Helena

Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh considered Helena to be his finest novel. A man who understood himself essentially as a Christian pilgrim and as a writer by vocation, Waugh himself admitted he was a very bad Christian and once told a society matron, “Madame, were it not for the faith, I should scarcely be human.” Throughout this crisp and deceptively simple telling of the life of Helena—mother of the Emperor Constantine and finder of the true cross—Waugh explores the question, how does one become a saint? His friend, poet John Betjeman, confessed to Waugh that Helena certainly “doesn’t seem like a saint,” to which Waugh replied: “I like 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 didn’t look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was God had chosen for her to do and did it.” For both Helena and Waugh, it seems the “remorseless fact of the lump of wood to which Christ was nailed in agony” reminds us, most importantly, that we have been created, and we have been redeemed.

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