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Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited details the journey of Charles Ryder, who, through the memories of his interactions with an aristocratic English family, encounters various episodes of conversion and experiences the illuminating power of divine grace—which, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, tugs on human hearts “with a twitch upon the thread.”
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Lodged between two world wars and burdened by the stark collapse of culture, Charles Ryder comes face to face with the perils of sin and confronts the inescapable yearnings of faith.

Brideshead Revisited is regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time. It is a moving and compelling story about love and loss, sin and forgiveness, grace and redemption, beauty and truth, and it is a must-read, especially for Catholics.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is, in my judgment, the finest Catholic novel of the twentieth century. What explains its greatness? It is Waugh’s illuminating portrait of a theme with particular evangelical import in our culture today: the power of beauty.

The book’s narrator, Charles Ryder, is an Oxford student and devotee of the fine arts who is, like a lot of people today, something of a cool agnostic. Ryder first becomes intrigued by the beauty of his Oxford classmate, Sebastian Flyte, the scion of an old recusant and fabulously wealthy Catholic family in 1920s England. Sebastian, in turn, brings him to the family mansion, “Brideshead.” In the complex semiotic schema of Waugh’s novel, the mansion functions as a symbol of the Catholic Church, combining two Pauline images—namely, of Christ as Bridegroom to his Bride and as Head to his Body. 

Charles is overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of Brideshead’s architecture and the sumptuousness of its artistic program, which includes magnificent painting and sculpture, a fountain of Bernini-like delicacy, and a chapel that was a riot of baroque decoration. Moving from room to room, convinced by the overall “logic” of the design, Charles remarks, “It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls.” So intense is his aesthetic experience at the fountain that he could say, “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.” The beauty of the place—evocative of the Church’s aesthetic richness—would entrance Charles for the rest of his life, drawing him back again and again.

Indeed, Waugh’s novel is ultimately about the process by which God calls his children back to himself—even those who have drifted to the furthest edge. The characters are lured by Brideshead’s beauty, repelled by its demands, and, finally, brought back by “a twitch upon the thread”—an image derived from one of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories: “I caught [the thief], with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” The overarching theme of Waugh’s great novel seems to be that once one has been entranced by Christ, there is, finally, no escape.