Tea at Trianon: Waugh's Helena

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Waugh's Helena

From First Things:

Helena, whom Waugh first portrays as the horseback-riding, tomboy daughter of the British King Coel (that “merry old soul”), marries a rising young Roman legionary, Constantius, and with him has a son, Constantine. For political reasons, Constantius trades in Helena for a trophy wife, and while he climbs the greasy pole of Roman military politics, she retires to the rural quiet of the empire’s periphery and eventually becomes a Christian. Reunited with her son after he establishes himself as Number One in Rome and begins to lay plans for a new capital, Constantinople, Helena discovers that post-persecution Christianity in Rome is embroiled in theological controversy, with various forms of Gnosticism threatening to reduce the faith to an arcane “knowledge” (the Greek “gnosis”) accessible only to the elite.

So the elderly Helena, a practical British girl and something of a populist despite her status as Dowager Empress, decides to put paid to that nonsense by going to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and recovering the instruments of the passion: the physical evidence that Christianity, rather than being an esoteric myth, is founded on real events that happened to real people at a real time in a real place—events that so changed those people and those they taught that the Christian movement converted a considerable part of the Mediterranean world before Constantine (always on the lookout for the main chance) joined the winning side. Helena’s quest, which has its climax during Lent, is rewarded by the discovery of the True Cross.

Helena is full of Waugh’s humor—including a hilarious putdown of Edward Gibbon and the anti-Christian motif in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—which makes for easy and amusing reading. The author’s intent, however, was entirely serious. He knew that Gnosticism was a protean heresy that re-occurred across the centuries. And as a convert (like his heroine), Evelyn Waugh chose the best tools at his disposal, his well-honed abilities as a wordsmith, to take a stand against the modernist tendency to reduce revelation to myth—and to make ourselves the judges of revelation, rather than being judged by it. (Read more.)