Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible…. We never discussed the matter until on the second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: “Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic.”

“Does it make much difference to you?”

“Of course. All the time.”

“Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.”

“I’m very, very much wickeder,” said Sebastian indignantly.

“Well then?”

“Who was it used to pray, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet’?”

“I don’t know. You I should think.”

“Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn’t that.” He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, “Another naughty scout-master.”

“I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”

“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”

“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”

“Can’t I?”

“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”

“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea”

“But I do. That’s how I believe.”

Throughout all the idyllic scenes in the early part of the novel, the cloud of the section’s title casts a dark shadow. The phrase Et Ego in Arcadia is often associated with several pieces of Renaissance art. These paintings usually show several individuals (often shepherds) in a paradisiacal, pastoral landscape stumbling upon a tombstone or skull with the above Latin inscription (translated, “I am even in Arcadia”). The “I” in the phrase is Death, who with the tombstone or skull reminds us that he is a threat even in the most idyllic setting. In Brideshead Revisited, this presence is primarily felt through, ironically enough, religion. Over the course of the first part of the novel, Sebastian is gradually given over to alcoholism, much to the displeasure of his moralistic mother (a fact which only serves to drive him to the bottle even more). In the end, Sebastian’s behavior forces him to leave Oxford and also the sanctuary of Brideshead Castle. Charles follows, and for a time breaks off contact with the Flytes, including Sebastian.

The second part of the novel takes place after a gap of several years has passed. Charles has entered an unhappy, typically modern marriage, and has begun a career as an architectural artist. He soon is reintroduced to the members of the Flyte family, who all find themselves in a much different situation than during the previous Arcadian days. Sebastian (who is heard about through second-hand reports) is still very much a drunk. Lady Marchmain is dying. Cordelia has grown into a wise, pious lady. Julia becomes the most important Flyte in this second half. While she had been a cold and distant presence earlier, Charles and Julia find themselves in similarly hopeless marriages and follow a very brief path from re-acquaintance to passionate love.

Like before, the title of the second part of the novel, “A Twitch Upon the Thread,” clues the reader into the inevitable ending. During one conversation with Charles, the grown-up Cordelia reminds him of one evening years before when her mother was reading aloud from one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries while Sebastian was drunk in his room: “Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ [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 bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” By the end, it becomes clear this is the purpose of the entire novel. The Flyte family has been haunted by their Catholic heritage—it is each individual’s avoidance of God which drives Sebastian to drunkenness, his mother to guilt-ridden moralism, his exiled father to lust and agnosticism, and Julia to adultery with Charles. Each, however, can only flee so far before the patient Fisher King will finally twitch the thread and reel them in.

The event which sparks these conversions is the deathbed conversion of Lord Marchmain, who had been a distant character until this point, living with his mistress in Italy. Of all the members of the family, Lord Marchmain was the most resistant to the Church, distracting himself with every conceivable sensual and aesthetic pleasure: in painting, music, and illicit romance. When he is brought back to Brideshead Castle, he continues to resist the Church while on his death bed until the very end, approving of his daughter’s adulterous relationship with Charles—even decided to give his estate to them jointly. But in his last moments, he relents to the persistent ministrations of the family priest, receives absolution, and makes a feeble sign of the cross.

This is the great turning point in Julia’s relationship with Charles, which had already been strained by Julia’s increasing pangs of conscience. After her father’s conversion and death, Julia breaks off her adulterous relationship with Charles and enters a life of service to the Church. Each of her siblings also becomes a monastic of some sort—Sebastian most literally.

The epilogue serves to bookend the entire flashback sequence that began in the novel’s prologue, which had opened with Charles Ryder finding himself again at Brideshead Castle while stationed there as an officer during the Second World War. Taken together, the prologue and epilogue highlight the two different worlds which confront Charles. The first world is the de-romanticized, hopeless Europe of WWII. One of Ryder’s subordinates in the army, named Hooper, is to Ryder the stereotypical modern young man. He is nothing like the kind of soldier who went into the First World War with a heart full of optimism for the future. Hooper’s mind is not stirred by

Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon - these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

The second world which the prologue and epilogue present is Ryder’s memories of Brideshead Castle, and all it represents. Here is where Charles himself realizes that he is no idle observer of the religious drama that overcame the Flyte family. He, too, had been hooked by that thread which Cordelia spoke of years and years before. In the epilogue, after reliving the memories of Brideshead, Charles walks throughout the old house, now empty of its former life and beauty. The last place he visits is the family chapel, which had been so infrequently used during his stays with the Flyte a decade prior. The closing passage is worth quoting at length:

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect….

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the Age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

And yet, I thought… that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design, re-lit before the beaten copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame, which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out: the flame burns again for other soldiers far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians. And there I found it that morning, burning anew among old stones.

Many critics who dislike Brideshead Revisited have attacked Waugh for what they argue is the inherent elitism and nostalgia which Waugh has for pre-war, aristocratic England. For these critics, this last passage from the epilogue demonstrates just what a hopeless romantic the former satirist Evelyn Waugh turned out to be. Waugh, they believe, gives himself completely over to a longing for some golden aristocratic age free from the troubles of modern democratic life. Martin Amis made this common criticism when he expresses his disappointment in how Waugh “squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly.” Martin Amis is continuing in the line of his father’s earlier mocking review of the novel, which was headlined, “How I Lived in a Very Big House and Found God.”

But these critics of Brideshead Revisited misidentify both what Waugh is attacking, and also what is his greatest hope for England and Europe. Waugh is not, as the Amises allege, displaying a nostalgia for the kind of life which Charles had with Sebastian before the latter was given over to alcoholism. This much should be clear from the title of the first section: Et Ego In Arcadia. Death is present in idyllic, aristocratic England just as much as Death is present in wartime England. What Waugh is lamenting and what he is hoping for are things entirely different.

For Waugh, the modern age—the Age of Hooper—is a colorless, ahistorical, and unromantic age. The antithesis of this modernity is the Church, specifically the Church of Rome. Neither the lazy Arcadian school days, nor the hopeless adulterous period of the second half of the novel, are what Waugh is wishing for. Rather, Waugh sees the Flyte family (who are types of England itself) as rebellious children of the Church, who have been caught up the dizzying swirl of modernity. Waugh himself described the novel in this way: it “deals with what is theologically termed, 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.” This is not an aristocratic nostalgia. It is something much more.