The rich, the poor and Evelyn Waugh.

This winter, I had the happy opportunity of sitting down over several Sunday afternoons and watching Jeremy Irons star in Brideshead Revisited, the movie adaptation of that wonderful novel by one of the twentieth century's great Catholic writers, Evelyn Waugh. Part way through luxuriating in the life of Oxford, London, and Brideshead (it's a long movie), I was snapped back to something approximating reality by a letter from two Protestant acquaintances who recently left Canada to live in Africa for several years doing development work with an organization of Calvinist affiliation.

As is to be expected, they have found many things unlike what they expected. One of the greatest of these discoveries has been the commonly accepted understanding that, as Western nationals, they will keep servants in their own rather modest (and childless) home. This they are now doing, and the incongruity of it is scarcely imaginable to those who knew them as two self-identified "progressive" Christians who hold all the correct (i.e., socialist) ideas about equality; i.e., class, and Christianity--ideas woefully common in that hothouse of ideological agitation, the contemporary university, from which they are recent graduates. Their idealization of the poor, and their ever-subtle denigration of the rich--what Randolph Churchill, after his father's government was ungratefully chased from office in 1945 by the "Attlee terror," memorably called "proletarian snobbishness"--is now being challenged mightily, and I for one cannot mortify my feeling of Schadenfreude.

In their African employ are three guards, who watch at all hours over their house, "enormous car", and other possessions, and a maid who does the cooking and cleaning for them. They are, they tell me, "struggling" with the "optics" of this. (This latter admission is revealing: it is not a struggle with the putative ethics of employing others but solely a struggle with "What Will the Lenins Think?")

I do not, as is said, "share their pain." I find it a healthful and necessary corrective to those all too common views which many modems have about class and money. Too many of our contemporaries in the liberal democracies of the West demonize the rich, romanticize the poor, and wish to blend the whole of society into one homogeneous mass under an enforced "equality" in which no one can be different in material status or social standing. (Sexual orientation, of course, is held to be a different matter, and all manner of perversions are celebrated in their multi-coloured splendour, including now, in British Columbia, child pornography, to which our robed judicial masters have given the green light.)

Counterparts in the Church

These are common secular views, but they have their theological counterparts in the "Church" of the last thirty years, especially as we find it in "liberation theology" and schemes for "social justice" (both hypnotics of whose draught my Protestant colleagues have drunk too deeply). The supposedly theological counterpart to this runs roughly like this: the poor are good, the rich are bad.

Now admittedly, the teaching of the Church makes it clear that the rich do have more demanding obligations placed upon them. Sacred Tradition teaches that the rich are to do good with the blessings abundantly bestowed upon them and not to hoard them selfishly, like the Israelites with the manna in the desert. Sacred Scripture is notoriously critical of riches and wealth (cf., inter alia, Mark 10:17-27 and James 5:1-6), knowing how often they can be a stumbling block to the pursuit of virtue, and to seeking that true treasure which is our heavenly homeland (cf. Matthew 6:19-21). The story of the rich young man is often used as proof of the difficulties which the rich will encounter. The rich, in our Lord's famously invoked phrase, will find that getting camels through needles' eyes will be an easier task than getting themselves into heaven (Mt. 19:16-26; Luke 18:18-30).

This is well and true as far as it goes. Strangely, however, many of us seem to have forgotten one very important part of this story--the conclusion. When the disciples ask our Lord who might be saved, given such a hard teaching, the response is swift and sure: "For men it is impossible, but for God all things are possible" (Mt. 19:26). God's grace, in other words, covers a multitude of peoples and conditions, including the rich.

With God, even the rich need not despair of their salvation, for His grace is sufficient for them, too. They will, Scripture and Tradition make clear, be held to a higher standard, and by and large will have a harder time getting into heaven, but being rich is not ipso facto a ticket straight to hell. This conclusion seems difficult for many, since it does not allow us to damn the rich in the here and now, in the hope that God will kindly follow our example and do likewise in the hereafter.

Catholic views?

These are, as I said, common enough views. But are they Catholic views? Can we, in the very Catholic pursuit of charity for the poor and downtrodden romanticize the poor and condemn the rich solely for their respective poverty and wealth--without consideration of any other factor? Neither the Calvinists nor the liberal bureaucrats issuing the welfare cheques have, it will be noted, ever produced a St. Francis or soon-to-be-sainted Mother Teresa, nor have they shown an equally Catholic concern for the other virtues, including justice. After watching Brideshead and reading several of Waugh's works, as well as his letters and two biographies, it occurs to me that he provides some helpful answers to these questions and, just to that extent, his corpus would be a helpful addition to the canon of Catholic social teaching insofar as it needs, in North America especially, to be differentiated in the popular imagination from the policy platform of, say, the NDP.

In his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memoirs of Captain Charles Ryder, Waugh, during the 1939-1945 war-time abstinence and rationing, unfolded a luxurious world of fine food, wonderful wine, and recognizably rich folk. He did not romanticize the characters in the novel who were spiritually poor, like Lord Sebastian Flyte, whose drinking and homosexuality very nearly led (despite his great wealth and prestige) to his destruction before, at the very end, proving--O felix culpa!--to be the point of entry for grace and redemption. Sebastian ends up finding some measure of sanity, sobriety, and salvation in a monastery, but his life has been ruined and there is no getting around this; his is not a happy Hollywood ending. God's grace triumphs, but it is not a panacea, and Sebastian's self-induced suffering is not thereby mitigated.

If Waugh refuses to romanticize the genuinely poor in spirit, he equally refuses to demonize the rich. Indeed, in the mouth of Lady Marchmain, he deliberately--according to Waugh's most recent and most capable biographer, Douglas Lane Patey--put the following speech in order to challenge such socialist views of wealth as were gaining hold in Britain and elsewhere in the postwar period:

"When I was a girl we were comparatively poor, but still much richer than most of the world, and when I married I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it's not any more."

With God all is possible

This was not an iconoclastic or isolated view for Waugh. He believed, as Christ taught, that "with God all things are possible," and that grace was encompassing enough to save the rich, the wise, and the well-off. In his later historical novel, Helena, which Waugh regarded as his "magnum opus" and finest work, he has the mother of Constantine say, in reference to the wealth of the Magi:

"Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too find room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were no lower in the eyes of the Holy Family than the ox or the ass.... For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom."

In these two passages are three refreshingly bracing correctives: first, as we have been noting, the clear recognition, in echo of Christ's words, that "with God all things are possible," including the salvation of the rich. The second is that equality does happen but only in Christ, in whom there is--as St. Paul taught us--neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor freeman.

This equality does not, however, and need not necessarily, lead to the social equality which characterizes the liberal democracies of the West. The Magi and the stable boy are one in the new order of charity which Christ inaugurated--but that does not necessarily entail that we can, or even should, strive to create a new Jerusalem, a socialist utopia, here and now: "The poor you will have with you always." (The perennial nature of poverty and injustice is a reminder of what Chesterton called the one Catholic doctrine which could be empirically proven: Original Sin.)

A different model

Thirdly and finally, Helena shows us, as Waugh would say in his letters, a different model of holiness. Her sanctity [was] in contrast to all that moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn't thrown to the lions, she wasn't a contemplative, she wasn't poor and hungry, she didn't look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God had chosen for her to do and did it. Waugh's letters and diaries make clear how much he believed in this idea of Providential vocation, and how much he struggled to get others to see that even one as rich and prestigious as the Dowager Empress of the Roman Empire could achieve heroic virtue and sanctity and thus come to the joys of heaven.

Concomitant with this, Waugh was forever defending himself against charges of snobbery and disregard for the poor. (As Patey tells us, the contrarian Waugh used to play the role of "comic super-snob" precisely to offend proletarian sensibilities, but he was otherwise extraordinarily generous to Catholic charities.) In one particularly important letter to his friend and fellow author, Nancy Mitford, Waugh put the matter directly: "It is not true that any Catholic thinks the poor go to a servants' hail in heaven." I must remind my Protestant colleagues of that when they write next with more qualms of conscience about their hired help. If even an Empress can make it to heaven, if God's grace can save even the notoriously rich, surely we might at the very least hold out the hope that they, contumacious Calvinists though they are, could just possibly make it to heaven together with their servants--and feast at the one table (where--saints alive!--there might even be a few NDP members). "For men it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."

Adam A. J. DeVille has recently completed an M.A. in the moral philosophy of the contemporary Thomist, Alasdair Mac-Intyre. He presently resides in Ottawa.