 Hello, fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praised their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello, I'm Joseph Pierce and welcome to this episode of The Authority. We're now well into the 20th century as we were the last couple with Beloch and Chesterton. We continue actually with the contemporary of Beloch and Chesterton's Robert Hugh Benson. His conversion to Catholicism in 1903 was probably the most controversial and publicized conversion to Catholicism of the whole Catholic literary revival with the obvious exception of John Henry Newman. So John Henry Newman was received in the church in 1845 and that was really, we say the definitive beginning of the Catholic literary revival with his conversion. And that sent shock waves through the British establishment because he was such a well-known writer and preacher and historian and intellectual and man of God. So his conversion was widely publicized and sent shock waves through the establishment. Well, the same was true of Benson's conversion. Now, that was because not so much because of who Benson was in himself, but because he was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of Canterbury, of course, is, shall we say for want of better terminology, the Anglican Pope. So when the head of the Anglican Church's son becomes a Catholic, he was already an Anglican priest and as soon as he became a Catholic, in 1903 he went on to study for the Catholic priesthood and was ordained a year later in 1904. So Robert H. Benson's in this series on the authority because of his role as a writer and specifically mainly as a novelist, but he was also a Catholic priest. Apart from his famous father, he came from a very, a family of, shall we say, high achievers and those who were successful actually in writing because he had two brothers. A. C. Benson wrote biographies of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of the ruby out of Armite Omar Cayam amongst other things, Walter Pater, one of the leaders of the aesthetic movement of the 19th century, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the great poet and John Ruskin, great champion of the Gothic revival amongst other things. So A. C. Benson was very much part of the documenting through the lives of these great men, the cultural movement of late Victorian England. E. F. Benson, Robert H. Benson's other brother was also known as being a novelist, a novelist of, shall we say, light fiction, humorous fiction and he is best known today for his map and Lucia novels which have been adapted for television. But it's obviously, it's Robert H. Benson is the brother we're going to be focusing on today. Following his conversion, he wrote a book called Confessions of a Convert and as a convert myself, I'm a great devotee and reader of other people's conversion stories. Obviously, the most famous is probably St. Augustine's Confessions. Then after that, probably Newman's own Apologia Provita Sua. But really, Robert H. Benson's Confessions of a Convert, which give his reasons for his conversion is one of the great works of conversion literature. So I thoroughly recommend that. He only wrote one novel prior to his conversion, all of his other novels were written after his conversion and that was a novel called The Light Invisible, which was actually very, very successful. But following his conversion, Benson was not as keen on that as he had been trying to read some passages here from my book Literary Converts about this. So he's speaking about The Light Invisible, he says, the Catholic atmosphere is on the other hand something quite apart from all this. For Catholics, there's almost a matter of indifference as to whether or no the soul realizes in such a manner as to be able to visualize the facts of revelation and the principles of the spiritual world. The point is that the will should adhere and the reason assent. But for Anglicans, whose theology is fundamentally unreasonable and amongst whom authority is really non-existent, it becomes natural to place the center of gravity rather in the emotions and to mistake the imagination for the soul. The reason for them must be continually suppressed even in its own legitimate sphere. The will must be largely self-centered. So here we see how as a Catholic, Benson has now matured, if that's the right word, into an understanding of the indissoluble union or marriage between fetus at Ratio, between faith and reason, and that faith has to pass the test of reason, has to be rational, as well as merely faithful. There's this union which is insisting upon, the danger of the absence of that is that we are ruled by our emotions and that our will becomes self-centered, becomes a servant of our emotions, which is a dangerous position to be in. Also, Benson confessed his indebtedness to John Henry Newman as one of the major influences upon his conversion, especially Newman's development of Christian doctrine, which shows how the church, the image I give about this often, and we'll do it again, the understanding of Newman's doctrine as regards the development of doctrine, his work on that subject, which is influential upon Benson and many others, can be liken metaphorically to a tree. So, we understand the Catholic Church is a tree that has grown through the 20th centuries. Now, as it grows through each century, new things happen in some centuries that never happened in previous centuries, and the church has to respond to those. So, for instance, the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the French Revolution in the 18th century, the rise of communism and fascism and Nazism in the 20th century. So, the church needs to respond to these new developments, which are really normally old sins dressed in new language. But in doing so, the tree grows, but it's still the same tree in essence, so that the church does not change in essentials, even as it grows and develops in doctrine. The doctrines don't contradict earlier doctrines. There are many developments from earlier doctrines to address what's happening now. So, Newman's book on the developed doctrine was hugely influential on Benson. Benson says, Newman's book had, quote, like a magician, waved away the last floating mists and let me see the city of God in her strength and beauty. And I want to just move on to a few more pages to talk about the influence on what was Benson's conversion. So, this is one of his own converts or later converts addressing the shock that many people felt when Benson was received into the church. Father Benson was going to become a Roman Catholic. Then, if he was not a Catholic now in the Church of England, what was he? What was I? It is no exaggeration to say that the very foundations of faith and all the realities of the spiritual life rocked and trembled from the violence of this utterly unexpected shock. It was extraordinarily difficult to know where one whom we looked upon as a pillar of English Catholicism should have found it necessary for his salvation to submit to the Church of Rome. That's the end of the quote, and this is my concluding paragraph to this section on Benson in my book, Literary Converts. After the initial shock had subsided, the above writer and many others sought to discover why their mentor had felt compelled to take this tremendous step. The result was that so many of us were led to study the question under his direction after he entered the Church and finally become Catholics ourselves. So, we've looked at Newman's influence on Benson's conversion and then Benson's influence upon the conversion of many others. We mentioned that he was ordained only a year after his reception into the Church in 1904, and that's when his first Catholic novel, his first novel as a Catholic was published. We won't have time in this podcast to go through all of the novels that Benson wrote. It's astonishing. He died young, as we shall see, so in a period of only 10 years he wrote a huge number of novels. I must confess I forgot to count them, but I'm guessing it's somewhere in the region of approaching 20 in the space of 10 years. So he was prolific until his untimely death. So the first of these was a book called By What Authority, by What Authority, a question mark, and this is an historical novel set during the 16th century and specifically the bulk of the novel during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. There's some wonderful scenes in the novel of Queen Elizabeth the First as a character in the novel which brings, if you like, this historical period to life. And that's what Benson's trying to do, that basically the English had been deprived of a balanced view of history, the tragedy of court always is the history is written by the victors, which means you get a somewhat warped view of history. Whereas, you know, Catholics were put to death for a period of 150 years from the 1530s to the 1680s and continued to be second-class citizens in their own country with all sorts of legal restrictions against them for further 150 years after that until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. So one of Benson's concerns as a novelist was to bring the history to life and to show the reality of the persecution of Catholics. So by What Authority, it's a wonderful novel because it shows that he's very balanced, he's not preachy, he's not pushing an agenda in some sort of didactic way. So you have characters in it that are good, honorable, honest, Protestants who are trying to do the best according to their lives. You have Catholics who are courageous and standing by their faith. You have other Catholics who are worldly and abandon their faith or others that compromise their faith in pursuit of love and other things. So it's a marvelous novel by What Authority is a new edition published recently by Seneca Press, which I thoroughly recommend. And then the following year, there's another volume was published called The King's Achievement and this takes the story back a little bit further to Queen Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. And the backdrop of that novel is the dissolution of the monasteries, so King Henry VIII's destruction of all the monasteries and converts in England during the 1530s. Probably the best known of Benson's historical fiction is the novel Come Rack, Come Rope, the title of which was plucked from the famous words of the Jesuit martyrs and Edmund Campion in his famous brag, Campion's brag where he promised that they would stay true to the faith, true to the faith, come what may, come rack, come rope. So it's inspired by that. We see the story there of a young man and it's a love story. Actually, one of the things I love about this particular novel is it is a love story between a young man and a young lady, but the young man feels drawn to the priesthood. And of course, at this particular time in history, 16th century, and by the way that the novel was inspired by real life English martyrs, the Padley martyrs who were martyred in Derbyshire. So this is based upon a true story that the character Robin is drawn to the priesthood and therefore, of course, needs to abandon his relationship with martyrs at least in terms of its natural ending in marriage. But what's one of the beautiful things about the novel is they remain in love, but they remain in love now in a really holy way where both of them are serving each other by serving God. So a chaste but nonetheless deep loving relationship between these two people throughout the novel. So that was published in 1912. Benson published other historical novels, but I say we don't have time to talk about all of them. I would say that when when Hilaire Belock first read Benson's historical novels, he thought that Benson might be the person one day to write the definitive non fictional history of what happened in the 16th and 17th centuries in England as regards the persecution of Catholics and Catholic resistance, etc. In actual fact, Benson as someone who certainly preferred fiction in writing of history than the nonfiction never did do that prior to his death. And in the envelope, took up the cudgels himself, shall we say, and wrote and published a whole string of novels on some of the leading characters of that period of history. Again, I'm not going to list them, but it's what Belock called the need to correct that tom full Protestant history, the biased view of history. But I want to mention one other historical novel because it's different from the ones we've mentioned. Most of Benson's historical fiction is set during the time of the English Reformation and the persecution of the 16th and 17th centuries. But he wrote one novel, which is actually my favorite of his novels and also was his favorite. So I feel vindicated there. And it's actually a book called The History of Richard Reinal Solitary. It was published in 1912, the same year as Comewrat, Comewrope. Solitary is a hermit, basically. So the history of Richard Reinal Solitary, Richard Reinal hermit. And this is set earlier than the Reformation, actually in the early 15th century. So the early 1400s, if you like, at the height of what has become known as Mary England of Catholic England. And it's such it's much, it's a much more joyful book, not that there's not evil going on in it. But it's much more joyful book because the backdrop to the culture is this Mary vivid, vibrant, living Catholic culture of pre-Reformation England. And also something which is very difficult to do, and Benson does it better than most, is to depict sanctity. It's much easier to write about evil in a work of fiction than it is to write about holiness without sounding preachy or saccharine or hagiographic, you know, just you're writing about someone who's basically perfect and immaculate. And the point is even the saints were sinners. So how do you depict sanctity while still depicting the humanity of the subject? Benson's superb at that. And Richard Reinal Solitary, the character of Richard Reinal is, to me, one of the one of the holiest characters in all of literature and I thoroughly recommend it. Benson, however, was an adventurer in terms of being a writer and did not allow himself to be constrained or restrained by one genre. So he did, although he wrote historical fiction and probably that's what he wrote most of, he wrote also fiction about set in contemporary times, set in his own time of Edward in England, early 20th century England. And perhaps the most notable of those is a novel called The Necromancers, which is published in 1909. And this is about spiritualism. And spiritualism was all the rage in the late 19th, early 20th century. So for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries was a great advocate of spiritualism, of basically being in touch with the spiritual world. And it even infected good Christian souls, such as Chesterton's own wife. The Necromancer was published in 1909. And two years prior to that, Chesterton's wife's brother, so Chesterton's brother-in-law, Nolly's blog, committed suicide. And Francis, Chesterton's wife, was so distraught by this development that she consulted a spiritualist and a seance with a crystal ball and the rest of it. Even though she was a good believer in Christian, that she was so distraught and disturbed and desirous of being in touch with her brother, her deceased brother, who having committed suicide, of course, the eternal destiny of his soul was in doubt. And obviously, she was seeking reassurance. Nonetheless, Chesterton was not very happy about his wife's dabbling in, basically, ultimately, diabolism. So he wrote this wonderful poem, and so we off track a bit, but it does connect to the culture that Benson was addressing in the Necromancers. And this is one of my favorite poems by Chesterton. It's called The Crystal, as in the crystal ball. And it's addressed to his wife I saw it, low she lay as one in dreams, and round that holy hair, round and beyond, my Francis, my inviolable, screamed the scandal of the dead men's demimonde. Close to that face, a window into heaven, close to the hair's brown surf of broken waves, I saw the idiot faces of the ghosts that are the fungus, not the flower of graves. You whom the pine woods robed in sun and shade, you who were septored with thistle's bloom, God's thunder, what have you to do with these, the lying crystal and the darkened room? Leave the weird queens that find the sun too strong to mope and cower beneath druidic trees. The still sweet gardens of the Daston's dream, God's thunder, what have you to do with these? Low fields and shining lying crystal land, peace and strange pleasure, wonder lands untrod, but not plain words, nor love of open things, truth, nor strong laughter, nor the fear of God. I will not look, I am a child of earth, I see the sun and wood, the sea and grass, I only saw one spirit, she is there, staring for spirits in a lump of glass. This is a powerful poem by Chesterton against the dangers of spiritualism, and again this was the subject of Benson's novel published two years later, so Chesterton's poem was presumably published around 1907 and the necromancers were published in 1909. And again, Benson is nothing if not versatile because he also wrote three science fiction novels, novels set in the future, the best known of which is Lord of the World, which is usually always in print, it's so popular, and that was published in 1907. And what's astonishing about it, it's in the vein of what we might call dystopian literature, and was a pioneer in that sort of literature. So the two most famous works of dystopian literature in the 20th century are probably Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was published in the 1920s, and 1984 by George Orwell which was published right just in 1949, I believe, 48 or 49, in the 1940s. But this is published in 1907, so almost 40 years earlier than that, and certainly 15 or so years earlier than Huxleys, and what's amazing is if anything it's more relevant than Huxleys and Orwell's dystopian fiction. So Huxleys, and anyway, there's a lot of truth to it, and Huxleys dystopian future, that humanity has some nambulated, has sleepwalked towards slavery because it's kept happy through drugs and easy pleasures, so it's the comfort being the path of least resistance, which leads to hell basically. So that's all absolutely true, and of course, George Orwell's book was written just after World War II with the defeat of the Nazis in very recent memory, and with the Soviet Union still very much a powerhouse of totalitarianism, and fascism in Italy, what have you. So 1984 is about the dangers of big brother, of having a big government that becomes so big that it crushes the citizens underfoot in jackboots, and what I think the key thing about Orwell's vision is that it doesn't really matter whether the jackboot that crushes the civilian is on the left foot or the right foot. In other words, whether it's communist or fascist, that the tyranny is the same. So again, all of this is true, but in order the world, what Benson shows is the rise of a very popular politician who, in a globalized culture, who becomes accepted by the various sort of globalist institutions such as the European Union doesn't exist there in those League of Nations or the United Nations, but basically there's this idea that the countries have come together in alliances and they hand over power to this man, who's the Lord of the World, and he's very popular because he promises peace and he seems to be affable, but his real agenda is poisonous, pernicious, anti-Christian, and ultimately, it's not just anti-Christian, he is effectively anti-Christ. So the rise of, should we say, secular fundamentalism, wearing a smile and looking for votes, that is something which we can perhaps all relate to in our own day and age. So, best known for his fiction, historical, contemporary, and science fiction, but he was not a verse to write in children's books. In 1905, he wrote a book with the alphabet of saints, and he worked with others, another couple of children's books, and he was a significant apologist, so a defender of the Catholic Church, wrote several books of apologetics, arguing for the Catholic Church's perspective, probably the best known of which is a book published in 1913 called Paradoxes of Catholicism. Now, he died tragically young of pneumonia in 1914, when he was only 42 years old, and what a marvelous and astonishing legacy he's left behind us in his corpus of works, fiction and non-fiction. He was also, by the way, an extremely popular preacher when he was giving us a sermon, that the attendants would be would be would be enormous. So posthumously, his spiritual letters to one of his converts was published, showing the spiritual depth of Benson's Christianity, his Catholic faith. But I haven't mentioned, and it would be a sin of omission if I didn't, that he was also a poet there was a running with his poetry published, and in the book Poems Every Catholic Should Know, published by Tan Borks, I select a few of his poems, and I thought I'd conclude this episode on Robert Hugh Benson with one of these poems, and it's called After a Retreat. What hast thou learnt today? Hast thou sounded awful mysteries? Hast pierced the veiled skies, climbed to the feet of God, trodden where saints have trod, fathomed the heights above? Nay, this only have I learnt, that God is love. What hast thou heard today? Hast heard the angel trumpets cry, and rippling harps reply? Heard from the throne of flame whence God incarnate came? Sound thunderous message roll? Nay, this have I heard, his voice within my soul. What hast thou felt today? Opinions of the angel guide, that standeth at thy side, in rapturous ardour's beat, glowing from head to feet, in ecstasy divine? Nay, this only have felt Christ's hand in mine. Thanks so much for joining me in the authority. Please do join me next time, and until next time, goodbye and good reading. This has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce, brought to you by Tan. For updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content, visit theauthoritypodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code authority25 to get 25% off your next order, including books, audiobooks, and video courses by Joseph Pierce, on literary giants such as Tolkien, Chesterton, Lewis, Shakespeare, and Bellach. As well as Tan's extensive catalog of content from the saints and great spiritual masters, to strengthen your faith and interior life. To follow Joseph and support his work, check out his blog and sign up for email updates and exclusive content at jpearse.co, and thanks for listening.