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    Lord of the World: A Novel
    Lord of the World: A Novel
    Lord of the World: A Novel
    Ebook406 pages6 hours

    Lord of the World: A Novel

    By Robert Hugh Benson and Mark Bosco

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    "I advise you to read it."--Pope Francis on Lord of the World

    In an airplane news conference on his return from the Philippines in January 2015, Pope Francis mentioned Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World. It wasn't the first time the Holy Father praised the book. This 1907 futuristic narrative has been hailed as the finest work of this unsung, but influential author and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury whose conversion to Catholicism rocked the Church of England in 1903. The compelling book includes a new introduction, a biography of Benson, and a theological reflection.

    Popular young adult books such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, as well as literary classics such as Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, have created a growing interest in dystopian novels. In one of the first such novels of the twentieth century, Robert Hugh Benson imagines a world where belief in God has been replaced by secular humanism. Lord of the World describes a world where Catholics are falling away and priests and bishops are defecting. Only a small remnant of the faithful remains. Julian Felsenburgh, a mysterious and compelling figure arises, promising peace in exchange for blind obedience. Those who resist are subjected to torture and execution. Soon the masses are in Felsenburgh's thrall and he becomes leader of the world. Into this melee steps the novel's protagonist, Fr. Percy Franklin. Dauntless and clear-sighted, Franklin is a bastion of stability as the Catholic Church in England disintegrates around him. Benson's harrowing plot soon brings these two charismatic men into a final apocalyptic conflict.

    With an imagination to rival H. G. Wells and theological insight akin to G. K. Chesterton, Benson's astute novel has captured the attention of many today, including Popes Benedict and Francis. This new edition makes it easily available and features an insightful introduction by Rev. Mark Bosco, S.J., a brief biography of Benson by Martyn Sampson, and a theological reflection by Rev. Michael Murphy, S.J.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAve Maria Press
    Release dateFeb 19, 2016
    ISBN9780870612992
    Lord of the World: A Novel
    Author

    Robert Hugh Benson

    Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) was an English Anglican priest who joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1903 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. He was lauded in his own day as one of the leading figures in English literature and was the author of many novels and apologetic works.

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      Book preview

      Lord of the World - Robert Hugh Benson

      "Prophetic wisdom is often best expressed and appreciated through works of art. Lord of the World is just such a prophetic work of art. The book tells certain critical truths: that evil is at work in our time, that lies embed seeds of destruction in the promise of peace, and that Jesus Christ is victorious through the indignation and suffering of the Cross. Lord of the World is the right book for Christians in the modern world—and there may be no message more critical for our time."

      Most Rev. James D. Conley

      Bishop of Lincoln

      Benson’s dystopic novel is more sinister than the simple hedonism of Huxley’s dystopia and more subtle than the sheer brutality of Orwell’s. I welcome Ave Maria Press’s new edition of this classic and prophetic work.

      Joseph Pearce

      Editor of the St. Austin Review

      "While addressing present trends and times, both Pope Francis and his predecessor have made reference to The Lord of the World. For curious or prudential minds, that is reason enough to seek out the story, but by including both a fresh, context-clarifying introduction to Robert Hugh Benson and his dystopian tale and an invaluable meditation on the theology that drives it, Ave Maria Press gives us a relevant and readable edition of a harrowing 1907 novel that, in places, seems all too familiar and timely."

      Elizabeth Scalia

      Author of Strange Gods

      Originally published in 1907.

      ____________________________________

      Introduction © 2016 by Mark Bosco, S.J.

      A Theological Reflection © 2016 by Michael P. Murphy

      Benson’s Conversion and the Writing of Lord of the World © 2016 by Martyn Sampson

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Christian Classics™, Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

      Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

      www.christian-classics.com

      Paperback: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-298-5

      E-book: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-299-2

      Cover image of St. George’s Cathedral in Southwark, South East London © Ministry of Information Photo Division/Imperial War Museums, UK.

      Cover design by Katherine Ross.

      Text design by Andy Wagoner.

      Printed and bound in the United States of America.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Benson, Robert Hugh, 1871-1914, author.

      Title: Lord of the world : a novel / Robert Hugh Benson.

      Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : Christian Classics, [2016]

      Identifiers: LCCN 2015037870| ISBN 9780870612985 (softcover) | ISBN

      9780870612992 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: End of the world--Fiction. | GSAFD: Christian fiction. |

      Science fiction.

      Classification: LCC PR6003.E7 L6 2016 | DDC 823/.912--dc23

      LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037870

      Clavi Domus David

      Contents

      Robert Hugh Benson and Lord of the World: Introduction by Mark Bosco, S.J.

      Tantum Ergo: Fury Destroys the World: A Theological Reflection by Michael P. Murphy

      Benson’s Conversion and the Writing of Lord of the World: A Brief Biography by Martyn Sampson

      Lord of the World

      Preface

      Prologue

      Book I: The Advent

      Book II: The Encounter

      Book III: The Victory

      Author Biography

      Robert Hugh Benson and Lord of the World

      Introduction by Mark Bosco, S.J.

      Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 apocalyptic novel, Lord of the World, has always had a small following of readers who enjoy dystopian fiction—novels that imagine a frightening future world. Benson’s novel claims to be the first modern dystopia, preceding the more famous ones, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). For academics, Lord of the World has always been a scholarly footnote of the Catholic literary renaissance that saw so many British intellectuals and artists like Benson convert to the Catholic faith in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

      More recently, the novel gained new relevance when Pope Francis revealed its influence upon his thinking. In a homily in November 2013, the pope referred to Lord of the World when he warned about the dark side of globalization. Offering the term beautiful globalization as an expression through which national identity and traditions are preserved, he warned that this phenomenon can become the more sinister globalization of hegemonic uniformity that is found in Benson’s novel—a uniformity of secular thought born out of human vanity and worldliness.

      In January 2015, as part of the pope’s in-flight interview from Manila to Rome, he referred to the ideological colonization of international family-planning agencies and national governments that impose population control as a condition of development aid. Asked what he meant by this term, Pope Francis told the plane full of reporters, "There is a book, excuse me but I’ll make a commercial . . . it is a book that, at that time, the writer had seen this drama of ideological colonization and wrote that book. It is called Lord of the World. The author is Benson . . . I advise you to read it. Reading it, you’ll understand well what I mean by ideological colonization." With this encouragement, curious journalists, scholars, and Catholic faithful have turned to this apocalyptic novel to see why Francis considers it such a compelling critique of our world today. This new edition of the book makes it more easily accessible to a wide audience.

      Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the apocalyptic imagination in literature found expression in catastrophic tales told for an increasingly secular, Western culture enthralled with technology. One literary strain of this movement found expression in the new genre of science fiction. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne created elaborate scenarios of imagined worlds, filled with prophetic warnings and utopian aspirations for a readership overwhelmed with the seemingly unstoppable possibilities of technological progress.

      In the variant form of the dystopian novel, elements of modern life are projected into the future, and a world is imagined that on the surface appears to be a utopian society but is actually repressive and authoritarian. Dystopias envision a dangerous and alienating future controlled by the State (Orwell’s 1984) or by self-interested elites within that network (Huxley’s Brave New World). Every dystopian novel has one foot in the present and one foot in an imagined future. It begins with a question: What if we continue down the road we’re already on? Its premise is the conviction that time has reached a critical juncture—that there is a unique importance to the present moment—and that the nature of things is being transformed into something vastly different and often sinister. The apocalyptic orientation of this literature thus impels the reader to act, to direct the future by transforming the here and now. In Lord of the World Benson depicts a scenario formulated from within the eschatology of scripture of an anti-Christ, or more accurately an anti-pope, rising to power in the end times. It is a well-crafted and prophetic novel that anticipates and dramatically renders the spiritual and cultural crises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But who is Benson, and how do he and his novel fit into the English Catholic literary revival?

      Robert Hugh Benson—who went by Hugh for most of his life—was born just outside London in 1871, the youngest son of Edward White Benson and Mary Sidgwick. When the young Hugh was twelve years old, his father became the Anglican primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benson was soon after sent to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge, for his education, after which time he would follow in his father’s vocation and be ordained to the Anglican priesthood (by his father) in 1895.

      A year later, his father died suddenly of a heart attack, and the traumatized young man was soon after dispatched on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. Father C. C. Martindale, S.J., in his biography of Benson, noted, [Benson’s] contentment with the Church of England suffered a shock. He travelled straight through France and across North Italy to Venice, and in church after church he found himself, as an ecclesiastical official, to be ignored.¹ His sojourn began a spiritual upheaval that would lead him to question the claims of the Anglican Church. Upon his return to England, he decided to enter an Anglican religious order, the Community of the Resurrection, and made profession with them in 1901. However, his attraction to Rome grew as he continued his studies and deepened friendships with Roman Catholics. In 1903, he was received into the Catholic Church. After nine months of study in Rome, Benson was ordained a Catholic priest.

      For his first assignment, Benson was sent to Cambridge to write and serve as a priest chaplain to the Catholic community; later, he was allowed to live on his own at Hare Street House, devoting himself to writing. A prolific author, his was a peripatetic life of writing, lecturing, and traveling. From 1910 to 1914, Benson made three preaching tours across much of the United States, writing admiringly about American Catholicism:

      [It] inspires the visitor from Europe with an extraordinary sense of life; the churches are not exquisite sanctuaries for dreaming—they are the business offices of the supernatural; the clergy are not picturesque advocates of a beautiful medievalism—they are keen and devoted to the service of God; the people are not pathetic survivals from the Ages of Faith—they are communities of immortal souls bent upon salvation. There is a ring of assurance about Catholic voices; an air of confidence about Catholic movements . . . a swing and energy about Catholic life, that promise well indeed for the future of the Church in this land.²

      Benson was one of a number of British intellectuals who converted to the Catholic faith in the first half of the twentieth century—Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Ronald Knox (another Anglican priest turned Catholic), to name only the best known of the age. As the son of the Anglican primate, Benson was considered a prize catch for the Catholic Church. He had a unique position among writers of his time: in the eyes of Catholics he was an example of the compatibility of the intellectual life with the claims of the Catholic faith; in the eyes of his non-Catholic establishment peers, he was taken seriously as a man of cultural gravitas who prodded them to consider—or reconsider—the inner logic of Roman Catholicism.

      Benson aimed to draw more converts into the faith that had won him. His principle line of argument was intellectual, criticizing the premises of secular philosophy and science, demonstrating their epistemological weaknesses, and exposing their link to a naive idealization of progress—sometimes with ironic admissions that he too had once been deceived by their charms. He also brought his Catholic perspective to bear on the political changes of his era, arguing that without the guidance of faith the world was spinning out of control. Benson would go on to write many apologetic works to advance Catholic thought as an antidote to a rising secularism in English society. Some of his better-known works of apologetics are The Religion of the Plain Man (1906), Paradoxes of Catholicism (1913), and Confessions of a Convert (1913), the latter loosely based on John Henry Newman’s own conversion story, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and first serialized in the American journal Ave Maria before it was published as a book. But Benson preferred fiction to other literary forms in order to advance his Catholic claims. Writing during the Edwardian era when the distinction between highbrow literature and popular fiction first emerged, he aimed for a popular Catholic readership, more in the literary style of H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, he had a prolific career as a best-selling novelist, creating finely researched narratives that went through many editions. Several of his novels were works of historical fiction, often about pre-Reformation or Reformation history that employed didactic points to editorialize about current religious life in Britain. His novel on the conflict between church and state, The Holy Blissful Martyr Saint Thomas of Canterbury (1908), became a sensation and delighted a vast Catholic readership. The book took issue with Protestant histories that valorized the conflict between Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket as an early episode of the Roman Catholic Church’s overreach in its authority. Instead, Benson executed a revisionist interpretation of Becket’s martyrdom as an act of integrity against the creeping influence of the state. The novel would become an important source for T. S. Eliot’s more enduring play, Murder in the Cathedral, first performed in 1935. Come Rack! Come Rope! (1912), perhaps Benson’s most famous historical novel, explores the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, when being or harboring a priest was considered treason and punishable by death. It tells the story of a love affair between children of two Catholic recusant families who, after much intrigue, choose imprisonment and martyrdom over apostasy. Historically accurate and using many archival texts, the title of the work comes from the last words of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, whose final speech after torture concluded with his assurance to his Catholic brethren that he had revealed no things of secret, nor would he, come rack, come rope. Benson also contributed to the emerging genre of the horror novel. His The Necromancers (1909) is a thinly disguised polemic against Spiritualism, popular among certain segments of British society at the time. The novel tells the story of a young man engaged to be married whose fiancée dies. Distraught, he becomes involved with a group of Spiritualists and begins attending séances. He discovers that he has the power of a medium and grows obsessed with making contact with his deceased sweetheart, even as it unleashes diabolic forces upon him. Benson’s biographer approvingly noted that in this novel he brings all his heavy artillery to bear on his professed enemy. Here again the uncanny enters, but rises to the heroic level, and achieves the horrible; and I will confess that I can think of no book which reaches so high a pitch of horror.³ Nevertheless, for contemporary readers, Benson will most probably be remembered for Lord of the World. As Pope Francis suggests, Benson’s one-hundred-year-old vision of the future does not seem that far-fetched. The novel imagines a world of rapid mass transit and rapid communication, of densely packed megacities, and of air transportation via a volor—an advanced Zeppelin-like airplane with wings that crisscrosses the globe at brisk speed. Set around the millennial year 2000, the novel is a future that is now our past, yet it surprises us with its prescience. We read of a European Union at war with the East, of weapons of mass destruction, of mutual annihilation pacts between empires, and of euthanasia centers ready to put an end to any discomfort or suffering. Benson culled much of this vision from the cultural trends of his own time: societies and movements promoting atheism, Marxism, and eugenics; the increase of evangelical revivals throughout Britain and the notoriety of these hypnotic preachers on many people of faith; the global impact of the general strikes and violent protests that led to the Russian Revolution of 1905; and Benson’s personal experience of the first successful socialist government in Britain in 1906. Lord of the World begins with a prologue where the reader hears an old man tell of the political, religious, and ideological history of the world of the time: There are three forces—Catholicism, Humanitarianism, and the Eastern religions. . . . Since the Catholic Church is the only institution that even claims supernatural authority, with all its merciless logic, she has again the allegiance of practically all Christians who have any supernatural belief left (see pages 9–10). Most strikingly the man claims, "You must remember that Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; . . . it has a creed, ‘God is Man,’ and the rest

      . . . yet it makes no demand upon the spiritual faculties (see page 10). Benson clearly captured the spiritual movement already underway in his time: the displacement of Christianity for a religion of materialistic humanism, the age of spiritual but not religious" in ancient guise. Benson constructed, in effect, a militantly secular humanism bereft of God, where the ideals of humanitarianism and tolerance come not from religious conversion or charity but are enforced by laws and regulations from a coercive government. The supernatural is evacuated from humanism and in its place is a rationalism that echoes back to the romantic excesses of the French Revolution.

      Into this moment steps Fr. Percy Franklin, who, in pondering the disintegration of Catholicism throughout the world, heads to Rome to propose to the pope that the Church needs a new religious society of men and women. He suggests that it be called the Order of Christ Crucified. This religious order will help the faithful survive persecution, even if they must go underground. Benson employed all the anti-Catholic propaganda of British Reformation history—with deep echoes of the Gun Powder Plot of 1605—as he narrated the novel’s crisis: Catholic terrorists are accused of blowing up the parliament. The government, under their new charismatic leader, Julian Felsenburgh, declares that every citizen must either disavow God or be executed without trial.

      The novel moves to its final climax, with a remnant faithful hiding in the town of Nazareth. It is a fitting strategy for this apocalyptic tale, for the place of God’s Incarnation becomes the place of our Armageddon. Without giving everything away, I will say only that Benson’s dark dystopia comes full circle. Readers will find in this novel a strand of secular thought very much alive today. If, from a literary point of view, the novel lacks the brilliance of the genre’s greatest exemplars, it satisfies as an adventure story of Catholic faith and alerts us to our present human folly.

      For further study, Fr. C. C. Martindale’s two-volume work, The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916), is still the most thorough treatment of the man and his work and is easily accessed in a digitized version on the web. A recent, shorter biography by Janet Grayson titled Robert Hugh Benson: Life and Works (University Press of America, 1998) does a more cursory treatment but has the added benefit of seeing Benson’s influence on twentieth-century Catholic culture.

      To learn more about other Catholic novelists in England who influenced and were influenced by Benson, see The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh by Ian Ker (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones by Adam Schwartz (Catholic University of America Press, 2003); and Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape by Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, 2014).

      Tantum Ergo: Fury Destroys the World

      A Theological Reflection by Michael P. Murphy

      The form of one approaching through the fog is at first ambiguous. Only two will know him: he who loves him and he who hates him. God preserve us from the sharpsightedness that comes from hell.

      —Romano Guardini, The Lord

      The bulk of the theological content in Lord of the World generates from a systematic series of transvaluations of a kind not seen in literature before Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 novel. This fact explains much about why Lord of the World is recognized as not only one of the earliest dystopian novels in the literary canon but also the earliest dystopian novel with such explicitly articulated philosophical and theological themes. Transvaluation—astutely identified by Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1895 saliva-fanged critique of Christianity, The Anti-Christ—is a dynamic process in which systems of thought, belief, and culture organize in time in relation to a rotating point of reference.

      In Lord of the World, we learn immediately through the novel’s prologue that the late modern world has, by series of dramatic events, been transvalued from a theistic culture to one that is anti-supernatural, a global society where Humanitarianism has inserted itself as the new Pantheism—but with the creed God is Man(see page 10). In the novel, Benson appropriated Nietzschean transvaluation and exposed its core flaw: the erroneous rejection—and implicit disdain—for a transcendent source of life and meaning. He then presented an apocalyptic world where truth and authority are subtly transignified and then reoriented upon a deceptive political cartography.

      The results are striking, not only for the way that Benson depicted the sanitized and sharpsighted precision with which religious persecution takes place in the 2007 setting of the novel, but also for the theological authenticity that critiques such a world, one that, as Yeats would observe with a kindred spirit twelve years later, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.¹

      Transvaluation is a simple concept, but like most simple things, it has profound power. When St. Paul observed decisively in Galatians that it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20), he was disclosing a transformed life in which the locus of all value flows from the truth of the gospel and the grace of divine relationship. Paul’s life was transvalued—transformed and sustained by the all-encompassing event of gracious encounter. For his part, Nietzsche was not so much critical of Paul’s logic as he was the focus and referent of his logic. After all, to discern and construct a philosophy and code of ethics that stem from a principle, experience, or person is natural enough, but to build such things on the founder of Christianity, a movement that Nietzsche rabidly assessed as the one immortal blemish of mankind,² is another thing entirely. For Nietzsche, Christianity is the triumph of the ill and a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instinct.³ Similarly, for the Oliver Brands who have risen to middling power in Lord of the World, the supplanting of Christianity means ideological victory for Humanity, Life, Truth at last, and the death of Folly!(see page 62). If Nietzsche presciently observed the philosophical death of God in the late nineteenth century of Benson’s youth, Benson’s reply was to imagine and aesthetically fashion a setting where the murder of God can take place.

      To highlight the inherently dialogical nature of transvaluation is to amplify the creative ways that Benson used his novel to expose what Hans Urs von Balthasar called theodrama. In Lord of the World, Benson anticipated and inspired other writers who would also draw on a theodramatic imagination (such as Lewis and Tolkien) and set the stage for a play of ideas where the stakes are, quite literally, life and death. Benson’s deft use of the doppelganger tradition as a literary device highlights this tension, which not only thickens the plot but also exposes the shrewd insidiousness that bleaching theology out of philosophy and trivializing the religious dimension entails. The two main protagonists—Fr. Percy Franklin and Julian Felsenburgh—are, in appearance, mirror images of one another. Midway in the novel, Oliver Brand and his wife, Mabel, speak about this uncanny resemblance:

      Mabel, do you remember what I told you about the priest?

      His likeness to the other?

      Yes. What do you make of that?

      She smiled.

      I make nothing at all of it. Why should they not be alike? (see pages 106–107)

      Clearly, Benson utilized the doppelganger to cultivate the theodramatic conflict between lightness and shadow, between truth and lies, and to demonstrate how near in appearance these things often look to us in real time. To the enlightened denizens of the new religion, Felsenburgh is the Son of Man while Franklin, particularly in his ultimate identity as Pope Silvester III, is the head of a baroque, backward-facing, and retrograde enterprise whose days are assuredly numbered (see pages 132–134). Since for Benson the truth of things was affixed to Christ and his Church—this is the fundamental message of the novel—the doppelganger became the perfect literary tool to reveal the fraudulent heart of Felsenburgh and the miraculous mind that animates his new world order.

      Felsenburgh’s ascension to Lord of the World, then, becomes a sham parody of Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6). In his quiet villainy, Felsenburgh is no rough-hewn Lord of the Flies, for Benson was focused on exposing the more clinical and mechanistic ways that ideology attacks the truth of Christian revelation. Clearly, this is Benson’s most sustained critique in the novel, one that reveals human complicity in the death-of-God philosophy. There is a fatigue that comes with dwelling in the complex dynamism between the natural and supernatural, especially in advanced technological societies, and it takes vigilant effort to recognize the mysterious tension between Incarnate God and all but Discarnate Man(see page 314). In Lord of the World, humanity has become blind to the fact that moral life, while imperfect, has been drawing on the stability of Christian theology for centuries. As Henri de Lubac sharply observed in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Nietzsche himself can be viewed as much as a canary in a coal mine, in this regard, as he can the primary perpetrator of divine assassination: In a word, while we are fully alive to the blasphemy in Nietzsche’s terrible phrase and in its whole context, are we not also forced to see in ourselves something of what drove him to such blasphemy?⁴ The consequence of this collective amnesia in Lord of the World is the decisive denial of transcendent mystery in favor of materialist and nominalist ideologies, ideologies that first mock intellectually and then exterminate incrementally the people of God.

      Lord of the World, then, is in direct dialogue with Nietzsche, but it is also in direct dialogue with Guardini, Balthasar, and de Lubac, theologians who owe a debt, however slight, to Monsignor Benson. It is also in conversation with Pope emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, both of whom cite Lord of the World as uniquely perceptive, indispensable, and prophetic. The myopia of human religion, especially when it becomes a vehicle for narrow ideology, not only describes the erosion of religion and public theology in the late modern age but also highlights the present need for a metaphysics that includes something more than the limited imagination of the discerning subject. Benson’s suspicion of this kind of humanism, so well drawn in Lord of the World, is a suspicion of any form of worship that eclipses the transcendent or reduces belief to matters of scientific materialism or spurious experimentations in social organization. In the novel, the inverted liturgical life that replaces what went before becomes a Catholicism without Christianity where the instinct of oblation without the demand is nurtured and religion is deprived of its supernatural principle(see page 175), reduced to something akin to a rose that possesses neither fragrance nor thorn. Such was the shape of liturgical life before Christianity and, as Benson suggested, so will it be after—degradations of religion that, as René Girard has so persuasively demonstrated and history has so consistently shown, almost always end in violence.⁵

      Balthasar’s short essay Human Religion and the Religion of Jesus Christ is profoundly instructive here and should be read, along with Girard’s work, as a companion piece to Benson’s novel. Balthasar meditated: It was God’s boundless love manifest in Christ that first exposed the boundlessness of man’s No and the real atheism that does not want to be obliged to anything or to anyone, but rather wants to create man itself.⁶

      The rejection of God in Lord of the World, while cleverly shrouded behind religious demythologization and social progress, is likewise cornerstoned in this premise: the No that asserts and defends a self-sufficient humanism and hides the quiet rage of its violent heart. Balthasar knew well, even against the long arc of history, that this development was definitively hatched only recently: In the religion of the Enlightenment, the truly enlightened person himself is the truth (untruth is its temporary obscurity); in the religion of Jesus Christ, he alone is the truth that exposes the sin and falsehood of man and atones for them on the cross.⁷

      This central theme—the denial of Christ, specifically as Savior and Redeemer—intensifies throughout the novel, reaching its climactic pitch theologically not in the novel’s final scenes but in a chain of events experienced earlier in the narrative by Mabel Brand.

      In prayer at a post-Christian church, Mabel begins in an ambient flow of guided reflection; next, she is moved to an epiphany, to the realization that Felsenburgh is the transcendent total of all humans, the new Saviour who bestows upon the world the unity of all(see page 203).⁸ However, this blessed assurance is short lived. Immediately upon exiting the church, the tranquility gained in Mabel’s mock beatific vision is abruptly replaced by a holy terror. She beholds the procession of a mob of phantoms as they slaughter the enemies of Humanity-Religion with the kind of barbarism and bloodlust typical of the human species. Her empires of belief begin to burn as she witnesses the parade of scapegoats: a great rood, with a figure upon it, of which one arm hung from the nailed hand, next the naked body of a child, impaled, and then a man, hanging by the neck(see pages 206–207). In a flash, the veil of ignorance is lifted as Mabel beholds the fury that destroys the world—and this will be too much for her to endure: There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one. Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God with which she did not wish to have anything more to do (see page 278). Unfortunately, in the enlightened world of Felsenburgh, there is an app for that.

      Lord of the World is a compelling narrative of ideas that, while deftly exposing the fatal flaws of a regressive turn to Nietzschean Humanity-Religion, also discloses the central Christological attribute of true Lordship: its nonviolent heart. As in the Tantum ergo that concludes the novel, in Jesus the newer rites of grace prevail. His journey to the cross—and the bloodless liturgies that memorialize this sacrifice every day—expiates the sin of the world, as Girard observed and which he astutely identified as the inability of man to free himself from his violent ways.⁹ Julian Felsenburgh’s ascent to Lord of the World, then, is theologically indefensible precisely because it is both philosophically counterfeit and historically blind. This does not guarantee against such a thing taking place, which, of course, is the cautionary point of Benson’s dystopian vision. Still, Benson demonstrates persuasively in the novel that the authority that comes with Lordship must be premised on the transcendent, having within it all sweetness, if it is to be valid, life giving, and durable. As Balthasar observed, ‘No one knows the Father except the Son’ cannot be subordinated to an ‘intrinsically good’ human nature that of itself . . . knows the truth and can come to possess it.¹⁰

      Benson not only pioneered new terrain in the literary imagination; he also offers readers a solid theological aesthetic—a way to think theologically and prayerfully by means of an artistic text.

      Benson’s Conversion and the Writing of Lord of the World

      A Brief Biography by Martyn Sampson

      The fourth son and youngest child of Edward White Benson (1829–1896) and his wife and second cousin, Mary Sidgwick (1841–1918), Robert Hugh Benson was born on November 18, 1871, at Wellington College in England. His father was the first headmaster there and was later appointed chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral before becoming bishop of the new diocese of Truro, then, in 1882, archbishop of Canterbury.¹

      In the same year, Robert Hugh Benson went to a preparatory school in Clevedon, Somerset, before going to Eton College, then Wren’s Collegiate Establishment. While there he prepared for a year to join the Indian Civil Service but was unsuccessful. In 1890 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, achieving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1893. He studied classics and began theology upon deciding to take holy orders. He was ordained a deacon in 1894, then a priest in the Church of England in 1895. In 1903 he became a Roman Catholic at Woodchester in Gloucestershire and in 1904 was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, after which he read theology at Llandaff House in Cambridge and began writing. Lord of the World was published in 1908.²

      Benson was all

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