“Is it nonsense?” Sebastian responds unhappily. I’m very, very much wickeder ” Charles asks him if they try and make him believe “an awful lot of nonsense?” Charles asks if it really makes such a difference to him, as he hasn’t noticed it having much of an impact, and Sebastian replies, “Of course. One evening, Sebastian bemoans the tension his religion creates: “Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic”. Charles understands neither Sebastian’s belief, nor why it gives him so much grief. Sebastian has a very firm understanding that Catholicism is true, and yet lives in complete irreverence to this belief. The first half of the novel, titled, “Et in Arcadia Ego”, follows Sebastian and Charles in their tumultuous youth. They all find, eventually, that no one on this thread is ever far from God, or from each other, and that God’s grace is what surrounds and makes sense of the whole world. Sebastian and Julia, knowing they are hooked on the thread, still attempt to escape, whereas Charles does not understand and does not notice, not until the very end, that he has also been caught. I would argue that, as thieves, they have all attempted to steal their own lives, to place their own happiness above the goodness of God. The significance of this intertextual reference to Father Brown’s “unseen hook” is apparent from the fact that Waugh titled the second section of the novel, “A Twitch Upon the Thread.” This image of God’s grace as an invisible, inescapable line sheds light on the spiritual conflicts within several of the main characters-especially Sebastian, Julia, and Charles-and their roles as runaway thieves on the thread of God’s grace. In the story, the detective says that he had “caught with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread”. Chesterton Father Brown story which Lady Marchmain had read aloud to the family years before. Then she goes on to quote a passage from a G. She assures a disbelieving Charles that “God won’t let them go for long, you know”. Cordelia, the youngest daughter and the most pious of them all, remarks to Charles that “the family haven’t been very constant, have they?” But, surprisingly, her family’s impiety does not seem to trouble her. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, nearly all of the characters spend their lives wrestling with Catholicism in some form or another.
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