Book Review: 1984 by George Orwell (1/2)
The Despair of a World Without God: Part 2 Wedenesday
George Orwell (1903-1950) published his dystopian science fiction novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), in 1949, just after the conclusion of the Second World War. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest, most insightful and original dystopian stories in history, alongside Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, all of which portended the rise of ideological regimes and robotic warfare in the 20th century and the grave consequences which they represented for the development of global civilization. Each expressed the particular worldview of its author, and 1984 illustrates many of the sentiments and beliefs which Orwell held and wrote about in other works. From a Catholic standpoint, despite its potential pitfalls of misunderstanding, 1984 is an invaluable fictional rendering of the miasma into which the modern world of materialism, relativism and the worship of technical power can fall, a world which has abandoned God and the guidance of His Church, and for this reason, 1984 remains as clear a warning today as when it was first published.
The dichotomy of existence and non-existence and the power of humans to confer both is a central theme of 1984. Following the horrors of World War II and driven by the fear and despair it caused, Orwell’s dystopian future portrays the State replacing God and religion in society. For Party members, religion is completely banned and forgotten, and for the proletariat masses, “even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it.”[1] In the absence of real religion, the Party has thus become the people’s religion, with Big Brother as their savior.[2] This fact echoes the words of G.K. Chesterton, who once observed in Christendom in Dublin, “Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.”[3] The goal of the Party is to erase all else from the lives of its members and consume them entirely in itself. As O’Brien, the primary antagonist of the story and chief Party torturer, explains:
Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen… There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always… there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.[4]
Since God alone has the power to create ex nihilo or to utterly destroy something,[5] the Party treats itself as God, presuming that executing people and removing any record or memory of them could truly erase them from existence. Similarly, the Party employs “doublethink” to change the past, something which even God cannot do. As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following both St. Augustine and Aristotle, God “cannot effect that anything else which is past should not have been” for the reason that “there does not fall under the scope of God's omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction.”[6] In this way, the Party not only assigns to itself the power and authority of God, but even goes so far as to violate the very order of reality by coercing its members into giving it a power which is impossible, that of altering the past.
