British writer Evelyn Waugh described his novel "Brideshead Revisited" as "nothing less than an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world."
A novel of pre-war decadence mixed with Catholic guilt. "Bridehead Revisted" reads as tumultuous spiritual journey. Irreligious Charles Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte as an undergrad at college in Oxford and befriends his wealthy aristocratic family who live in a mansion known as Brideshead Castle. The Flyte clan is deeply Catholic, but each Flyte is wrestling with the religion on their own terms. Sebastian battles alcoholism and ends up in a monastery. Lord Marchmain the Flyte patriarch has left his wife and is living in sin in Morocco as an adulterer.
In this excerpt from the book Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead Castle to die. Of course he's dying in that epic sort of grand way that British aristocrats in literature tend to die. He refuses last rites from the priest since he has long lived without faith. But his daughter Julia who is struggling with religion in her own way insists on bringing a priest to his deathbed. The priest performs the Last Rites despite his resistance. A beautiful metaphor for God's forgiveness and unconditional love. It's a tense and deeply spiritual moment. As he breathes his last breathes he's confronted with Pascale's Wager, and can not deny God. Lord Marchmain in his final moments makes the sign of the cross. He hedges his bets and dies returning to faith.
"...Then I knelt, too, and prayed: “O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,” and the man on the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him.
I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgement of a present, a nod in the crowd. All over the world people were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being played again by two men—by one man, rather, and he nearer death than life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor.
The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he finished what he had to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. “O God,” I prayed, “don’t let him do that.” But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom."
At the end of the novel Charles revisits Brideshead Castle after the war. He's now an officer in the military. He finds a candle burning in the chapel reading it as a sign of God's eternal grace. He kneels at the tabernacle and says a prayer. In that moment Charles has abandoned his secular and irreligious ways for Catholicism, or at least faith is shining a light into his life. Waugh's miracle of Catholicism.
Waugh explained, "I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It's there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there's a particular time – sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed – when all resistance is down and grace can come flooding in."