Katana VentraIP

Lord of the World

Lord of the World is a 1907 dystopian science fiction novel by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson that centres upon the reign of the Antichrist and the end of the world. It has been called prophetic by Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI.[1]

Author

United Kingdom

English

1908

Print (hardcover)

352 pp

Synopsis[edit]

Prologue[edit]

In early 21st century London, Father Percy Franklin and Father John Francis visit the elderly Mr. Templeton. A Catholic and former Conservative Member of Parliament who witnessed the marginalisation of his religion and the destruction of his party, Mr. Templeton describes to the two priests the last century of British and world history.


The British Empire is now a single party state. The British Royal Family has been deposed, the House of Lords abolished, and Oxford and Cambridge universities closed down. Marxism, atheism, and secular humanism dominate culture and politics. The Anglican Communion has been disestablished and, like all forms of Protestantism, is almost extinct. The world now has only three main religious forces: Catholicism, secular humanism, and "the Eastern religions".


The world has been divided into three power-blocs: a European Confederation of Marxist one-party states and their colonies in Africa; the "Eastern Empire", whose Emperor descends from the Japanese and Chinese Imperial Families; and the "American Republic", consisting of North and South America. The European Confederation and Eastern Empire are now on the brink of war.

Book I: The Advent[edit]

Oliver Brand, an influential MP from Croydon, listens as his secretary, Mr. Phillips, describes the seemingly inevitable rush toward war between Europe and the Eastern Empire. A mysterious Senator Felsenburgh has unexpectedly taken charge of the American Republic's peace delegation and is travelling the Empire, delivering speeches to rapt audiences in their own languages.

Release and reception[edit]

Upon its 1907 publication, Lord of the World caused an enormous stir among Catholics, non-Catholics, and even among non-Christians. Mgr. Benson was therefore kept busy answering letters from both readers and literary critics. Mgr. Benson's reading of these letters helped inspire his novel The Dawn of All.


In reply to a critic who expressed a belief that Mabel Brand condemned herself to Hell by committing suicide, Mgr. Benson wrote, "I think Mabel was alright, really. Honestly, she had no idea that suicide was a sin; and she did pray as well as she knew how at the end."[18][19]


In a 16 December 1907 letter to Mgr. Benson's brother, British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge wrote, "The assumption that there can be no religion except a grotesque return to Paganism, short of admitting the supremacy of Mediaeval Rome, is an unexpected contention to find in a modern book... I am wondering what the leaders of the Church think of it. Perhaps Pius X may approve; but it is difficult to suppose that it can meet with general approbation. If it does, it is very instructive."[20]


Some critics and readers misinterpreted the novel's last sentence as meaning, "the destruction, not of the world, but of the Church." Some Marxists were reportedly "delighted" by the ending and one non-Catholic reader wrote that Lord of the World had, "struck heaven out of my sky, and I don't know how to get it back again."[21]


Other readers were more admiring. Although "grave exception" was taken there to Mgr. Benson's "sympathetic treatment" of Mabel Brand's suicide, Lord of the World was enthusiastically received in France.[22]


In a letter to Mgr. Benson, Jesuit priest Fr. Joseph Rickaby wrote, "I have long thought that Antichrist would be no monster, but a most charming, decorous, attractive person, exactly your Felsenburgh. This is what the enemy has wanted, something to counteract the sweetness of Christmas, Good Friday, and Corpus Christi, which is the strength of Christianity. The abstruseness of Modernism, the emptiness of Absolutism, the farce of Humanitarianism, the bleakness (so felt by Huxley and Oliver Lodge) of sheer physical science, that is what your Antichrist makes up for. He is, as you have made him, the perfection of the Natural, away from and in antithesis to God and His Christ.... As Newman says, a man may be near death and yet not die, but still the alarms of his friends are each time justified and are finally fulfilled; so of the approach of Antichrist."[23]


Shortly after Mgr. Benson's novel was published, British historian and future Catholic convert Christopher Dawson paid a visit to Imperial Germany. While there, Dawson witnessed the increasing de-Christianisation of German culture and the rapid growth of the Marxist Social Democratic Party. In response, Dawson called the Kaiser's Germany "a most soul-destroying place", and complained that German intellectuals, "examine Christianity as if it were a kind of beetle." Dawson further lamented that his stay in that "most dreadful" country reminded him of "the state of society in Lord of the World."[24]


Furthermore, despite Mgr. Benson's subtle contempt for "Greek Christianity",[25] Mother Catherine Abrikosova, a Byzantine Catholic Dominican nun, former Marxist, and future martyr in Joseph Stalin's concentration camps, translated Lord of the World from English to Russian shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution.[26]

The Last Word (Greene short story)

Archived 15 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine

"Hopes and Fears: Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World" by Colin O’Brien, in the Dappled Things Quarterly

Ahlquist, Dale (2012). The American Chesterton Society, March 12.

"The End of the World,"

(1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 48.

Bleiler, Everett

Cuddy, Denis L. (2005). News with Views, April 20.

"Lord of the World,"

Martindale, C.C. (1916). Vol. 2. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson,

McCloskey, Fr. John. Catholic City, [n.d.].

"Introduction to Benson's 'Lord of the World',"

Rutler, Fr. George W. (2008). National Review, November 3.

"The One We Were Waiting For,"

Schall, Rev. James V. (2012). Crisis Magazine, July 10.

"The Lord of the World,"

Wood. Joseph (2009). The Catholic Thing, March 31.

"Lord of the World,"

complete text online at Authorama.com – public domain books

"Lord of the World"

complete text from Project Gutenberg.

"Lord of the World"

Dood, Mead & Company, 1908 1917, from Internet Archive.

"Lord of the World"

Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1918, from Hathi Trust.

"Lord of the World"

public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Lord of the World