Sorting out our many possessive, grasping loves, and redirecting them towards God is the objective of Lent asceticism. Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, is transformed by becoming friends with Sebastian Flyte. His love for Sebastian opens him up to a joy in life he has never known. Although their love is tinged with a possessiveness that eventually kills it, Charles is permanently changed. Their relationship raises a theological question: what is the nature of eros? Is it ultimately selfish and unworthy of a Christian, or is it the very soil without which grace cannot take root? In Charles’s spiritual journey, an answer is proposed through suffering and renunciation. It is through, and not in spite of his eros for Sebastian, and later for Sebastian’s sister Julia, that Charles is led to agape, self-gift, and so ultimately from agnosticism to the Catholic Church.
Charles and Sebastian in Arcadia
By the time Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte meet, they are in their second term at Oxford. Each has already begun his own life. Sebastian’s is flamboyant and eccentric; Charles sees him walking around with his teddy bear, Aloysius, and wearing fake whiskers to restaurants. Charles’s life, on the other hand, consists of meetings with the college intellectuals, often held in his rooms among his “meagre and commonplace” books, cheap art prints, and a painted screen. One of the intellectuals is Collins, a man that Charles describes as going “round the cultural waterwheel” his whole life. Charles later wonders whether he might have ended up going down the same respectable and boring path, had he not met Sebastian. And he notes that, even before the excitement of being on his own with rooms and money had worn off, he “felt at heart that this was not all Oxford had to offer.” However, at “Sebastian’s approach these grey figures seemed quietly to fade into the landscape and vanish,” replaced by figures full of color.