George Orwell in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Did…the pope just cite George Orwell?

Not exactly. But Pope Leo did casually drop an unexpected eponym into his Jan. 9 address to diplomatic ambassadors:

It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it. 

The term Orwellian—denoting language reminiscent of the dystopian rhetorical conventions of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four—has entered our consciousness to such a degree that you don’t have to know who Orwell was to know what it means. This can happen—sometimes we behave in a quixotic way, or boycott a thing or two or behave like a dunce, especially in a world grown so Kafkaesque. 

The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia as well as many other books, essays, poems and journalistic endeavors (you won’t get out of a writing program without reading “Shooting an Elephant” or “Politics and the English Language”), George Orwell has kept his status as one of the premier writers of modern English even 76 years after his death. There’s even a new animated movie based on Animal Farm coming out this May, directed by Andy Serkis and including the voices of Seth Rogen, Woody Harrelson, Kieran Culkin and more. (It’s going to be terrible, isn’t it?)

Orwell was born (as Eric Blair) in India in 1903 to a father of English descent and a mother of French descent. His mother moved with her children to England when he was 1. Part of his early education was at a convent school run by Catholic nuns. He attended Eton on a scholarship, earning mostly poor marks, and eventually joined the Indian Imperial Police and was stationed in Burma. He returned to England in 1927 after contracting dengue fever, resigning his post soon after and dedicating himself to his writing. Time in London and Paris gave him the material for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933 under his new pen name.

At the end of 1936, an increasingly political Orwell decided to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. After being shot in the neck in 1937, he returned to England, disillusioned by many of his leftist comrades and wary of the Stalinist influence on socialist and communist movements with which he otherwise found common cause. Declared unfit for service for health reasons in World War II, he instead served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC while writing what would become Animal Farm. 

It wasn’t easy to get Animal Farm published; the Soviet Union was a British ally in World War II, and the obvious critique of Stalin and Soviet-style governance—from a revolution of the proletariat through to a repressive oligarchy worse than the previous system—scared off many publishers (and, frankly, Stalin was still the darling of many British socialists and fellow travelers). The book enjoyed critical and commercial success upon its publication in Great Britain in 1945 and the United States a year later, with the burgeoning Cold War making the critique of the Soviet Union far more welcome in the West. Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared in 1949, just a few months before Orwell’s death.

His health had declined precipitously in 1947, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he died in January of 1950 when a pulmonary artery ruptured while he was being treated for another bout of tuberculosis. He was only 46.

An irony pointed out by a few commentators about Pope Leo’s use of “Orwellian” is that Orwell himself is almost always described as having significant antipathy toward religion. Indeed, he wrote soon before his death that the perfect symbol of Christianity was a crucifix that hid a stiletto, and organized religion comes in for special vitriol in some of his essays. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote:

The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Reading Orwell on religion is like reading Christopher Hitchens on the subject: They both hate it, but they can’t stop writing about it. In a 2011 essay in The Spectator, Robert Gray noted that while Orwell certainly disliked Catholicism, “he seemed unable to leave the subject alone.” Evelyn Waugh, who visited Orwell a year before he died, described him as “very near to God,” and Orwell was a regular communicant in the Church of England and requested a Christian funeral and burial.

Gray also noted that while Orwell despised any religious interference in politics, he recognized the importance of religion as a social good, and was critical of other atheists and socialists who believed religion would wither away once the material needs of all people were met. (He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that the Catholic Church would inevitably return to a position of influence in Spain, because “night and the Jesuits always return.”) An atheist from an early age, he also wrote to a friend near his death that there must be some kind of afterlife.

America’s editors and contributors have always loved Orwell regardless, and both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four garnered positive reviews upon their release. In his review of the former, Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., wrote that “We may chuckle heartily with Orwell here, but underneath our laughter and his book there is a chill undertow, as even he seems to admit in the macabre ending.” 

In recent years, the American political situation has spurred more than one contributor to note Orwell’s increasing relevance, particularly regarding doublespeak and the wanton misuse of language for political ends. Orwell would have nodded sagely—like Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm—at the Trumpian emergence of the phrase “alternative facts.”

In a 2019 essay for America, Franklin Freeman quoted Orwell on the subject of the manipulation and obfuscation of the truth: “In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.” Further, Orwell wrote, “This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” The truth, he observed, “becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.” That sounds familiar.

What would Orwell think of the fact that his name is used to describe the tendency he most despised? In a 2014 review of Robert Colls’s biography of Orwell, James R. Smith offered a possibility. “I don’t think Orwell would like becoming an adjective,” he wrote. “What he would like is to become an adverb, as we get better at doing Orwell in our seeing and writing and talking and thinking.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Our Epiphany,” by J. Michael Sparough, S.J. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.