Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE George Orwell finished Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948 while dying of tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island, and the urgency of a man writing against time gives the novel its unnerving compression. Set in a future England renamed Airstrip One, the book follows Winston Smith, a low-ranking bureaucrat whose job is to rewrite historical newspaper articles so that the Party's past predictions always match present reality. The Party's central claim is that it controls not just behavior but thought itself — that if enough people can be made to believe whatever the ruling apparatus requires, then objective truth ceases to exist. Orwell wrote the novel as a warning drawn from his experience covering the Spanish Civil War, where he watched both fascist and Stalinist forces systematically falsify what had just happened in front of witnesses. The book's intended reader is anyone who has ever noticed that a government's account of events does not match their own experience and wondered whether to trust the institution or their own memory. It remains the most widely read political novel of the twentieth century for the simplest reason: the experience it describes — of being told that what you know to be true is false — is not exotic. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The novel's most theologically significant moment is Winston's insistence, against all external pressure, that two plus two equals four. This is not mere stubbornness; it is Orwell's dramatization of the indelibility of natural law written into the human person. The capacity to recognize a self-evident truth and refuse its negation is, in CCMMP terms, an expression of the imago Dei that no totalitarian apparatus can fully erase. The Party can punish truth-telling, but it cannot make Winston's intellect stop recognizing truth — it can only break his will to assert it. - **Fallen**: The Party's system is a clinical diagram of what Aquinas identifies as the disordering of the intellect through habituated vice, operating at civilizational scale. 'Doublethink' — the trained capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and believe both — is not portrayed as an aberration but as the natural endpoint of a society that systematically rewards the suppression of rational judgment. This is concupiscence institutionalized: disordered desire encoded into language itself through Newspeak, so that future generations will lack the vocabulary to form a dissident thought. - **Fallen (social structures)**: The Thought Police represent what happens when the structures meant to protect justice (law, governance, community) are fully inverted into instruments of domination. O'Brien's confession that the Party seeks power 'for its own sake' is Orwell's answer to every utilitarian justification for coercion: at the far end of disordered will, there is no goal beyond the exercise of power itself. - **Redeemed (partial and tragic)**: The novel offers almost no Redeemed pole, which is itself a theological statement worth taking seriously. Winston's brief period of genuine love, memory, and intellectual honesty in the middle section — keeping the diary, meeting Julia, reading Goldstein's book — functions as a fragile image of what human flourishing requires: interiority, truth, love, and the freedom to inhabit one's own past. That the Party systematically destroys each of these is Orwell's argument for why they matter. The novel does not provide restoration; it identifies, precisely by their annihilation, the conditions without which restoration is impossible. - **Prudence (foresight)**: The book trains the reader in the specific prudential virtue of foresight by making visible the slow, incremental logic by which free societies can become unfree ones. Orwell does not posit a sudden coup but a decades-long erosion of language, memory, and private life. Readers who absorb the novel's mechanism — not just its atmosphere — develop a more alert practical judgment about the early stages of such erosion in their own contexts. SECTION THREE Michael Pierce[^1], in his neo-Jungian reading of personality, lists Orwell's 1984 directly within a bibliography oriented around the Nietzschean will to power and its psychological consequences — a convergence that locates the novel at the intersection of depth psychology and political philosophy that the CCMMP would approach through the lens of disordered appetite rather than the shadow archetype, but the dialogue is genuine. The roster does not contain a close interlocutor among the Catholic theological or clinical authors for the novel's specific argument about truth and institutional coercion; the natural conversation partner would be figures in the tradition of Jacques Maritain on the person and the common good, or Ratzinger on the dictatorship of relativism, but neither appears in the retrieved passages. ## References 1. Pierce, Michael (n.d.). *Motes and Beams: A Neo-Jungian Theory of Personality*. Bibliography. — "Orwell, George, 1984, Signet Classics (1977)"
✓ Strengths
- ✓Orwell's portrait of the prole masses retaining fragments of natural law intuition — a lingering sense that two plus two equals four — affirms the CCMMP premise that created goodness and the capacity for truth cannot be entirely extinguished by disordered power structures.
- ✓The novel gives one of modern literature's sharpest dramatizations of what Aquinas calls the disordering of the intellect and will through sin: the Party does not merely punish wrong action but systematically redirects the cogitative sense so that persons can no longer distinguish the real from the fabricated.
- ✓Winston Smith's doomed act of writing in his diary — insisting on personal memory against institutional erasure — maps directly onto the integral virtue of prudential memory: the effort to learn from the past and retain wisdom against forces that deny the past's existence.
- ✓The book is an extended argument for the moral weight of truthfulness as a virtue. By making truth-telling a capital offense, Orwell forces the reader to feel the cost of its absence, doing for justice-truthfulness what no theological treatise achieves through abstraction alone.
- ✓Julia's pragmatic resistance and Winston's more principled revolt together illustrate the CCMMP distinction between a merely reactive response to fallen structures and a response oriented toward something genuinely good — even when that orientation is incomplete and theologically unanchored.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠⚠️ Content warning: the novel contains a graphic torture sequence in Part III ('Room 101') involving psychological and physical degradation, a sustained scene of sexual initiation presented in explicit terms, and extended passages depicting dehumanizing violence. Catholic mental-health readers and formators should assess suitability for younger or trauma-sensitive audiences before recommending.
- ⚠The Redeemed pole of the CCMMP arc is largely absent. Orwell offers no credible path to restoration: Winston's transformation in Part III is a capitulation, not a redemption, and the novel's closing line forecloses hope with deliberate finality. Readers seeking formation in virtue or grace will need to bring those categories from outside the text.
- ⚠The novel's anthropology is essentially materialist. The human person appears as a product of social conditioning and biological drive, with no theological account of the soul, conscience, or transcendent dignity. This is not a flaw in a novel but a limitation for formation use: the CCMMP framework must be applied to the text, not drawn from it.