies" rung of the Ladder and is hurdling after Socrates. However, this is, somehow, not enough; Sebastian, of a different kind of beauty, a wild and very sensuous beauty, literally breaks into Charles' tidy existence, vomiting on his tidy expectations: the only reason this has happened to Charles, our lens, is because he has "unwisely" taken ground-floor rooms: he is lower on the ladder than even he realizes, or perhaps there is some part of his soul that must be fundamentally open to the material world, that ground-floor of the body...perhaps he cannot skip this step, though he tries to, though he sees his "art" as his own means to interpret the physical world in a cold, rational, technological way that distills its beauty in lines and color, flattened on a canvas. He is one step removed from the visceral, changing, dangerous material world by his art. And then Sebastian vomits on this artful world, and he can because Charles has, perhaps on purpose, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps inadvertently, taken ground floor rooms with windows open to the courtyard.
Sebastian then fills Charles' ground-floor, vomited-upon rooms with flowers; the rooms become a cacophony of sense, a further incursion into the artful, breaking beyond it all like a wave that breaks over the sea wall, and Charles is invited to Sebastian's rooms and here begins his journey, and our journey, into Sebastian's soul: it is, first, his soul we must know more clearly. Through the lens of Charles, we see again the irony: Charles desires Sebastian's world, a world of mystery and myth and war, grand desires on a scale that further break into Charles' soul; Sebastian desires, simply, love from Charles. We see this terrible irony and this is, underneath, the first rung in the ladder for us: Charles' love for the material appearances is not even on the first rung of real desire, and though Sebastian is at least searching for human love crowned by sexual union, it is tragically misplaced, disordered, ill-formed. We see fairly early that Sebastian is like a tree growing sideways, but growing, attempting to ascend nonetheless, while Charles is simply desiring whatever he cannot have, a sterile love, a gnawing, envious desire for possession and acceptance into a chimera: he does not, at first, see the real situation.
Sebastian does.
Sebastian sees, clearly, that he is sinful, that his soul is warped, somehow, and that an ascent for him is, in the real world of Truth and Beauty, a descent. Sebastian, as we begin to see through Charles' failure to see, understands the Truth that calls him from the chapel; he hears that Voice calling even through the flack fire of his mother's programmed, unknowable, controlled religion, and knows that, against his own material desires for bodies, Charles is a love denied him because it cannot be a true ascent (that ascent to Beauty a grounding and source of real love), knows that there exists a diamond-hard wall of Truth, and that he will be inexorably broken upon it. Sebastian is a mystic, of sorts, who hears, always, hears the Truth calling, but is broken on the wheel of his own warped desires; he is prevented from ascending the Ladder of Love by some deep deformation, some desire that takes him sideways and down. He sees clearly the cross given him, one of the hardest crosses given; in response, he tries to drown himself in many ways, and we lose sight of him, just over the horizon, as Charles also pursues his desires sideways, horizontally through his own chimeras of beauty: first, Julia as another, more acceptable doorway, or "brideshead"; when this fails, though a wife who simply admires him, children he doesn't even see in the end; we meet him again as he searches again for that wildness, that first step which is also a temptation; he searches for the genuine, real wildness he once found in Sebastian by escaping to the jungle: again, though, he simply paints it and we see life around him through his glass box of art and distance. A sort of theophany again is needed, a breaking through the window that is his art, his glass box. This time, it is Julia on the ship at sea.
A moment to think about the daring nature of Waugh's vision, of the lens he gives us: Waugh's "break-through" elements are, themselves, temptations. Sebastian breaks through, Julia breaks through, like theophanies, but how can we call these "theophanies" when they are themselves bodily temptations, potential gateways into disorder? This is the lens Waugh gives us, and many readers simply refuse to acknowledge Waugh's unorthodox idea of a "theophany" by claiming that there is no homosexuality in the book, or that Julia is simply a temptation, and Charles' journey is about overcoming temptation. Perhaps the book can be read on this level, but it does not take into account the full impact of Sebastian's role in Charles' life, or the depth, in my view. These views do not take into account real experience of desire in the material world for sinful humanity, for a warped humanity, or the full humanity of Sebastian and Julia, or how the cosmos is, still, even in a sinful state, a wild-ness of theophanies. We are all warped and thus all potential temptations, and yet we are all potential theophanies for each other at the same time. It is daring. Waugh is nothing if not daring. Additionally, Waugh gives us a clue about this through Charles' experience with Lady Marchmain: she is the paragon of overcoming temptation, of climbing ladders through religious desire, and she is no more a theophany for Charles, for us, than Rex, King of Death. Why? This too is daring. Perhaps it is because she is too far up the Ladder; perhaps it is because she is more like Charles than he realizes; she too has created an art, the art of religious manipulation, and has also ascended sideways into her own glass box which must be broken open.
So is Waugh really showing us wild, imperfect, even warped instruments that are potentially theophanies, namely the two that do look alike: Sebastian and Julia? They are both, at first, for Charles, material bodies, beautiful physically and materially, inhabiting a world of material beauty that is Brideshead; they draw him out, one by one, into the challenge of a real desire, albeit dangerous ones, warped and wild, but real passion, uncontrollable. Charles cannot control it, or them, just like Lady Marchmain cannot control her husband, who is living out desires on the material plane, on the rung of the ladder, that rung that in the Symposium Alcibiades inhabits, that Dionysian desire that goes sideways if banished outside the rational city (see the Bacchae). Charles, in Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, and Julia, encounters Dionysius breaking into his neat world and drawing him out to the world of desire; in this sense, they are theophanies, albeit only reaching his pagan sensibilities.
However, all three also inhabit a Catholic world, or rather are misfits in a Catholic world, all three broken upon the higher rungs they cannot reach by nature alone. Charles must, perhaps, through them, both acknowledge Dionysius like Pentheus of Thebes, as a breaking into a tightly woven, humanistic, artful, rational world, and yet surpass Dionysius by seeing him, in them, submit to a higher Beauty.
If Waugh had allowed us to see Charles saved by Sebastian or Julia through a natural, Dionysian love alone, then Waugh would have written, simply, a pagan book, but Charles' desires are disappointed here, as are Sebastian's, as are Julia's. Waugh does not stop with the pagan theophanies, that first rung on the Ladder of Love; before she dies, before Charles meets Julia at sea, Lady Marchmain, in experiencing the theophany of disappointment of desire for a neat, correct, Catholic family world, nevertheless breaks into Charles' dreary glass box one rainy day, like grace falling, and humiliates herself by asking her enemy to help her find her lost son Sebastian. This "breaking in" leads us to one of the most profound moments in the novel: Charles' encounter with Sebastian in Morocco.
Sebastian is in a monastery hospital, dying; he has descended to the bottom of the upside-down ladder, deeper into the disorder, and yet he begins to serve another more selfish than himself, and eventually, through sickness and weakness brought on by his lifestyle, ends up at the monastery. Charles asks Sebastian for forgiveness, a real desire for the good of the other first entering into the heart of Charles; Sebastian's reply gives us a glimpse of his later holiness: "I asked too much of you; only God can return that kind of love." Charles leaves, saddened, but he has experienced a certain kind of ascent through Sebastian's suffering, and we see another irony parallel to that we experienced by looking at Sebastian through Charles' lens in the beginning of the book: Sebastian loves in a more pure, or focused way, and we see that Sebastian knows, has always known, that all love, to be satisfied, must end in God; like Augustine, perhaps, Sebastian may see but may not be able to ascend yet. But he sees, and Charles is given this sight through the juxtaposition of Sebastian's suffering and his deep desire for God.
The next theophany is through Julia. Julia herself must experience a profound theophany as her father returns to die. In this moment, a prayer is answered, God breaks into the soul of the old Dionysius as he dies, and grace is given for him to ascend, leaping through death towards Beauty Himself. Julia witnesses this and ascends through her father's deathbed ascent; Charles, still on the first rung is beaten and battered, yet the glass is cracked.
During this period with Julia, Charles meets Cordelia again, another Flyte (Marchmain) sister, who is the messenger of yet another Sebastian-theophany: one of the brothers in the Moroccan monastery tells Cordelia that Sebastian eventually "wanted to become one of us" but that the toll of addiction and a lifetime of misplaced desire has prohibited his living a full religious life; instead, Sebastian becomes the lowest of the low, and is the under-porter at the gate of the monastery. Gone is the physical beauty, gone is the status, the mysterious and beautiful world of Brideshead and upper-class life; gone is the Oxford golden boy; Sebastian has long eschewed them all in his search for love; in place of the chimera that Charles desired is Sebastian, full of arrows, dying slowly as the porter at God's door. This position marks Sebastian clearly as a "gateway," one who opens the gate to the garden, the true house of God, the place where men give up the material desires, move past them, and who serve the sick and the poor in the bywaters of the world. He is, indeed, holy, and from far away, across the world, across the ladders of physical beauty, the beauty of thought and architecture, the beauty even of decorated and ensconced and habitual religion, beyond the "artful" painting, wedding gift of a broken marriage, beyond the procession of Brideshead, Sebastian's ascent calls to Charles, just as Julia was called from beyond through her broken father at the gateway of eternity.
In a profound conversation between Charles and Julia in Book 3, Chapter 4, Charles calls Sebastian a "forerunner" of his love for Julia; in turn, she wonders if she herself is another forerunner to another love, and Charles uses the language of signs, those elements like theophanies that point to ever-higher, more Real Objects, and says that perhaps all loves are merely symbolic of other loves not yet known. He is more right than perhaps he knows, but it is the first real glimmer of understanding on Charles' part of the Ladder of Love.
Sebastian and Julia, theophanies and symbols, disappear into the light of the Beauty to which both are finally ascending through their suffering in the face of more and more insistent theophanies in their own lives, the "twitches of the thread," and Charles is finally left alone, "all loves dead" in the midst of the war, and Brideshead is overrun by the stamping of boots; as he revisits it at the end of the novel, Brideshead itself disappears into the material, human constructs that end inevitably in conflict, descent, and destruction. The material, the human, is disrobed and revealed as dust; however, within that casing, a flame is lit, a tiny, single flame before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel. It is, physically, a small beauty, but it is the sign for Charles of the Beauty he has been seeking all his life; it is the quiet step for him up the Ladder of Love, and this Love has been waiting for him all along, calling him beyond the desire for bodies, for great thought, art, human constructs, beyond his own narrations and art.
So it is, perhaps, that the greatest obstacles to a real ascent are not, after all, those deep and human warpings that are yet still desires for the Real, found by embodied souls in climbing, painfully, through disappointment, failure, and suffering, the rungs of the ladder; perhaps the greatest obstacle is the desire to possess the Real as I desire to possess it, in the neat and tidy package I make for myself, the conditions upon God I place before I will accept His love; like the Pharisees unable to see God in the Flesh, perhaps we create the greatest obstacle to ascent by requiring Him to be what we expect or desire in the small, provincial frame we've created. Instead, He waits for us like a flame we can extinguish: or not. He is the small, humble door of the tabernacle marked by the tiny flame that requires us to lay down all burdens, expectations, pride, especially, perhaps, religious pride, to enter through the small gate.
