Book Review: 1984 by George Orwell (2/2)
Truth, Goodness and Beauty
The final part and conclusion of 1984, arguably one of the most poignant and tragic in the history of literature, provides a subtle but penetrating insight into the true nature of Christ’s Passion and sacrifice on the Cross, as well as the participation of humanity in His redemptive suffering. While seeking to combat the Party and its demonic Ingsoc ideology, Winston identified two ultimate standards by which to do so: truth and love. He recognized these facets of reality and faculties of human nature as those which are the most fundamental and perennial, alone remaining undeniable against the greatest of challenges. However, in his resolution, Winston made an error on each point which is characteristic of a modernistic and relativist worldview, a worldview which, despite his opposition to the Party, he was himself committed to by his professed atheism.[1]
Since God is I AM, who as infinite Being is essentially Truth and Goodness, He alone is the antidote to the poison of coercion and propaganda as practiced by the Party. Even if death is the punishment for upholding truth, such integrity is the only real guarantee of sanity, peace and freedom, since even bodily death is only temporary, for as Christ taught, “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Mt 10:28) Winston clings to this principle and proclaims it as a credal confession when he says, “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change… Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”[2] Again he echoes Chesterton, who prophesied in a 1926 article for Illustrated London News,
We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.[3]
Winston recognized truth as the conformity of the mind to reality, which exists in an orderly, natural way beyond subjective perceptions, feelings or opinions, and he held on to this primarily through the reliability of mathematics and sensory experience.[4] In this way, as Erich Fromm explained in the afterword to the novel, Winston (and Orwell), unlike O’Brien his Thought Police tormentor, was not an absolute relativist; he did not deny human nature or the existence of objective truth.[5] Nevertheless, in his particular understanding of truth, Winston made the fatal error, one which is common today, of denying a divine source and foundation for reality, an infinity of which finite existence is a participation. Without a structured, rational belief in a God who is beyond human subjectivity, who remains true even when humanity is false, Winston’s tenuous grasp of truth was shattered by the sophistical arguments and physical and psychological tortures of O’Brien.
While this brainwashing and Winston’s resultant brokenness are understandable as afflictions which most people cannot even imagine, many others throughout history, such as the holy martyrs, as well as victims of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and other cultic or ideological tyrannies then or today, have been able to hold on to their sanity and their humanity, and they all did so by retaining faith in God. Even if their normal human faculties were obliterated, their human nature could not be totally destroyed, and so they retained the intrinsic natural longing for God which is part of the imago Dei in every human person. (CCC 357)
Like Winston, those in more recent times who deny the dual unitive and procreative meanings of human sexuality, the spousal meaning of the body, the humanity of unborn children and the inalterability of biological sex lack an adequate objective reference point by which to maintain a hold on reality. The preference of the individual becomes the arbiter of truth and morality is reduced to personal taste. Pilate expressed the relativism of O’Brien when he asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38) and Christ stood silently before him, answering through His own divine Personhood as “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (Jn 14:6) He is the fulcrum of truth upon whom the saints have relied throughout Christian history, no matter what unrealities the world threw at them, and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church remains the infallible guarantor of the authentic interpretation of the Gospel even today.
Winston’s remaining foothold in reality – love – is a recognition of goodness, alongside truth, as what Fr. W. Norris Clarke, following the classical and Thomistic tradition, in his book The One and the Many calls “a transcendental property of being,” with the good being defined as “that which is perfect in itself and perfective of another,” which, accordingly, indicates the negation and imperfection of evil as a privation of the good of being.[6] Goodness is thus an objective attribute of reality itself, a secure foothold beyond all temporal or subjective limitations. However, Winston commits an error similar to his flawed understanding of truth: by associating love only with physical pleasure and emotional affection, confusing authentic goodness with self-gratification,[7] Winston makes the good purely subjective, and so when a stronger impulse is given against this kind of love, as in the terror of the rats used as his greatest fear in O’Brien’s final torture, he is unable to overcome it.[8]
As with truth, the blessed martyrs retained fidelity to love, both of God and neighbor, by seeing true love as charity founded in and exemplified by Christ who, as God, “is charity.” (1 Jn 4:8) Following Christ’s command to “love one another, as I have loved you,” (Jn 13:34) the martyrs endured afflictions comparable to or even surpassing those of Winston, such as St. Margaret Clitherow who with her unborn child was crushed to death beneath rocks during the English “Reformation,” or St. Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally executed by lethal injection in a Nazi concentration camp after heroically volunteering to take another’s place.
Unlike these saints but like many people today, Winston made the mistake of separating or ignoring three necessary aspects of love: eros, caritas and ethos. Although Winston showed little or no recognition of love in the sense of disinterested, self-sacrificing charity, he was not wrong to value erotic love; however, he failed to pursue this eros in truth, according to the wisdom of Socrates, on the Ladder of Love from the love of earthly beauties in an upward ascent to the love of God, who is Beauty-Itself and “draws us out of ourselves and into another.”[9] Pope St. John Paul II, in his monumental work on the theology of the body Man and Woman He Created Them, explained that eros possesses two meanings: the classical, consisting of “the inner power that draws man toward all that is good, true, and beautiful,” but more commonly, as a sensual attraction which “arouses a reciprocal tendency in both the man and the woman to draw near to each other, to the union of their bodies.”[10]
Winston neglected the first meaning and thus failed to see the second as being fulfilled in the first; he saw chastity as just another form of Party coercion and concupiscent pleasure as “rebellion” against it, as when he told Julia, his lover, “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.” And the narrator continued his thoughts: “Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”[11] His restriction of love to impersonal sexual pleasure was disordered, lacking the properly hierarchical harmony between the two meanings of eros which is achieved by ethos, as the Holy Father makes clear:
It is necessary continually to rediscover the spousal meaning of the body and the true dignity of the gift in what is ‘erotic.’ This is the task of the human spirit, and it is by its nature an ethical task. If one does not assume this task, the very attraction of the senses and the passion of the body can stop at mere concupiscence, deprived of all ethical value, and man, male and female, does not experience that fullness of ‘eros,’ which implies the upward impulse of the human spirit toward what is true, good, and beautiful, so that what is ‘erotic’ also becomes true, good, and beautiful. It is, therefore, indispensable that ethos becomes the constitutive form of eros.[12]
Despite his failings, based in the intellectual errors inculcated by a lifetime of culturally-diffused brainwashing followed by a period of intensive torture, Winston is sympathetic in his fallen humanity and provides an example of the dangers which can come from a godless worldview. In the end, only Christ can endure the greatest sufferings without falling into sin, and it is only by His grace of perseverance that the saints can imitate Him. As Christ reminded His disciples, “I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing.” (Jn 15:5) While Winston finally succumbed and offered Julia to take his undue punishment instead of himself, discarding his last foothold in reality in the face of unimaginable terror,[13] Christ offered Himself in self-sacrificing love to take the punishment which humanity truly deserves.
As a hypothetical, dystopian future, 1984 reflects the views and imaginings of George Orwell and is thus not necessarily always accurate to the truth as Catholic tradition reveals it. Nevertheless, it is a necessary warning for those appointed to live in the modern world, and as such should be required reading for all, especially everyone engaged in the culture war against the prevalent “Orwellian” ideologies today which deny not only God, Christianity, human dignity and objective morality but the very intelligibility of reality itself and so threaten to destroy the world as we know it.
[1] Ibid., 218.
[2] Ibid., 66.
[3] G.K. Chesterton, “On Modern Controversy,” Illustrated London News (14 August 1926), in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. XXXIV: The Illustrated London News 1926-1928 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 145.
[4] Orwell, 1984, 66.
[5] Erich Fromm, afterword to 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1961), 318.
[6] W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 327, 334, 374. Kindle.
[7] Orwell, 1984, 102.
[8] Orwell, 1984, 231.
[9] Harrison Garlick, “On the Crisis of Fat-Souled Men,” at The Josias (28 August 2023), at https://thejosias.com.
[10] Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston, MA: Pauline, 2006), 47:2. Kindle.
[11] Orwell, 1984, 56, 102-3.
[12] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 48:1.
[13] Orwell, 1984, 232, 235.