The particular geniuses of Waugh, Greene, and Percy can sometimes be lost on some readers for the simple reason that their worlds often seem devoid of hope. Of course, very few Old Testament prophets were honored with ticker tape parades. But each novelist, in some ironic way, does offer some cause for hope.
Modernism would have us distrust all authority not contained in the individual conscience or the State magisterium. But all three novelists would have us turn instinctively to the Church [for authority]. For them, the rituals, the transcendent morality, and the sacraments which the Church offers are the means by which the West can escape the floodwaters rising on all sides. The material “things” and blessings which the Church has the authority to dispense are Christ to the world. The service of its ministers, the food and drink of its table, the waters of its baptismal fonts—all these things are the Son of God made flesh. Even Graham Greene during his darkest years of apostasy retained an instinctual trust in the elements of the Eucharist.
This trust in the incarnate, bodily nature of faith is not something reserved only for Roman Catholics, however. Evelyn Waugh, as traditional a Catholic as he was, allowed that the nature of modernism had realigned the battle-lines so that the fight was no longer between Protestant and Catholic, but between Christianity and chaos. The total breakdown of historic morality and aesthetics is all that can be expected when “the supernatural basis” upon which they rest have been denied for so long. The Protestant and the Catholic both have a moral imperative to proclaim the incarnate Word to a world which has become blind to the divine glory which surrounds it.
But let’s assume for a moment that, like Jeremiah, this proclamation of the Word falls on deaf ears. Let’s assume that God will allow the West to continue to decline and become a parody of what it once was. If this is our future, Christians of all people should not fear it. In God’s eschatology, judgment is only the precedent to greater glory. For every diatribe that God delivered against His people through His prophets, there followed an escalated promise of blessing. When tried in the “furnace of affliction,” Israel learns that God will not allow His name to be profaned, nor stand by while His glory is claimed by an unworthy vessel (Isaiah 49). But in the end, the object of His wrath is made the vessel of His glory, refined through the fire and restored like a blazing diadem in His New Jerusalem.
There is hope for the chastened. God may be having His revenge on us now, withholding pleasure and beauty and wholeness from us with always-increasing stinginess. Perhaps He is squeezing us until we finally can admit, Yes, things are as bad as they seem. And that is where hope begins. Our modern rebellion began with the Baconian hope that we could progress beyond anything our fathers had ever imagined—we could build a tower to heaven. Our first step back to reality is an acknowledgement that there is nothing new about our modern accomplishments. As the historian Leopold von Ranke put it, “each age is immediate to God.” We are nothing new. God’s demands are often just this simple: He requires humility. If we withhold our praise and acknowledgment of His presence in the world, He withholds that which we desire and enjoy, like any loving father would.
T.S. Eliot said that ours is an age of moderate virtue and moderate vice—we are a decent, godless, lonely people whose only monument is “the asphalt road/And a thousand lost golf balls." But even after the gradual loss of community and pleasure, Eliot—echoing the three novelists reviewed here—holds out a quiet hope. In “Little Gidding,” Eliot presents us with an iconic figure for our present study. This figure is a poet who has come to pray at a monastery in order to arrive at “the intersection of the timeless.” The poet awakes in the morning and is met by a ghost who grants him the burden of wisdom and reveals to the poet how the world has become impotent, passionless—how it indulges in empty laughter and the pursuit of beauty which will never be attained. The scene changes in the middle of the poem when a dove descends with a “flame of incandescent terror,” holding the promise of redemption “from fire by fire.” The poem concludes with a reflection on how the timeless is joined to the time-bound, how history and the dead saints of the past are still with us and remind us that for all our dreams of progress and greatness, we will always end up right where we began. And it is at this point, when we humbly acknowledge the vanity of all our work, that the fire of hell’s judgment transforms into the Rose of Dante’s Paradise. The poem concludes:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
In the end, the crowned Trinitarian knot transforms judgment into blessing. God humbles in order to exalt. We kneel in order to rise absolved of all sin. Fire purifies and restores us to salvation.
Over one hundred years ago, Nietzsche’s madman called the empty churches and cathedrals of Europe the tombs and sepulchers of God. The glory of Lord had long departed, and His presence had been unwelcome for centuries. The supplications offered up by the people were only prayers to broken stone—who could hope that God would again hear us? God is dead. We have killed Him.
But of course—as Waugh, Greene, and Percy remind us—God can only be dead to us for so long. Charles Ryder awakes in the morning to find the flame in the temple “burning anew among old stones.” The peasant boy who witnessed the martyrdom of the whiskey priest opens his door to find a new messenger of God. Dr. Tom More hears rumors of the reappearance of an ivory-billed woodpecker, the Lord-God Bird, and believes it to be a promise of the coming of Christ. Resurrections are not expected. Dead men usually stay dead. Dead stones aren’t supposed to come alive. And a dead God isn’t supposed to hear the prayers of the living, nor take up His dwelling among men.
But that is exactly what we hope for. Even if we are silent, the broken stones will cry out. The rumor of angels will be confirmed. The world as we know it will end, and all manner of thing shall be well.
