make him 'perfect.' Part of the process requires that he deny fundamental mathematics. O'Brien, Winston's torturer cum father confessor, proposes that two plus two equal five, but he is not satisfied when Winston acquiesces to this absurdity. He demands that Winston believe the sum is five. In fact, he must even transcend the report of his senses. When O'Brien holds up four fingers, he demands that Winston at once see that there are four and believe there are five and simultaneously know that he is exercising the process of doublethink. 'Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston,' O'Brien explains.
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right… But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
With impeccable logic, O'Brien demonstrates the political advantages of believing in nothing: it renders one capable of believing in anything-anything, that is, that the Party decides will be true for the moment.
When Winston protests that this is nonsense, that the Party can't control the laws of nature, can't stop aging and disease, can't know the minds of others, O'Brien calmly demurs. He points out reasonably that whatever happens outside the mind is unknowable and whatever happens within is fully controllable. 'We make the laws of nature,' he boasts. 'Reality is inside the skull… There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation- anything. I could float off this floor like -889- a soap bubble if I wished to.' Without an objective standard to appeal to, Winston flails about to regain his intellectual footing. 'The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind- surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false?' When he desperately insists that 'there is something in the universe-I don't know, some spirit, some principle-that you will never overcome,' O'Brien asks the question Mr. Todd had asked of Tony Last: 'Do you believe in God?' Winston doesn't. 'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?' O'Brien demands. 'I don't know,' Winston replies, appealing vaguely to 'the spirit of Man.' The novel's bleak ending does not make this seem an effective appeal.
It is typical of Orwell's integrity that he did not make things easy for himself in his inverted utopia. Elsewhere he had argued that belief in absolutes, whether God or political ideology, diminishes the individual human being. Yet here he displays the individual's vulnerability in a world stripped of any fixed coordinates external to the mind. In such a world, power, not impartial inquiry, must always be the final arbiter of truth.
Unlike Orwell, Waugh did believe in absolutes. After reading 1984, he wrote to Orwell to say how much he admired his novel but added that he couldn't agree with its metaphysics. One can see why, especially in his novel Helena. Here he openly marshals the tenets of his faith to defeat the argument that reality is a purely mental affair. While his theology may only persuade the already convinced, it nevertheless allowed him to examine one of the critical problems of modern thought: How does one refute O'Brien's solipsistic logic without appealing to an absolute?
For Waugh there was but one way out of this impasse. As he had written in 1946, human nature could only achieve 'its determining character' in the recognition 'of being God's creature with a defined purpose.' Only in light of this purpose, he believed, could the mind hope to address reality confidently and effectively. This is the burden of Helena.
Waugh liked to say that Helena was his best novel. Very few have agreed with this estimate. Unlike his other fiction, with the partial exception of Brideshead Revisited, it is frankly a work of apologetics. Yet it has its own charm as a historical romance, amusingly written in a modern vernacular, and it has special value for anyone interested in Waugh because it so clearly reveals the premises upon which his other novels rest. -890-
The narrative retells the story of St. Helena, mother of Constantine and alleged finder of the True Cross. In Waugh's version of the legend, Helena's first promptings toward Christianity are much the same as his. Like him, she is drawn to its straightforward rational arguments and its insistence on its simple historical origins. She finds this a refreshing contrast to the exotic mystery cults of her day with their subtle metaphysics and ingenious exegesis of ancient myths.
Helena is constitutionally unreceptive to intellectuals who delight in speculation for its own sake. Marcias, the eunuch slave who was once her tutor, is such a thinker. A professional Gnostic, he gives lectures on the mystery religions. Helena attends one of his talks on the significance of the fertility goddess Astarte. At his recital's conclusion, she demands to know 'when and where did all this happen?' Marcias informs her that her question is childish. 'These things are beyond time and space.' But the plainspoken Helena is not so easily put off. 'It's all bosh,' she concludes, using her favorite term of dismissal.
Marcias is portrayed as an irresponsible intellectual-a clever, talented man, obviously sophisticated and well-read, but without convictions. At bottom, he cares little for the consequences of his teachings except as they help or hinder his career. When things become at all difficult, he simply retreats into his mind, 'sailing free and wide in the void he made his chilly home.' He is as sterile intellectually as he is physically.
This is why Helena turns her back on him. Later, once her interest in Christianity has been aroused, she decides the best way to consolidate her faith and that of others will be to locate Christ's cross. She is convinced there can be no better proof of the incarnation than the historical artifact, the 'solid chunk of wood' on which Christ was crucified. She will have nothing to do with Marcias's mysticism.
We meet variations of Marcias's type throughout Waugh's fiction-for instance, Mr. Samgrass in Brideshead Revisited. An Oxford don, Samgrass enjoys an encyclopedic grasp of history and culture, but he is, for all his intellectual attainments, essentially shallow. We're told that although
not a man of religious habit… he knew more than most Catholics about their Church; he had friends in the Vatican and could talk at length of policy and appointments… what recent theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he had everything except the Faith. -891-
Samgrass, or Sammy, as he is called by condescending acquaintances, is a little man who makes his way in the world by toadying to the whims of his aristocratic patrons. Despite his erudition, he is no more than a soulless flunky, at best an object of scorn, at worst an interfering nuisance.
Mr. Prendergast in Decline and Fall is a more pathetic version of the type. He is a parson who suffers 'Doubts.' He accepts an assignment as a prison chaplain because the post does not require that he hold any particular beliefs at all.
These figures and others like them have an identifiable source in Waugh's life. Looking back in 1949, he tells us of the theologian who 'inadvertently made [him] an atheist' in his early youth. This happened the day he informed his public school class that none of the Bible's books were written by their supposed authors and then invited his students 'to speculate in the manner of the fourth century on the nature of Christ.' Once this worthy had 'removed the inherited axioms' of his faith, Waugh reports that he found himself quite unable 'to follow him in the higher flights of logic by which he reconciled his own scepticism with his position as a clergyman.'
Waugh was always troubled by such sophistication. 'If its own mind is not made up,' he reasoned, religion, however erudite, 'can hardly hope to withstand disorder from outside.' When the mind retreats into itself, it either loses the strength to confront reality or, alternatively, it willfully constructs a private, self-centered reality. It was better, he reasoned, 'to be narrow-minded than to have no mind, to hold limited and rigid principles than to have none at all.'
Waugh portrayed both his decent agnostics and his unprincipled intellectuals as wholly unready to stand up to the barbarism that, in his view, was always clamoring at the gates of civilization. When a fanatic inmate decides Reverend Prendergast doesn't believe in Christ, he takes a saw and decapitates the hapless clergyman. This gruesome episode stands as a metaphor of one of Waugh's central themes: modern man rendered impotent by doubt, his intellect uselessly detached from reality.
As his Helena recoiled from the mystery cults of her time, so Waugh was repelled by what he took to be the subtle evasions of modern thought. Either there was a truth to be found or there was none at all. Either the human mind could discern a purpose to existence or life was meaningless. For Waugh there was no middle ground. From his conversion in 1930, the choice for him was always 'between Christianity -892- and Chaos.' (This, of course, was true on intellectual grounds, not behavioral; Waugh readily acknowledged that his actions aligned with his ideals only intermittently. His personal incivility is legendary. He was a man capable of reducing sincere admirers to confusion and even tears for no better reason than personal pique. When asked how one who professed to be a
