---
title: Waugh's Helena
tags: [Literature, Quotes, Christianity]
summary: A favorite passage from near the end of Evelyn Waugh's wonderful novel, Helena.
banner: twocrowns.jpg
---

I wanted to briefly share a favorite passage from near the end of Evelyn Waugh's beautiful novel, *Helena*.  The first time I listened to this passage, I can still recall where I was on the highway from Lexington to Louisville.  It spoke so directly to me that I wept.

The novel follows St. Helena (sometimes known as St. Helen), the mother of Constantine.  Much of the novel is a meditation on the conversion of the Roman Empire, especially the transition from Christianity being a marginal affair to something possible for the upper classes.

Toward the end of the novel, Helena makes a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, and here she makes a prayer to the three wise men, a moving expression of the paradox we find in St. Matthew's gospel that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," and yet, "...with God all things are possible."[^dV]

  [^dV]: Matthew 10:25--27.

> "You are my especial patrons," said Helena, "and patrons of all
> late-comers, of all who have had 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. And
> pray for Lactantius and Marcias and the young poets of Trèves and
> for the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe
> Odysseus and for the great Longinus."
> 
> "For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always
> for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite
> forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their
> kingdom."

The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the simple; it is *their* kingdom.  And yet...the grace of God may extend even to the rich, the powerful, the sophistocated, even to an emperor like Constantine and a queen like his mother.  What a happy inversion!  What a hope!  That humble barn of Bethlehem has room enough for the whole world, and the only hope of the great is, like Constantine, to find before the end "kneeling-space in the straw."

There is also here a hope for classical culture, "the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe Odysseus and for the great Longinus."  This culture receives some redemption not on its own merits, but because it, like Constantine, finds some "kneeling-space" by the grace of God.

![Discovery of the True Cross](http://dtsheffler.com/images/Agnolo_Gaddi_-_Discovery_of_the_True_Cross_-_WGA08367.jpg)