“I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”
“What do you mean by that, Cordelia?”
“Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.”
—Brideshead Revisited
I like that, but doesn’t it happen just as often, possibly more often, that a person does direct his hatred explicitly toward God—for a desperate prayer that went unanswered, perhaps— but that it is not really God he is hating, but rather something like himself?— not like him specifically, but like us, the human race. When God disappoints us, we, not knowing who he really is and therefore not able to trust him, explain it in the way we explain it in each other, as failure or ill will. And we think we are hating him when we are really hating the human.
A co-worker of mine recently wrote a paper on Brideshead for a class he’s taking. In the paper, he describes Lady Marchmain (“Mummy” above) as pious but not holy, and, noting that Charles is not charmed by her, says “The pious do not charm many, for that is the job of the holy.”
He divides the Marchmain family into three categories, rather interestingly: the pious—Lady Marchmain and Bridey; the holy—Cordelia and Sebastian; and the saved—Lord Marchmain and Julia.
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