‘Lord of the World’: A Warning against Ideological Uniformity
A review of ‘Lord of the World’, by Robert Hugh Benson; Dodd, Mead and Company, 1908.
Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World describes the rise of a tireless politician at a time of global change and the response of the Church, already weakened by the growth of atheism. It is set in a world in which the state has been abolished, and three global powers — Europe, Asia and America — vie for supremacy. War seems certain if a unifying figure, with unifying ideals, fails to appear. Pope Francis called the book ‘prophetic’. When condemning calls for a ‘new world order’, Benedict XVI invoked it, saying any world state would lead to ‘terror’.
The story follows Father Percy Franklin, a Catholic priest, and Oliver Brand, the Labour MP for Croydon. Brand is an MP in a single-party state: the Royal Family has been deposed, the House of Lords abolished, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge closed down. But peace is nowhere to be found: the East has annexed India, Australia and New Zealand, and a war against Europe now seems inevitable. Brand blames religious belief, still extant in the Eastern Empire, for the rush towards conflict; but hopes an enigmatic senator, in charge of the American Republic’s peace delegation, has the answer.
Brand blames religious belief, still extant in the Eastern Empire, for the rush towards conflict.
That senator, Julian Felsenbergh, interests Franklin, too. Felsenbergh has been crisscrossing the East, giving speeches in many languages and with remarkable fluency, always to wild applause. His ascent seems to have hastened the loss of faith throughout the world, including in Franklin’s colleague, who has decided to leave the priesthood. More and more, Felsenbergh is seen by Brand and others as someone who can unify the world beneath a new, secular law. Franklin muses that the Church, too, requires a new order if it is to survive.
The book thus asks a question: What would happen were we to impose a single worldview, however peaceful-seeming, on a diverse, imperfect world? What would happen were we to accept what Pope Francis has called ‘ideological colonisation’? Benson’s answer is perhaps predictable; but in the modern world, it is almost taken for granted by many that we are, and ought to be, moving towards just the thing that Benson fears: a single world state. That we can guess Benson’s view takes nothing away from his story. Nor does the characterisation of Felsenbergh from the opening as an Antichrist figure make his eventual appearance any less striking, even frightening. For it is the world that he enters — the world that accepts him so readily — that is Benson’s focus. For him, a world in which religious good and evil are dismissed, and godlessness, materialism and conformity accepted, is one in which people do not fail to see the storm coming. It is one in which they hasten its arrival.
What would happen were we to impose a single worldview, however peaceful-seeming, on a diverse, imperfect world?
Benson writes in a clear and exacting style that has something in common with the prose of George Orwell, whose own contribution to dystopian literature, 1984, also featured a perpetual war between three superstates and the elevation of a man or idea — ‘Big Brother’ — to the level of God. This hastens the pace of the story, which evokes the speed and inevitability of Felsenbergh’s rise and the powerlessness of the Church, to which Benson, a priest, belonged, to stop it. Lord of the World thus seems to warn us that once the barbarians are at the gates, so to speak, it is already too late: that to get to such a point is already to have brought an end to everything.
This is a powerful and distinctly Catholic novel with ecumenical appeal which, given that it was written before the horror of two wars, the rise of totalitarian and explicitly atheistic regimes in Germany and Russia, and a long and brutal cold war, must have seemed frighteningly prescient. In a sense, Benson’s basic message is a simple one: even in an age of great technological prowess and prosperity — an age when our mastery of nature seems complete — we know nothing. There will never be a ‘total solution’ to our woes; and to think otherwise is to make a grave and bloody error.
