A question that everyone asks — or should ask — at some
point in his or her life is, What is the meaning and purpose of life? As Socrates is reported to have said
(sometimes Plato’s reporting seems a little . . . off), “The unexamined life is
not worth living.” What does it all
mean? Why should we bother?
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| R.H. Benson |
The quick and easy answer to that question, at least from
the Aristotelian-Thomist point of view, is that the meaning and purpose of life
qua life is to become more fully
human. From the Christian standpoint —
the one from which Robert Hugh Benson operated — the reason one becomes more
fully human is to prepare a solid foundation to move to the next level (what
Fulton Sheen called the third story of the house of life) and become an adopted
child of God, and use this life to prepare for the next. Life, that is.
Many people, at least those who have the means to be able to
think for themselves without fear of the consequences, have little problem with
working to become more fully human. It’s
an obvious conclusion we reach by using our reason, unimpeded by external
pressures.
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| Can't put it down. . . |
Don’t worry. This is
not another lecture on the importance of widespread capital ownership as the
principal means by which people secure and maintain their other natural rights,
and thereby become more fully human through their exercise, or the importance of reading Fulton Sheen's lost-lost classic, Freedom Under God. If you haven’t gotten that point by now,
giving Aristotle’s argument about the necessity of private ownership of capital
in order to pursue “the good life” of virtue isn’t going to do much good.
No, it’s a lecture on how one can pursue the good life (in
the Aristotelian sense), and move on to the next level of becoming an adopted
child of God (or the equivalent in your faith or philosophy), and yet still be
uncertain if you’re doing the right thing the best you can. We can know in general what to do, but are we
doing the right thing(s) in particular?
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| A.C. Benson's memoir |
That was a question that confronted Benson his entire life;
even his brother Arthur commented on it in the
memoir he wrote.
Benson seemed suffused with a sense that he was
constantly seeking and yet not finding the particulars of his true calling, his
“vocation.” This meant exploring the multitude of ways in
which people work to try and discern God’s Will for themselves, a search unique to every
person, yet based on universals about the human condition.
What makes Benson, almost the quintessential “Catholic”
writer, attractive and useful to non-Catholics, even non-Christians, is his accomplishment of successfully
presenting a specific body of truths within a society that, in large measure,
either rejected those truths as hostile to their being and way of life, or to the
whole concept of what it means for something to be true. This is the theme not only of Lord
of the World, but of every work of fiction (and quite a bit of the
non-fiction) that Benson wrote.
Nevertheless, the fact that Benson felt himself constantly in search of his own
vocation did not
mean that he could not help others in their searches. Perhaps he felt that others might profit from
his struggles. It might even be
construed an advantage to have a man who evidently felt something at loose ends
to use his possibly more highly developed sense of vocation to discern that of
others — except when those others were clearly making no effort to help out in
the matter, and, in fact, obviously believed that the task of seeking a
vocation didn’t even have any meaning. This
latter group Benson saw exemplified by the upper classes of
English society, the milieu with which he was, by nature and by nurture, most
familiar.
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| Inspiration for Waugh's The Loved One? |
A constant theme running through much of Benson’s
fiction, especially the later, “contemporary” or “mainstream” novels (below),
was the loss of the sense of purpose on the part of the English upper classes. It seemed to Benson that, on the whole, the purpose of the upper
classes was to have no purpose — a theme he presented in the darkly whimsical A
Winnowing, a book about life that seemingly
talks of nothing but death. He may have struggled with finding his particular
vocation (he was
never in doubt about his vocation in general), but he appeared to have little
sympathy for people who not only didn’t bother to search for their vocations,
they didn’t seem to feel that there was any need to do such a thing.
The nineteenth century may have been the twilight of an
upper class in England that retained even a vestige of noblesse oblige. This faded quickly by
the end of the century, however, and within fifty years would infect the United
States as well. When Benson wrote, the rich in America were still flexing their muscles, so to speak,
wondering where this new class that technology had enriched far beyond what
could be attained by human labor fit into the scheme of things.
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| Pope Pius VII |
This was something that concerned the popes as well, from
the unexpected endorsement of democracy by the aristocratic Pius VII, to the
revolutionary encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI, and even John Paul II and,
evidently, Francis. There seemed to be
something special about the United States; Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop
Ireland might not have been the mindless Jingoes they appear to their blasé and
sophisticated countrymen of today.
Sources for Benson’s novels and related material: