Background
Robert Benson was born on November 18, 1871 in Wokingham, United Kingdom. He was the youngest son of Edward White Benson (Archbishop of Canterbury) and his wife, Mary, and younger brother of Edward Frederic Benson.
Benson was educated at Eton College.
Benson studied classics and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893.
Robert Benson was born on November 18, 1871 in Wokingham, United Kingdom. He was the youngest son of Edward White Benson (Archbishop of Canterbury) and his wife, Mary, and younger brother of Edward Frederic Benson.
Benson was educated at Eton College and then studied classics and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893.
In 1895, Benson was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father, who was the then Archbishop of Canterbury. After his father died suddenly in 1896, Benson was sent on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. While there he began to question the status of the Church of England and to consider the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. His own piety began to tend toward the High Church tradition, and he started exploring religious life in various Anglican communities, eventually obtaining permission to join the Community of the Resurrection.
Benson made his profession as a member of the community in 1901, at which time he had no thoughts of leaving the Church of England. As he continued his studies and began writing, however, he became more and more uneasy with his own doctrinal position and, on 11 September 1903, he was received into the Catholic Church. He was awarded the Dignitary of Honour of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. Benson was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1904 and sent to Cambridge. He continued his writing career along with his ministry as a priest.
Like both his brothers, Robert wrote many ghost and horror stories, as well as children's stories and historical fiction. The first of Benson's novels, and the only one written while he was still an Anglican, was "The Light Invisible," published in 1903 and written when he was in the midst of the convulsive throes of spiritual conversion. The book is awash with a veritable confusion of emotive mysticism - a confession of faith amidst the confusion of doubt. Once he had gained the clarity of Catholic perception, Benson looked upon his first novel with a degree of scepticism. In 1912, he commented that its subsequent popularity appeared to be determined by the religious denomination of those who read it.
Hilaire Belloc was so impressed by Benson's historical novels that he wrote enthusiastically of him to A.C. Benson in 1907 that it was "quite on the cards that he will be the man to write some day a book to give us some sort of idea what happened in England between 1520 and 1560." In fact, prompted by his anger and frustration at the Protestant bias of the Whig historians, Belloc would write several books of his own on this subject, including studies of key 16th and 17th century figures such as Wolsey, Cromwell, James I, Charles II, and Cranmer.
Benson, however, achieved in his fiction what Belloc was striving to achieve in his non-fiction. "In Come Rack! Come Rope!", possibly the finest of Benson's historical novels, the whole period of the Reformation is brought to blood-curdling life. With a meticulous approach to period detail, "Come Rack! Come Rope!" leaps from the page with historical realism. The reader is transported to the time of persecution in England when priests were put to a slow and tortuous death. The terror and tension of the tale grips the reader as tightly as it grips the leading characters who courageously witness to their faith in a hostile and deadly environment. Few novels have so successfully brought the past so potently to life.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of Benson's genius is to be found in the ease with which he crossed literary genres. Aside from his historical romances, he was equally at home with novels with a contemporary setting, such as "The Necromancers", a cautionary tale about the dangers of spiritualism, or with futuristic fantasies, such as "Lord of the World." The latter novel is truly remarkable and deserves to stand beside Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" as a classic of dystopian fiction. In fact, though Huxley's and Orwell's modern masterpieces may merit equal praise as works of literature, they are clearly inferior as works of prophecy.
The world depicted in "Lord of the World" is one where creeping secularism and Godless humanism have triumphed over religion and traditional morality. It is a world where philosophical relativism has triumphed over objectivity; a world where, in the name of tolerance, religious doctrine is not tolerated. It is a world where euthanasia is practiced widely and religion hardly practiced at all. The lord of this nightmare world is a benign-looking politician intent on power in the name of "peace," and intent on the destruction of religion in the name of "truth." In such a world, only a small and shrinking Church stands resolutely against the demonic "Lord of the World."
If Benson's literary output encompassed multifarious fictional themes - historical, contemporary, and futuristic - he also strayed into other areas with consummate ease. His "Poems" display a deep and dry spirituality, expressed formally in a firmly-rooted, if sometimes desiccate, faith. The same deep and dry spirituality was evident in "Spiritual Letters to one of his Converts", also published posthumously, which offers a tantalizing insight into a profound intellect. A series of sermons, preached in Rome at Easter 1913 and later published as "The Paradoxes of Catholicism", illustrates why Benson was so popular as a public preacher, attracting large audiences wherever he spoke.
Particularly remarkable is Benson's masterly "Confessions of a Convert" which stands beside John Henry Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua" and Ronald Knox's "A Spiritual Aeneid" as a timeless classic in the literature of conversion. The great influence on Knox's conversion was G.K. Chesterton and it is perhaps no surprise that Benson was a great admirer of Chesterton. Benson's biographer, the Jesuit C.C. Martindale, who was himself a convert, wrote that Benson's "Papers of a Pariah" were "noticeable" for their "Chestertonian quality."
Further evidence of Chesterton's influence on Benson is provided by Benson's admiration of Chesterton's "Heretics." Chesterton was not a Catholic in 1905 but "Heretics" was the first evidence that, as Benson put it, he "had the spirit." Chesterton's "spirit," every bit as influential as Benson's during the early days of the Catholic Literary Revival, is the subject of the next article in this column. Chesterton, however, is enjoying a great revival of interest, whereas Benson is still sadly neglected. It is high time that Mr. Robert Hugh Benson, the unsung genius of the Catholic Literary Revival, experiences a revival of his own.
Benson died of pneumonia in 1914 in Salford, where he had been preaching a mission. He was 42. At his request, he was buried in the orchard of Hare Street House, his house in the Hertfordshire village of Hare Street. A chapel, dedicated to St Hugh, was built over the site. Benson bequeathed the house to the Catholic Church as a county retreat for the Archbishop of Westminster. The Roman Catholic church in the nearby town of Buntingford, which he helped finance, is dedicated to St Richard of Chichester, but also known as the Benson Memorial Church.
Benson became an Anglican priest, but he had already begun to suspect that in the quarrel between Anglicanism and Rome, Rome was right. The next several years were spent navigating among High Church groups and their diverse rationales for not converting. In the end – after his father’s death – Benson finally gave up on these doctrinal waverings and acted upon his growing conviction that the true Church had to be one that could rightly be said to “know her own mind” concerning the essentials of salvation. He became a Catholic in 1903 and was ordained the following year.
Quotes from others about the person
I always looked on him as the guide who had led me to Catholic truth - I did not know then that he used to pray for my conversion.
As a young man, Benson recalled, he had rejected the idea of marriage as "quite inconceivable." He had a close friendship with "Baron Corvo", alias the notorious novelist Frederick Rolfe, with whom he had hoped to write a book on Thomas Becket, until Benson decided that he should not be associated (according to writer Brian Masters) "with a Venetian pimp and procurer of boys."