Dr.

Robert Hickson

18 August 2015
Saint Helena

Saint Helena's Belated Mission as a Late-Comer to Christ

--Epigraphs-It is reported (and I, for one, believe it) that some few years ago [as of 1950] a
lady prominent for her hostility to the [Catholic] Church returned from a visit to
Palestine in a state of exultation. 'I got the real low-down at last,' she told her
friends. 'The whole story was made up by a British woman named Ellen. Why,
the guide showed me the very place where it happened. Even the priests admit it.
They call their chapel the Invention of the Cross [i.e., the Inventio Crucis
in Ecclesiastical Latin].'
It has not been my primary aim [in this book] to disillusion this famous lady
but to retell an old story. (Evelyn Waugh, Helena (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1950), p. ixPrefacemy emphasis added)
***

'I have spent fifty-four years [1905-1959] trying to learn English and I still find I
have recourse to the dictionary almost every day. English,' I said, warming a little
to my subject, 'is incomparably the richest language in the world. There are
two or three quite distinct words to express every concept and each has a
subtle difference of nuance.' (Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (1960) in
Waugh Abroad: Collective Travel Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Everyman's Library # 266, 2003), p. 1019my emphasis added. Evelyn Waugh
spoke these suddenly invited, clearly spontaneous, and heartfelt words to a class
of culturally mixed young students in Tanganyika, on 3 March 1959.)
***
It was by [Cecil] Rhodes's express wish...that the bones were brought here from
Zimbabwe, where they were first buried. They were, as the [burial] inscription
simply states, 'Brave Men'; that is to say, they fought to death in
circumstances when neither retreat nor surrender was possible....At [Cecil]
Rhodes's funeral [in 1902] the bishop of Mashonaland read a poem of four stanzas
composed by [Rudyard] Kipling for the occasion. The theme was Vision:
'Dreamer devout by vision led/ Beyond our guess and reach.'....That was written
fifty-seven years ago and [unlike Saint Helena's in 326 A.D.] already every
prediction has been belied.
In his [Rhodes's] own lifetime, and largely by his own imprudence and
dishonesty, he had seen Afrikaners and British in South Africa hopelessly
embittered. Today [in 1959] his great project of the all-British Cape [of Good
Hope] to Cairo route has lost all meaning; the personal, honourable ascendancy of
Great White Chiefs has degenerated into 'apartheid.' One is tempted to the trite
contrast of the achievements of the politician and [the achievements] of the
1

artist; the one [the politician] talking about generations yet unborn, the other [the
artist] engrossed in the technical problems of the task at hand; the one fading into
a mist of disappointment and controversy, the other [the artist, like Waugh
himself] leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before
him and would not have been there but for him. But Rhodes was not a
politician [Rhodes was a financier.p. 1057]; or rather a minor one [i.e., he
was but a minor politician]. He was a visionary and almost all he saw was
hallucination. (Evelyn Waugh, Waugh Abroad: Collective Travel Writing
(2003), pp. 1055-1056, 1057my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)
***
'This [Feast of Epiphany] is my day,' she [the Empress Dowager, Saint Helena]
thought, 'and these [the Three Magi] are my kind.' Perhaps she apprehended that
her fame, like theirs, would live in one historic act of devotion....'Like me,' she
said to them, 'you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long
before....You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage [from the East]
and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on
King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which [obsequious ingratiations]
there began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!
(Evelyn Waugh, Helena (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), p. 223my
emphasis added)
***
Two years after Evelyn Waugh had published his long-incubating, and especially moving,
historical novel on Saint Helena, entitled Helena (1950), he published a short non-fictional book of
some personal and historical importance, entitled The Holy Places.1 In this short presentation of earlier
and then-current Israeli history, he also examines the mystery and special place of Saint Helena in the
history of the Catholic Church, and in light of the special (as well as the general) Providence of God.
We shall see in this little book many glimpses of Evelyn Waugh's deep thought and deep-heartedness.
Although he was almost twenty-seven years of age when he quietly entered the Catholic Church
on 29 September 1930, he too, like Saint Helena, was a late-comer to Christ and very grateful. As he
suggestively and deftly puts it in his semi-autobiographical 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:
The Pinfolds were Roman Catholic, Mrs. Pinfold by upbringing, Mr. Pinfold by a
later development. He had been received into the Churchconversion
suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the
propositions of his faithin early manhood [like Waugh himself at Farm Street
in London], at a time when many Englishmen of humane education were falling
1 Evelyn Waugh, The Holy Places (1952, 1953), which is to be conveniently found in the larger and more recent
anthology, entitled Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), pp. 919-950,
inclusive. Henceforth all references to The Holy Places will be from the 2003 edition, and placed above in parentheses
in the main body of this essay.

into communism. Unlike them Mr. Pinfold remained steadfast. But he was
reputed bigoted rather than pious.2

In The Holy Places we shall also see Evelyn Waugh's special and candid pietas. It constitutes a
worthy sequel to Helana, a fruitful work which Waugh himself so modestly but deeply cherished
moreover, it was the only novel of his that he ever read aloud to his children.
The frontpiece of The Holy Places has a figure of a Cross, under which, in untranslated Latin, are
the words of Christ in the Improperia (Reproaches, Remonstrances) uttered in the Traditional Liturgy
on Good Friday. Recalling, in part, the Prophet Micheas (Micah 6:3), Christ speaks especially to the
Jewish people but also to the ingratitude of His Christian people:
Popule Meus quid feci tibi? Aut in quo contristavi te? Responde Mihi (My
people what have I done to you? Or wherein have I grieved you [caused you
sadness]? Answer Me.) (920)
In this Hymn for Good Friday, as we behold the Wood of the Cross (the Lignum Crucis), Christ
also adds: Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti, Parasti Crucem Salvatori tuo (Because I led you out of the
land of Egypt, you have prepared a Cross for your Savior).
All of these evocative and allusive words are a fitting preparation for Waugh's further
examination, which is divided into three components: Work Abandoned; St. Helena Empress; and
The Defense of the Holy Places.
His introductory Work Abandoned helps frame the context and tells us what had been done, and
what had regrettably been left undone. He wrote this portion in 1952 at his home at Piers Court in
Stinchcombe, before he was to move permanently in 1956 to Somersetshire, England, to Combe
Florey, where he is buried.
Waugh, writing in 1952, four years after the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948,
gives us some history of his own involvement with the Holy Land:
My first visit to Jerusalem was at Christmas-tide, 1935 [some five years after his
reception into the Church, and now 32 years of age]. I came from embattled
Abyssinia. The League of Nations had virtually come to an end that summer. But
at Bethlehem and at Calvary were the pilgrims of the world, united in an older and
more steadfast friendship. It seemed a place of peace.
2 Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece (London: Chapman & Hall, 1957), p. 6my
emphasis added.

Those who lived in Palestine knew otherwise. The Arab Revolt was even then
being planned. That Christmas in fact was the last to be celebrated at Bethlehem in
complete tranquillity. But the pilgrim was not to know that. The Zionists had not
then thrown off their disguise; they showed themselves to the ingenuous as
decent, rather cranky young people, innocently occupied in the cultivation of
grape-fruit. Jerusalem had all the air of a city of Christendom reclaimed....The
first Christian government [after World War I and especially after General
Allenby's superbly modest entrance] since the fall of the Crusaders' kingdom was
the purest and the most benevolent which the land had known since the age of
Constantine [and Saint Helena]. (925my emphasis added)
In this atmosphere, Waugh was inspired to initiate a writing project of considerable scope:
So elated was I by the beauties about me that I there and then began vaguely
planning a series of bookssemi-historic, semi-poetic fiction, I did not quite
know whatabout the long, intricate, intimate relations between England and the
Holy Places....Helena, Richard Lionhart [et al.]....Helena above all first began
a ferment in my imagination which lasted for fifteen years [1935-1950]. I
completed a novel about her [in 1950] which failed in most cases to communicate
my enthusiasm. I then devised a short explanation for the B.B.C. [British
Broadcasting Corporation], who were giving a dramatic version of my story. It is
this that is here reprinted [St. Helena Empress (927-933)]....The first, flushed,
calf love of my theme has never completely cooled, though I know I shall not
pursue it further. (925-926my emphasis added)
There are many reasons for this Work Abandoned, but one of them is especially poignant:
One element [of my decision to cease] certainly is dead for everthe pride of
country. We surrendered our [British] mandate to rule the Holy Land for low
motives: cowardice, sloth and parsimony. The vision of Allenby marching on
foot where the [German] Kaiser had arrogantly ridden, is overlaid now by the
sorry spectacle of a large, well found [British] force, barely scratched in battle
[against the resisting, often fanatical, anti-British terrorists], decamping
[cravenly] before a little gang of gunmen [the Zionist Stern Gang and the Irgun,
mostly; with some hostile Arab groups or false-flag operations, too]....
[Nonetheless,] The patronage of Life [Magazine] enabled me to make a long visit
last year [1951] and the second essay in this book [The Defense of the Holy
Places (934-950)] is the report on what I saw, originally written for that
magazine. It [the Report] makes clear, I think, why the life's work I planned will
never come to fruit [especially given the situation of strife in the Jewish State of
Israel, now and in the likely future]. (926my emphasis added)
Before Evelyn Waugh presents us with the known life of Saint Helena and some of the mysteries
surrounding her life, he thoughtfully cautions us to be disciplined when we strive to meditate on the
lives of the saints (927), for it is an arduous activity when properly done; and a heavy apparatus
has been at work in the last hundred years [1850-1950] to enervate and stultify the imaginative
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faculties. (927my emphasis added) Moreover, when certain kinds of novels, plays, and then the
cinema
have made the urban mentality increasingly subject to suggestion...it now
lapses effortlessly into a trance-like escape from its condition [to include its
own moral and spiritual risks]. It is said that great popularity in fiction and film
is only attained by works into which readers and audience can transpose
themselves and be vicariously endangered, loved and applauded. This kind of
reverie [or sentimental escape] is not meditation, even when its objects are
worthy of high devotion....There are evident dangers in identifying ourselves
with Saint Francis or Saint John of the Cross. We can invoke the help of the saints
and study the [Providential] workings of God in them, but if we delude ourselves
that we are walking in their shoes, seeing through their eyes and thinking with
their minds, we lose sight of the one certain course of our salvation. There is
only one saint that Bridget Hogan can actually become, Saint Bridget Hogan, and
that saint she must become, here or in the fires of purgatory, if she is to enter
heaven. She cannot slip through in fancy-dress, made up as Joan of Arc. (927
my bold emphasis added; italics in the original)
Waugh then adds that, for this reason, it is well to pay particular attention to the saints about
whom our information is incomplete. (927) We soon come to discover that Saint Helena herself is also
one of those saints who are remembered for a single act. (928my emphasis added) To this class
Helena eminently belongs, indeed:
In extreme old age, as Empress Dowager, she made a journey [in 326 A.D., one
year after the Council of Nicea] into one part of her son's [Emperor Constantine's]
immense dominions, to Jerusalem. From that journey spring the relics of the True
Cross that are venerated everywhere in Christendom. That is what we know; most
else is surmise.
Helena was at the time, literally, the most important woman in the world, yet we
know next to nothing about her....She was [from her childhood family's status]
probably of modest rank, not servile, not illustrious. Constantius [Constantine's
soldier-father] married her early in his rise to power and abandoned her later
for a royal match....She bore one son, Constantine the Great, probably at Nish in
Serbia. After her divorce she settled at Trier (Treves) [on the beautiful Moselle
that flows northeast into the Rhine] where the [current] Cathedral probably stands
on the foundations of her palace. Almost certainly it was there that she became
Christian. Lactantius [the famous Christian scholar and writer], who was tutor to
her grandson Crispus, may have helped instruct her. At the very end of her life
she suddenly emerged for her great adventure. She died at Constantinople and
her body was thereupon or later moved to Rome. Her tomb never became a great
centre of pilgrimage. She, herself, seems never to have attracted great personal
devotion; but she was a popular saint. Numberless churches are dedicated to her;
numberless girls baptised with her name; she appears everywhere in painting,
5

sculpture and mosaic. She has fitted, in a homely and substantial way, into the
family life of Christendom. (928my emphasis added)
Then Waugh, with his characteristic integrity and with some more of his own searching questions
about this mysterious woman and her evident courage and indefatigability, says with honesty, as
follows, as he teaches us to examine her life and importance further:
There is little heroism or genius in any of this [sketchy summary of what is known
of Helena]. We can assume that she was devout, chaste, munificent; a
thoroughly good woman in an age when palaces were mainly occupied by the
wicked; but she lived grandly and comfortably whereas most of the saints in
every age have accepted poverty as the condition of their calling. We know of
no suffering of hers, physical, spiritual or mental, beyond the normal
bereavements, disappointments and infirmities which we all expect to bear [even
abandonments and multiple exiles?]. Yet she lived in an age when Christians had
often to choose between flight [hence often also exile], apostasy or brutal
punishment. Where, one may ask, lies her sanctity? Where [lies] the particular
lesson for us who live [in England in 1950, and] in such very different
circumstances? (950my emphasis added)
Although we shall now pass over Waugh's vivid depiction and acute analysis of the world of
Constantine, as we catch glimpses of it (930) and certain superficial similarities (930) that were
rather familiar to those who were then living in Europe in 1950, there is one important exception,
Waugh contends:
All this seems familiar; but for the event of supreme importance, the victory of
Christianity, we can find no counterpart in contemporary history. We cannot
by any effort of the imagination share the emotions of Lactanius [the exile in
Trier], or Macarius [Saint Macarius the Bishop of Jerusalem when Helena arrived
there on her journeyand with her special mission!]. Helen, more than anyone,
stands in the heart of that mystery [namely the victory of Christianity in the
world of Constantine]. (950my emphasis added)
Let us now more reflectively and more fully and more patiently consider that mystery. For, as
Hilaire Belloc sprightly said in his Essays of a Catholic Layman in England: One of the main marks
of stupidity is the impatient rejection of mystery.3
We may well imagine that Waugh, who greatly admired Belloc, would have liked that insight and
the manly form of expression. Waugh often alluded to Belloc's dear Catholic friends, too, especially
G.K. Chesterton and Maurice Baring. He evokes Baring's work on Mary Queen of Scots while himself
3 Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic Layman in England (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931), p. 275. Belloc's fuller, pert
affirmation included a short addition: One of the main marks of stupidity is the impatient rejection of mystery; one of
the first marks of good judgment, combined with good reasoning power, is the appetite for examining mystery. (p. 275)

returning now to the mystery of Empress Helena, to include the manifestations of her serene and
recurrent acceptance of her various, often dislocating, states and places of life. Especially shown is
her receptive and resolute acceptance of God's call and His clear will for her near the end of her life:
She [Helena] might claim, like that other, less prudent queen: In my end is my
beginning.4 But for [except for] her final, triumphant journey she would have no
fame. We should think of her, if at all as we think of Constantine: someone who
neatly made the best of both worlds. The strong purpose of her pilgrimage [to
Jerusalem] shed a new and happier light on the long years of uneventful
retirement, showing us that it was an act of will, grounded in patience and
humility, that she accepted her position. Or rather, her positions. We do not know
in exactly what state Constantius [her future husband] found her. She certainly did
not choose him for his hopes of power [ i.e., his lust for power without grace].
Those hopes [and his ambitions], indeed, proved her undoing and [he] dismissed
her, divorced, into exile. In a court full of intrigue and murder, she formed no
party, took no steps against her rival, but quietly accepted her disgrace.
Constantine [her son] rose to power, proclaimed her empress, struck coins in her
honour, opened the whole imperial treasury for her use. And she accepted that
too. Only in her religious practices did she maintain her private station, slipping
in to Mass at Rome among the crowd, helping with the housework at the convent
on Mount Sion [later in the Holy Land, outside the old east walls at Jerusalem].
She accepted the fact that God had His own use for her. Others faced the lions
in the circus; others lived in caves in the desert. She was to be St. Helena Empress,
not St. Helena Martyr or St. Helena Anchorite. She accepted a state of life full
of dangers to the soul in which many foundered, and she remained fixed in her
purpose until at last it seemed God had no other use for her except to continue [to
persevere] to the end, a kind, old lady. Then came her call to a singular peculiar
act of service, something unattempted before and unrepeatablethe finding of
the True Cross [the Inventio Crucis Verae]. (930-931my emphasis added)
Waugh once again mentions and faces the skeptics and the mockeries:
We have no absolute certainty that she found it. The old sneer, that there was
enough wood of the cross to build a ship, though still repeated, has long been
nullified....But there is no guarantee which would satisfy an antiquary, of the
authenticity of Helena's discovery [inventio in Latin]. If she found the True
Cross, it was by direct supernatural aid, not by archaeological reasoning. That,
from the first, was its patent of title....And who would have tried to trick her?
Not St. Macarius certainly [who was the attentive bishop of Jerusalem]. But it is
nevertheless possible that Helena was tricked, or that she and her companions
mistook casual baulks of timber, builders' waste long buried, for the wood they
4 Maurice Baring, In My End Is My Beginning (London: William Heinemann LTD, 1931). As Baring says at the very
beginning of his book's Preface: The title of this book needs some explanation. The inscription 'IN MY END IS MY
BEGINNING' was the motto embroidered upon the Chair of State of [Mary] the Queen of Scots. (p. vii) This tragic and
manifoldly haunting and lovely Catholic woman died young in captivity in England, due to the perfidious injustices of
Queen Elizabeth Tudor and William Cecil. She is also known as Queen Mary Stuart of Scotland (1547-1567).

sought; that the Label, somehow[i.e., The 'Label'...the inscription Jesus of

Nazareth, King of the Jews (931)]got added to her treasure later. Even so her
enterprise was something life-bringing. (931my bold emphasis added; italics
in the original)
And now we shall come to consider how and why that initiative and its fruit was life-bringing.
Waugh now again tries to combat the trivialization of Helena's claimed discovery, and, implicitly,
also those who would call the reputed discovery merely fantastic. (932) Waugh even thinks Helena's
discovery entitles her to a place in the Doctorate of the Church. (932my emphasis added) We
now seek to know what, especially, she taught us. Waugh may surprise us by boldly saying:
She was asserting in sensational form a dogma that was in danger of neglect.
Power was shifting. In the academies of the Eastern and South-Eastern
Mediterranean sharp, sly minds were everywhere looking for phrases and
analogies [a sort of syncretism] to reconcile [sic] the new, blunt creed for which
men had died [as of 326 A.D.], with the ancient speculations which had
beguiled their minds, and with the occult rites which had for generations
spiced their logic. (932my emphasis added)
Moreover, as is the case still today, these sharp, sly minds thought that
Everything about the new religion was capable of interpretation [as with the
Neo-Modernist Hermeneutics?], could be refined and diminished; everything
except the unreasonable assertion that God became man and died on the Cross;
not a myth or an allegory; true God, truly incarnate, tortured to death at a
particular moment in time, at a particular geographical place, as a matter of
plain historical fact. This was the stumbling-block in Carthage, Alexandria,
Ephesus and Athens, and at this [stumbling-block, scandalon] all the talents of
the time [circa 325 A.D.] went to work [pace Saint Athanasius!], to reduce,
hide, and eliminate.
Constantine was no match for them. Schooled on the battlefields and in
diplomatic conferences, where retreat was often the highest strategy, where truth
was a compromise between irreconcilable opposites....Constantine, not yet
baptised, still fuddled perhaps by dreams of Alexander [the Great]; Constantine
was quite out of his depth. The situation of the Church was more perilous,
though few saw it [one of the few being Saint Athanasius], than in the days of
persecution. And at that crisis suddenly emerged, God-sent from luxurious
retirement in the far north, a lonely, resolute old woman with a single practical
task clear before her; to turn the eyes of the world back to the planks of wood
on which their salvation hung. (932my emphasis added)
That was Helena's life-bringing Mission and Achievement. She discovered, after all, the
Lignum Vitaethe Wood of Life . Ave Crux, Spes Unice.
In conclusion, Waugh says and it is an insight very important to him, and very intimate:
8

What we can learn from Helena is something about the [Providential] workings
of God; that He wants a different thing from each of us, laborious or easy,
conspicuous or quite private, but something which only we can do and for
which we were each created. (933my emphasis added)
CODA
In 1935, five years after he had been received in the Catholic Church (on 29 September 1930),
Evelyn Waugh first published his profoundly moving book on the Jesuit proto-martyr in Elizabethan
England, Saint Edmund Campion (d. 1 December 1581). His book, entitled Edmund Campion, was in
large part an act of thanksgiving, both for the heroic virtue and the way of sacrifice of Campion himself
(who, in 1930, was not yet fully canonized), and also for the gift of the Faith itself, especially for those
persons who had helped him, especially Father Martin D'Arcy, S.J., to whom, under God, I owe my
Faith.5 Waugh even dedicated his Campion book to Father D'Arcy, S.J.,Some-Time Master of
Campion Hall, Oxford. Indeed, Father D'Arcy had been so important in Waugh's earlier Catholic
formation and to his final coming into the Church even helping him to be received at the Farm
Street Jesuit Church in London (Mayfair).
More importantly for our present purposes, Evelyn Waugh later wrote a further-revealing
Preface to American Edition, first in 1946, just after World War II and two years before the
Declaration of the Jewish State of Israel in May of 1948. At the end of that short and sobering Preface,
Waugh said:
We have come much nearer to Campion since [Richard] Simpson's day [the latemid Victorian era, when the learned biographer (d. 1876) himself wrote his
Edmund Campion (1867)]. He wrote in the flood-tide of toleration, when [Queen]
Elizabeth's persecution seemed as remote as Diocletian's. We know now [in 1946]
that his age was a brief truce in the unending war. We have seen the Church
driven underground in one country after another. The martyrdom of Father Pro
[S.J.,] in Mexico re-enacted Campion's. In fragments and whispers we get news
o f other saints in the prison camps of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, of
cruelty and degradation more frightful than anything in Tudor England and
of the same pure light shining in the darkness, uncomprehended. The hunted,
trapped, murdered priest is amongst us again, and the voice of Campion comes
to us across the centuries as though he were walking at our side.6

Six years after his 1946 Preface to Edmund Campion, Waugh began his The Defense of the Holy
Places Part III of his book The Holy Places with the following trenchant and ominous words:
5 Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), p. ix.Preface to American Edition.
6 Ibid., p. xmy emphasis added.

On one side a people possessed by implacable resentment, on the other by

limitless ambition; between them [as of 1951] a haphazard frontier determined
by the accidents of battle and still, in spite of the truce, the scene of recurrent acts
of atrocity and revenge; on that line and cut through by it, the most sacred city of
the world. (934my emphasis added)
We soon find out that the city is Jerusalem. On one side, the Arab people, both Christian and
Mohammedan; on the other side the Zionists, atheists, and Orthodox Jews. The matter of Jerusalem
was still in dispute, especially after the dedicated announcement of the Jewish State of Israel, which
declared independence and was formally founded on 14 May 1948, followed by the multiple
vacillations of the United Nations Organization. Waugh then comments on what happened only seven
months after the formal establishment of the Jewish State:
Publicists and politicians [as of 1952] have conspired to forget and to make
forgotten the open wound in international honour. On 11th December 1948, the
General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed Jerusalem unique and
granted international status under United Nations control which neither then nor
later was made effective. Now, by a double act of aggression as flagrant as the
[25 June 1950 North Korean] invasion of South Korea, the city has become a
battle-ground temporarily divided between two irreconcilable enemies. One
voice only is heard reproaching the nations with their betrayalthe Pope's
[Pius XII's voice]; but he speaks as always in terms of generations and centuries.
When he says that internationalism is the only proper solution of the problem he
[Pope Pius XII] does not mean that it is expedient to evict the usurpers [the
Zionists] immediately. The great opportunity has been lost. It will come back one
day on the tide of history. Meanwhile the Holy City stands as a chilly
monument to the moral confusion of our rulers. (934my emphasis added)
We may now continue to receive insights about the truth of history and from Waugh's fresh and
honest vantage point and perspective also to learn things about the Holy Land and its history that
many today are not knowledgeable of, and are even quite fearful to discuss fully and thus with candor.
It is good, therefore, for us to receive these Reports from Reality from 1951-1952, in the longer light
of history, so that we may also better understand the current actualities in and about the Jewish State of
Israel. For example, Waugh candidly tells us:
It was typical of this confusion [the moral confusion of our rulers] that even at
a time when it seemed as though the international politicians were ready to
protect Jerusalem, they spoke of it as being sacred to three great world
religions suggesting that the rights and claims of Christian, Mohammedan
and Jew were similar and equal. In fact there are decisive theological and
historical differences. Christianity and Mohammedanism may both be reasonably
be called world religions in that each offers a cosmic system of the relations of
all mankind to God. Judaism is the religion of a particular people, a system of
10

rites and social habits which united a nation once dispersed, now partly
reassembled in a national state. The Temple of Jerusalem was once the sole
focus of Jewish worship. There alone a priestly order [the Aaronic Priesthood]
sacrificed to the national deity. When the Temple was destroyed by [the Roman
General and future Emperor] Titus in A.D. 70 the Jewish religion was
profoundly changed. Since then there has been no priesthood and no sacrifice. In
A.D. 363 the [Roman] Emperor Julian the Apostate [only 37 years after Saint
Helena's own discovery of the True Cross in A.D. 326, and himself a nephew of
Constantine!] ordered the restoration of the [Jewish] Temple and of its worship,
but the work was interrupted by a cataclysm which contemporary witnesses
accepted as a divine intervention. Since then no responsible Jew has advocated the
rebuilding of the Temple....The orthodox Jews, who form some eighteen per cent
of the population of Israel [circa 1951-1952], believe that the work can only be
undertaken when there is an unmistakable, apocalyptic summons. The ten per
cent of [Jewish] dogmatic atheists, of course, expect no such event. The majority
of Zionists are being encouraged to see the fulfilment of the prophecies in the
establishment of the State of Israel. For the first time no Jew has access to the
Wailing Wall [which is in East Jerusalem and is believed by the Jews to be an
actual remnant from the Temple of Solomon itself], but it is not in the temper of
the new State to lament past glories but instead to exalt present achievements.
There is a strong movement to divert the national disposition for mourning into
more topical channels. (935-936my emphasis added)
For those who might still think that the Christian Crusades were ad bellum an unjust war of
aggression or even a disproportionate pre-emptive strike, Evelyn Waugh has some helpful
observations:
The Mohammedans were late-comers. Jerusalem had been the sacred city of
Christianity for six hundred years before it fell to Omar [in 637 A.D.]. He
himself entered with all reverence and chivalrously refrained from entering
the Holy Sepulchre, an act commemorated in the neighboring mosque. It is
probable that the prophet passed through Jerusalem on his way to Damascus. It is
certain that he picked up a great respect for the place in the garbled versions of
Christianity [e.g., Nestorian] and Judaism which formed the basis of his
meditations. At one time he turned to Jerusalem to pray. But in the end he left his
bones in Medina and appointed Mecca as the prime centre of pilgrimage and
devotion. Jerusalem comes third to the Mohammedan and only one spot there
is of supreme importance, the rock over which the great Dome stands, reputed to
be the altar on which Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac; the foundation
of the altar is both the Jewish Holy of Holies and the taking-off place of the
Prophet's visionary visit to Paradise. It was a Christian church for three
hundred years before Omar [637 A.D.] and again for a century under the
Crusaders, but it is now [in 1952] recognized by all as an inalienable
Mohammedan possession. It lies on its great platform on the east of the
city....When internationalisation comes [if ever!], it will be...an integral part of the
Arab Kingdom. The rest of the ancient city [of Jerusalem] comprises [as of 1952]
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a dense constellation of Christian Holy Places....Indeed the conditions which

provoked the First Crusade were scarcely more offensive to the pilgrim than
those existing today [even in 1952, let alone in 2015!]. (936-938my emphasis
added)
We may also now consider through Waugh's eyes one more matter of moment, something which
happened just before the Mohammedan conquest of Jerusalem and something that is intimately related
to Saint Helena herself, as it turns out:
Meanwhile one wanders backward through history....Then one may find tucked
away underground all that is left of the original buildings of Constantine and
Helena. That great assembly of building was destroyed by the Persians [shortly]
before the Mohammedan invasions, by Chosroes in 614, who carried off the
True Cross. The [Roman] Emperor Heraclius was the first true Crusader.
Solemnly dedicating his arms, he invaded Persia eight years later [622] and
brought the relic home in triumph, while the monk Modestus travelled throughout
the Empire raising funds for the rebuilding....Certain events are of determining
importance. The destruction by Chosroes and rebuilding by Modestus and
Heraclius is one of them; next, very soon after, the surrender of the city to the
Caliph Omar in 637. His [Omar's] Mohammedan successors did not imitate
his chivalry. In 1009 the Caliph Hakim, an Egyptian, tried to extirpate
Christianity in his dominions. (942-943my emphasis added)
Evelyn Waugh does not explicitly speak of the collaboration of the Jews and Persians in the 614
conquest of Jerusalem and its aftermath, but it is something many Jewish scholars themselves (e.g. in
the learned, early-20th Century Jewish Encyclopedia) frankly celebrate: the Jewish revenge taken on the
Christians in 614 A.D., who putatively had persecuted them and even for quite a long time,
purportedly.
In his 1936 book, entitled The Battleground, about the long history of Greater Syria (hence of the
Holy Land), Hilaire Belloc also speaks of Persia in Jerusalem, and of subversively collaborating Jews:
In A.D. 573 the anti-Christian Persian Army, advantaged by quarrels in the
Christian camp, again captured Antioch and when they ebbed away took with
them one-third of a million Syrians. This late Persian victory was not the last;
Syria was overrun again in 607; and half a dozen years later there is a Persian
garrison established in Antioch once more. That invading army seized [the key
strategic city of] Damascus as well; and the next year, A.D. 614, they took
Jerusalem.
It looked for a moment like the end of Syria. The True Cross was taken, and
another great herd of Christian prisoners from Jerusalem, the numbers are
differently handed down to us (some say 90,000, none less than 30,000, but at any
rate a very great number) were taken captive to be sold into slavery.* It was
recorded that this was the occasion of another Jewish revenge, the last before
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the coming of Islam. The Jews had been forbidden to inhabit Jerusalem by the
Christian Empire. The Jews [as collaborators of the Persians, once again, this time
on the inner front of Jerusalem itself] bought up, it is said, the Christian
prisoners from the heathen Persians and massacred them.
There was in command in Byzantium at that moment a very remarkable
man, the Emperor Heraclius, the last of those who kept up the fight for Syria
and the Oriental frontiers of Rome. Not ten years after the [614] catastrophe of
Jerusalem he organised a great rally, based upon the religious enthusiasm of his
subjects. He dedicated his efforts to Our Lady and Our Lord, whose images he
had borne before him. He destroyed the Persian Army opposed to him in Asia
Minor, and, although barbarian swarms were menacing Constantinople itself,
he established himself at the very end of his effort in Mesopotamia, gaining a
great victory near the ruins of Nineveh.
Chosroes, the Persian King who had triumphed at Jerusalem was dead, his son
would not keep up the struggle, and the symbolic act which marked what was
apparently a final and decisive Christian victory over the Orient, was the
restoration of the True Cross.7

With Evelyn Waugh himself now in mind, especially his sorrow of heart and sense of growing
tragedy transpiring in the Catholic Church during the last five years of his life (1961-1966), Hilaire
Belloc's noble presentation of the tragic sequel to Heraclius' apparent victory against the Persians will
touch the human heart and it may even have been movingly read by Waugh himself some time after
1936 and before 1965. Moreover, Belloc's insights might also apply to our current situation in 2015 in
the Middle East and in Europe, amidst a weakened Cultural Immune System in the Catholic Church.
Let us, therefore, meditate upon Belloc's own noble and elegiac words concerning the Eastern
Christian Frontier during the years roughly from 614-637 A.D.:
The power of our civilisation seemed, by a sudden reverse of fortune, restored in
Syria for good, and the Christian name would now attach to all that land for ever.
The name of Heraclius might stand as that of Constantine stands; he might have
been the pacificator and rebuilder of everything, to whom we should look back
as the second founder of Christian peace throughout at least the eastern, Greek,
part of the Mediterranean world. But the event was enormously otherwise.
Even at the moment when the Holy Cross was being restored [circa 622 A.D.]
and our power over the Orient triumphantly affirmed, with the re-establishment of
Christian Syria once more as a permanent bastion, there was arising unsuspected
a force which was to undo everything. The desert was about to return. Islam
7 Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground (London: Cassell and Company LTD., 1936), pp. 282-283my emphasis added. This
profound strategic-historical book was dedicated to Belloc's dear friend and frequent travel companion, Edmund L.
Ware, whom he often fittingly and affectionately called Bear Ware!

13

was born and was upon the march to conquerbut of this Heraclius amid his
Christian triumph knew nothing.8

In his lucid, learned, and profoundly sympathetic book on Evelyn Waugh's life and abundant
writings Evelyn Waugh's Officers, Gentlemen, and Rogues: The Facts behind His Fiction 9 a
Jesuit Professor, Gene D. Phillips, S.J., will lead us to consider the poignant end of Waugh's own life
and how he strove to keep his interest in Chivalry and in the Crusades, especially in honourable and
chivalrous men also like Guy Crouchback (and his beloved father) in his final Sword of Honour
Trilogy (1965).
Phillips first cites another Jesuit and scholar who certainly knew Evelyn Waugh very well:
At the end of his life, Father D'Arcy recalls, Evelyn was going through a bad
period....Everything which he had stood for had gone up in smoke, he thought.
The allies had sided with Yugoslavia and Russia, two Communist countries in
World War II. And Vatican II [1962-1965] had hit him hard. He thought that
what happened during the Protestant Revolt would happen again [in the LiberalModernist Revolt]. The Protestants had started with putting the Mass in the
vernacular and ended by abolishing it altogether, a phenomenon which Waugh
had treated in his life of Edmund Campion [1935].
Waugh therefore could not bring himself at any time to accept the aggiornamento
(renewal [sic]) in the Church because he saw it [the purported updating] as a
capitulation to the modern age, as I noted in discussing his [1965] Preface to the
one-volume edition of the Sword of Honour Trilogy.....Or, as Waugh says in his
Diary, One has heard all the world has to say, and wants no more of it. (9 May
1962)
Because of his unhappy frame of mind, Waugh did not write much during his last
year [1965-1966]. He was commissioned to write a history of the Crusades,
says Teresa Waugh D'Arms [his daughter], and he read a great deal on the
subject for several months. But he finally gave up the [long-range] project in
weariness and distaste. Fortunately he was able to repay the advance which he had
received for the book, which wasn't easy. Waugh's interest in the Holy Land had
already produced Helena [and The Holy Places], but he could no longer muster
enthusiasm for a long-term project. Shortly before his death Waugh decided to
begin work on the second volume 10 of his autobiography, A Little Hope, but he
8 Ibid., p. 283my emphasis added.
9 Gene D. Phillips, Evelyn Waugh's Officers, Gentlemen, and Rogues: The Facts behind the Fiction (Chicago: NelsonHall, 1975). Page reference to Father Phillips' book will be placed in parentheses the main body of this above.
10 For the first volume of Evelyn Waugh's autobiography, see A Little Learning: The Early Years (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1964). Then he moves on to his following title, A Little Hope,
which was to come after A Little Learning. Something to meditate on with compassion, I believe, even the meaning of
the sequential, carefully chosen titles.

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finished only eight pages. (152, 154my emphasis added )11

Father Phillips visited Evelyn Waugh's wife, Laura, at her home at Combe Florey, and she also
received him very warmly, after Laura Waugh graciously invited me to visit her there (155):
To Laura Waugh the reason her husband developed a writing block during his last
year seems clear: I would have thought it obvious that with the changes in the
Church he lost all impetus to creative writing. Waugh's published utterances
abo ut the changes initiated by Vatican II make hers the most plausible
explanation. Some obituaries speculated on what kind of fiction Waugh would
have written had he lived, but Harriet Waugh [his daughter] says that he had
decided he would write no more fiction after he published [in 1965] the
revised [chivalrous] trilogy [Sword of Honour].
Evelyn Waugh died in his home at Combe Florey on Easter Sunday, 10 April
1966, only an hour after attending with his family a Mass celebrated in Latin by
Father [Philip] Caraman [S.J.]. The funeral Mass [the traditional Requiem Mass]
at nearby Wivescombe was also in Latin, as was the special memorial Mass on 21
April at Westminster Cathedral in London presided over [sic] by Cardinal Heenan
[who had variously betrayed Evelyn Waugh12]. At the end of the memorial service
[sic] military trumpets sounded throughout the cathedral to honor the army
[Captain and Commando Officer and disillusioned] veteran of World War II.
Waugh lies buried on the grounds of Combe Florey, his home for the last decade
of his life, where his wife Laura continued to live until her death in June 1973.
(154-155my emphasis added)
May Evelyn and Laura Waugh now rest truly in peace, knowing now, too, the Gaudium de
Veritate: the joy that comes from the truth. And may they also thus know, in their generous and modest
gratitude, an abiding companionship with their beloved Helena, Saint Helena of the Cross.
Is not Sancta Helena's belated Inventio Crucis Verae also, under Grace, now an intimate and
resonant mission for us, as well, even for us personally? Even though we may have been for too long
much more sorrowful and more slothful13 than Evelyn Waugh or Helena? Yet now, like generous
Helena herself, we may also, Deo adiuvante, pray for our own vulnerable children and still, like her
11 Evelyn Waugh also wrote a profound essay on growing old and on the deadly sin of Sloth (in Latin, Acedia or Tristitia
de bono spirituali). See, especially, his original January 1962 article on Sloth,later to be found more conveniently in
the anthology, The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: William Morrow, 1962), pp. 55-64. See also The Seven Deadly Sins,
editor Raymond Mortimer (London, 1962).
12 See A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes (Edited by Scott M.
Reid) (London: The Austin Press, 1996, 2000),
13 Evelyn Waugh, Sloth in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (edited by Donat Gallagher) (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1983, 1984), pp. 572-576. This searching and honest essay, later frequently reprinted in
anthologies, was first printed on 7 January 1962 in the London Sunday Times.

15

and Captain Waugh, become profoundly grateful late-comers to Christ and to His more abundant Life
in time and in eternity.
You are my especial patrons, said Helena, and patrons of all late-comers, of all
who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with
knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves
partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents. Dear
cousins, pray for me, said Helena, and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too,
before the end find kneeling-space in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish
utterly....For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts [when the three of you
knelt in adoration at the Epiphany], pray always for all the learned, the oblique,
the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple
come into their kingdom.14

--Finis- 2015 Robert Hickson

14 Evelyn Waugh, Helena (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950), p. 224. It is, especially, a mother's prayer for her
son, still unbaptized, still presumptuous, overloaded as Emperor, and possessed of Power without Grace (185, 186).

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