The hand of time is particularly cruel to books: it silently slips the vast majority of books off the bookshelves and into the bin of collective amnesia. Only the classics are spared such ignominy. They are “canonised” by popular acclaim. And precisely “the canon” is the term used to refer to the collection of works which have received classical status. In fact the cruel hand of time does us a great favour by removing from our potential reading lists books which would have been a waste of time. And so it is that here in Position Papers we love to revisit these great classics (while keeping an eagle eye on contemporary publications of course).
With James Bradshaw we reexamine the great British writer George Orwell and from what Bradshaw writes Orwell is well worth a revisit. His two classics Animal Farm and 1984 have helped encapsulate the dynamics of totalitarianism: its idealistic origins, it intrinsic mendacity and its nightmarish possibilities when it triumphs. 1984 in particular has been a wonderful book to unmask the tricks of the totalitarian trade, in particular its seizure and manipulation of language. However Bradshaw takes us beyond those two Orwellian staples to the the full range of Orwell’s novels and essays which reveal the author’s tremendous power of insight. Strangely however, as Bradshaw shows, Orwell was blinkered and even biased where it came to the Catholic Church. This shows itself especially in his failure to acknowledge the horrors experienced by Catholic Spain at the hands of Marxists in the Spanish Civil War – a war in which Orwell himself fought, as he recounts in Homage to Catalonia.
Another great classic we look at is Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, which as Michael Kirke points out is both a difficult and extraordinary book. Kirke is not exaggerating when he speaks of it as a kind of City of God for the contemporary world. We will have to return to more of Ratzinger’s works over the coming months for his is a prophetic voice in the modern world if there ever was one.
Pat Hanratty reviews George Chevrot’s wonderful 1937 spiritual classic Simon Peter: Lessons from the First Pope – the first in a series of reviews of spiritual classics which have be reprinted by Scepter Press in the USA. It is a delightful book which bears re-reading.
Happy reading!