The Season of Brideshead: Sex and sainthood pt 2

Sex and sainthood part 2
The  saint side of Sebastian may seem hard to grasp now, and I will only make it harder over the next while (Sebastian fans will hate me before long).

When John Bejteman wrote Waugh about his novel Helena and said that its lead character didn't seem much like a saint, here is how Waugh answered him:

Saints are simply souls in heaven. Some people have been so sensationally holy in life that we know they went straight to heaven and so put them in the [liturgical] calendar. We all have to become saints before we get to heaven....And each individual has his own peculiar form of sanctity which he must achieve or perish. It is no good saying, "I wish I were like Joan of Arc or St. John of the Cross." I can only be St. Evelyn Waugh - after God knows what experiences in purgatory. 

I liked Helena's sanctity because it is in contrast to all that moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn't thrown to the lions, she wasn't a contemplative, she wasn't poor and hungry, she didn't look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God had chosen for her to do and did it.

(That's from The Letters of Evelyn Waugh edited by Mark Amory pp 339-340.)

I think you can see from that how Sebastian Flyte's path to sainthood might work. That saints are "simply souls in heaven" is a good way of putting it. We might think of saints as impossibly good people but Catholic teaching is that we are all called to be saints.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here.