Luca Fumagalli

Just over a month and a half ago, on August 15, the «Tablet», a British Catholic weekly, published an article by Eamon Duffy entitled The scourge of the Modernists (available here: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/24719/the-scourge-of-the-modernists-). Adapted from this year’s Jesmond Lecture, the piece is about Msgr. R. H. Benson and his most celebrated novel, namely The Lord of the World, first published in 1907.

The book tells of a hypothetical future in which faith has almost completely disappeared, replaced by secularism, and global peace is guaranteed by the ability and charisma of an extraordinary politician, Julian Felsenburgh, whose origins remain shrouded in mystery. However, it is not long before the latter authorizes the systematic persecution of Christians, proving himself to be none other than the Antichrist. The only one who opposes him is a humble priest, Percy Franklin, who finds himself leading the last surviving community.

Duffy, Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and former president of Magdalene College, accuses The Lord of the World of being «an embodiment of a narrow and suffocating Catholicism that distrusts democracy, science and academic theology and insists on uniformity and submission». He argues that the book promotes an outdated conception of the Church, closely linked to the figure of Saint Pius X and his bitter fight against Modernism: «Like all Benson’s novels, it embodies an utterly clericalist and authoritarian ecclesiology, and enshrines a megalomaniac view of the papacy». «Among the other effects», continues the professor, «it inclined the papacy to favour authoritarian and reactionary political regimes and to distrust secular aspirations for the reform of society».

According to Duffy, the Church described in The Lord of the World would therefore be an Ecclesia Militans that no longer has anything to do with current Catholicism, whose spirit of openness and dialogue is the result of the Second Vatican Council and documents such as Gaudium et Spes. It follows that a narrative similar to Benson’s today is obsolete if not downright harmful.

As for the ecclesiology of the monsignor, what Duffy claims is substantially true (apart from the obvious exaggerations). The excellent Jesuit Martindale, Benson’s first biographer, had even gone so far as to note a clear resemblance between the appearance of Percy Franklin, as described in the novel, and that of Saint Pius X. In The Lord of the World, then, the modernist heresy is explicitly mentioned as one of the causes that drove several ecclesiastics and intellectuals to leave the Church, eager to keep up with the times; moreover, a no-holds-barred fight between Good and Evil is narrated, where dialoguing attitudes or compromises are impossible.

Nor should a simple biographical fact be forgotten, namely that Benson’s Catholic career – conversion from Anglicanism, priestly ordination and apologetic commitment – ​​happened almost entirely under the pontificate of Pope Sarto, who, incidentally, wanted to appoint him papal chamberlain not least by virtue of his commitment to the “holy fight”. And, even if we admit, as Duffy claims, that the monsignor received a flawed seminary education, that his work as a narrator and preacher aimed more at stimulating emotion than reason, and, finally, that his passion for ghost stories and the occult can leave one perplexed, this does not undermine the sincerity of his being a follower of Saint Pius X. This fact remains true even if Benson had rather troubled personal history, had some friendships that may seem less than recommendable or had an ambiguous family (details that Duffy dwells on in the article with ill-concealed malice, but which at most can call into question the morality of the monsignor or those around him, not his theological position or literary production).

After all, what he wrote proves it, and it is no coincidence that the list of admirers of his works is rather long and certainly does not only include “reactionaries”.

Returning to the ecclesiological issue, even the hermeneutics of discontinuity evoked by Duffy is flawless. Radio Spada has long been stating that with the Second Vatican Council there was a break with the past, but, unlike the professor, we are not at all happy about it and we acknowledge it with pain, so much so that the aim of our project (blog and publishing house) is to fight rampant neomodernism, promoting the Roman Mass or “vetus ordo” and the sound doctrine. And when Duffy closes his piece believing he is making an easy joke – «In Pius X’s and Benson’s terms, we are all Modernists now» – he does not realize that he is stating what for us is simply obvious.

However, the professor’s biggest mistake that ends up creating a mess in his own reasoning, is to completely ignore the main point of The Lord of the World, which, among other things, make the novel pleasing to Ratzinger, Bergoglio and many others who have no sympathy for the anti-modernism of Pope Sarto.

In fact, what prompted Benson to embark upon his bestseller was first and foremost the desire to show the reader, in the form of a narrative that borders on satire, the dangers associated with the so-called “humanitarianism”, the new dominant gospel, which is nothing other than the sin par excellence, the same as that of the Progenitors: man’s claim to replace God. The devil’s «I will not serve» is therefore the motto of the dystopian world imagined by Benson. As the philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who praised the prophetic force of the novel, recalls, «secularization seeks its ultimate justification in positioning itself as an instrument, the only instrument, of human liberation and emancipation from every form of alienation and servitude». The monsignor claims that the evil of modernity is this sort of spurious, godless religion, which appeals to typical instances of Catholicism to empty them from within, perverting their meaning: just as religious tolerance turns into secularism, charity also becomes a generic and soulless solidarity. It is a progressive, slow and silent subversion, aimed at reducing everything to something merely human («Humanitarianism, contrary to all persons’ expectations, is becoming an actual religion itself, though anti-supernatural. It is Pantheism; it is developing a ritual under Freemasonry; it has a creed, “God is Man”»). Soon even pacifism turns into intolerance and violence. The world described by Benson follows an agnostic philosophy according to which the unknowability of the divine means moral relativism. The new humanism, this time corrupt, is therefore the Luciferian exaltation of selfishness, the transformation of man into king and judge of himself. This reversal of values ​​is exemplified in one of the most disturbing passages of the book, following a dramatic accident, when the dying cannot be given any consolation other than state euthanasia.

Similarly, universal peace is the result of a collective madness, of a widespread disinterest in any search for meaning and significance: when the characters seriously confront the aspirations of their soul, they discover a void so unbridgeable as to make even death desirable. Killing God, in other words, meant collective suicide.

It is because of all this that The Lord of the World is destined to be everlastingly relevant, because it speaks of the heart of man and of the terrible and invariable temptations that pass through it. In addition, this explains its resounding success and the reason why many readers with different ideas have been able to appreciate it. The ecclesiological issue raised by Duffy, although important, therefore remains in the background and is negligible compared to the core of the book (it will instead be explored in depth by the monsignor in the novel The Dawn of All, published in 1911, in some ways a mirror version of The Lord of the World). Failure to realize this inevitably leads to misunderstandings that end up doing a grave injustice to such a masterpiece of Catholic literature.

Follow Radio Spada:

Photo credit: Gorce, Agnès de La (1928). Robert Hugh Benson: Prêtre et Romancier, 1871-1914. Paris: Plon.