To Know and To Love
I can’t seem to stop thinking about Brideshead Revisited. I don’t have time or inclination to write an extensive or systematic essay about it, but here are a few of those thoughts. They do constitute something of a plot spoiler, so don’t read past this paragraph if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know yet what happens.
The movement of the story seems to me to be summed up in two moments, both of which I’ve quoted here before. In the first, Charles is enduring an unwanted counseling session from his tiresome cousin Jasper, who is concerned only that Charles should be well-regarded by the right people. Charles thinks:
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
The second is the climax, when Charles, who until this moment has resisted the intrusion of God, or even the idea of God, into this situation and into his life, suddenly finds his resistance collapsing among the events at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed:
Then I knelt, too, and prayed: “O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,”…. I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign.
In the first quotation Charles is speaking of Sebastian, but it is the Catholic Charles of 1944 who speaks, not the agnostic or atheist student of 1925—that is, he knows where love of this one person will lead him. Since his love for Sebastian is, in 1925, primarily a sort of refined hedonism which is entirely of this world, and is, in its physical expression “high on the list of grave sins” (as he himself puts it), how will it prove to have been “the beginning of wisdom?” The answer is that it’s the first time the rather closed-off and self-centered Charles is drawn out of himself into two conditions which are among the highest and most God-like faculties of the human person: contemplation and communion, to know and to love. (Or is it to love and to know?—at our best they are one.)
With respect to the first: his delight in Sebastian’s beauty is almost disinterested; his pleasure in Sebastian’s presence seems to be at least as much sheer appreciation as desire. With respect to the second: his emotional intimacy with Sebastian is deep, and constitutes a radical change in him, because he has been, as far as we know, pretty well cut off from emotional warmth since the death of his mother and the withdrawal of his eccentric father. And he wants not only to love but to know Sebastian; he delights in Sebastian not just for his own pleasure but because Sebastian is inherently, intrinsically worth knowing.
A love that manifests itself sinfully can still be real love. This is true of Charles’s homosexual relationship with Sebastian and of his adulterous relationship with Julia. Much of the latter part of the novel involves the purification of these loves, the removal of what is selfish and wrong in them, the renunciation of the erotic—or rather I should say the physical expression of the erotic—in favor of the love that understands that if it is to be worthy of the name it must desire the highest possible good for the beloved.
What makes his prayer at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed so moving to me is not so much his own hesitant first step of faith as the fact that he is doing it for Julia. It is mainly for Julia, not for himself, that he desires a sign from God. He sees that it is desperately important to her, and, realizing that it is not in his (or any other human being’s) power to give, he turns in desperation to the only possible source: Oh God, if there is a God…He loves her so much that he is willing to open himself to God, to this possibility he has scorned until now, for her sake. He is not even thinking, yet, of his own salvation; her happiness is what matters.
And this leads him to the next step: beginning to understand that it is not her mixed happiness for a few years on earth that is at stake, but her pure happiness for eternity, he sees that he must give her up precisely because he loves her so much. It’s true that he doesn’t really do this willingly, but he accepts its necessity.
In this last section of the novel we see a whole network of love drawing all the participants together. It is Julia’s love for her father that impels her to call for a priest, even though she is not at all sure that she herself believes. It is Cordelia’s love for Lord Marchmain that helps open the road to repentance for him, when she gently but firmly refuses to excuse his abandonment of his wife:
“I was too young. Then I went away—left her in the chapel praying…. Was it a crime?”
“I think it was, Papa.”
The “ruthless” and eccentric Bridey and his Beryl have their place, as Julia admits: their prayers have in all probability affected her situation, and Bridey’s stubborn and clumsy insistence on calling for a priest, although unsuccessful, certainly helps to put the wheels in motion. And surely Sebastian, veering between prayer and drunkenness at a distant monastery, has an influence—and Nanny Hawkins, who hardly stirs from her room but loves all the family as her own.
The classical definition of love—“to will the good of another”—may seem a bit dull in comparison to the rhapsodies that romantic love produces, but romantic love (as well as the other strongly emotional loves such as that of parents for children) leads directly toward it and is encompassed by it. Real love does indeed find its own delight in the person loved, but it doesn’t stop there; it wants above all the happiness of the beloved, even at its own expense. The more real it is, the less concerned it is for its own pleasure and happiness and the more for that of the beloved.
It’s true that one can exercise a form of this love in a bloodless and passive way: I can say that I will the good of everyone, even the people who annoy me every day. But I am fundamentally pretty indifferent to them. As limited creatures we are not ordinarily capable of loving very many people with real emotion, with real delight in them for what they are, not for anything they give us: spouses, children, parents, other family, a few friends—these are as many as most of us can love in a personal way. These loves are the school in which we learn to love as God loves: not disinterestedly benevolent, but intensely interested, desiring their good not passively but passionately, and desiring to know them and to be in communion with them because it is a pleasure to us.
I suppose most of the world regards Benedict XVI as a dull old man with a lot of irrelevant ideas. They should read Deus Caritas Est, of which the first half is devoted precisely to this reconciliation of erotic and/or emotional love—the love of the sentiments—with charity. Ultimately the intensity of emotional love is not suppressed but enhanced, purified, and increased by its incorporation into charity. Charity is, in the end, what burns between Charles and Julia.
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