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Literature: Waugh’s Fourth Century

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Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (Loyola Classics) doesn’t get Constantine quite right, but he has some very sharp observations on other fourth-century personalities and events. His description of the effect of Constantine’s conversion on Lactantius captures the euphoria of the moment: “in that unique springtide there was no escape from change, not even in Treves, most polite of cities, not even for Helena, most excluded of women. The huge boredom, which from its dead center in Diocletian’s heart had saddened and demented the world, had passed like the plague. New green life was pricking and unfolding and entwining everywhere among the masonry and the ruts. In that dawn, reflected Lactantius, to be old was very heaven; to have lived in a hope that defied reason; that existed, rather, only in the reason and in the affections, quite unattached to common experience or calculation; to see that hope take substantial and homely form near at hand and on all sides, as a fog, lifting, may suddenly reveal to a ship’s company that, through no skill of theirs, they have silently drifted into safe anchorage; to catch a glimpse of simply unity in a life that had seemed all vicissitude – this, thought Lactantius, was something to match the exuberance of Pentecost; something indeed in which Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost had their royal celebration. . . .

“Events were no longer following their humdrum human pace. There was a disproportion everywhere between cause and effect, between motive and movement, an intervening impetus and increase beyond normal calculation. In his dream a man may put his horse at a sizable obstacle and without design take wing and soar far above it, or seek to move a rock and find it weightless in his hands.” The narrator rebukes Lactantius for his naivete, but he captures the feeling of fourth-century Christians: “We were like those who dream; then was our heart filled with laughter. . . . the Lord has done great things for us.”

Waugh, of course, can’t be entirely serious. There is a wonderful lampoon of a lecture by a gnostic teacher, and then there’s the hilarious and prophetic scene where Lactantius is reflecting on history-writing with Helena as both watch the Indian ape that has been sent to her as a pet: “‘You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing. Suppose that in years to come, when the church’s troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,’ and he nodded toward the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit. ‘A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors. He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people’s minds when the refutations were quite forgotten. That is what style does.’”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 1:16 pm

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Literature: Waugh’s Fourth Century

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