Revisiting Waugh’s
deeply spiritual novel
Helena is underrated, says Milo Yiannopoulos
13 March 2009

Classic Catholic Book
Helena
Evelyn Waugh

That Evelyn Waugh was one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language is now widely accepted. But much less well known about are Waugh's contributions to the Catholic canon. I would argue that Brideshead Revisited is the greatest of all Catholic novels, yet its Catholicism is only oblique, expressed more in themes and subverted conflicts than in narrative.

Waugh's most obviously Catholic novel, Helena, is also his shortest. It concerns the pilgrimage of the empress Helena, consort of Emperor Constantius and mother of Constantine the Great, to Palestine. Part fictional account and part Catholic apologetic, the novel accomplishes the impossible: it encapsulates the essence of the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity while not, in a sense, being principally concerned with it.

The novel follows the empress Helena as she seeks - and finds - pieces of the True Cross. She subsequently builds churches in Olivet and Bethlehem.

While the religious upheaval in Rome and throughout the rest of the empire provides omnipresent context, the empress is always the focus of the story.

Following an esoteric and likely apocryphal tradition, Waugh casts Helena as the red-haired daughter of Coel, a chieftain of the British Trinovantes.

Helena was written in 1950, long after A Handful of Dust and five years after Brideshead. So it's interesting that it is almost entirely absent of the satire Waugh perfected in those earlier works (though the writing is unquestionably fine), and Helena lacks much of the subtlety of characterisation of Waugh's earlier creations.

But the power of the word (if not yet the Word) is evident throughout: "Just the place for a basilica," remarks Helena in Chapter 11. "It was like a masque of oriental magic, this utterance of a spell, this materialisation from the clouds and colonnades." As Sebastian devastates Charles, Helena too moves mountains with her speech.

Waugh apparently regarded Helena as his finest work (an assessment not shared by any major critic). I believe this says more about his faith than his literary judgment. But neither is an indictment: after revisiting this novel I heartily recommend it on both accounts.

The novel contains many beautiful and often deeply spiritual passages, not least among them the vastly underrated final paragraph, whose full significance can only be appreciated after what has gone before: "Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope."