Lord of the World
I have been reading a book called Lord of the World. It has been recommended by the last three popes as something all Catholics should read. That’s right. Pope St John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis. Fr. Robert Hugh Benson wrote this apocalyptic novel in 1907, before the two World Wars. He foresaw many of the changes in society we see today: increasing materialism, loss of faith, decreasing church attendance, decreasing vocations, and persecution. Society is willing to trade the freedom of religion even if it means conformity and a Godless peace.
A young priest named Fr. Percy Franklin finds himself in the center of the action. As the story progresses we witness his anguish and increasing reliance on the Holy Spirit in his spiritual combat against the Spirit of the World, made manifest in the person of Julian Felsenburgh.
I will not tell you more—for that you will need to read the book. But I will share with you a meditation on another famous work by William Butler Yeats that deals with the same apocalyptic theme, written in 1919 from a secular viewpoint. It is surprising how prophetic both works are.
What lessons should we take away?
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1919).
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
That is the whole thing. Now I will break it into sections:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
There is no center now to our culture. Everyone can declare their own truth, and the ones being punished are those who try to hold to the truth that once was accepted everywhere. Our culture dissolves into nonsense. Everyone makes their own truth.
When did the error of relativism first appear? It starts with the Sophists, but runs through Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. The idea was propagated by anthropologists who saw different cultures and from that asserted that there was no ultimate truth. Everything is subjective, everything is relative
The center does not hold. If there is no such thing as the Truth, then there is no road forward. We are all isolated inside our own heads, and other persons are unknowable. White people can never understand the Black experience and Black people will never understand Whites. Take it further. Men and women will never understand each other. Who's to say which experience is true, which should prevail? All dissolves into power struggles.
In logic, there is a law of non-contradiction. X cannot be true and false at the same time. It is a necessity for mathematics and for science. The imposition of relative conditions on Truth makes scientists and mathematicians uneasy because they rely on the law of non-contradiction.
Our knowledge of scientific facts is conditional because our understanding may improve as new evidence comes in. But understanding is possible, and reality is testable. It is not subjective. In math a theory must be subject to proof using logic. A theory depends on the prior assumptions of the particular field of study, but a proof can never be true and not true at the same time.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Such beautiful language to describe something so grim! This poem is a depiction of the oncoming fate of civilization that Yeats foresaw. He wrote this only a year after the end of "the war to end all wars." Yet the events leading to the next World War were already in motion. The movement toward communism had begun earlier, but the October Revolution in 1917 started the civil war that led to the rise of Lenin. The founding of the Chinese Communist Party began in 1921, leading ultimately to the People's Republic of China and Mao Zedong. The seeds of the rise of Hitler were sown with the imposition of punishing terms in the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended the First World War. Reparations of 132 billion Gold Marks and the redrawing of boundaries all over Europe caused extreme hardship for the German people and was profoundly humiliating for them.
Benson describes something even more agonizing than the last century in Lord of the World. We know what we feared in Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong. We were afraid of the total domination of the world by despots. This is the topic of Lord of the World. It describes the rise of the Antichrist, the ultimate despot, that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. It is a bleak and desperate world where Catholics are driven almost to extinction. They are the only Christians remaining.
The Antichrist hates all people who believe in God but especially Catholics. The few that can hang onto their faith as priests are killed and the sacraments are not available. One by one, and after a terrible mass murder, they are either eliminated or subverted until few ordained men remain. The Antichrist brings all his bitter power against them. But he also seeks to destroy all people. He establishes centers of euthanasia and advertises them as a beautiful way to end one’s life, even as an act of self-determination. Sound familiar? Perhaps Benson foresaw the legalization of abortion also.
Lord of the World was written in 1907 and Yeats's poem in 1919. Though the technology is different in Lord of the World the themes are sadly prescient. The book is a description of the end of all things that is true to the essence of the Book of Revelations. If you haven't read Lord of the World yet, I recommend it highly. It is the kind of book that may make you want to read it non-stop. Despite its grim story (perhaps because of it), you will care deeply about the characters, and long for God to rescue them. It is a story of providence, perseverance, personal freedom, choice, and even mysticism. The ending will stick with you for a long time.
Lord of the World also illustrated a scriptural lesson taken from Luke. Jesus gives the parable of the widow and the unjust judge in Luke 18:1-8 to teach us persistence in prayer, to pray for the marginalized and the powerless, and to not give up. Pray with the belief that Our Father hears us always. But most importantly, pray without ceasing. We need prayer to grow in faith. When we face tribulation, we will need prayer even more.
Luke 18:7-8
7And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. 8 However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?
TANTUM ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.
This is how the book ends, in worship and benediction.