Upon rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited of late I have been particularly struck (yet again), by the buffoonish character Rex Mottram. Brash and savvy from a worldly perspective, Mottram is captivated by Lady Julia Flyte and sets about ingratiating himself to her, and to her family—eventually making himself indispensable to them all. His ambition for influence and affluence unbounded, Mottram desires Julia as his wife—she is beautiful, graceful in social settings, and of high status in English society (even if her Catholicism puts her somewhat out of the mainstream—a fact that Rex does not seem to recognise at first or understand at all later on). Despite his less than pure motives, Rex is not without heart. As the novel progresses he seems to develop a genuine affection for Julia, even if that affection fails to amount to love properly understood, something that we find Rex is almost entirely incapable of. Rex is really a tragic character.
One of the difficulties that faces Rex in his quest to wed Julia is the matter of religion. Julia, as we have mentioned, is Catholic, and while her own sacramental practice waivers throughout the text, the fact of it remains, and so Rex—if he is to marry her—needs himself to enter the Church. What unfolds is an interesting subplot that I wish to comment on for the purposes of this post.
While Rex is seemingly genuine in his attempt to subject himself to the Catholic faith enter the Catholic Church for the purposes of marrying Julia, there is something in his character that inhibits the faith’s taking hold in his life. He is not at all antagonistic towards the faith, in fact, he displays a kind of apathetic contentment in accepting whatever he is told, and it precisely here where the difficulty arises. As he progresses, seeking full membership of the Catholic Church, Rex exhibits a complete credulity, a disposition that counterintuitively makes him impervious to genuine faith.
Rex’s temperament is one that I think is worth reflecting on in our present context, as there is something in his character which is indicative of much in the contemporary experience of those who have been involved in the Church’s mission to evangelise in what some have unhappily and imprecisely termed a ‘post-Christian’ West. While there are, of course, many in our day who would position themselves as antagonistic towards Christian and particularly Catholic faith, Rex’s position vis-à-vis Christianity, Catholicism, or the person of Jesus is one of complete indifference. In the words of his would-be catechist, Fr Mowbray, ‘he doesn’t correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.’ (p. 185).
Rex’s complete and utter willingness to undergo whatever it takes to secure Julia as his bride leads him to a disposition of unqualified credulity which has the effect of neutering the basic claims of the faith. Fr Mowbray reports his difficulties as such:
‘“I can’t get anywhere near him. He doesn’t seem to have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety. ‘The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: ‘“‘I don’t mean anything. You tell me.” I tried to, in a few words, and he said: ‘‘Right. So much for prayer. What’s the next thing?” I gave him the catechism to take away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: “‘Just as many as you say, Father.” (p. 185).
Rex, we see, is prepared to accept whatever he is told concerning the Catholic faith unquestioningly because is something that he sees are purely extrinsic or external to his lived reality. This all becomes completely explicit when the reader is later regaled with an account of the influence of the young Cordelia Flyte on Mottram’s catechetical instruction. Lady Cordelia, whose interventions serve not only to completely befuddle the process of Rex’s instruction in the faith, exposes the fatal flaw that a priori inhibit the development of any genuine faith on Rex’s part: that is the thoroughgoing separation between faith and reason as he understands them.
Rex is not without rationality, but his is a rationality that operates in a reductively mechanistic manner—utterly devoid of and detached from intelligence. Reason operates for him as pure technique, and while this renders him very savvy in the realms of both politics and finance, he remains in the words of Mowbray, a ‘semi-imbecile’—that is he has no habit of judging the meaning of the things that are presented to him.
Questions of faith or religion are for Rex relegated exclusively to the realm of values, and are thus entirely disconnected from the facts of real life. He has been able to conform himself to a seemingly irrational moral code (somewhat), and has been able to commit aspects of the Church’s doctrine to memory: He has demonstrated his capacity to accept and memorise all manner of statements pertaining to the two natures of Christ, sacred monkeys at the Vatican, or ‘that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that’s the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there.’ But something is lacking. And this is where things come unstuck for poor old Rex. For Rex, faith operates in an entirely different universe from his lived reality, and it is a source of utter perplexity that it could be otherwise, a frustration that he gives voice to again and again.
The problem with Rex is not that he is lacking in reason, but that he has an overdeveloped reason that operates such to the detriment of his intelligence. As Julia later explains:
“He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.” (p. 193).
Rex’s inability to see the faith as anything more than an ethical choice or a collection of lofty ideas leads him to an understanding of Christianity that is disconnected from reality, and unable to take on cultural form – unable to take root in his life (See Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, n.1). Rex’s example is instructive for evangelisers in our contemporary context who face a veritable sea of Rex Mottrams, many of whom have had zero exposure to the Catholic-Christian faith as a lived reality, even if they have encountered it in an institutionalised form.
The problem for Rex and for so many of our day and age is the strict separation that exists between faith and life, what Pope St Paul VI referred to as ‘the drama of our time.’ (Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntianti, n. 20). Crossing that chasm is no mean feat, a task that requires what Pope Benedict XVI spoke of in his (in)famous Regensburg Address of 2006 as ‘a broadening of our concept of reason and its application.’ Rex may simply not want to see or experience a faith that can have an impact on reality, but he is not free to remain neutral in the face of a faith that has been incarnated in history.
