Christian Imagery in George Orwell’s “1984”
Few books have made as much of an impact on the
political world in the last 100 years as George Orwell’s 1984. It is
usually revered for its stark depiction of a world gone mad and for its stern
message that communism has evolved to be the anti-thesis of its early Marxist
ideologies. It is a brilliant warning that, unless people realize the dangers
of the far left, we may end up in a world similar to that described in the
novel. However, there is another underlying message that is rarely touched
upon. It is a message of religious mockery that brings out Orwell’s own leftist
leanings. Orwell seems to be warning us that the political movements of the
thirties and forties are digressing Europe back to a state of totalitarianism
unknown since the days of Innocent III and the Papal Empire. This was an
extraordinarily efficient form of despotism, commonly called fundamentalism,
which propels its leader to a godlike status; or in the case of the Catholic
Church, God itself. Any form of deviation that the leader may not agree with is
met with either excommunication or extreme torture leading to false confessions
and eventually death through violent means. This reign was so total that the
consequences of it can still be felt in Europe today. Throughout the book,
Orwell draws several parallels between the society created by the Roman
Catholic Church and the society depicted in the novel.
The undisputed leader of the country
of Oceania, and of the religiously strict ideology of English Socialism, is Big
Brother. Posters of his face plaster walls all over the country, with the
underlying caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. However, nobody knows where
Big Brother lives. Nobody has ever seen him in public and nobody knows how old
he is. The protagonist, Winston, even doubts his existence. He has been falsely
attributed with inventing both the airplane and the automobile. “It was not
true, for example, as was claimed in the party history books, that Big Brother
had invented aeroplanes and automobiles’ (p. 38). Before Big Brother and The Party (there is no
need to specify which party, as only one political party is in existence) there
was nothing. Big Brother is all knowing and all-powerful. The parallels to the
medieval concept of God, as propagated by the Catholic Church, are numerous.
They are both supposedly omnipotent beings who will exist until the end of
time. Neither of them can be proven to exist. However, they are both
unquestionably loved by the majority of the populace based on nothing but pure
faith and propaganda. Both are used as a means to control the population into
doing what the government wants through written propaganda and fear. The
Catholic Church’s written propaganda was the Bible, whereas The Party has an elaborate
system of altering all written documents, by means of recalls, in the Ministry
Of Truth where Winston works. “ It was thought necessary to alter, or, as the
official phrase had it, to rectify (the document).” (p. 40). The Bible has no
doubt been altered incredibly in the last 2000 years due to people hand copying
and translating it countless times into what was the most desirable prose each
time. It is hypothesized that this is the source of the many contradictions
held in its many pages. Winston performs the same operation by altering the
same statistics over and over to coincide with The Party’s current position.
Any defiance of the will of either results in torture and death, or as in the
case of Goldstein, excommunication. Both have ‘secret services’ to track down
heretics. The Catholic Church had the Spanish Inquisition and Oceania has the
Thought Police. Both have attempted to stall scientific growth. The Christians
suppressed the work of Copernicus and Galileo (and later on Darwin and Mendel) because
they contradicted the stories in the Bible. In Oceania, scientific study is
impossible because there are no scientists! Science is freedom of thought,
which is dangerous in a totalitarian society, so it has been eliminated. “In
Oceania, at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to
exist. In Newspeak, there is no word for ‘Science’.” (p. 201). As Big Brother
represents God, O’Brien represents Jesus. He is a teacher and a role model to
Winston, who grows to love him like a father. Winston’s name is taken from
Winston Churchill (most important and most liked English politician of the
time) and the most common surname in England, Smith. His full name becomes
Winston Smith. In this sense, Winston represents the common man who agrees with
the most liked politician. He also represents the common man in the Europe run
by the Papal Despots. O’Brien is viewed as a very high ranking official in the
Inner Party, second only to Big Brother. Jesus is second only to God. Jesus
preached a forgiving God over the Jewish concept of a vengeful one. He also
encouraged repentance of sins instead of the old Jewish concept of killing
those who do not follow the laws of the Talmud. O’Brien revealed that the Party
does not kill its thought criminals until they have repented and been granted a
full pardon. “We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.” (p. 265).
To fulfill the Christian analogy, we need a Holy Spirit. This is symbolized by
the spirit of Ingsoc. Both are vague concepts that people do not understand
fully, and both are supposed to lead the people and give them strength against
their enemies.
The Christian religion believes in one monotheistic
omnipotent God. It also believes in a trinity concept: Father + Son + Holy
Spirit = 3 Gods in 1 God. This theory contradicts itself, as three gods are
surely polytheistic in nature and polytheistic beliefs of any kind break the
first commandment. However, the population of much of Europe was forced to
believe this without questioning it for close to one thousand years.
Eventually, people came to see it as completely logical. Orwell came up with a
word for this phenomenon: doublethink. It is more or less a way for
fundamentalist governments to say something (that originated from the leader,
of course) and then completely contradict it with something else; yet allow
them to both be true depending on whether the circumstances suit one meaning or
the other. This brainwashes the populace into believing that the leader, and
therefore the government, is completely infallible. The religion of English
socialism, or Ingsoc, also believes in a trinity concept supported by Oceania’s
three official slogans. They are WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS
STRENGTH. These are also expressions of doublethink, as they all are
contradictions of each other. The first slogan is meant to convince the
population that war is essential to the wellbeing of the nation. It is
accompanied by propaganda showing false atrocities by the enemy, Oceania
bombing itself and blaming it on the enemy, dragging humiliated POW’s through
the streets of London and public executions of hostages. This creates an
attitude in the proletariat that these nations are the enemy of Ingsoc. As a
result, people feel compelled to fight a war out of fear because they do not
want Ingsoc to be destroyed and because the enemy is portrayed as pure evil.
The Party needs this because if the people were not at war all the time they
may expect better living conditions. Also, the war serves as an excuse to unload
an incredibly heavy load of work on the populace, creating an incredible amount
of wealth for the inner party members because the war is in reality virtually
non-existent. The raw materials that are collected by the proletariats and are
supposed to be used to make war materials are in reality used to make luxuries
for the Inner Party. This represents the Crusades and the church’s widespread
propaganda that Muslims were destroying Christian shrines in the Holy Land. It
also represents the multiple ruthless massacres that the church ordered in the
name of God, the widespread pillaging and raping of middle eastern cities
during the Crusades and the racism towards non-Europeans (especially Jews) that
developed after the first Crusade and is still present today. Most of the
wealth stolen from pillaging ended up in the hands of the Church, and much of
the Church’s wealth originated from this pillaging. Many people have questioned
the Church’s motives since Pope Urban II suggested the idea in a speech outside
a small city in France, 1095. The second slogan is meant to trick people into
believing that freedom of expression is wrong and those who deviate from
orthodoxy are enslaving themselves in false conceptions of human nature. Of
course this is nonsense, but using the principals of doublethink it is
impossible to disprove. Freedom of expression will ultimately lead to the
destruction of Ingsoc, so it is watched very closely in Oceania. Ultimately,
Winston and Julia are sent for ‘reintegration’ because they exhibit freedom of
expression through the sexual act. Thoughts that do not coincide with what The
Party says are called thoughtcrimes and the act of repressing them is called
Crimestop. Crimestop should not be a conscious process; it should be controlled
by the autonomic nervous system much as digestion and the beating of the heart
are. Freedom of expression was also watched very closely in the height of the
Papal Despotism. Thoughts that disagreed with Church doctrine were called
‘heresies’ and were punished quite harshly. The word heresy itself is a Greek term that originally meant a belief
that one arrived at by oneself (Greek hairesis,
“choosing for oneself”). An example of the Church’s destruction of independent
thought is when Pope Innocent III ruthlessly crushed the Albigenses because
they thought of the Church, with its cruel methods, as evil. Another was the
Inquisition, which burned suspected heretics and sorcerers often without so
much as an unfair trial. In both societies, the oppressors thought that they
were helping their victims. The Christians believed that, by burning heretics,
they were cleansing them of evil and saving their soul. The Party believes that
those who display independent thought are insane, and that they must be cured.
“Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane!”
(p. 265). The third slogan is designed to keep the masses uneducated. If the
populace is ignorant to a better way of life than they will never want one.
Therefore, any form of education not in line with Party teaching is disallowed.
The Party accomplishes this feat by writing all the books available in Oceania
and recalling them all for editing whenever they change their views on
something. All literature with democratic ideals in it, like Goldstein’s book,
is also prohibited. This is similar to when the Church published The Index
of Forbidden Books, which was a collection of books that were banned by the
Church under penalty of excommunication. It is also reminiscent of the book
burnings that the Catholic Church sponsored until at least the late 1800’s when
the church burned all of the works of the founder of genetics, Gregor Mendel.
There also seems to be an animosity towards the Christian concept that we are
all sheep and that God is our shepherd. Sheep are known to blindly follow the
shepherd wherever the shepherd may lead because they don’t know any better.
Similarly, the populace in Oceania was made to lead Big Brother wherever he
wanted them to because they were ignorant of where they were being led.
You can’t create a
successful allegory of Christianity without a Satan figure. This role is
fulfilled by Emmanuel Goldstein. According to Judeo-Christian mythology, Satan
was originally one of God’s favorite angels. Eventually, this went to his head
and he began to believe that he was an equal to Yahweh. When He saw this, Satan
was expelled from heaven. As time wore on, those of the Jewish faith began to
blame all evil on this fallen angel and he became a scapegoat for all the evil
things that occur in the world. In a similar way, Goldstein was expelled from
Oceania for preaching democratic ideals. He also became the scapegoat and enemy
of The Party. There is an irony in that the way which Orwell chose to portray
his Devil was in the form of freedom. This represents the topsy-turvy world of
a totalitarian government, where good becomes evil and evil becomes loved. His
name is also ironic. Emmanuel is Jewish for ‘Messiah’ and Goldstein is a Jewish
surname. This is further representative of the backward ideals of Oceania.
Most people fail
to see that Orwell is not only warning us of the future but also of the past.
It is clear that he believes that totalitarian ideals are not only a problem of
the future but also one that we have defeated in the past when we freed
ourselves from the oppressive Papal regime. He is warning us that if our
society cannot learn from its mistakes, then we won’t have a future. Orwell
expresses this through the character of Winston:
[O’Brien] filled
the glasses and raised his own glass by the stern.
‘What shall it be
this time?’ he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. ‘To the
confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To
the future?’
‘To the past,’
said Winston.
‘The past is more
important,’ agreed O’Brien gravely. (p. 184)
grade 12 english class
may 30, 1999
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