Books and articles on George Orwell continue to multiply. All of his books remain in print, including his novels, nonfiction books, diary, letters, and collected essays. Almost three-quarters of a century since his death in January 1950, he continues to fascinate both popular and scholarly readers. There are obvious reasons for this. He wrote two masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which brilliantly illuminate the dangers of totalitarianism in the modern world. He was also one of his century's greatest essayists. Several of his essays, including “Politics and the English Language,” “A Hanging,” and “Shooting an Elephant,” continue to be read widely.
One of the many topics that fascinate Orwell scholars is his preoccupation with religion, which persisted despite his self-professed atheism. Michael Brennan, who has written on faith in the work of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, has taken on the admittedly more complex question of Orwell's attitudes in his George Orwell and Religion. Seeking “to explore exactly what levels of creative stimulation the private Eric Blair and the public George Orwell drew from his considerations of religious customs, beliefs and institutions,” Brennan undertakes a chronological analysis of his life and writings, concluding that religion was an issue that Orwell simply could not leave alone (xiii).
Brennan addresses two main aspects of Orwell's (anti-)religious views: his negative opinion of Catholicism and his anti-Semitism. According to Brennan, Catholicism obsessed Orwell throughout his life. He speculates that the Catholic background of Orwell's mother's family, combined with his schooling by Ursuline nuns while a young boy, somehow “played a formative role in the development of George Orwell's lifelong hostility towards the Catholic Church” (6). The evidence for this hypothesis is weak and hardly explains the ferocity of Orwell's contempt for Catholicism. At many points in Brennan's analysis of Orwell's early years, he is reduced to surrounding key points by phrases such as “it seems likely,” “it is likely,” and “probably been.” Nonetheless, the outsized place of Catholicism in Orwell's imagination comes through clearly.
Brennan also illuminates Orwell's early anti-Semitism. Elements of anti-Semitism emerged in Orwell's first important writings, particularly in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which contains harsh portraits of Jews as scoundrels and cheats. The book abounds in popular anti-Semitic images: “trust a snake before a Jew,” “a horrible old Jew with a red beard like Judas Iscariot.” To be sure, anti-Semitism was common in English literature in the early twentieth century and could be found in the work of Orwell's contemporaries. Orwell was hardly alone. Anti-Semitic caricatures continued in his writings until he became aware of the fate of Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Orwell then grew interested in understanding the root of anti-Semitism in England, believing that the view of the Jew as sinister and cunning was strongest among the lower classes, especially (predictably) among the Irish Catholic working class. Brennan points out that Orwell had only anecdotal evidence for this belief, as well as for many other sweeping generalizations regarding religion.
Orwell returned to the topic, then, during the last decade of his life. Postwar reports of the systematic murder of Jews profoundly disturbed him. However, he was unsympathetic to the idea of Jewish homeland in Palestine. Brennan notes that Orwell “had an inbuilt antipathy towards small nationalist movements” and regarded Zionism, especially the Zionism of American Jews, as “malignant” (111). Orwell's Jewish friends, Tosco Fyvel and Arthur Koestler, found it impossible to discuss the idea of a Jewish homeland with him.
If Orwell was conflicted about Judaism, his antipathy toward Catholicism never relented. Orwell regarded Catholicism as a consistent enemy of democracy. In fact, Brennan asserts that his antipathy toward Catholicism was “the formulating element of his writings” (95). Orwell equated Catholicism to Fascism, Nazism, and Communism—examples of totalitarian movements that would tolerate no dissent. Brennan sees this equation as evidence of the kind of sophistic and confused thinking that Orwell often was guilty of when dealing with Catholicism.
Orwell was critical of those converts—G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Lunn, Monsignor Ronald Knox—who argued that Catholicism possessed a central truth denied other religions. While Orwell admired certain Catholic writers, especially Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, he believed it was impossible to be a grown-up and a good Catholic novelist. Orwell developed a particular distaste for Greene's The Heart of the Matter, whose main character, Scobie, represented the dubious idea that somehow it was “more spiritually elevated to be an ‘erring Catholic than a virtuous pagan’” (131). In notes prepared shortly before his death, Orwell observed that Waugh was as good a novelist as it was possible to be “‘while holding untenable beliefs’” (156).
Brennan suggests that to fully grasp the extent of Orwell's hatred of Catholicism we must first understand him in his role as pamphleteer. He set out to write “not as an impartial journalist, essayist or reviewer but as a highly partisan polemicist” (125). Orwell believed in the inequity of Catholicism and sought to promote that idea by “earnest argument through satire and rhetoric to sheer abuse” (125).
This is fine up to a point and opens new insights into Orwell's approach to his anti-Catholicism. However, Brennan never really gets to the root of this hostility. He discusses it in more depth than has any other writer on the topic to date, but he fails to explain persuasively what caused it. It must be more than his youthful education at the hands of Ursuline nuns, a point by the way, that Orwell never mentioned in any of his writings. Orwell regarded Catholicism as the most doctrinaire Christian faith and thus the most antithetical to his way of thinking. This explains much. And then, maybe part of the answer is as simple as old-fashioned English patriotism, which had viewed Catholicism with suspicion since the days of the Reformation. Still, Orwell's version of such patriotism would likely be complicated.
Brennan has produced an important addition to the field of Orwell studies. His examination of Orwell's writings is thorough and shows a familiarity with the works of the best authorities on his career. It will take its place as the best study of Orwell's complex relationship with religion in its various forms, though it will leave room for further exploration of the topic.
