ARTICLES

The Search for God

A Chat with Evelyn Waugh's Grandson

BY BRODERICK BARKER

Good Friday of 2004 marked the opening of the 30th Annual Convention of American Atheists, held this year at San Diego's Shelter Pointe Hotel and Marina. The convention's first day featured an address by Alexander Waugh, who discussed his new book, which is succinctly titled God. The American Atheist website noted that Waugh "is the grandson of the popular, distinguished British writer Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh." It did not mention that Evelyn Waugh was one of the most famous Catholic writers of the 20th century.

On a cloudy and decidedly cool Holy Thursday afternoon, I journeyed to the bar of the Best Western Island Palms Hotel, just down the road from Shelter Pointe, to chat with Alexander Waugh about his book, his family, and his faith. Though he was a bit rumpled and frizzy with jet lag, his dark suit and buttery accent made him seem wonderfully correct amid the bamboo and t-shirts. He started on beer, but soon joined me in a few rounds of bourbon.

Grandpa Evelyn was a convert, said Waugh, and like many converts, he burned with zeal for his new faith. Sadly, that zeal was more curse than blessing. "My grandfather was really, really obsessed -- to the point of madness. And a lot of obsession turns into depression. It breaks on itself and cracks up. You can get to a sort of entrenched state in Catholicism whereby you don't really give a fig about death, because the answer is after death, anyway. And thereby, you don't give a fig about life, and suddenly, you're depressed. Evelyn Waugh got so immersed in his Catholicism that life itself began to mean nothing to him. Everything was beyond that, it was all to do with Jesus and the afterlife."

Evelyn's immersion took its toll on his son Auberon, Alexander Waugh's father. Evelyn, said Alexander, "was in a desperate state about the changes in the Catholic Church" that came in the wake of the second Vatican Council.

"He went to church and he sat in the back row, moaning really loudly -- everybody could hear him. He couldn't bear what the priest was saying."

But when Auberon was injured in Cyprus after accidentally shooting himself while trying to repair a machine gun, Evelyn didn't visit him. "He very nearly died. He was in the hospital for four months, and Evelyn didn't bother to go and see him. He said, 'If he dies, I'll go and come back with the coffin.' The only thing that impressed Evelyn was that Auberon was whispering the De Profundis in the ambulance."

Being the son of a convert, said Alexander, "unbalances you in a way I think is not good. My father was very religious...no, that's wrong, he was very irreligious, but he believed in God. He was very irritated by the Catholic Church." But the Catholic Church provided the religious air he breathed in youth; it suffused his spirit. "I saw my father wrestle with problems for a long time. People who discard [their childhood religion] on the basis of logic feel a hole that's been emptied, and needs to be filled with something else. My father was spiritually lost. I really think that because he was brought up so fervently in his belief ... his brain didn't tell him it was all rubbish, but his brain told him that the Church was a bunch of loose cannons. Like many, many people, he felt, 'I want to maintain faith, but I cannot glue myself like a Yes Man to the Church.'"

"It happens to everybody to different degrees. We all have personal problems about God. Most people of any single intellectual effort have queries. Anyway, then he died, and that was the end of that -- or wasn't. We all wait to find out."

And Alexander, the famous convert's grandson? Baptized Catholic, even confirmed, but no longer in the fold. He is neither an atheist nor an agnostic. He is a seeker frustrated by the failure of his fellow Catholics to aid him in his search. "A long time ago -- I was 12 or something -- I shocked my aunt, shocked her. I said I didn't understand the difference between Anglicanism and Catholicism. She got very annoyed and said it all had to do with transubstantiation -- the wafer is the body of Christ. I said, 'How is it the body?' She answered, 'It just IS!' -- like that, all mad. 'It just IS!' I mean, that's not an answer. I cannot deal with that. I don't care if the answer is unsatisfactory to me, or if it creates other questions, but I have to think that people are trying to answer on my level and not getting angry with me -- because I just want to know the bloody answer. It was quite a turning point, her shouting 'It just IS!' at me like that."

Questions to his school chaplain got him accused of "presumptuous arrogance." "I think it's very bad to stop an inquisitive mind. You must be able to ask. At the worst, all that comes is that we say, 'I don't know.' If you're talking to a priest, he can say, 'I can't answer the question, but I've been a priest for 20 years, and this is what I believe, this is what I sense is the case.' A good priest can do that; he can come up with answers that mean something, without necessarily being totally driven by logic. He answers a question and shuts the wise up. You could say, 'Why?' to his answer, but you don't, because it's good enough. It's strong enough to make you say, 'All right. I don't need to say any more words. I'm happy.' I hate seeing these priests who, when you ask them a question, they look shifty. Better to say, 'I don't know.' Just don't look shifty."

That shifty look may come because the pressure is on to give a compelling answer, but Waugh says that's not what he's after. It may not even be possible. "In faith matters, you can only say, 'I've gotten this far, and I'm on this journey and this is what I think. This is what's giving me some sort of sense that I'm heading in the right direction.'"

Too often, he says, the people Waugh questioned "panicked and flailed about, and it got irritating."

Nor was he satisfied with the notion that his questions should not be asked because they were unanswerable. And the God who silenced Job with His withering blast of questions -- "Who laid the corner stones when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" -- did not silence Waugh. He did not silence Waugh because that God "is only part of the story. The God who squished Job was one description of the same God that sits down and eats with Abraham.

"The Catholic answer was, 'Don't worry about God, because Jesus is God. Don't panic over anything you read in the Old Testament. Look at Jesus. He is the personification of all this, and the answers lie with Jesus.' You simply don't preach the Old Testament very much. As a result, Catholics didn't have to deal with some of the odder bits.

"For starters, it's not a monotheistic text. You look at Psalm 82, and there are gods crawling all over the place. God takes his stand at the Council of El, surrounded by all the other gods. Taking God on His own is something the Jews had to do much more. They have to answer all these questions -- 'What the heck is going on here?'"

Waugh admires them for trying. "You cannot have a religion that carries around all this baggage under its arm and won't discuss it. It's just maddening."

That is why Waugh decided to write God. "It's sort of a personal quest," he admits. "I had this curiosity that was neither led by a desire to ridicule nor a desire to praise God. I simply wanted to answer an interesting question: Who is God? What's He like? It's never answered, and I suppose the main reason is that people get very, very hung up on the faith question. If you can't get past the question of 'Does God exist?' you get unbelievably stuck. I thought that it was actually perfectly possible to put the whole of that to one side and say, 'Hang on, does it really matter about whether I believe or don't believe? What can we actually find out about this figure that is concrete?' My view was that there must be more to this than meets the eye. Some of it appears to be a bit ridiculous. Some of it appears to be ponderously serious, but never mind. Let's just put it all together and see what the broad picture is."

In the book, Waugh writes of God that "the best thing for it is to seek him out from all sides at once, to blitz him, if you like, from every conceivable angle...."

Along the way, he sought to excise his own opinions from the text, contenting himself with the editing and shaping of the book as a whole. "It's a scrapbook," he says. "I've gotten everybody else's stuff. Of course, that means a lot of it contradicts."

The strongest "editorial whiff" comes from Waugh's frequent use of humor. Waugh notes that toward the end of the ten plagues, for instance, Pharaoh was eager to get the Israelites out of Egypt. But God kept hardening his heart and so prolonged the drama. In Waugh's account, God was having fun. "There are moments where I'm chuckling," admitted Waugh, "because I think something is really silly. But I'm not sneering or scoffing. I'm just saying, 'This is funny because it's incongruous, and there are things that don't work, and we're all fighting, we're all striving to get answers to this.' It doesn't mean I think the whole concept of God is ridiculous. It means, perhaps, I've spotted some human flaws and madnesses that need a bit of a jocular nudge in the ribs."

The humor didn't play with every audience. "When the book was published in England, the Jewish community was really jolly about it. But the Catholics got rather tense about it."

He found it odd -- especially since the God of the Hebrew bible came in for so much jocular nudging -- until it dawned on him that the Catholics he knew, even the very funny Catholics, didn't joke about Catholicism. "There was simply no tradition in Catholicism where you could laugh at these things. There is one in Judaism. They make jokes about praying; during praying, they're making jokes. God is like a sort of friend, someone to whom you go, 'Ah, come on....' He's a chum you barter with. With the Catholics, absolutely not.

"Catholics in England felt rather betrayed by the whole thing," Waugh says. After all, here was Joseph Smith, who saw God and Jesus in the Vermont woods, being quoted right alongside Isaiah. Here was Mohammed, right alongside Jesus. Waugh protested that to say that Isaiah was right and Smith was wrong "would have utterly spoiled the book. It would have been a bit of proselytizing."

The Bible "was essentially the start point -- so there is a bit of a Christian bias. But it's because the Bible is so incredible. It's got everything; it's so huge and cross-referenced. The Qur'an isn't. And you can't fish out of it so much about God." But the Qur'an does get used, as do the Book of Jubilees, The Gospel of Thomas, and the Book of Mormon and countless other sources.

"What we forget in our excitement about the Bible," explained Waugh, "is that there were these councils" to determine which books were canonical. Waugh says that "Epiphanius, who wrote the ancient history of the Church in the first or second century, reported the goings on at the council. It was not a sober occasion. The canon of the Bible was decided in a grotesque argument amongst people who simply couldn't control themselves. It was not a sober occasion. That might be a bit annoying if it's a sacred text for your religion, but it becomes interesting when you look at those texts that were pushed out. It's worth reading and it's worth comparing. The Book of Jubilees explains quite a lot of problems, like how did Adam and Eve have all these descendants if their sons killed each other off? There's a huge resource of richness in those old texts. Taken on a purely literary or scholarly level, they complement the Bible and make the picture much more complete."

A.C. Grayling, writing in The Literary Review, opined that God "makes mincemeat of theism." But Waugh keeps his own conclusions close to the vest. "People do like to be spoon-fed a bit. I think some people would have liked the book to say, 'This is a Catholic book' or 'This is an atheist book.' It's not. I hope it makes people think. I hope it broadens anyone, whatever position they come from. It's a starting point to say, 'Actually, there's a lot of interesting stuff on this subject, and maybe we just gloss it a little bit.'"

Like his father, Waugh received the faith as a child -- though he remembers Auberon as being "far less dogmatic" than Evelyn. It was there in his formation, and it still hovers about him. "Everyone's faith is something that matures in them," he says. "It's not something you either have or you don't. It strengthens and weakens."

But, Waugh says, "If faith proves too crumbly and wrong, I'm going to jump off and find something else. But even if I do that, I still have that problem -- there's that hole that needs to be filled."

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