Confessions of a Convert: The Classic Spiritual Autobiography from the Author of "Lord of the World"

By Robert Hugh Benson and Dawn Eden

Mentioned by Pope Francis as a writer whom everyone should read, Robert Hugh Benson, author of Lord of the World, shares his spiritual journey from being an Anglican and son of the archbishop of Canterbury to becoming a Roman Catholic priest. Through his humble, honest, and memorable story, Benson invites us—in this republished classic—to think about what it means to wrestle with the deep questions of our Catholic faith while rejoicing in the power of their universal truths.

In 1907, The Ave Maria magazine invited well-known English novelist Robert Hugh Benson to share his conversion story. He began the first of eight installments with a statement that captures the perils and joys faced by converts as they attempt to "cross the Tiber." "When one stands at last upon high ground, it is extraordinarily difficult to trace the road by which one has approached: it winds, rises, falls, broadens and narrows until the mind is bewildered."

Benson weaves those challenges into Confessions of a Convert as he examines his own life for the signs and wonders that illuminated his way. He was astonished at how the remote God of his Anglican upbringing drew close to him, igniting a fire in his to heart and a desire to know God on a deeper level. This transformation led him to the doorstep of the Catholic Church. Reluctant to venture further because he was known as an important figure in the Anglican world, Benson grappled with the sacrifices he would make, including the loss of his vocation, family, and friends. After the death of his father, Benson finally embraced the nearness of God found in the Eucharist.

He shows us that coming closer to Christ and his Church is not always neat and tidy. Benson’s humor and humility help bridge the century-long gap between his time and ours and he teaches us to embrace the questions, struggles, and falterings of our faith in a way that’s full of God’s love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9780870613050

Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) was an English Anglican priest who joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1903 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904. He was lauded in his own day as one of the leading figures in English literature and was the author of many novels and apologetic works.

Book preview

"Just as Bl. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and G. K. Chesterton’s The Thing continue to both encourage those on their way to the Church and sustain those already in it, so too does Robert Hugh Benson’s 1913 memoir Confessions of a Convert retain its power to inspire. As a convert myself, having traveled through Judaism, agnosticism, and evangelical Christianity before coming home to Rome, I find that Benson’s breathtakingly intimate prose does even more. It jars. It enlightens. It surprises."

From the foreword by Dawn Eden

Author of Remembering God's Mercy

"Between Cardinal Newman and Dr. Scott Hahn, there was Robert Hugh Benson. The son of the archbishop of Canterbury, his entrance into the Catholic Church in 1907 caused an uproar in English-speaking Christianity. Modern readers will find Confessions of a Convert to be a reliable guide to understand why Protestant clergy and lay people come home to the Catholic Church."

John Bergsma

Author of Bible Basics for Catholics

"As a convert myself, Confessions of a Convert startled me—all over again—with the same poignant, invigorating shock of my first breathtaking plunge into the deep waters of the ancient Truth that is our Catholic faith."

Sonja Corbitt

Catholic speaker, radio host, and author of Unleashed

"Robert Hugh Benson’s Confessions of a Convert is a book of startling originality that charts the path of how a committed Anglican priest found himself called to Rome. The son of an archbishop of Canterbury, Benson seemed an unlikely contender for the Catholic priesthood. But the stirrings of faith in his heart, soul, mind, and body are narrated in ways that are beautiful and moving. This account is set to surprise, inspire, nurture, nourish, and ultimately guide a new generation in its contemplation of the experience of conversion."

Martyn Sampson

English professor at the University of the West of England

Foreword © 2016 by Dawn Eden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.avemariapress.com

Paperback: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-304-3

E-book: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-305-0

Cover image © John Woolworth / Alamy.

Cover and text design by David Scholtes.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benson, Robert Hugh, 1871-1914. author.

Title: Confessions of a convert : the classic spiritual autobiography from

the author of Lord of the world / Robert Hugh Benson.

Description: Notre Dame, IN : Christian Classics, 2016. | "Reprinted, with a

few additions and corrections during the time that has elapsed since their

serial appearance."

Identifiers: LCCN 2016026636 (print) | LCCN 2016031732 (ebook) | ISBN

9780870613043 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780870613050 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Benson, Robert Hugh, 1871-1914. | Catholic

Church--England--Clergy--Biography. | Catholic

converts--England--Biography.

Classification: LCC BX4705.B3 A5 2016 (print) | LCC BX4705.B3 (ebook) | DDC

248.2/42092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026636

Contents

Foreword by Dawn Eden

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Foreword by Dawn Eden

Can a book on conversion to Catholicism penned by a priest who died more than a century ago speak to modern readers? The cultural landscape has changed so much in recent generations that the thought seems almost incredible. Yet, just as Bl. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and G. K. Chesterton’s The Thing continue to both encourage those on their way to the Church and sustain those already in it, so too does Robert Hugh Benson’s 1913 memoir Confessions of a Convert retain its power to inspire.

As a convert myself, having traveled through Judaism, agnosticism, and evangelical Christianity before coming home to Rome, I find that Benson’s breathtakingly intimate prose does even more. It jars. It enlightens. It surprises.

Although Benson (1871–1914) was one of the most popular and prolific authors of his time, modern readers know him primarily through his futuristic 1907 novel Lord of the World, the only work of his that I had read before taking up his Confessions of a Convert. My expectation of this book was that the author, given his heritage as the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, would frame his conversion story as a Newman-style apologia to those in the Anglican fold that he had left behind. To be sure, he does indeed explain how, as a young Anglican priest, he came to realize that his denomination was not the true Church. But as the book progresses, it becomes clear that his real interest is not apologetics but rather spirituality. He is concerned with nothing less than the practical implications of Jesus’ taking flesh.

That the mystery of the Incarnation looms large in Benson’s creative consciousness is clear; as Janet Grayson put it in her biography of Benson, his writings [grapple] with the mystery of spirit and body, of soul contained in perishable matter, the eternal in the carnal, of life in a handful of dust.

In Lord of the World, he uses the lens of fiction to critique a society that is scandalized by the idea of God becoming man while it clamors to worship man as God. With Confessions of a Convert, he uses the lens of memoir to examine the corruptive force of a religious ideology that, while professing to believe that God became man, denies practical meaning to the Incarnation. That angle, for the modern reader, is what is most striking about the book: Benson is not so much interested in addressing Anglicans in particular as he is in addressing all whose thought is infected with the relativism that characterizes modern secularism—or, to use a term that did not exist in his time, postsecularism.

Like Chesterton, whom he admired, Benson was keenly attuned to the currents of relativism that were already reshaping Western culture, so much so that he saw with great clarity the great conflict in which we find ourselves today. It is not merely a conflict between religious adherents and unbelievers. It is a conflict rather between those who desire to ground their lives and their very identity upon the logos of objective, transcendent moral truth and those who cannot even conceive that such truth exists, let alone that it is desirable.

Confessions of a Convert is tense with references to this conflict. Although Benson encounters many sincere Anglicans who strive to lead godly lives according to the lights that they are given, their witness is not enough to hold him in a denomination where there is no teaching body to distinguish truth from error. One can feel his frustration when a high-ranking Anglican official indicates to him that religion is a matter more or less of individual choice and tastes. In the official’s opinion, Benson writes, Christ had not revealed positive truths to which, so soon as we accepted Christ as a Divine Teacher, we instantly submitted without hesitation.

Jesus says, If these things are done when the wood is green what will happen when it is dry? (Lk 23:31). The subjectivism that appalled Benson has since been spread via the strong process of secularization under the banner of the absolute autonomy of the human being, as Pope Benedict XVI noted in an audience given one hundred years after the publication of Benson’s memoir. A particularly dangerous phenomenon for faith has arisen in our times, the pope said, "indeed a form of atheism exists which we define, precisely, as ‘practical,’ in which the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless. So it is that people often believe in God in a superficial manner, and live ‘as though God did not exist’ (etsi Deus non daretur)."

Yet, if Benson in Confessions of a Convert foresees the practical atheism that would result from the Anglican attitudes that he sought to escape, he also reveals, through his own experience, the sure hope that Catholic Faith provides to the seeker. In this present age of false freedoms, and particularly in the wake of the sexual revolution, Benson’s words speak with renewed power as he writes that there is a liberty which is a more intolerable slavery than the heaviest of chains.

I did not want to go this way and that at my own will, he adds. I wanted to know the way in which God wished me to walk. I did not want to be free to change my grasp on truth: I needed rather a truth that itself should make me free. I did not want broad ways of pleasantness, but the narrow Way that is Truth and Life.

Those are fighting words. They were countercultural in 1912; they are even more so in 2016. With them—and indeed with the whole of this book—Benson, who died as the guns of World War I were beginning to fire, shows himself an ideal foxhole companion for the believer engaged in today’s spiritual battles.

Preface

The following chapters were first published, in substance, in the American Catholic magazine The Ave Maria in 1906–1907, and it is by the kind permission of the Editor, Father Hudson, that they are now reprinted, with a few additions and corrections.

During the time that has elapsed since their serial appearance, the writer has received a very large number of applications that they should be issued in book form; and after long hesitation, he has acceded to these requests. He hesitated partly because it appeared to him really doubtful whether their issue would be of any real service at all, partly because he occasionally contemplated adding considerably to them, and annexing to them further confessions of a convert since his conversion. This latter idea, however, he has abandoned for the present, owing to the extraordinary difficulty he has found in drawing any real comparisons between the rapidly fading impression of Anglicanism upon his memory, and the continually deepening experiences of the Catholic religion. Cardinal Newman compares, somewhere, the sensations of a convert from Anglicanism to those of a man in a fairy story, who, after wandering all night in a city of enchantment, turns after sunrise to look back upon it, and finds to his astonishment that the buildings are no longer there; they have gone up like wraiths and mists under the light of the risen day. So the present writer has found. He no longer, as in the first months of his conversion, is capable of comparing the two systems of belief together, since that which he has left appears to him no longer a coherent item at all. There are, of