The phrase brave new world, from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, was taken by Huxley as the title of his futuristic novel, in which he portrayed a "perfect" humanity that has no need of mercy or love. Perfect technology and successful genetics are enough.

Everything is sterile, utilitarian and hurried; life is pleasant, there is no illness, emotion, pain, suffering or coercion. Entertainment and a consumerist mentality flourish, all activities are collective, and sexual promiscuity is desirable. Sexuality is separated from emotion and intimacy, in keeping with the slogan everyone belongs to everyone else. Everyone is constantly together, yet individuals are unfeeling and atomised, so that true community does not exist. 

Citizens are genetically modified – standardised people emerge from the incubator, groups of identical individuals. From the start, individuals belong to a particular caste; ranked highest are the Alphas (future intellectuals or administrators), and lowest the Epsilons, who will do menial work for which intelligence is not required. Through hypnopaedia, brief foundations of sexual education and caste-consciousness are implanted in them as they sleep: ending is better than mending, I love new clothes… From early childhood, everything children need to fulfil their predetermined role is instilled in them: a hundred repetitions, three nights a week, for four years… Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. The aim is for them to come to love their inescapable social destiny.

Scholars say that in this play - his last, shortest and best drama The Tempest - Shakespeare settled accounts with himself. The play takes place over three hours and symbolically encompasses three periods of time: past, present and future. The three hours that Prospero's enemies spent on his island served, for them, as a role of transformation. Their sin from the past was forgiven in just three hours, and as such they continued their journey towards the future. At the centre of the play is, as is often the case with Shakespeare, her majesty – conscience.

The Tempest is enormously topical today. It deals with the problems of ecology, genetics, a perfect society, power, earthly messianism, family, love, gender and so on. Shakespeare openly says that everything will end in despair unless we all accept the law of conscience and the logic of prayer, of mutual forgiveness and of God's mercy.

Prospero, the main character, who is Shakespeare himself, is a man of books. Since he did not care for the duties of a ruler, which were his by right, he handed over the government to his brother, and for this was banished to a desert island with his daughter Miranda (she who is to be wondered at), a girl of noble, selfless and good heart. After twelve years on the desert island, he comes to the realisation that the world cannot be saved by philosophy, nor by magic, nor by craft/technology, nor by theatre/art, but only by fervent prayer for forgiveness and for God's mercy. Let us hear what, at the end,  Prospero says to the audience: Now I want/Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,/And my ending is despair,/Unless I be relieved by prayer,/Which pierces so that it assaults/Mercy itself and frees all faults./As you from crimes would pardon'd be,/Let your indulgence set me free.

Prospero himself forgave his brother, who had cast him into bitter exile, and his rival, the King of Naples, who had betrayed him. He gave his only daughter to the King's son. Their love was the turning point. It was the motive and the fire that burned away all "faults".

In the play, Prospero's daughter Miranda, in the rapture of her betrothal, says: O, wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/That has such people in't! The new world dreamed of by Gonzalo, Prospero's counsellor, is one in which the world would once again be as it was at the beginning, in the Garden of Eden. He muses that everything should be held in common in the new world, where people know no violence, and live in peace and happiness. It is such a life and such a place that Gonzalo longs for.

It is interesting to know that our own Edita Majić once took part in a production of this play. She left the world of theatre, the glamour of acting, and moved to a Carmelite convent in Ávila. Now she prays fervently for all people of books, technology, art and power to open themselves to God's mercy, which draws us out of the cauldron of delusion, disappointment and despair.

Edita Majić, and all those who have come to know Christ's bridal love and God's mercy, know that a brave new world comes about through a conscience cleansed of dead works. Through the prayer of the Our Father.