Faith & Spirit Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh is doing what he does best: smuggling a social provocation into a prayer and daring you to object without looking philistine. On the surface, it reads like pious generosity toward “the learned, the oblique, the delicate.” Underneath, it’s a barbed dispatch from a writer who watched modern mass culture flatten distinctions and then congratulate itself for the demolition.

The key trick is his reversal of Christian expectations. Christianity traditionally privileges the meek, the poor in spirit, the “simple.” Waugh doesn’t deny them; he grants them a coming “kingdom,” a phrase that echoes the Beatitudes while quietly twisting them into political forecast. When “the simple” rule, he implies, the refined will become a minority in need of protection, even charity. The prayer asks God to remember the very people the modern world is learning to sneer at: intellectuals, aesthetes, those who move at angles (“oblique”) rather than in straight lines of popular taste.

It’s also a self-portrait with plausible deniability. Waugh, the Catholic convert and satirist of English manners, knew that “delicacy” can be virtue and affectation at once. By placing these traits “at the throne of God,” he treats cultural refinement as something like a moral endangered species, not merely a lifestyle choice. The line lands because it’s both snobbish and anxious: a witty prayer for elites that doubles as a critique of an age that mistakes simplification for justice.