18/CHRONICLESnselves. The flames themselves, Cass reports, are of anothernand more contemplative temperament than ourselves.nTheir philosophizing “was more imaginative and less conceptualnthan [ours], more of the nature of art, of mythconstruction,nwhich [they] knew to be merely symbolical,nnot literally true.” The active and the contemplative intellect,nthe critical and speculative imagination, the individualnand the community, “the cold light of the stars” and “ournlittle glowing atom of community” must all be given theirndue. “Intellectual subtlety might produce a mania fornanalysis and abstraction,” warns Stapledon in Starmaker,n”with blindness to all that intellect could not expound. Yetnsensibility itself, when it rejected intellectual criticism andnthe claims of daily life would be smothered in dreams.”nStapledon was trying, against the odds, to hold time andneternity, the individual and the community, fury and thenjoy without a cause in tension, not because he was sexuallyndisturbed (as if a good sexual relationship were the answer tonall metaphysical and moral problems—which is whatnLeslie Fiedler’s biography seems to suggest), but becausenthese mighty opposites must be reconciled in any humannlife. He was not naive, and he was certainly not a devotee ofnpositivistic science: Writing in a review of Wells’s Starbegottenn(which has certain affinities with Last Men innLondon and Stapledon’s own A Man Divided), he remarks,n”Although, when clerics expound their faith, I fly to line upnbehind Mr. Wells, I am an erring disciple. For, when he innturn explains, I feel a restless expectation of a somethingnmore which is never forthcoming. He is too ready tonassume that an idealization of the positivistic, scientificnmood, which is mainly a product of the nineteenth century,nreally can adequately suggest the essence of the trulynadult human mentality.” It is perhaps fair to point out thatnWells’s life ended in despair, and Stapledon’s did not: Henhad not put his hope in merely contemporary powers.nReaders of Stapledon mistake his purpose if they see himnas spokesman for a scientistic mythology that licenses racistn(or speciesist) oppression and impiety. C.S. Lewis’ bentnscientist, Weston (in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra),nis not—as some have thought—a caricature ofnStapledon, though he behaves like some of Stapledon’snsupposedly “superior” types. Nor is Ransom’s apocalypticnvision, in Perelandra, that distant from Starmaker. BothnRansom and Starmaker & narrator “come to themselves” atnthe highest point of vision and find truth where they are,nwhere they are placed by the Creator’s hand.nCertainly, in Starmaker, “love was not absolute; contemplationnwas,” whereas for the Christian, the nearest approachesnin Perelandra to Stapledon’s terrible archangel arenthe visible images of Malacandra and Perelandra: “Pure,nspiritual, intellectual love [wholly devoid of all naturalnaffection] shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It wasnso unlike the love we experience that its expression couldneasily be mistaken for ferocity.” It is not the angels that arento be worshiped but Blake’s “infinite and eternal of thenhuman form”—as Stapledon in effect declares in the finalnpages of Starmaker. Stapledon did not, to my knowledge,never openly say or perhaps even recognize what his fablesnintimate, that contemplative ardor may spill over intondiabolism as easily as parochial practice may become trivial.nHe offered a succession of images within which we can findnourselves, and find the Cod who is not only “Spirit,” butntrue Man.nORWELL AND RELIGION hy Alvaro de SilvanIn his novel 1984, George Orwell created a world devoidnof freedom and justice, truth and goodness. But there isnanother void in the book that critics seldom notice: the utternlack of religious faith. The absence of any vestige of religionnseems to Christianity’s advantage: The Orwellian world isnsuch a desolate, inhuman, and horrifying place because,nbesides the self-evident reasons given in the narrative, itsninhabitants lack the consolations that faith in Cod can give.nWhen I first read it, I thought: Perhaps only a believer couldnbear this torture, and even, with God’s help, end it.nCertainly, the reader can have no doubts about Orwell’snrejection of such a world. Yet, the world of J984 is, in everynsense, an Orwellian world. It is the unwanted child, butnchild nevertheless, of Orwell’s own metaphysical assumptions.nWhat is wrong with J 984 is exactly what was wrongnwith its author’s thought.nOn March 3, 1944, Orwell wrote that “Western civilisa-nAlvaro de Silva is a Catholic chaplain to universitynstudents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and ancontributing editor of Nuestro Tiempo.nnntion, unlike Oriental civilisations, was founded partly onnthe belief in individual immortality. If one looks at thenChristian religion from the outside, this belief appears farnmore important than belief in God. The Western conceptionnof good and evil is very difficult to separate from it.”nWas Orwell taking down notes for his famous novel whennhe immediately afterwards added, “One cannot have anynworthwhile picture of the future unless one realizes hownmuch we have lost by the decay of Christianity”? In thenworld of 1984, Christianity is not decaying, it is dead; andnGeorge Orwell did not desire its being otherwise. “I do notnwant,” he said in the same article, “the belief in life afterndeath to return, and in any case it is not likely to return.nWhat I do point out is that its disappearance has left a bignhole, and that we ought to take notice of the fact.”nOrwell’s vision of modern man is inspired in a rathern”cruel trick” that he once played on a wasp:nHe [the wasp] was sucking jam on my plate, and Incut him in half. He paid no attention, merely wentnon with his meal, while a tiny stream of jamn