Everyone has heard of The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy epic by Tolkien. Some might have read the book. Others might only have seen the film adaptation by Peter Jackson, which is returning to movie theaters this month. But far fewer people will have heard of Lord of the World, a dystopian fantasy by Robert Hugh Benson, which is a literary classic that every Catholic should know.
Before we look at Lord of the World itself, let’s get to know the author, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, whose conversion to Catholicism in 1903 was almost as controversial as the earlier conversion of John Henry Newman.
The reason for the controversy was that Benson was the youngest son of E.W. Benson, who had been the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1882 until his death in 1896. The fact that the son of the leader of the worldwide Anglican communion had become a Catholic signaled that the Catholic Revival was gaining credence and momentum in the highest levels of British culture.
Priest, preacher, novelist
Robert Hugh Benson became a Catholic priest and was a powerful and hugely popular preacher. He was best known, however, as the writer of many bestselling novels between 1903 and the time of his untimely death, at the age of only 42, in 1914. He wrote several historical novels set during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that focused on the heroism and martyrdom of Catholics during those virulently anti-Catholic times. The best known of these is probably Come Rack! Come Rope!, the title of which was taken from words written by the Jesuit martyr St. Edmund Campion.
Whereas many of Msgr. Benson’s novels were set in the past and others in contemporary England, Lord of the World, arguably his greatest literary achievement, is set in the future. In many ways it parallels The Lord of the Rings as a trailblazer in its genre. In much the same way that Tolkien had pioneered fantasy, Benson’s Lord of the World would pioneer the genre of dystopian fiction, blazing a trail that others, such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, would follow.
A choice of dystopias
Although Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are better known and more widely read, Lord of the World is their equal in terms of literary merit and might be superior in terms of its powers of prophecy. Huxley’s novel presents a future world, set in a globalist World State, in which people have somnambulated toward slavery through their addiction to comfort and the use of soporific drugs.
Nineteen-Eighty-Four depicts a future world divided among three international power blocs, known as Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, which are perpetually at war with each other, inviting parallels with the geopolitics of our own day, in which the United States, Russia and China are the superpower hubs. Orwell’s dystopic nightmare vision of the future shows big government using surveillance technology to destroy any dissidents who refuse to conform to the will of the state.
Clearly there are valuable lessons to be learned from Huxley’s and Orwell’s cautionary novels, but Benson’s Lord of the World is at least as perceptive and prophetic. The world depicted in Benson’s futuristic novel is one in which creeping secularism and godless humanism have triumphed over traditional morality and in which religion is not tolerated in the name of tolerance. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of "peace," and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of "truth." In such a world, only the Catholic Church stands resolutely against the demonic "Lord of the World," who reveals himself to be the Antichrist.
“Written more than a century ago, [Lord of the World] was to some degree prophetic in its description of a future dominated by technology, where everything is made bland and uniform in the name of progress, and a new ‘humanitarianism’ is proclaimed." - Pope Francis
Tragic predictions come true
It is truly remarkable that Lord of the World was published as early as 1907. Whereas Huxley and Orwell were both writing after the Bolshevik Revolution and Mussolini’s March on Rome and could see the consequences of communist and fascist totalitarianism with the wisdom of hindsight, Benson was writing 10 years before the Russian Revolution and 15 years before the rise of fascism in Italy.
Lord of the World predicts a revolution in 1917, which leads to a totalitarian socialist state, though it occurs in Britain, not Russia, and it foresees the use of flying machines to bomb civilian populations, 30 years before the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The novel even predicts the dropping of bombs so powerful that whole cities can be wiped out, prefiguring the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that it was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” The same is true of Lord of the World, a prophetic novel that every Catholic should read.
Editor's note: 'Lord of the World' is one of the wonderful reads on the Aleteia 2024 Summer Book List. The copy featured in this article is the Voyage Classics edition, which features a new typesetting, 20 beautiful illustrations by Andre Siregar, and a foreword penned by Aleteia's own Philip Kosloski.
