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Imaginative Eschatology: Benson's ‘The Lord of the World’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The advent of the end of the second millennium is unlikely to be greeted, in the historic Christian churches, with the mixture of enthusiasm and alarm which heralded the end of the first. Quite apart from the inroads of ‘de-mythologising’ and ‘existentialising’ before which traditional eschatology has lost ground, the number symbolism of biblical apocalypticism simply does not lend itself to two thousand years in the way believers with misplaced literalism applied it, in fear and awe, to the completion of the first thousand years of the agôn between the Gospel and the world. On the other hand, consider some presumptive ‘signs of the times’: the possibility, admittedly controverted, of eco-catastrophe; the ever-present threat of nuclear war—the more pressing as smaller powers, with less to lose and weaker traditions of rational policymaking, acquire weapons of mass destruction; the victories of secularist materialism which, it seems, only the Islamic powers will challenge—courageously as to substance, injudiciously as to mode; the creation of a medical technology that can encompass, at the ends of the life process, the manufacture of some human beings and the safe disposal of others; the new disparity between the technical means to feed the hungry, never before present, and the political will to do it. These provoke thought, and, in any case, the ending of a millennium reminds the Church of her faith conviction that, in this world, the human project is essentially limited in time.
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- Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 For Benson’s life, see C.C. Martindale, S.J., The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (London 1916, two volumes).
2 Confessions of a Convert (London 1912; 1920), p. 107.
3 C.C. Martindale. S.J., op.cit., II. p. 434.
4 Ibid., p. 78.
5 On his debt to Julian, see Spiritual Letters of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (London 1915), p. 6; Richard Rolle was the historical model for the fictional ‘Raynal’ in Benson’s Richard Raynal, Solitary (London, 1906). Note also his collection of pre-Reformation devotions, A Book of the Love of Jesus (London, 1905) which he feared English Catholics, used to more Baroque fare, would find insufficiently warm – ‘too Saxon’ – but whose ethos he described as ‘an extraordinary mixture of passion and restraint, strength and delicacy’, Spiritual Letters, p. 73. For his Christocentricism. see, above all, The Friendship of Christ (London 1912), but also Christ in the Church (London 1911).
6 Benson’s work offers a theology of the city of Rome, as ‘a sort of sacrament of the New Jerusalem. You meet the four marks of the Church, incarnate. in the streets and churches’, Spiritual Letrers, p. 49.
7 By What Authority? (London 1909); Come Rack, Come Rope (London 1912); The Queen’s Tragedy (London 1906).
8 Benson did not scruple to speak of the importance of ‘the materialisation of religion’, which he defined as ‘the supplying of acts and images on which religious emotion may concentrate itself. Extreme definiteness seems necessary, and that, not only in the bright and impressive adjuncts of worship, but in the modes in which individual approach to God is made’, Confessions of a Convert, pp. 37–38.
9 E. Gellner. Plough, Sword and Book: the Structure of Human History (London 1988).
10 Francis Fukiyama, ‘The End of History’, The Independent, 20/21. 9. 1989; for a Catholic response, Eamon Duffy, ‘A Pot of Hubris at the Rainbow’s End’, ibid., 3. 10. 1989.
11 Hebrews 11, 37–38. Benson also created, at his readers’ instigation and with less enthusiasm, an alternative account of the End to this ‘remnant’ version: The Dawn of All (London 1911). But the author’s heart is not in it; his conviction that salvation moves over through Cross to resurrection could not be married with such a non-dialectical view of the Church’s triumph.