George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 3 March 1944 Some weeks ago a
Catholic reader of Tribune wrote to protest against a review by Mr Charles
Hamblett. She objected to his remarks about St Teresa and about St Joseph of Copertino, the saint
who once flew round a cathedral carrying a bishop on his back. I answered, defending Mr
Hamblett, and got a still more indignant letter in return. This letter raises a number of
very important points, and at least one of them seems to me to deserve discussion. The
relevance of flying saints to the Socialist
movement may not at first sight be very clear, but I think I can show that the present
nebulous state of Christian doctrine has serious implications which neither Christians nor
Socialists have faced.
The substance of my correspondents letter is that it
doesnt matter whether St Teresa and the rest of them flew through the air or not:
what matters is that St Teresas vision of the world changed the course of
history. I would concede this. Having lived in an oriental country I have developed
a certain indifference to miracles, and I well know that having delusions, or even being
an outright lunatic, is quite compatible with what is loosely called genius. William Blake, for instance, was a
lunatic in my opinion. Joan of Arc
was probably a lunatic. Newton believed in astrology, Strindberg believed in magic.
However, the miracles of the saints are a minor matter. It also appears from my
correspondents letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion
dont have to be accepted in a literal sense. It doesnt matter, for instance,
whether Jesus Christ ever existed. The figure of Christ (myth, or man, or god, it
does not matter) so transcends all the rest that I only wish that everyone would look,
before rejecting that version of life. Christ, therefore, may be a myth, or he may
have been merely a human being, or the account given of him in the Creeds may be true. So
we arrive at this position: Tribune must not poke fun at the Christian religion,
but the existence of Christ, which innumerable people have been burnt for denying, is a
matter of indifference.
Now, is this orthodox Catholic doctrine? My impression is that it
is not. I can think of passages in the writing of popular Catholic apologists such as
Father Woodlock and Father Ronald
Knox in which it is stated in the clearest terms that Christian doctrine means
what is appears to mean, and is not to be accepted in some wishy-washy metaphorical sense.
Father Knox refers specifically to the idea that it doesnt matter whether Christ
actually existed as a horrible idea. But what my correspondent says would be
echoed by many Catholic intellectuals. If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or
Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that
anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally. These doctrines have, you are
told, a quite other meaning which you are too crude to understand. Immortality of the soul
doesnt mean that you, John Smith, will remain conscious after you are
dead. Resurrection of the body doesnt mean that John Smiths body will actually
be resurrected and so on and so on. Thus the Catholic intellectual is able, for
controversial purposes, to play a sort of handy-pandy game, repeating the articles of the
Creed in exactly the same terms as his forefathers, while defending himself from the
charge of superstition by explaining that he is speaking in parables. Substantially his
claim is that though he himself doesnt believe in any very definite way in life
after death, there has been no change in Christian belief, since our ancestors didnt
really believe in it either. Meanwhile a vitally important fact that one of the
props of western civilization has been knocked away is obscured.
I do not know whether, officially, there has been any alteration
in Christian doctrine. Father Knox and my correspondent would seem to be in disagreement
about this. But what I do know is that belief in survival after death the
individual survival of John Smith, still conscious of himself as John Smith is
enormously less widespread than it was. Even among professing Christians it is probably
decaying: other people, as a rule, dont even entertain the possibility that it might
be true. But our forefathers, so far as we know, did believe in it. Unless all that they
wrote about it was intended to mislead us, they believed it in an exceedingly literal,
concrete way. Life on earth, as they saw it, was simply a short period of preparation for
an infinitely more important life beyond the grave. But that notion has disappeared, or is
disappearing, and the consequences have not really been faced.
Western civilization, unlike some oriental civilizations, was
founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. If one looks at the Christian
religion from the outside, this belief appears far more important than the belief in God.
The western conception of good and evil is very difficult to separate from it. There is
little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern mans
feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it
becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right, even if you are defeated.
Statesmen, nations, theories, causes are judged almost inevitably by the test of material
success. Supposing that one can separate the two phenomena, I would say that the decay of
the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine
civilization. Machine civilization has terrible possibilities, as you probably reflected
the other night when the ack-ack guns started up: but the other thing has terrible
possibilities too, and it cannot be said that the Socialist movement has given much
thought to them.
I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in
any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has
left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. Reared for thousands of
years on the notion that the individual survives, man has got to make a considerable
psychological effort to get used to the notion that the individual perishes. He is not
likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is
independent of heaven and hell. Marxism,
indeed, does supply this, but it has never really been popularized. Most Socialists are
content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a
material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when ones belly is full. But
the truth is the opposite: when ones belly is empty, ones only problem is an
empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall
really start wondering about mans destiny and the reason for his existence. One
cannot have any worth-while picture of the future unless one realizes how much we have
lost by the decay of Christianity. Few Socialists seem to be aware of this. And the
Catholic intellectuals who cling to the letter of the Creeds while reading into them
meanings they were never meant to have, and who snigger at anyone simple enough to suppose
that the Fathers of the Church meant what they said, are simply raising smoke-screens to
conceal their own disbelief from themselves.
I have very great pleasure in welcoming the reappearance of the Cornhill
Magazine after its four years absence. Apart from the articles there is a
good one on Mayakovsky by
Maurice Bowra, and another good one by Raymond Mortimer on Brougham and Macaulay
there are some interesting notes by the editor on the earlier history of the Cornhill.
One fact that these bring out is the size and wealth of the Victorian reading public, and
the vast sums earned by literary men in those days. The first number of the Cornhill
sold 120,000 copies. It paid Trollope
£2,000 for a serial he had demanded £3,000 and commissioned another from George Eliot at £10,000. Except
for the tiny few who managed to crash into the film world, these sums would be quite
unthinkable nowadays. You would have to be a top-notcher even to get into the £2,000
class. As for £10,000, to get that for a single book you would have to be someone like Edgar Rice Burroughs. A novel
nowadays is considered to have done very well if it brings its author £500 a sum
which a successful lawyer can earn in a single day. The book ramp is not so new as
Beachcomber and other enemies of the literary race imagine. |