His post-conversion novels, baptized with the beauty of the Catholic aesthetic and conveying the realism of the Catholic understanding of good and evil, satirize the “Looking-glass world” of the modern wasteland, “where everything is an absurd caricature.” They expose its hedonism as hollow, as nothing but a vacuous viciousness devoid of virtue and veritas, and its philosophy as fatuous, offering nothing but futility. He remained thereafter a faithful son of Holy Mother Church, though few would venture to suggest that he lived the life of a saint. 29, 1930, being received at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in London by the famously erudite Jesuit, Father Martin D’Arcy, the inspiration for the character of Father Mowbray in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh crossed the threshold into the life and light of Christ on Sept.
It gives life to those who had been in a living death and gives light to those who had been groping in the dark.
And, what is more, it is also light giving. These wonderful words of Evelyn Waugh, referring to his conversion to Catholicism, are so powerful and so succinctly expressive of the seismic shift of perspective that conversion brings, that I selected them to serve as the epigraph to my book, Literary Converts.Įvery convert knows that stepping across the threshold into the life and light of Christ is more than simply lifechanging.
Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature, into the real world God made and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.
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