BENSON, ROBERT HUGH. - English convert, apologist and novelist, b. in Berkshire on 18 Nov. 1871 and d. in London on 19 Oct. 1914. He studied theology at Cambridge, at Trinity College. At first an Anglican minister (his father Edward White was Archbishop of Canterbury), he soon felt the inconsistency of Anglicanism and converted in 1903; in 1904 he was ordained a priest, and in 1911 he became a Roman prelate. A writer of rare fecundity, he was one of the most interesting but also most debated figures in the religious and literary history of contemporary England. A lively apologist and penetrating connoisseur of modern psychology, as well as an exquisite artist, inferior perhaps only to Newman.
Among his works particularly worthy of note are: Confession of a convert (London 1913), one of the most suggestive works of its kind; The Lord of the World (ibid. 1907), an apocalyptic tale about the last days of the world, which aroused keen interest but also stirred up bitter literary and theological controversies, to which he responded with another tale, The Dawn of all (ibid. 1910), on the same subject. In other novels: By oath Authority (ibid. 1904), The King's Achievement (ibid. 1905); The Queen's Tragedy (ibid. 1906); Come Rach, come Roise (ibid. 1912), in which B. recounts the history and offers the apology of Christianity in the tormented era of Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth; in still others he seeks, with great moral seriousness and in a form of great effect, to glorify the Ecclesia militans or even to demonstrate in a lively, original, and sometimes paradoxical manner the absolute insufficiency of science and of modern material and mechanical progress to solve the problems of life.
In the writings: Christ in the Church (It. trans. by A. Tovini, Brescia 1936) and The friendship of Christ (It. trans. by E. Francia, ibid. 1931), he shows himself an ardent, experienced and also original expounder of the doctrine of the mystical Christ.
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Giulio Gnaedig