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Hindustan Times
23-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Pope Francis' Favorite Dystopian Novel
Robert Hugh Benson, center, and his you to have asked Pope Francis to name his favorite book, he would probably have said the Bible. Asked for his favorite novel, however, he might have mentioned a dystopian thriller in which the Antichrist is a senator from Vermont. The Holy Father certainly talked it up during his papacy. 'I was deeply struck when I read it,' he wrote in 'Hope,' his memoir, published in January. He praised the book as 'a prophecy' in one of his earliest papal homilies and recommended it to journalists in 2015: 'I advise you to read it.' The book is 'Lord of the World,' by Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914), an English priest whose conversion from Anglicanism in 1903 attracted national attention because his late father had been the archbishop of Canterbury. 'I proposed becoming a Roman Catholic,' wrote the son, 'because I believed that Church to be the Church of God.' Hugh, as friends called him, was the youngest of several literary siblings. A pair of brothers, E.F. and A.C. Benson, wrote novels and poetry but today are best known for their ghost stories, including one that Rod Serling adapted for 'The Twilight Zone.' A sister, Margaret Benson, was an Egyptologist. 'Lord of the World' (1907) eclipsed them all. Its title alludes to the tale of Christ's temptation in the desert, described in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, in which the devil offers a deal: If Jesus will agree to worship Satan, Jesus will gain 'all the kingdoms of the world.' Jesus refuses, but Benson proposes that much of humanity would accept the terms and conditions, purging God for promises of power. Benson wrote in a preface that 'Lord of the World' was 'a terribly sensational book,' and some of its renown comes from his technological forecasting. Much in the way that Jules Verne imagined submarines and flights to the moon in his 19th-century science-fiction novels, Benson predicted air travel, mass transit, artificial light, heat vents and weapons of mass destruction. His gee-whiz wonders exist alongside typewriters and telegraphs, creating a steampunk aesthetic that 21st-century readers may find pleasing. Yet that isn't why Francis plugged it. In 2013, he said that the opening chapter of the First Book of Maccabees is 'one of the saddest pages in the Bible' because 'a great part of the people of God withdraw from the Lord in favor of worldly proposals.' He then pointed to Benson, arguing that the novelist had portrayed a modern society whose inhabitants made the same mistake: 'He envisioned what would happen.' What Benson envisioned was a communistic Europe that had nationalized its industries and disestablished its churches. In London, St. Paul's Cathedral is rebranded as 'Paul's House,' a meeting hall. Paris's Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre becomes a transport hub for zeppelins. The government shuts down universities, encourages euthanasia and persecutes Christians. Only a few of them remain, including a small number of Catholics who provide the only real resistance to the state's 'dogmatic secularism.' Into this grim environment steps Julian Felsenburgh, a charismatic politician who begins as a senator from Vermont. As he travels to other countries, he grows in popular acclaim and uses his wiles to become a messiah to mobs, the 'President of Europe' and eventually the ruler of just about everything. He is in fact the Antichrist, 'represented as a great carrier of peace,' observed another admirer of the novel—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI—in a 1992 speech that cautioned against global government. In the story, Felsenburgh promises world peace but launches a devastating attack on Rome. Felsenburgh is Benson's Big Brother, even though 'Lord of the World' appeared decades before George Orwell's '1984,' published in 1949. It also predates the other classics of 20th-century dystopian fiction: 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley (1932), 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury (1953), and 'The Giver' by Lois Lowry (1993). While those novels also describe godless regimes, their stories have little to say about religion. 'Lord of the World,' by contrast, is full of faith, and Francis used it to raise alarms about the dangers of imposing Western secular values on developing nations by forcing them, as a condition of humanitarian aid, to adopt policies involving contraception, same-sex marriage and transgenderism: 'Reading it, you will understand what I mean by 'ideological colonization.' ' 'Lord of the World,' he added in 2023, warns of 'a future in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, a single leader of the whole world.' In 'Hope,' he described the book as 'an antidote to teenage progressivism, to that worldly totalitarianism that leads to apostasy.' It spoils nothing to say that the book ends with a scene so apocalyptic that it might be called 'biblical'—and, at least for readers who share Francis' faith, surprisingly hopeful. Mr. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Times
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Times
Pope fiction: a writer who foresaw our dystopian era
'I advise you to read it,' Pope Francis said, and it's not often that the Pope recommends fiction, so I did. Lord of the World, a 1907 dystopian novel by the Catholic convert Robert Hugh Benson, is about the appearance of the Antichrist on Earth in the guise of a secular, humanist dictator, before whom a deracinated human race prostrates itself. The book seems to have had wide appeal among Catholics, liberal and conservative, clerical and synodal alike, and Francis was not the first pope to recommend it. Perhaps he won't be the last. Benson's Antichrist clearly captures the modern forces that Catholics feel they're up against. This charismatic but bloodless Satan seduces humanity by preaching a creed of global unity under a perfect ideological schema: collective ownership, absolute equality, 'humane' euthanasia and so on. His disciples boast that he will bring about world peace and a rational reorganisation of all societies. He takes over by consent, but the impersonal, remote power structures acting in his name soon suppress dissent and enforce new, neopagan forms of worship. Benson effectively predicts that the main ideological fault line of the modern world would be between atheistic, rationalist egalitarians and hierarchical, faith-inspired traditionalists. He saw that the stripping away of deep-rooted culture by global forces would leave societies ripe for all sorts of cults and shamans — bodybuilding, Jordan Peterson, jihad, gender ideology, Just Stop Oil. Francis saw the creed of Benson's Antichrist, which he called 'ideological colonisation', all over the world. The desire to abolish binary sex categories was an attempt, as he put it, to make a world 'in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same'. One can see similar strands in projects of international law, globalisation, socialism, neoconservatism and EU 'harmonisation'. But there was also a time when the Vatican aspired to rule the world. Maybe it's only Satanic when it's the other guy doing it. Musk-hailed space opera Elon Musk, who seems to aspire to rule Mars after populating it with his offspring, has also proffered the odd book recommendation. I bought Consider Phlebas, the first in a 1980s ten-book 'space opera' by Iain M Banks, on Musk's public endorsement. It proved weirder and less readable than expected. I won't summarise the whole plot; it would take too many words on names alone (one character is called Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif, and no, she isn't a Spanish infanta), but here's the gist. An interplanetary, post-scarcity humanoid empire called The Culture, which is run by mega-advanced AI (Minds) and pursues hedonistic pleasure for all, is at war with an expansionist, religious empire of super-intelligent tripod-legged aliens called Idirans, who view AI as idolatrous. There are long action sequences and strange, melodramatic internal monologues. There's a certain symmetry with the late Pope's reading material. Banks, like Benson, saw an irreconcilable conflict between a religious and utilitarian view of the world. You might assume Elon Musk would be on the side of the interplanetary, pleasure-seeking humans. But he's said he's worried that AI will take over and make humans obsolete. So maybe he isn't the Antichrist after all. Dysmorphic dobbin Where's the long face? No, really, where is it? Horses, one of the most beautiful creatures on this earth, are defined by their long, graceful noses and arching necks. But in the ubiquitous stickers and cartoons of unicorns flogged to little girls, they are drawn more like a dog, the horsey nose snubbed, presumably so the eyes can face forwards, anthropomorphically. All that remains of the horse is the flowing mane.
