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3) SCHALL ON CHESTERTON.
The Midwest Chesterton News was a newsletter published by John Petersosn (740 Spruce Rd., Barrington, Illinois, 60010) and some very devoted Chesterton admirers. Their society, the American Chesterton Society, has an annual conference, usually at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Originally, there was a lively newsletter, the inspiration for another newsletter from St. Paul, Minnesota, called Generally Speaking, as well as of The Defendant from Western Australia and All Things Considered from Ottawa, Canada. In the Fall of 1997, the Midwest Chesterton News, Generally Speaking, and All Things Considered combined to form a new journal entitled, Gilbert!
Since 1989, I have contributed a monthly column called naturally, Schall on Chesterton, to this newsletter. I remain a great admirer of the British journalist G. K. Chesterton, one of the wisest men I know. I have been more than struck by the sanity and insight, even foresight, that he displayed ever since he began writing early in the 1900's. Though he died in 1936, he remains one of the most quoted writers in the English language even today. He seems to have been a man whom everyone loved, yet also a man who had an uncanny knack of seeing reality, of putting things just right. He wrote more things than most of us could ever read, all of which are interesting, amusing, profound. Some forty of these and later essays are collected in Schall on Chesterton (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 266 pp.
Here, I will include (Series I) thirty-five Chesterton columns by way of introduction both to Chesterton and the way I look on him. Then I will add a” New Series” II of thirty-five more. I find him to be one of my own greatest teachers.
After these two columns’ sections, I want to include four longer essays, 1) "G. K. Chesterton: Journalist," that, in a shortened form, appeared in the Chesterton Review from Canada (itself one of the best on-going efforts to account for Chesterton); 2) "Orthodoxy: Chesterton on the 'Delight of Truth'," Dossier; 3) "On the Enemies of the Man Who Had No Enemies," Vital Speeches; 4) "'Never Enough of Nothing to Do': On the Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton," World & I. Some other essays appearing in other journals or books will be also listed.
The 35 columns (Series I) are: 1) "The Purpose of Intellect"; 2) "Theses and Essays"; 3) "On Creeds"; 4) "Babies"; 5) "The First Day of a New Creation"; 6) "On the Best Book Never Written"; 7) "The Horror"; 8) "The Campaign against the Ten Commandments"; 9) "The First Day of a New Creation"; 10) "The Dullness of Chaos." 11) "On Not Wrecking Divine and Secular Things"; 12) "Belloc on Chesterton"; 13) "The Only Virtue"; 14) "The Coming of Christ"; 15) "The Divine Vulgarity of the Christian Religion"; 16) The Great Temptation of the Catholic in the Modern World"; 17) "At Christmas Dinner"; 18) "The Natural Home of the Human Spirit"; 19) "Wilde and Wilder"; 20) "What Science Cannot Comprehend." 21) "G. K.'s Weekley: June 18, 1936"; 22) "Sympathy"; 23) "On Defending the Independence of Dependent Things"; 24) "On the Strangeness of Things"; 25) "The True Modernist"; 26) ""Never Less Alone"; 27) "On Things that Cannot Be Defined"; 28) "The Most Tremendous Question in the World"; 29) "On Being Inhuman Out of Sheer Humanitarianism"; 30) "'Women and the Philosophers.'" 31) "Gilbert Chesterton and His Murdering Ways"; 32) "Christmas and the Most Dangerous Toy"; 33) "The Invisible Man"; 34) "Of Lawyers and Prayer Books"; 35) "Chesterton on Ireland."
Series II (21columns, titles may be slightly different from titles in Gilbert!)) includes: 1) “‘More Radical than the Radicals,’” 2) “The Mind ‘Poisoned’ with Paradoxes,” 3) “On Depriving Humanity of Divinity,” 4) “The Essence of the Trinity,” 5) “Cheerfulness That Comes from Theology,” 6) “Chesterton on ‘The Servile State,’” 7) “‘Praise Enough,’” 8) “To Trace the Lines of a Form – and a Face,” 9) “The Call for Classical Education,” 10) “On Being Still in Eden,” 11) “The Eclipse of Liberty,” 12) “A Very Alarming Place,” 13) “On Good Causes with Bad Arguments – Chesterton on Lincoln,” 14) “‘The Last Lie in Hell,’” 15) “St. Lubbock, Pray for Us,” 16) “A ‘Right’ to All Experience?” 17) “The Final Use of Good Literature,” 18) “London,” 19) “‘That Most Monstrous of All Monstrosities,” 20) “The Nations and the ‘World State.’”
21) "G. K. Chesterton -- Journalist"; 37) "Orthodoxy: Chesterton on the 'Delight of Truth'"; 38) "On the Enemies of the Man Who Had No Enemies"; "'Never Enough of Nothing to Do': On the Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton."
Other Schall essays on Chesterton: 1) "On Things Worth Doing Badly," Introduction to Vol. IV, G.K. Chesterton: Collected Works (Ignatius Press); 2) "The Sanity of Gilbert Chesterton," Social Survey, Melbourne, October, 1977); 3) "The Rarest of All Revolutions: G. K. Chesterton on the Relation of Human Life to Christian Doctrine," The American Benedictine Review, December, 1981; 4) "The Last Medieval Monarchy: Chesterton and Belloc on the Philosophical Import of the American Experience," Faith & Reason, Summer, 1988; 5) "The Inexpressible Value of Existence," in What Is God Like? (Liturgical Press/Michael Glazer, 1992); 6) "On Doctrine and Dignity: From Heretics to Orthodoxy," in Another Sort of Learning (Ignatius, 1988); 7) “Introduction to Vol. XX, G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works (Ignatius Press).
1) From Schall on Chesterton, Gilbert! I (November, 1997), 14-15.
THE PURPOSE OF INTELLECT
On April 26, 1924, in the Illustrated London News, Chesterton began a column with this question from Mr. H. G. Wells, to wit: "Why is there not more esprit de corps among intellectuals, especially of the academic and scientific sort?" (CW, XXXIII, 316-20). Anyone who has read Chesterton as long as I have will have no difficulty in imagining the potential humor implicit in this apparently earnest question. Chesterton will examine just what might follow if the status of being an "intellectual" is to be decided by intellectuals' own sense of their belonging together. He will, of course, hint that anyone who even asks this question about sticking together will, ipso facto, in his own very question indicate that he does not understand what intellect might be. Briefly, the cry "we intellectuals have to stick together" means "we intellectuals do not understand intellect."
It seems that Wells was up in arms over Mr. William Jennings Bryan's attempt to deal with Darwinists. Chesterton hints that if indeed the American Fundamentalists succeed in ridding our academic institutions of Darwinism, by that very fact alone, Darwinism's major premise will be defeated, since, to recall another famous Chesterton quip, "the survival of the fittest means the survival of those who have survived."
Thus, if fundamentalism wins over the Darwinian professors, fundamentalism is by that fact alone fitter than the professors, a proposition that few Darwinists would dare to contemplate. But this is not all, what is even worse is that the major objection to Darwin comes not from religion, which can manage to finesse it a bit, but from science itself. The theory as it was originally proposed is full of flaws. So the fundamentalists, in Chesterton's view, do not need to overthrow the Darwinian professors but just look up their critics in science itself.
Chesterton's way of putting the problem is this: "It seems a pity that the poor old skeleton of the Missing Link should be laboriously burnt by theologians, when so very little of it has been left by biologists." Chesterton always loved talking about the skeleton of the missing link, since he could not see what he could possibly "link" if he was in fact missing. Thus, Chesterton did not understand why Wells, an academic, would feel so much in need of calling academics to the barricades when the theologians had no need of refuting a theory that was well on its way to refutation by the very people who brought it up in the first place.
Chesterton does point out, however, that academics are always quite selective about which fellow academics they call to support them. He noted that one of the most famous poets, or academics, of Wells' time was an Italian by the name of Gabriel D'Annunzio, who also just happened to have lead a notorious bombing raid on the City of Fiume in a dispute about Italian possession of the area. Chesterton wondered why Wells, on the basis of his own principles, did not call other academics to the barricades to defend D'Annunzio. Could it be, Chesterton wondered, that academics were very selective in what causes they embraced and only called for help for the ones they themselves advocated?
Now, while Chesterton had great fun with Bryan and the Fundamentalists, with Wells and the Darwinists, he took just a brief moment to explain why it was not a good idea -- the implicit assumption of Wells -- for all academics to stick together. If we have a world in which all academics are busy sticking together, we can be pretty sure we live in an ideological world in which there is very little intellectual activity and very much coercion and peer pressure.
"There cannot be a real combination of intellectuals because of the purpose of the intellect," Chesterton observed. Clearly, it would seem obvious that to be an intellectual, so-called, would presuppose some clarity on what the intellect was. Only if we did not quite understand that purpose, could we propose for it a purpose -- that is, to gather together all intellectuals under some cause or other -- that was alien to the very nature of intellect.
What then is this "purpose of intellect?" "The purpose of the intellect is to come to conclusions, or rather to convictions." The fact is that we all have "intellects." What it means to be a rational animal is that one has an intellect. We do not in fact go around hawking and harping the notion that we are great just because we have intellects as a power given to us by nature. Everyone has such a power, and it does no good to hype that fact against those creatures that do not. The only person who might understand what it means to have an intellect is one who has one.
We are concerned rather with what the intellect, when it acts, does. And what it does is come to conclusions. It is the instrument of making dogmas, as Chesterton said elsewhere. An intellect that refuses to come to a conclusion is one that refuses to be an intellect. We are aware that in this multicultural, relativist world, one of the off-shoots of this theory is that no conclusions are conclusions, but only variable opinions, restricted to time and place. This is but another way of saying that the modern world is against intellect.
What we care about, even if we are relativist multiculturalists, is not whether we have an intellect, but whether what our intellect concludes to is true. We passionately care about that, or we at least should. Obviously, the picture of a rabid multiculturalist holding the truth of a multiculturalism in which nothing is true but this theory that maintains nothing is true is amusing. "I know," Chesterton admits, "there is a very solemn and impressive school of intellectuals who appear to have no intellects. They worship the intellect like an idol; and all the more because it is to them an unknown god." The "unknown god," of course, recalls St. Paul in Athens, speaking to the descendants of the original, and worthy, intellectuals.
The fact is that we do not "worship" intellect as such. We might thank God that we exist and exist as beings with intellects. Lord knows, we did not give ourselves our own intellects, let alone give to ourselves our very being what we are. What the intellect is, is not the product of our own making. But once we realize that it is given as part, the defining part, of what we are, we begin to realize that it has a purpose or function that we are responsible for using and using properly. "But those who use the intellect like a tool will always prefer the product to the process." What is more important in practice is what conclusions we come to when we use our minds.
This being the case, Chesterton concludes, when people group themselves together, it is because of agreement or disagreement about what they hold to be true. The fact that they are "intellectuals" as such means nothing. The intellectuals' "corporate enthusiasm will be for those with whom they agree, and not those with whom they differ." This means then that the great divides among us are not between those who have some title of "intellectual" and those who do not, but over what this or that group of intellectuals or ordinary folks holds to be true. The fact that academics are "intellectuals" does not, by itself, prevent them from holding the silliest of things, the logic of which will simply not hold up.
We have intellects. The purpose of the intellect is to know. The purpose of the intellect is to know whether what we know is true or not, whether it does or does not conform with reality, a reality that our intellect did not itself make. The purpose of human fellowship is to join together in those things that we know, in our own minds, are true. The purpose of intellectual dispute is calmly to examine things held to be true and to resolve, by means of principle, essentially that of contradiction, what whether what we hold is or is not true. The only title any human being, intellectual or otherwise, has for respect, once we know the respect due to each simply for what he is, is whether what we hold is true. A kingdom divided against itself cannot hold. That is, intellectuals as a group can and have conspired against the truth. Chesterton was aware of all of this in 1924 when he reminded us of "the purpose of intellect."
2) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 9 (October, 1996).
ON THESES AND ESSAYS
Just when I thought that I had the importance and delight of the essay pretty well figured out, I ran across an essay of Chesterton that made me doubt the line of thought I have often used to praise Chesterton himself. The occasion for these reflections was a very nice book review of my Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays, by Professor James Finn Cotter at Mt. St. Mary's College, in Maryland. Cotter remarked, with much eloquence, that "the personal essay is a most creative form of human expression when it comes to reaching out to the reader. It is natural, authentic, and unique, and it cannot be easily faked, like a poem or a story. When read aloud, an essay touches our emotions directly and makes us think more clearly."
My Idylls and Rambles (Ignatius Press, 1994) itself contained a defense of the essay and argued that it was quite the most delightful of all forms of writing. I rejoiced that Belloc and Chesterton wrote essays with such humor and insight. I even cited Stevenson and Hazlett as favorite essayists. Now, I know that some people prefer poetry or the novel or the solid book to the short essay. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot enjoy every form that comes along, if it is good. I knew that the early essay in French was an "effort", an "attempt" or a "try" at explaining or accounting for something. Its genius is that it is open to every topic and mood, whimsical or solemn.
The day after I read Cotter's review, I decided to do a column for the Midwest Chesterton News. About a year ago, as I mentioned in an earlier column, I bought several volumes of the Collected Works, but I had noticed that I had not read any of Volume XXXV, 1929-31. So I opened up the book rather arbitrarily to the column of March 2, 1929, on "Buddhism and Christianity", a most pertinent topic considering John Paul II's remark on Buddhism in Crossing the Threshold of Hope and his Ut Unum Sint. Just as I was about to begin my essay on Buddhism (hold your breath), however, I thumbed backward to the Chesterton column of February 16, 1929. Its title was, I could hardly believe it, "On the Essay"! I, being only fourteen months old when it was written, had never seen this essay before; it was like discovering gold in your own backyard. I thought maybe Professor Cotter might like a copy of it, so I xeroxed it. I figured I knew exactly what Chesterton would say in his essay.
Then I read Chesterton's essay "On the Essay" only to discover that he did not at all say what I assumed he would say. He did say, much to my consolation, that he himself indulged in the essay all his life and loved it as a form of writing. Chesterton began his essay, however, with this quite upsetting sentence for someone, like me, prepared to exalt the essay at all costs: "There are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays." "Wow!" I thought to myself, that is quite a surprising remark -- evil re-enters the world in the form of essays! Here I had been thinking that the essay could save the world and I discover the Devil as its author!
It has been my experience, as devoted readers of the Midwest Chesterton News well know by now, however, that whenever Chesterton talks about evil, I had better pay attention; something momentous is about to happen. The plot thickens when Chesterton remarked that the essay came into English letters from the French via Francis Bacon. Chesterton added, "I can only believe it. I always thought he (Bacon) was the villain of English history." It was Bacon who taught the English that knowledge is purely positive, purely useful.
So what's up with the essay, the form of literature Schall likes most? Is the truth now out, that, as many of his best friends have darkly hinted for years, Schall himself is a cooperator in the Evil that re-enters history, no small problem as even Schall recognizes?
Chesterton admitted that "I take my greatest literary pleasure in reading them (essays); after such really serious necessities of the intellect as detective stories and tracts written by madmen." Well, you just have to laugh at such a remark. We readers of Father Brown know about Chesterton and detective stories; we readers of Orthodoxy know of Chesterton and madmen; we readers if a hundred of his books know about Chesterton and essays. So here Chesterton is telling us that essays are something of a serious intellectual problem through which evil re-entered the modern world. Why so?
Chesterton maintained that the essay is a modern invention -- though it was known to the Romans, I think, say to Horace and Cicero. Most readers know that I also do a monthly column in Crisis entitled "Sense and Nonsense". Needless to say, I have always understood that this title comes from Chesterton. Let us see how it works into our present plot:
There is any amount of sense and nonsense talked both for and against what is called medievalism. There is also any amount of sense and nonsense talked for and against what is called modernism. ... But if a man wanted the one real and rational test, which really does distinguish the medieval from the modern mood, it might be stated thus: The medieval man thought in terms of the Thesis, where the modern man thinks in terms of the Essay.
The man who wrote a Thesis, stated what he held and then proceeded to prove it by known, orderly, logical rules. The man who writes the essay holds nothing so definite.
Chesterton said that he enjoys Stevenson, but he worried about the man who preferred, as Stevenson said in a famous essay, the travel to the arrival at the end of the road. Chesterton always preferred the flagons at the Inn at the End of the World. In logic, Chesterton pointed out that if the end of travel were not more important, no one would ever set forth. The travel itself may well be diverting enough, but it cannot be the end or purpose of the journey. The essayist, not the thesis maker, has unfortunately become our moral philosopher. He, like the traveller, has nothing definite in mind when he sets out or when he concludes. "After a certain amount of wandering the mind wants either to get there or to go home," Chesterton observed. "It is one thing to travel hopefully, and say half in jest that that it is better than to arrive. It is another thing to travel hopelessly, because you know you will never arrive." Needless to say, the medievals travelled hopefully, knowing by their theses to where they would arrive, while the moderns travel hopelessly, not having anywhere to go.
Chesterton thus was able to take that which he himself wrote thousands of times, the very essay, and subject it to critical examination about what it did and what he was doing. Chesterton found an element in modern letters that is, because of its inconclusiveness, "indefinite and dangerous." For he understood that it is dangerous for the mind not to do what the mind does of its nature, that is, come to conclusions, on the basis of a thesis, of an open argument. In this sense, Chesterton understood that the "article", the unit of argument in St. Thomas' Summae, was a far different proposition from the essay that only rambled on about one's own feelings.
Now I do not think there is anything particularly wrong with feelings or rambling, but it is not to be done for its own sake. Chesterton saw that evil re-enters in the world when the world is so proposed to us that all there is in it is travel, no goal. The evil is fuzziness, the inability to make a decision or to live by one when made, the certainty of uncertainty that paralyzes the mind and the culture.
In writing an essay, we can deal with theoretical or practical matters. This is the liberty of the essay. But properly to present theoretical matters we must put forth a theory and arrive at a conclusion based on that theory. If we substitute the looseness of the essay for the rigor of the thesis and the argument, we will end up simply roaming and wandering about the intellectual landscape.
After I read this essay of Chesterton on the essay, I asked myself, is Chesterton, in his essays, guilty of the fault that he attributes to the heritage of Bacon, of letting evil into the world because the essayist could not make up his mind about what he was arguing? I thought of the many times in these pages that I have reflected on, analyzed, commented on, one or another Chesterton essay. I realized that what was to me always unique and striking about Chesterton's essays, what made them different, was that his essays, while always revealing a good amount of wonderment and delight, were always theses. He always knew what the mind was for. Even in his playful essays, in his "attempt" to wander about within an experience or an event, Chesterton came to a clear conclusion based on principled argument. Chesterton managed to combine the virtue of the medieval thesis with the modern essay. He was so delightful, so perceptive that he taught the truth, in both sense and nonsense, under the guise of evil re-entering the world.
3) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (May, 1995).
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
We have heard the complaint, no doubt, that religion, particularly the Christian religion, is so negative. It seems always to be telling us what we cannot do, not what we can do. We want a "positive" religion; we do not want to worry about "don'ts". Just give us the "do's". Having propounded this well-known thesis, we proudly content ourselves with our liberality, our progressivism in things to be done.
Such is a very common complaint, and yet, when examined, a very superficial one. When we sort it out, when we think of why the Ten Commandments "forbid", at least those that apply to us human beings and our relations to each other, we will realize that these negative dicta are the most positive things we could imagine. In the one positive Commandment, besides that of "keeping holy the Sabbath", we are told to "honor" our father and our mother. Now this positive command is rather more demanding than if we were simply told "Not to Dishonor Them". It is as if we were told -- and the Greek philosophers do tell us this -- that there is no way we can repay our parents for what they have given to us, that to honor them is an obligation that really never ends. The positive Commandment to "honor" our Father and our Mother is, in fact, the most difficult of things to do.
On the other hand, take the law of driving. The basic law of the State of California is simply, "Drive Safely." This command is stated positively, but, as it stands, it is not really of much help. The negative laws -- "STOP", "DRIVE SLOWLY", "SPEED LIMIT, 25 MPH" -- give us the freedom and knowledge of what actually to do. Even these negative commands always have to be interpreted in the light of "Drive Safely". The negative commands tell us what actually to do when we drive safely.
Now I bring this consideration of law and Commandment up because I purchased, at a reduced price, Volume XXXII, of Ignatius Press' Collected Works of Chesterton (1989). These are the columns from The Illustrated London News from 1920-22. The very first essay in this volume is dated January 3, 1920. Like so many of Chesterton's essays that I had never read before, on reading it, I just wanted to cheer, it is so well put.
This particular essay was given the title, "Negative and Positive Morality". As the essay was written just after the Great War and during the time of New Year's resolutions, Chesterton noted that a "resolution" was a formal statement of hope. A resolution specifies what specifically we have to do to change ourselves, year after year. Thus, finding ourselves rather difficult suddenly to change, we will probably have to deal with our recurrent sins -- "for the soul and its sins are in every sense a problem of eternity."
Chesterton, referring to World War I, furthermore, remarked that in being relieved and grateful for the end of the War, we should notice that our gratitude is greatest when our escape from evil is very narrow. Likewise, our resolutions of hope that we change ourselves, that we recognize our sins, indicate to us the narrowness of the gap that stands between ourselves and the evil we could do if we would, if we did not observe the Commandments.
We must further recognize that when we say "yes" to something, we at the same time say "no" to something else. Every "yes" is a "no". If we say "yes" to this, we say "no" to that; it cannot be otherwise. "The silliest sort of progressive complains of negative things," Chesterton continued. But the fact is that what we say "no" to defines in the simplest and more graphic way to what it is that we say "yes". When this "silly" progressivism becomes a "campaign against the Ten Commandments", it indicates that it does not understand what is going on when things are commanded not to be done. "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity." Why is this so?
Why, in other words, are the Ten Commandments, mostly negative statements to be sure, rather signs of humanity and liberality than signs of gloom and narrowness as they are commonly thought to be? This is the reason Chesterton gives us, in one of his finest sentences: "It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted, precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." The Lord did not list all the positive things that we should be doing because the list would never end and, besides, we are supposed to find out the positive things for ourselves. We are supposed to be surprised by the myriad of good things that are.
Thus, if we were to be commanded simply, "Do good", instead of "Thou shalt not", we would never end with the good things that we should or could do, the most things that are permitted to us because the whole world is given to us. The natural law, in fact, already tells us "Do Good and Avoid Evil," so revelation adds what we need to know so that we will not be confused about the most essential things that we ought not to do.
Chesterton, by way of example, offered a marvelous list of good things we might possibly be commanded to do if, because we could not get the point otherwise, we insisted on having our commandments stated positively: Thou shalt first "pick dandelions on the common". Then the list would go on for a month with other things we might do before we come to, Thou shalt "throw pebbles into the sea, ... sneeze, ... make snowballs, blow bubbles, play marbles, make toy airplanes, travel on Tooting trains." The list would simply never come to an end before we come to consider the things we ought not to do, things that might make finding any ordered good in things impossible.
In comparison with what we might do and are permitted to do, then, the Ten Commandments display "that brevity that is the soul of wit". Thus, "it is better to tell a man not to steal than to try to tell him the thousand things that he can enjoy without stealing." And if we insist that there are some things that we cannot enjoy unless we steal them, we at the same time deprive someone else of enjoying what we have stolen from him. Our "yes" is someone else's "no". By not observing the commandment, we insist that what is not ours is ours. We give the same right to someone else to steal from us; we end up in a war of all against all because we do not observe the negative commandment which lets everyone enjoy what is his.
Chesterton next, to clarify the point more graphically, takes up the problem of the positive side of the Fifth Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Now the commandment simply tells us not to kill anyone, including the mythical "Mr. Robinson" of Chesterton's example. What happens positively when we do not kill this Robinson? Well, basically, Robinson continues to live and do all those things for which Robinson is noted, things that we cannot imagine. Mrs. Robinson, no doubt, is delighted to have old Robinson still around. Robinson himself is delighted to be around, though he does not know the narrow escape he had by our observing the "Thou Shalt Not" of the Commandment.
Chesterton thought of the Great War in the same way as he did of Robinson, that, however destructive, it saved Western Civilization, Christendom, from something worse, from nothingness. It was still around though it might have been destroyed by Prussianism. "Nothing is negative except nothing; and it is not our rescue that was negative, but only the nothingness and annihilation from which we were rescued." Thus, if the civilization is not destroyed, if Robinson is not killed, what results is civilization and Robinson, which, in both instances, is positive not negative.
Thus, if someone obeys the Commandment and does not get rid of Robinson, the negative prohibition means that Robinson positively lives. "And to say it is not a positive good and glory to have saved him from strangling is to miss the whole meaning of human life. It is to forget every good as soon as we have saved it...." The point about the good we save is precisely the activities, the life, that continue in being. The important thing about not killing Robinson is not killing him, but the things that good old Robinson does of which we probably have no idea.
Consequently, we are really to fear that good things can be lost or destroyed. The things that are, all that is good, we are permitted, provided in our pursuit and choice of them, we obey the commandments, for these are the limits and guidelines by which we can really have, really enjoy what is good. We can only have Robinson, if we do not kill him. We can only have our property, if someone does not steal it. We can only have our wife if someone else does not covet her. All these "Shalt Not's" are resolutions by which we are free to enjoy the thousands of things that we are permitted to do, the end of which we shall never reach. This very experience indicates to us why we are, in the same revelation that gives us the Ten Commandments, given also the promise of eternal life.
But what is the most penetrating reflection that Chesterton gives to all these considerations of the positiveness of negative morality, of the reasons why the "campaign against the Ten Commandments" is so "silly"? It is because we can appreciate most what we nearly lost. We do not realize the wonder of an existing thing until we recognize that it might not exist, indeed, that it might not exist at our hands. The Ten Commandments are the other side of our realization of the wonder of existing things, the good things we let be and we choose because they are good. And this is Chesterton's great line: "We adorn things most when we love them most; and we love them most when we have nearly lost them." This is what the Ten Commandments are really about.
The Commandments prevent us from losing things that we love most. We love them but we do not really see them as the goods they are until we nearly lose them. We can lose everything that is good if we do not observe the Commandments that are specifically designed to keep in being what is good. When we see that what we love is almost lost, we adorn it in thanksgiving; we respond to the beauty of what is with the added beauty of our own recognition of what is given to us, of what we almost lost because we did not observe the Commandments.
4) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 9 (March, 1997).
ON THE BEST BOOK NEVER WRITTEN
In the "Introduction" to The Everlasting Man (Collected Works, Vol. II), Chesterton begins with the famous sentence about two ways of getting home. The most efficient way is never to leave home in the first place. But if someone stays home all the while, he may never realize just how unique his home is. The other way to get home is for someone to go around the world, seeing how different everything is, until he comes back to where he started, finally to recognize its utter uncommonness. Chesterton then confesses that he once tried to write a book on this very theme about going around the world to reach home, but that he never managed to finish it. This is the book he called "the best book he never wrote."
Needless to say, this image of the two ways of "getting home" serves as the analogy by which Chesterton discusses the uniqueness in the universe of both man and the Church. Neither man nor the Church are noticed for what they are because they are said, on too superficial examination, to be just like something else. That is, man is "just like" the animals and the Church is just like "religion". But how very different each is within these categories is minimized or overlooked or not noticed. And what is disregarded is, as Chesterton explains, the most striking things about them.
Chesterton remarked in a "Preliminary Note" to this book that there comes a time when ordinary people need to talk about whether popular or scientific positions, like evolution or comparative religion theories, really make sense as explained. Chesterton insisted on what he called "the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists produce." Chesterton implies, naturally, that science is not exempt from logic and religion is not exempt from consistency, lack of either of which Chesterton happens to be a genius in noticing in either scientists or parsons.
I realize that I have not read The Everlasting Man in a long time. Somehow, it has never been one of my favorite Chesterton books, but the more I look at it now, the more I begin to like it. By chance, I had been rereading C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity on an airplane to Phoenix. In the first part of this still amazing book, Lewis brings up the fact that our initial human experience in, say, listening to people argue, is that first there is some law or rule that they expect others to obey -- "I's not fair", "I was here first." Secondly, human beings, even while knowing this law, often do not observe it. And when questioned about why they did not observe it, they will always have a "reason" of some sort to which they appeal.
Lewis remarks in this context that in fact Christianity has nothing to say to people who are not aware in their reason or in their experience that they themselves have done something wrong. What to do about this sense of having done something wrong, something personally wrong, however, provides the very entry of Christianity into the moral world. Christianity comes as a remedy for something that we ought to be aware of, something the perplexes and unsettles us. Thus, we are told to "repent" at the very beginning of the Gospel, as if it presumed that everyone has something to be sorry for and they are looking for a way to do something about it.. The Pharisees are scandalized because Christ forgives sins, sins they blindly do not see in themselves.
The memory of his remark of Lewis made me pay particular attention to the following sentence of Chesterton in the "Introduction" to The Everlasting Man: "When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do." The Church is unique among the religions because it proposes to do something about the sin we already recognize to be such an enigmatic part of our experience.
The Church is even more unique because it does not propose to eradicate sin from the world but to be there all along to forgive when sins are committed. The Church cannot provide a method to infallibly get rid of sin because it cannot get of free will, which lies at the origin of all sin, and, for that matter, of all repentance.
Thus, the Church does not say that sin is determined to happen from all eternity. It does not say that it is an illusion. It does not say that it can simply be ignored or forgotten without repentance and the sacrament. Moreover, the Church does not affirm that there is nothing wrong. Nor does it call evil good. And it does not locate the source of this something wrong outside the human will, in property configurations or in matter or in the fact of sex, none of which in itself is evil or sinful..
Chesterton suggests that if we are Christians we will know these things about human life, about sin and forgiveness. They will be familiar to us because they constitute part of the home we live in, but often do not recognize in its extraordinariness. He also remarks that someone totally from outside of Christianity, some Chinese gentleman perhaps, might also see that Christianity's particular doctrines are quite unique, not really posed in any other tradition.
The man least likely to recognize the importance and wonder of his spiritual home, however, will be "the man who now (is) most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into an ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginnings, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard." As the Holy Father intimates in his teaching on the Third Millennium, we are a civilization filled with people precisely "weary of hearing what it has never heard."
We live in a time in which many, many Christians cannot recognize their own home. This is why something like the General Catechism of the Catholic Church or Crossing the Threshold of Hope are such amazing books because they describe home so well to those who never left it and so clearly to those who had never heard of it before. But the utter uniqueness of either man or Christianity cannot be seen by Christians who have slipped into a kind of practical skepticism or personal sinfulness that prevents them from seeing what they really in fact need as human beings in the world -- a teaching that recognizes a law, that recognizes that we break the law, that we need forgiveness, that a source of this forgiveness has been revealed to us. The boredom of the world is caused by not being able to see the newness of what is already at home. The world is full of those unable or unwilling to see what they already have. The Good News has already arrived and many of us are too weary to notice.
5) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 8 (February, 1996).
BABIES
A memorable essay in The Well and the Shallows (1935) is entitled "Babies and Distributism" (Collected Works, III, pp. 439-41). It may well be the most defiantly counter-cultural essay of our times, to be matched only by Flannery O'Connor's remark that birth control is the most spiritual doctrine of the Church. Neither Chesterton nor Flannery O'Connor had children of their own. Both wrote in disdain of the intellectuals, secular and ecclesiastical, of their era who advocated this practice. Both wrote knowing that their position would be rejected. Both understood that the Church's position had something profoundly right about it, something at the heart of human reality. Pius XI's Encyclical Casti Connubii ("On Christian Marriage") had appeared on the last day of December, 1930, some four years before Chesterton wrote this essay.
Knowing the bitterness of opposition to what he maintained, and having seen this opposition develop mostly as he knew it would, Chesterton's essay today reads almost like reading direct revelation. The whole of our time, so it thought, "knew" the Church was wrong. Chesterton knew the Church was right, even before the issue really developed in the convoluted manner we know it today. Intellectual reputations were made, much publicity was gained, by openly opposing what the Church taught. All sorts of devious theories have had to be invented in order to justify this opposition. Almost every day, even yet, theologians and professors will be quoted to the effect that the Church will, must, ought to change its views.
In the meantime, the present Holy Father, as did his predecessors before him, repeats, clarifies, and demonstrates both why it will not change this position and what it is defending -- human life and human love. Moreover, our times live out in the lives of those who will not accept the Church's teaching what it means to defy what is the truth in these matters. The destruction of the family is in the news every day but we choose not to make too many connections. It is too much to bear to think the Church, even on empirical grounds, has been right all along, as it has been.
What is remarkable about Chesterton's short essay, I think, is not only his clear insight into what would happen if we denied the truth of the Church's position, which is the position of reason, but also his own personal reaction to the public policy of birth control. Chesterton was a mild and gentle man. He rarely was annoyed. Indeed, in this essay, he recounted this very serene quality of his own soul. Atheists did not particularly annoy him as he could understand the narrow logic by which they limited themselves. Even Bolsheviks were people with the same narrow minds but who at least were against something that needed to be corrected. But for the proponents of birth control, Chesterton only had, as he tells us, "contempt."
When Chesterton had "contempt" for something, we can be sure that something was radically wrong with the position. He was one of those men who could both explain what was wrong and even sense it, feel it. A good man can often uncannily recognize the face of something that is really evil; he can see its evil because he can see where it leads and what it prevents, something close to the heart of God. We should never forget that human babies, from the moment of their conceptions, are very near the heart of God. Their angels look on His very face.
Chesterton gave three reasons for his "personal contempt" about this issue. He lived before the days in which those who proposed eliminating babies in wombs called themselves advocates of "choice" instead of killers of human lives, which is what they objectively are. Choice is a verb and must have an object. "To choose" cannot be understood without its object. To be "pro-choice" does not mean in practice to be "for free will" as if it referred to some sort of theoretical dissertation on the human faculty. It means in context always choosing to kill an already incipient human life at some stage of its already begun development. This current abuse of the language would have driven this gentle man into a rage, I am sure.
But Chesterton had something of the same language problem already in 1935. His first reason for opposing it had to do with the very phrase "Birth Control". Chesterton could not stand lying with words. He would not have minded it so much had its advocates called it "Birth Prevention", for that is what it was; but to call it "birth control" was simply a gross abuse of language. "I despise Birth-Control," he wrote,
first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word, and is used so as to curry favor even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that that there shall never be any birth to control. ... Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth.
What "Birth Control" means, to use the language precisely, is "Birth Prevention". Chesterton thought the very word was a lie and intended to be a lie.
The second reason Chesterton had personal contempt for "Birth Control" was because of the thing itself. Chesterton is very blunt and frank here. He saw "Birth Control" to lack the courage of its convictions which even the Eugenicists have. At least the consistent Eugenicist would follow the example of dealing with animals where we let all the off-spring be born then choose which ones we want to keep. This would be a better position, Chesterton thought, than the "Birth Prevention" system which prevents or kills all birth.
In a reflection that may have something to do with the reason why many western countries have to rely on foreign labor, Chesterton wrote,
By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and the most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly for mercenary motives.
Chesterton thought that the "Birth Prevention" and Eugenic movements were hiding their real program. They treat human beings in principle as we treat the animals, that is, we keep or kill only what we want for our own ideological or mercenary motives.
The most important reason the Birth-Control mentality bothered Chesterton was as follows: "my contempt boils over into bad behavior when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be 'free' to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like door-mats in that they use the word 'free'." When human babies are not preferred to material possessions, this preference is not a sign of freedom but of servitude. Material possessions are not signs of freedom; children are.
Chesterton put the issue with much eloquence, by establishing what it first and what is second, what is important and what is its cause. "A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom," Chesterton wrote.
He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation.
Chesterton here clearly reminded us of our priorities, of what is essential, of what is merely a means. Chesterton already saw back in the 1930's how words and ideas would be abused to further anti-human priorities and realities. At the heart of reality is the child, the baby. This is the sign of freedom. The child is a new will in the world. What we have forgotten is precisely the wonder of this will when it is protected and wanted by its parents against the world, if necessary. No state or authority can interfere with this parental freedom to establish its own family in which its babies are to be born.
The child is the parents' contribution to creation. The new free will and mind in the world represent that potential innovative force by which the material possessions needed to support us can be invented and come into being in the first place. The ultimate wealth is the human mind and will as it refreshingly comes to be in each new human birth. Human beings do not want to be free from children, their children. Babies teach us what stands at the heart of reality -- "the sign and sacrament of personal freedom."
6) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (November, 1994). ON CREEDS
Chesterton very often returned to the idea that man is, by nature, a creed-making animal. Needless to say, this position is provocative, since we moderns often pride ourselves about not having any "creed" to restrict our style. What is peculiar about man, among other things, however, is that he smokes in spite of warnings of the Surgeon General that it is bad for his health -- although the scientific status of the present Surgeon-General (Elders) admittedly makes one suspect that if she is against it, it must be vital for one's continued well-being. It is thus one thing to have a creed and deliberately break its provisions and another thing to maintain that there is nothing to break, that there is nothing we can establish as a standard, whether we keep it or not.
The mind has its own peculiar function, however, a function that is its own proper activity. This function is, in Chesterton's view, that of making dogmas. Creeds are organized and coordinated lists of dogmas or doctrines. They state as clearly and as accurately as is possible just what it is we understand about some subject -- be it God, man, earth, or society. To forbid a mind to make a dogma or establish a doctrine that is true is to forbid it to be a mind. The mind seeks to know the truth. When it knows a truth, the mind seeks to formulate and state it, as if stating what the dogma is, is itself vital both to the creed's integrity and to our lives. We seek accurately to translate creeds into differing languages so that the same idea or understanding of a doctrine or a dogma will be accurately comprehended against the background of legitimately differing languages.
Chesterton wrote two columns about creeds in the Illustrated London News in November of 1927 (XXXIV, pp. 408-12; 421-24). In both essays, he was amused that the popular ideas about creeds -- namely, that they are "crumbling" and that men are becoming "weary" of them -- are both quite wrong. Chesterton maintained that if you asked the next ten, fifty, or a thousand people you met whether the "creeds" were crumbling, they would admit that they are because that is what they have heard repeated over and over. But these same people would not really be examining what is going on all around them. The fact is that people want to hear about dogmas and are eager to listen to disputes about them. Though we probably at first sight think exactly the opposite, people are "entirely interested in doctrinal matters and not in merely moral matters."
Thus people are not particularly interested in whether "Tommy is a good boy," but they are intrigued about rumors of whether the Dean of St. Paul's is "a Christian or a Platonist or a Pyrrho-Buddhist." What is, no doubt, amusing about that last remark is that we must today also examine whether bishops and deans profess, that is, agree with, the dogmas they are committed to hold by virtue of their office or whether they have gone off on some or other outlandish or dangerous tangent. Everyone sees that the importance of creeds is clearly manifest by the thoughts and actions of those who profess to uphold them but do not in practice.
"People are not merely interested in morality, or even merely in religion. They are intensely interested in theology -- if possible even more than in religion." What does this mean that people are more interested in theology than in morality or religion? Obviously, it means that people want to know, not merely to follow as in ritual or to act as in morality. What we do and what we think are intimately related. The most interesting and important thing we can know about someone, Chesterton said in his famous essay on "Why I Am Not a Socialist", is what he thinks, how does he see the world? Only when we know someone's "creed" will we be prepared to know how he might act in the world.
This is not to deny, of course, as E. Michael Jones in his Degenerate Moderns and Paul Johnson in his The Intellectuals put it, that we can also tell much about why people hold the theories they do by looking at how they live their lives. What appears at first sight to be an extraordinarily convoluted theory often becomes quite intelligible when we look at the kind of life that is being justified. Lives reveal theories; theories influence lives. Those who demonstrate in practice no relation between mind and act or act and mind are hardly human, again not forgetting that we are beings who can be wildly inconsistent. We have a society filled with people who are against smoking on the grounds that it is injurious to human health, but who are pro-choice when it comes to killing incipient human life.
Chesterton told the story of his friend, Bernard Shaw, who was once asked to be on a discussion panel. The rules of the panel forbad any discussion of religion and politics. Shaw retorted, that "he never discussed anything else except politics and religion." Chesterton added, "I also can claim that I never discuss anything except politics and religion." And Chesterton added, "There is nothing else to discuss." By this of course, Chesterton meant that there are some things that are "discussable" and some things that are not. As Aristotle said, nobody debates about whether to begin the Trojan War. It is already over. We can only seek the facts of what happened, not whether to begin it.
Chesterton thought that probably people were "intensely interested in theology -- if possible more than in religion." Why would he say this? It is, I think, because theology means precisely word or thought about God, the attempt to unravel and clarify what we mean by or know of the highest Being. The knowledge of whether God exists is one thing, interesting enough as it is. But the real interest comes when, once knowing of the existence of a beginning source or cause, we commence our wondering about what sort of a being or reality this origin or end might be. So we try to formulate what we think, what we conclude, what we articulate.
When we begin to do this articulating, we are in the creed making business, whatever we call it. "A creed means what anybody believes, and generally lends something of its definite character even to what he disbelieves. That the Creator is indifferent to creed is itself a creed. Even that the Creator does not exist at all is in essence a creed." This is why it is important especially for those who claim that they are free of odious creeds to identify their own creed so that we can examine them for their validity. We can in fact state in creedal form any claim to deny the need of a creed. No one is more pitiful or more dangerous than the "creedless" professor or parson. Chesterton had the uncanny ability to perceive and articulate the hidden creeds of those who had no creeds.
What might also sound strange to us on first reading is Chesterton's insistence that morality is not very interesting. We hear a lot about the notion that we should not bother about the differing creeds or statements of what people believe but look to their deeds. Samuel Johnson, I believe, once quipped that if a man denies in theory the validity of private property while he is visiting our house, we should count the silver after he leaves. It is true that by their fruits you shall know them. What is not true is that these fruits come from some sort of mindlessness that has no relation to a thought that might have caused them. If we really only were interested in actions with no perception of the thoughts that caused then, "the result would be a torrent of tedium, a howling wilderness of boredom." We would eliminate "mysticism" and the consciousness of our inner lives. The attention to deeds without to the thought behind them would be only moralising, something men find "the dreariest experience on earth." By eliminating any discussion of creed, creeds of even those who claim not to have any, we would at the same time get rid of what men "find really interesting," namely, "the disputes about dogmas and creeds." That is to say, we would rid ourselves of serious discussions about what is true.
In his second November article on creeds, Chesterton remarked that on having watched the situation from his "first to his second childhood", the fact is that creeds, far from crumbling, seem in fact to be "the hardest and most indestructible material made by man, if they were made by man." Chesterton was not here talking about the truth of creeds, though that is obviously the key question. He simply pointed out that men have been reciting the Nicene Creed, for instance, for almost seventeen centuries now. The new General Catechism still explains the centrality and indeed the truth of the creeds by which Catholicism identifies itself. It identifies itself by stating clearly what it holds to be true. And it does this after the manner in which the mind functions, that is, by making intelligible propositions of what it is that is the point of the doctrine.
What is in fact constantly crumbling, Chesterton thought, was not the creeds but the criticism of the creeds, that is, the grounds upon which this criticism is based. Chesterton had remarked someplace in Orthodoxy, I believe, that any stick is all right to beat the creed-making Church with, even contradictory positions. Thus, if the creed is said to be wrong because science has proved that it is untenable, what happens when the scientific position that was said to be the basis of the refutation of the creed is itself what is changed or untenable? "The first skeptic says something is wrong because something else is right," Chesterton explained. "If the second thing is not right, then there never was any reason to believe that the first thing was wrong. If I say Paul Jones was wicked because he was a pirate, and then go on to prove that piracy is perfectly innocent and respectable -- well, then it follows that there was never any particular objection to Paul Jones, and there is an end to it."
The creeds are the stable things. Indeed, it turns out that even the objections to creeds that claim to be true are themselves claims to be true. They may reappear from time to time in a certain new garb but with essentially the same position. Chesterton found that heresies rather frequently showed up unbeknownst to those who had forgotten the dogma against which a heresy was first directed. "It is not the creed, but the criticism that is always crumbling away, age after age." We live in a world in which we constantly look for something new. We live in a world in which what turns out to be most new and refreshing is something very old, something that states as carefully as it is given to the human intellect and human word to state it, what is true of God, world, man, and society. What angers many in our time is that we did not invent these doctrines that mind discovers and formulates when the mind does what it is supposed to do. That is to say, what angers many is that the creeds give us a criterion by which we can escape from being prisoners of the dominant ideologies and fads of our time. We need the liberty the creeds in order to see that the criticisms of the creeds are what are always crumbling.
7) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (April, 1995).
THE HORROR
We cannot help today but be conscious of the degree to which law or ideological pressure imposes on language, requires us to say certain things in certain ways or forbids us from saying them in other customary or normal ways. We have to utter the boring "happy holidays" because "Merry Christmas" hints that Christ is important. We have to affirm that active homosexuals live noble lifestyles. We have to pretend that we are all morally equal, no matter what we do, a position that puts vice and virtue on the same level and allows no moral discourse about whether there be virtue and vice in the first place. We are more and more dominated by a coerced public language totally out of harmony with what actually goes on in reality and with what we actually think. We all begin to lie about the important distinctions of right and wrong because we are allowed no other way of speaking about them. No public discourse will mean what it says.
Things that are perfectly intelligible and clear are, for political reasons, said to mean something else when they really don't. If I say, for instance, that "man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river," I am said arbitrarily to exclude from this sentence the feminine half of the human race. Therefore, I must not say that "man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river." Rather, I must say awkwardly, that "the human being is a rational animal; he/she laughs; she/he cries, he/she floats on her/his back in the river." Preposterous, really.
Of course, in my original sentence, as any fair minded person knows, I have not either in logic, grammar, or intention excluded half of the human race. Nothing exists in that original sentence that would not include each member, male or female, adult or child, of the human race. In order to think that it does, one must have been deprogrammed or educated out of the normal understanding of words and their relation to concepts. Words can have different meanings. We can understand them when they do. The word "man" can and does refer to a concept that prescinds from, without denying, the distinction of male and female. Every language for thousands of years has recognized this multiple meaning for words.
The proper English pronoun that refers to this concept, "man", is "he". It makes the same adjustment that the word "man" does when it means either the generic human being prescinding from the distinction of male and female or the male. Neither word, man or he, when used for the abstract concept, in any meaningful sense to anyone who understands the language, excludes females since it does not talk about males or females as such. Both words, "man" and "he", in context are designed to talk of human nature without averring to the sexual distinction, but without denying it either. We can do this easily and clearly and habitually. Not to have this mechanism at our disposal makes our speech stilted, silly even. University lectures and academic journals have become boring, unending repetitions of unnecessary and confusing hes/shes in all their splendid ideology.
Another variety of this same problem occurs when we use words to cover up what we are really doing or talking about. The most obvious candidate in this category is what is known, with incredible paradox, as the "choice" movement. Today, if I say that I am for "choice", it does not mean that I have some elaborate theory about free will. It means rather, to put it clearly, that I think it all right to kill babies in wombs. The word "choice", by itself, does not tell us what is going on, except when we come to know how it is used. "To choose" never stands by itself. I always have to choose something, this or that. Simply to have the power to choose, which is what all rational creatures have by their nature, tells us nothing at all about what individuals will do with their wills. The "pro-choice" movement, thus, is not some debating club organized to combat radical determinism. It is rather a theoretical justification for killing certain human beings (euthanasia is also a part of this same movement) on the sole basis that we want to (choose to) do so. There is not the slightest scientific evidence that what we kill is not a human life in its initial form, already complete from the moment of conception.
Likewise, if I am opposed to the "pro-choice" movement", it does not mean that Schall is suddenly to be ranked with those philosophical systems that maintain that we must do what we do, that there is no freedom in the cosmos or in ourselves. In the "pro-choice" movement, choice does have a very particular, individual, tiny object that is impossible to separate from the power of choice itself in the act of its choosing. Every "to choose" of this type is to put an action in the world that kills a begun human life. The language cannot mean anything else in this usage. It cannot simply mean I am for "the power of choice", against which stand only theoretic determinists. If I am "for choice", it means both that I can justify the power of free will and understand that the object of choice, what it chooses, determines whether it is being used for good or evil. When what I choose is to terminate the life of another innocent human being, my choice is evil, even though the fact that I have this power remains good. If I try to hide from myself what I objectively do by some theory of privacy, I am in utter self-deception about myself, about what I do, about choice, about the world itself.
Recently, someone gave me a copy of Loyola University Press sample collection of G. K.'s Weekly. I am not adept enough to figure out who wrote the unsigned editorials and columns in this remarkably quaint and fascinating journal. But Chesterton does write a signed column or essay almost regularly. On October 17, 1931, he did a column called "The Horror". Needless to say, I was curious to find out just what this "horror" was. I thought at first it might be perhaps Hitler, or even some account of an English ghost or politician.
But the column in 1931 turned out in fact to be about this very topic of the proper use of language that has become so convoluted some sixty years later. The very first sentence of this essay reads: "Nearly all newspapers and public speakers are now entirely occupied with finding harmless words for a horrible thing" (325). What else is "pro-choice" but precisely "harmless words" designed to cover up "a horrible thing"? Political and polite society does not allow us to use the real words that give the true picture of what is happening.
Recently, however, I read The Quotable Paul Johnson, which George Marlin, Richard Rabatin, and Heather Richardson Higgins edited. In it, I read these absolutely clear under the heading "Abortion Industry":
The abortion industry has been given a green light to do, in effect, what it wills. A fully formed child can be ripped from its mother's womb, screaming and gasping for breath, and then coldly butchered on the waiting slab by men and women -- "specialists" -- whose sole job in life is performing such lawful operations.
Here the language does not "find harmless words for a horrible thing." Rather, the language finds horrible words for a horrible thing. In other words, the language does what it is supposed to do. It tells the truth about what goes by using appropriate and accurate words.
Chesterton, in his day, was still dealing with prohibition. In 1931, we were prohibiting alcohol. Today we prohibit smoking; just as we also prohibit parents from knowing when their daughters go to an abortion clinic on the grounds of privacy. Thus, when we cannot hide the results of our choices, an impossibility in any case, we cover ourselves with the mantle of privacy, that is, we lie even to ourselves.
Here, then, we are interested in the use of words to lie to us about what is going on. Chesterton himself had a kind of genius for seeing through the veneer of a language that deliberately lies to us about what it means. He could see the ironies to which this deliberately obscuring usage could lead us. "Everybody was taught to use the word 'temperance'," he remarked in the same essay, "to mean refusing to any man even the chance to be temperate. They talked about Birth Control when they meant preventing birth, just as they talked about Liquor Control when they meant forbidding liquor."
"Birth control", that systematic blockage that especially liberal Catholics want to defend unto the death, was itself a most amusing phrase to Chesterton. He had quipped someplace else that "birth control", when examined for the actual meaning of the words, meant precisely "no birth" and "no control". This entertaining remark, no doubt, contains the essence of the papal position, that there should be a relation between our actions and their consequences that is under our control, under our own wills. Contraceptives, abortions, RUD's, and all the myriads of similar paraphernalia simply do what Chesterton said they did; they prevent births without demanding any sort of control in the sexual act itself, which is where human relation and self-rule exist in this case.
The Liquor Control Commission evidently thought to solve a problem not by temperance, by allowing us to rule ourselves, but by forbidding that about which temperance usually exists, that is, food, drink, and sex. Again, we noticed that Chesterton was protecting a philosophy by protecting words. He saw that words were being used to foster a new philosophy, one that retained on the surface words that sounded like the old morality but which were in fact the new determinism disguised as choice or control. Abortion, after all, is itself the result of a failure not only of control but even of the devices or, more often, the will to use them. The minute we place the problem in the wrong place, we will never solve it, or if we do solve it, we will have to use methods all out of proportion to the way human beings ought to rule themselves.
The "horror" that Chesterton already saw in 1931 is today a part of our very culture. We lie to ourselves in order not to have to admit to ourselves what we are actually doing. We then pass laws and enforce customs and language that prevents us from penetrating back to that reality which words are designed to indicate and describe. If we call abortion an "industry" protected by law, with highly paid practitioners who serve the law by their trade, we will begin to think we are dealing with something like General Motors or the Restaurant Industry. What we are doing, as Paul Johnson so graphically said, is butchering human beings for no other reason than because we choose to do so and it is legal. What would Chesterton have called such an "industry". He would have called it what it is, a "horror".
8) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 8 (August, 1996). THE ONLY REAL HAPPINESS POSSIBLE TO MAN
My friend David Yost in Monterey, California, called to my attention two brief passages from Chesterton, one from Dickens and the other from an essay "On Sentiment", found in John Guest's collection of Chesterton essays. In the meantime, I also came across in the November, 1994, issue of The Chesterton Review, in which is reprinted Chesterton's 1905 column from The Daily News entitled, "The Alphabet of the Liberal". I want to say something about all three of these items.
The title of this particular essay I am writing now is taken from the Dickens book, in which Pickwick's spectacles are described as being fixed in "that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man" (CW, XV, 92, italics added). Yost recalled this passage in Dickens because he had read a sentence in my Idylls and Rambles, that went, "The capacity to be surprised comes close to the very definition of our dignity." I have often pondered this surprising "surprise", this grave surprise that touches our dignity and constitutes our only true happiness. It is rooted in the fact that we are finite beings called to eternal life, something we could in no way imagine for ourselves but yet which is offered to us through no merit of our own. The grave surprise of the baby is, as Chesterton often noted, caused by the fact that the baby has never seen anything at all before. To the baby the world is fresh with grave and delightful things that come to him from nowhere about whose presence before him he shows in his face, eyes, and voice a "grave surprise"..
In Chesterton, I believe, we can find several sources for his famous remark that if a thing is "worth doing, it is worth doing badly." It occurs for sure in What's Wrong with the World, perhaps the Chesterton book most pertinent to our current familial disorders. I did a class on Thomas Aquinas during the Spring Semester. One day I was somehow reminded of this passage. We had been reading together Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas. I said to the class one day, "Listen to this statement from Chesterton and tell me the example he used to prove its validity." Naturally, the class looks at such a professor as if he were temporarily deranged or suffering from incipient Alzheimer's disease. I read the passage, "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." Again I asked them, "what is the example to illustrate this principle?" The statement is obviously paradoxical and ironic. The class come up with nothing. Then after some pause, I asked them whether they wanted me to tell them? They nod. "Dancing," I announced, somewhat wickedly, to be sure, as this is their field, not mine. I could see their faces brighten when they get the implications of the paradoxical answer.
In 1905, Chesterton remarked that there were some things that we did not want done at all unless they were done well, indeed "exceedingly well". I now recall seeing some of these examples before -- they are things like "playing on the violin, walking on a tight-rope, discovering the North Pole, looping the loop, performing duties of the public analyst, hangman, Astronomer Royal." One can only smile at this remarkable list.
I often remind my classes that Aristotle said that there are two things we should all be able to do but not do well. They are playing the flute and cooking. I then ask them why Aristotle would say such a thing. Usually someone will have it figured out, namely, that if we play the flute very well, or cook exceedingly well, we will not have any time left over to do the thousands of other things that are worth doing. It is the difference between the well-rounded man and the expert.
Chesterton goes on in this very Aristotelian spirit: "There are a number of fundamental things that we desire all sane men to do for themselves, whether they are done superlatively well or no, such as "laughing, playing with toys if immature and with children if adult, talking, blowing one's nose, making love, earning a living, saying one's prayers." Again, this is an equally remarkable list of things we all prefer to do by ourselves. Chesterton then adds the principle involved: "These are normal human functions, and we prefer that they should be done badly by the man himself than well by anybody else." Thus, Chesterton added, that we really do not want to pay some "expert" to write our love letters. "We do not want other people to choose our wives, unless we are sociologists, and thus in our second infancy." No wonder we love Chesterton. Who else tells us what we obviously need and want to know about ourselves?
In Idylls and Rambles, speaking of Belloc's love of The Diary of a Nobody, Yost underscored this passage, "it seems that he (Belloc) saw in it (the hero of The Diary of a Nobody) a kind of Christ figure, of the fallible and failing man who somehow was the object of redemption." This passage reminded Yost, a Professor of International Relations at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, of a passage from "On Sentiment", a copy of which he kindly send me.
Chesterton had remarked that the ending of Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan was unsatisfactory. Peter Pan is an elf who never changes, but he falls in love with a normal little human girl. He is given the choice of becoming mortal to live with her or remaining an immortal without her. Either choice would have been noble, but Peter Pan wants to compromise. So he prefers to remain an elf but wants to come back every year to visit Wendy for a day. Of course, time does not exist for the elf and Wendy rapidly becomes an old woman.
The issue that Chesterton points out, the one that David Yost cited to me, is that Peter Pan, and consequently often we ourselves, do not understand the true implications of our happiness and our human condition. The true alternative that Peter Pan had is this: He could have chosen one or the other, but not both, to become human or remain an immortal -- Chesterton added, "the evil comes when we waver about weighty matters." Chesterton continued:
He (Peter Pan) might have said that he was a god, that he loved all (mortals) but could not live for any; that he belonged not to them but to multitudes of unborn babes. Or he might have chosen love, with the inevitable result of love, which is incarnation, and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion; yes, if it were only crucifixion by becoming a clerk in a bank and growing old. But it was a fork in the road and even in fairyland you cannot walk down two roads at once.
These are remarkable words, that if we choose love, we choose incarnation. If we choose incarnation, we choose crucifixion. And finally, that every ordinary, insignificant life, as well as every life of the great, involves the daily job, the growing old, dying.
The only real happiness possible to us comes to us with the surprise that is beyond the crucifixion that each of us must endure in our own lives. If a thing like living our normal lives is worth doing badly, because it means living at all, this is because we are finite, fallible, fallen creatures. We live within a love that leads to incarnation; we live within an incarnation that leads to crucifixion. We live within a crucifixion that leads to resurrection -- not to be gravely surprised at our condition is to miss understanding the only real happiness possible to man.
9) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 8 (April, 1996).
THE FIRST DAY OF A NEW CREATION
The Ottawa Chesterton Society Newsletter has republished (January, 1996) an essay of Chesterton from December 28, 1935, in the Illustrated London News. Reading this essay, I was particularly struck by the following line, a line, I must say, that is close to the heart of what Chesterton stood for: "Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult." When I cited this sentence to a friend, I at first wondered just why gratitude would the the most difficult of human duties. It seemed to me at the time that it was because gratitude implies that so much of what we are and have does not originate in ourselves. We are reluctant to acknowledge this fact and think that it is better to claim authorship or ownership of as much as we can rather than to acknowledge what we have received.
But as I reread this sentence, however, what I now find most striking is Chesterton's calling gratitude precisely a "duty". We recall Christ's wonderment about the "other nine" who did not return to thank him on being cured. That is, one in nine, on the average, do not give thanks, a ration I have found to be actually about the way it is We like to think, however, that if we have a "duty" to something, especially to give thanks, that would mean that it is not pure.
A couple of weeks after Christmas Mass at the old Novitiate in Los Gatos, in California, on Christmas Eve this year, my two little grand nieces and grandnephew each wrote me a dear note of thanks for saying the family Christmas Mass. Now, I know that the idea of writing Uncle Jim was not original with the kids themselves. Their mother had a hand in it. She was teaching them something, the duty of thanks. We need to be alerted to things that we ought to acknowledge.
Suddenly, we find, with Chesterton, that the whole world is a place filled not so much with ourselves but with others to whom we "owe" thanks. Somehow, if we do not actually articulate the thanks we "owe", we are missing something fundamental about being human. Our very existence is something for which thanks are due. This is Chesterton's primal insight.
In The Everlasting Man, we find a chapter entitled "The Strangest Story in the World." The end of this Chapter contains Chesterton's own account of the meaning of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. If we look back at Chesterton's Chapter title, we see that the words are carefully chosen. The world had never seen a story like this before. It strikes anyone who hears it for the first time as precisely "strange". It does not conform to our experience, however much it might conform to what we would want if we could have it.
Chesterton speaks in almost apocalyptic terms in this passage. The glorious yet somber humanity of the ancient world came to an end in this very grave wherein Christ, now crucified, was buried. "It was the end of a very great thing called human history, the history that was merely human" (Collected Works, II, p. 345). Chesterton affirms here, of course, that what follows is something that is not "merely human". It is something that bears the character of gift and sacrifice done for us, in our behalf. The ancient heros had lived. They were now dead.
Chesterton then concludes his Chapter with these extraordinary lines:
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they had hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in the semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.
These poetic lines are revelatory to us -- "the world died that very night." They recall Genesis and something more than Genesis. The empty tomb and the stone rolled away are things seen with eyes of the friends, the witnesses. Chesterton's words are graphic. Mere human history has ended. What is seen is no longer this history; a new heaven and a new earth are already there.
We regard these events. On the third day, the friends come at daybreak. Suddenly, we can look back with new insight on Chesterton's notion of the "duty" of gratitude, of why it is the "greatest" of human duties in a world in which the old human history is dead. We can understand too why this "duty" is so difficult, because it suggests that the terms of what it is we might most want, the truth of what happened to cause the empty tomb and the stone rolled away, are not results of our own planning and organization, of our own accomplishments except in so far as we are invited to accept them as a gift. The end of a history that is "merely" human in fact needed to end. This is not the world for which we are created and destined.
The "Strangest Story in the World" in fact has a happy ending, in the cool of not the evening but of the dawn. When I think of why Chesterton used the term "duty" of gratitude, it was not because he thought gratitude was coerced or ought not to proceed from our freedom and delight. Rather it was because of the very real danger that, unless we are initially taught and guided to do those things for which we will be thankful, we will likely miss them. If the ancient human history has ended, it does not mean that the great events that marked its ending have been accepted in the only way that they can be accepted, after the manner of gifts, for which we give thanks. The "world that died that resurrection night" was a world that led nowhere, that soon lost its ability even to enjoy itself.
Indeed, it is difficult to give thanks, to know gratitude. If the great sign above the gates of Hell are, as Dante said, "abandon all home all ye who enter here", the great banner floating over the Gates of Paradise surely read, "You are first loved, then you are." The Resurrection dawn is the completion of that ultimate truth according to which we can be joyful at all, according to which we can acknowledge that someone else redeemed us, but that we are, none the less, redeemed. The only "duty" we could possibly have before such events and such happenings in the world, old and new, is indeed that of gratitude.
10) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 3 (October, 1990).
ON THE DULLNESS OF CHAOS
The other day I received from New York a copy of the 1986 British Penguin edition of The Man Who Was Thursday. A young friend spotted it in a book store and figured I would like it. How do you give thanks for such unexpected gifts?
What interests me here is the first Chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). The book began with a poem dedicated to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Chesterton's lifetime friend. Chesterton explained that out of all the arguments and mysteries of their youth and in spite of the fantastically wrong theories of our intellectuals -- "Science announced nonentity / And art admired decay..." -- it was now possible to talk calmly of ordinary things, their wonder and their mystery. The poem ended:
Yes, there is strength in striking root, And good in growing old. We have found common things at last, And marriage and a creed, And I may safely write it now, And you may safely read.
But these are exactly the things that are not safe at last, the common things, marriage and the Creed, though they are the things that we most want and whose wonder most needs explanation to us.
The plot began in an extraordinary ordinary suburb of London called Saffron Park. Already here is Chesterton's theme that the most extraordinary things in existence are the ordinary human beings we meet every day in the ordinary places in which they dwell. We mostly do not notice how extraordinary it is, just to be. "A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy."
The story began with a kind of sunset that was so unusual that everyone remembered it. "It looked like the end of the world." The colors were so fantastic and varied that they covered up the sun "like something too good to be seen." The clouds and light cast a glow over Saffron Park that made it seem mysterious. "It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism." All of this took place in an ordinary suburb on a day that might have been any day.
In this suburb lived a radical anarchist poet who believed, "with a certain impudent freshness" the old cant "of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness." Into this suburb improbably came another poet, a poet of "order." The poet of revolt had a following of "vaguely emancipated women" who had some protest against "the male supremacy." But these were clearly not ordinary women. "These new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking."
The anarchistic poet had a sister, Rosamund, who was much taken with the poet of order, so different he seemed than her brother. "Mr. Syme," she said to the poet of order, "do the people who talk like you and my brother often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?" To which Syme responded, "Do you?"
The heart of the initial encounter between the poet of anarchy and the poet of order had to do with Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet's remark that "an artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."
The Underground Railway is, of course, the London Subway. And true to form, the poet of order thought that in fact that the London subway was the most poetical thing in the world. Gregory, the anarchist, thought the world would be more romantic if the next stop after Sloane Square would not be Victoria, as it was, but say Baker Street or Baghdad. Whether we know it or not, we are involved here in St. Thomas's proof for God's existence, the one from order, about why things do reach their ends.
Syme, the poet of order, was sure that it was more wondrous if the subway actually went to where it said it was going than if it just went anywhere. "Chaos is dull," he continued,
because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride.
The opposite of chaos is order. We do not want to go just anywhere, but to somewhere. Syme felt that coming to Victoria was not unlike that "hairbreadth escape" from a world of chaos in which nothing gets anywhere, in which men have not the will or capacity to order their world because they do not love the smallness that made it the extraordinary place it is.
But Gregory, the anarchist, thought that man would be unhappy to learn that the New Jerusalem looked just like Victoria Station. "The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt." To this, Syme retorted, "Being sick is a revolt." And he explained,
It is things going right, that is poetical! Our digestion, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars -- the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
The anarchist, of course, could hardly comprehend the poetical wonder of the fact that in us things go right and we do not even notice it. It is not merely how the Underground Railway gets from Sloane Square to Victoria, but how our blood gets from our heart to our toes.
Rosamund was watching Syme who was discussing whether he or the anarchist or she was "sincere" in their questions. "She was looking at him (Syme) from under level brows; her face was grave and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world." The maternal unreasoning responsibility protects what is simply because it is, the fierceness for being and life.
To return to Chesterton's poem and his recollection of his endless youthful all night discussions with Bentley and his friends when they, as all young men should, were trying to figure out what dogmas were true, Syme is described walking with Rosamund in the garden. "For he (Syme) was a sincere man, and in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely." The proud man watches himself too closely -- whether this is the ultimate defense of loquaciousness, I do not know. But it is the defense of Chesterton's long conversations to find the truth which required the humility of watching what is, of watching the Underground from Sloane Square actually rumble into Victoria, of knowing that his digestion worked best when he did not notice that it worked at all, of knowing that the New Jerusalem will not be a chaotic thing in which nothing in particular matter, but it will be a particular place to where our aims have always been directed.
Chaos is dull. "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it." This is what St. Thomas said. We will not be bored in the Streets of Heaven if we are delighted when the train from Sloane Square arrives at Victoria and not at Baghdad.
11) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 4 (September, 1992).
ON NOT WRECKING DIVINE OR SECULAR THINGS
The Chesterton Review (May, 1992) reprinted a Chesterton essay entitled "The Roots of the World." The essay was originally published in The Daily News in London on August 17, 1907. This would be about the time Chesterton was writing Orthodoxy.
The essay begins with a kind of narrative parable. Father Boyd in his little introduction remarked that this was a very famous essay and that Chesterton used such parables "as a way of teaching moral truths." I suspect that he used it also as a way to teach the metaphysical truths upon which moral truths are based.
Essentially, Chesterton argued that the whole universe is connected, the highest things with the lowest things and the lowest with the highest. What you cannot do is change God, but you may just change yourself or the world if you try to change God into something other than He is. That is to say, the logic of changing one thing will necessarily result in changing something in the world. If you think wrongly about God, you will think wrongly about man.
The story is a sort of re-telling of the Fall in Genesis. There is a garden in which is growing an odd star-shaped flower that a little boy is commanded not to pull up by the roots. He can pick the flowers but not pull the plants up by the roots.
Naturally, the little boy, shades of the young Augustine, wants nothing more in this world than to pull up the flower by its roots. The elders on the scene give him a number of not very good reasons for not pulling up the plant. But the boy has a very "silly" reason for wanting to pull up the plant, whatever the reasons for not doing so are. He explains that "the Truth demanded that he should pull the thing up by the roots to see how it was growing."
The boy's parents and tutors never really gave him the full reason for the prohibition which was that pulling up the plant by its roots "would kill the plant, and that there is no more Truth about a dead plant than about a live one." In other words, it would have been helpful perhaps for the parents to have given the boy an accurate reason for the prohibition, but even if they did not do so, the prohibition stood. Since the dead plant will not reveal the truth about itself, the boy risked the punishment for violating the prohibition and risked losing the truth itself that could not be discovered by his method.
It seems that one dark night the boy slipped into the garden and started pulling up the plant by the roots. Suddenly strange things began to happen. First, the boy could not succeed in pulling up the plant, but as he pulled, the great chimney of his house collapsed. He pulled again and the stables fell down. Cries of agony began to be heard. The castle itself fell down. This chaos seemed to frighten the boy but he managed to say nothing about the strange incident of the flower. He still did not want to obey the prohibition.
The boy grew up and decided to try again to uproot the plant. He was a politician and ruler now. He surrounded himself with a group of strong men and announced, "Let us have done with the riddle of this irrational weed." So they all began to pull it out with great force. Suddenly, the Eiffel Tower fell, the Great Wall of China, the Statue of Liberty. "St. Paul's Cathedral killed all the journalists in Fleet-street." The ruler recalled his earlier experience in the garden.
In their efforts, these strong men had managed to pull down half of the buildings of their country, but they still could not pull up the roots. Finally, the man gave up his project in frustration but he called his pastors and masters. He blamed them for not telling him that he could not root up this plant and that if he tried, he would ruin everything else. All they had told him was not to do it. He now saw the results but would not admit his responsibility.
This parable, of course, is about Christianity and the efforts of secular men to rid themselves of it. In attacking religion, the secularists end up by not eliminating religion but they do manage to pull up the roots "of every man's ordinary vine and fig tree, of every man's garden." Somehow there is a connection between religion and ordinary life.
We are warned about this relationship and we are given some half-baked reason for it. If we think the reasons to be wrong or not what we would do, we go ahead and try to uproot religion, only to end up destroying the very core of civilized life in the effort. We do not intend this result, but this is what happens. "Secularists have not succeeded in wrecking divine things; but Secularists have succeeded in wrecking secular things."
The "enemies of religion," Chesterton concluded, are like the little boy. They cannot leave it alone. It is a kind of forbidden fruit, a challenge to their autonomy. They see all the prohibitions merely as arbitrary, as "something wild," not as something reasonable. They cannot believe that disorder flows from tampering with the solemn prohibitions. "They laboriously attempt to smash religion. They cannot smash religion; but they do smash everything else."
But why cannot they smash religion? The secularists and opponents of religion cannot touch the axioms of religion, which are dogmas and intelligible. They remain as they are no matter what goes on in the world. In not holding the doctrines of the faith, the secularists necessarily are committed to other doctrines. To maintain that man is not made in the image of his Creator is as dogmatic as to maintain he is.
Chesterton gave two examples, the case of the pacifist and of the evolutionist. The pacifist has a doctrine about coercion. This results in the "intolerable and ludicrous" alternative "that I must not blame a bully or praise the man who knocks him down." My theory has strange consequences. Because of the endless gradations in nature, upon which evolutionary theory is based, we cannot on this basis be forced to "deny the personality of God, for a personal God might as well work by gradations as in any other way." So the theory stands, but what the evolutionist does, if his theory be taken strictly, is not to deny the personality in God but the personality in Jones.
If evolution is true, Jones is within the scope of evolution. That is, he is himself being "rubbed away at the edges." He is at this very moment evolving into something else. If everything is evolving, including ourselves, including Jones, then in strict logic, we are not really ourselves. What must finally be denied is not personality in God but "the existence of a personal Mr. Jones."
If we want Jones to exist as Jones, then he must not even slightly be in the process of becoming Mr. Smith, or some higher species. The old religion wants Jones to remain Jones. If we try to root out this doctrine of religion, we do not end by changing the theory that Jones is Jones and that Jones wants to be Jones, but we do force ourselves to look on him as becoming not-Jones. In this evolutionary case, in its logic, the world is full of things, including Jones, that are not really themselves.
So, we cannot really wreck divine things, but we can certainly wreck human things. If we see human and secular things being wrecked, we must begin to suspect that we are violating some prohibitions, that if we root up a certain flower, we will root up the world. We should not forget too, that the prohibitions were also rooted in the Truth that the boy was seeking. The truth was that he would not know the real truth of the flower if he killed it by uprooting it. The prohibition would have saved the world. Reason would have saved the flower.
At the roots of the world lies disturbingly the will that wants only its own Truth. The prohibitions tell us that there is a world we want, we, Jones, even if it is not the world we make. The flower was already there. Jones was already Jones. The commandments, the prohibitions, are designed to keep them both. Even when we pull down the world, we will not find our truth, but only the truth. There is only one theory, as far as I know, that allows Jones to be Jones. That theory is still called Christianity. This is the meaning, I think, of Chesterton's parable about the roots of the world.
12) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, October, 1992.
BELLOC ON CHESTERTON
Frank Petta, on reading of my brother-in-law's troubles in finding Belloc's little book on Chesterton (MCN, March 1992), was kind enough to send me a copy of the Obituary -- it is entitled simply "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" -- that Belloc published in The Saturday Review of Literature, for July 4, 1936. Belloc had written evidently a number of things on Chesterton just after he died, but I had not known of this particular essay. On receiving it, I had put it aside and came across it by chance the other day looking for something else. I re-read it. And I read it a second time, and a third. I suddenly was struck by the profundity of this essay of Belloc, of how he saw the essence of Chesterton.
Belloc began the essay by analyzing why the English aristocracy and press never acknowledged Chesterton's greatness. Even though Chesterton was "the most English of Englishmen," he stood on the Catholic side of culture even as an Englishman. In this sense, Belloc thought Chesterton's fame would increase so that Belloc's children and grandchildren would have a better chance to understand Chesterton than even his generation did.
However, Belloc himself knew Chesterton. "I knew him I think as well as any man ever knew another." This friendship was based on long acquaintance -- "close on forty years" -- but it was especially based on the quality of its intellectual exchange. Belloc wrote:
so thoroughly did my mind jump with his, so fully did his answer meet the question my own soul was always asking, that his conclusions, the things he found and communicated, his solutions of the great riddles, his stamp of certitude, were soon part of myself.
The great riddles of life were asked, answers were forged. This sense of actual answers to riddles, as Chesterton showed in Orthodoxy, is especially characteristic of Christian friendship. Not just the questioning that is perhaps more Platonic, but the realization that answers are there when the proper questions are asked. The nobility of the human condition is not merely that it can ask questions, but that it can know when its questions are answered.
Belloc observed, furthermore, that they both came of the same "stock." Belloc's mother was English.
My mother derived directly from that English middle class of yeomen and liberal stock which in literature and the arts, in law and even in arms, in merchant enterprise, and, most of all, in metaphysical and religious speculation, has determined the character of England from the moment of the Puritan triumph three hundred years ago.
Chesterton's family was in the real estate business in London. Both Belloc's mother and Chesterton came into the Church from "sheer power of brain."
Belloc acknowledged that he had grown in his appreciation of what Chesterton stood for. Belloc next remarked something that puzzled me, something I always thought he denied. I had to look it up. On his "path" from Toul to Rome, Belloc in 1902 or perhaps in 1901, remarked in a passage I have often cited, with considerable consolation, I admit, that "it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."
Here in the Chesterton Obituary, we find Belloc reflecting:
I myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach, to a beginning at least of understanding in the matter (of faith); but it was never my good fortune to bear witness by the crossing of a frontier: a public act. Such good fortune was his (Chesterton's). I was born within the walls of the City of God: he saw it, approached it, knew it, and entered. I know not which is for the run of men the better fate, but his was certainly of our two fates the better.
I suppose these two things can be reconciled. Yet I cannot help but think that Chesterton himself would have been surprised at Belloc here. Chesterton would have thought that Belloc was right in The Path to Rome and wrong in the Obituary. Chesterton the convert would have agreed that it was indeed "a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."
Belloc to be sure was comparing returning to a faith having lost it to a person who never having it and subsequently found it. Belloc suggested that for most men it may be better to have been born in the faith. He himself has had a struggle to see the faith, know it. Chesterton's path was to Belloc more noble and clearer. If the issue were only between Chesterton and Belloc, perhaps Chesterton's was the better path.
Still there is something to be said for the Belloc of The Path to Rome. If we too are born "within the walls of the City of God," as Belloc put it, using a phrase from Augustine, no doubt, we must still bear witness, cross frontiers, make our act public. We must see, approach, know and stay within.
And yet, the best and most profound part of Belloc's reflections on Chesterton were not about his origins, his Englishness, or even his friendship with Belloc. Chesterton's life, in Belloc's mind, was not spent in "search for truth," This understanding is too abstract. Chesterton was "hungry for reality." It is one thing to have a vague or abstract sense of this hunger but quite another to think of satisfying this hunger.
He (Chesterton) was hungry for reality. But what is much more, he could not conceive of himself except as satisfying that hunger; it was not possible to him to hesitate in the acceptation of each new parcel of the truth; it was not possible for him to hold anything worth holding that was not connected with the truth as a whole.
Chesterton's was a "strange consistency" that placed each new reality he hungered for within the satisfaction of the whole. He knew where things belonged.
In a passage reminiscent of St. Thomas famous dictum, "contemplata tradere (to pass on what is first contemplated), Belloc noticed that Chesterton's passion for "what is," a passion that made him reject both confusion and falsehood, was "the driving power moving his spirit to disseminate what he knew." Chesterton was so struck by reality, by what is, in its infinity of forms and shapes, that he wanted to respond to it, explain it, appreciate it. In short, he delighted in it.
Belloc stressed this latter quality as it was easy to miss. Chesterton's love of fun, of jesting, his vitality, made us forget or overlook what Belloc called Chesterton's "power of proof." This power of proof was "not only the central thing, it was the whole meaning of his work." In a passage mindful of Josef Pieper, Belloc continued to explain what Chesterton was about. "The whole meaning of his life was the discovery, the appreciation, of reality." We have, of course, read Chesterton's book St. Thomas Aquinas in which this very quality is so evident. Chesterton's work "was made up of bequeathing to others the treasure of knowledge and certitude upon which he had come."
What follows from this basis, I think, shows that Belloc really did understand Chesterton in the most profound of ways. And through him, if not also through his own experiences, he knew that Chesterton's love of reality was something that was not merely his own, even when it was his own.
Side by side with and a product of that immense exuberance in happiness not only of himself but of all around, of that vital rejoicing not only in man but in every other work of God and in God Himself, the most conspicuous fruit was generosity.
The affirmation of what is that it is, the rejoicing in what is, that it is, the affirmation that all that is is worthy of praise, not excluding oneself -- this in what Belloc called in such a felicitous phrase "that intense exuberance in happiness" -- these qualities lead to generosity, to the realization that what we are and have do not exist of ourselves, but exist because they are given in an abundance, in gift, that we can only receive in wonder and awe.
Chesterton could "write on all things because he was in the spirit of all things and from this central position he could explain, predicate, and give peace." To "give peace," I think, means to know that the riddles have answers.
We often wonder about Chesterton's frequent paradoxes. Some folks do not like them; others wait for them, so illuminating they are. Perhaps this is Belloc's comment on this topic: "He exaggerated in nothing save in emphasis of expression when rhetoric demanded. In statement of truth he did not and could not exaggerate because truth, which was his sole concern, is of its nature absolute." This is right, of course.
Today, anyone who suggests that the truth is "absolute," let alone that he might have discovered and passed it on, is looked on as some sort of danger to the republic. Belloc noted that all conversation today is advocacy. It is rooted in opinion and uncertainty, even in the "certainty" that truth cannot exist at all.
Chesterton, however, was not an "advocate." He was almost the only man in England who was not an advocate. "He does not advocate but tells." What a marvelous thing to say of Chesterton, something that explains the feeling we often get from reading him that he has discovered the truth, but he has not invented it. "In the midst of such a chaos Chesterton's voice and pen proclaimed not selected evidence but the thing that was; the thing that he saw and knew." He simply "told" us what he knew and saw and reflected on. He gave us peace of mind because he believed we did have minds, minds as he often said that are by their very nature made to come to conclusions, to formulate dogmas, to tell the truth.
Belloc saw what was at stake in modern philosophy. He saw it as Chesterton saw it, namely, that the social world can be constructed according to human will, that we can, in some sense, make come to be what we want to be and not only what ought to be. Whether we can reverse our principles and foundations remains to be seen. The challenge of religion and classical philosophy ought to do precisely this reversal, were it not for the fact that both religion and philosophy have often sounded very much like the social world that has come to be from pure will.
Now Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life was on the side of those who at so much risk determined to reverse if reversed it could be the current of the time. All around him was a society which had determined upon the opposite and fatal course -- hiding its weakness -- and of erecting an imaginary world that should satisfy foreign critics and lull its own confidence in security.
Only today are we beginning to understand what that "risk" of restoring order might consist in. The opposite and fatal course seems, at bottom, not to have been communism, but the system that communism shared with modernity.
Would this reversal be possible? Belloc thought that wrong ideas and systems once entered into usually had to bear their own bitter fruit in social reality before they could intellectually be seen for what they were. Belloc thought that this seeing required not merely intelligence and knowing what is, but "repentance." Belloc felt some connection between a failure to repent and the death of Chesterton, the may who "told" the truth, who loved the variety of things, appreciated them, saw them in the light of God who made them. Men can refuse what is. It was Chesterton who could affirm it, who could, as a result, be generous for what he had, what he knew, was not his.
13) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 5 (November, 1992).
THE ONLY VIRTUE
Volume III of The Collected Works (1990) includes a book known as The Well and the Shallows (1935). The book ends with two short essays, one of which was a Letter Chesterton wrote to The Catholic Herald entitled "Why Protestants Prohibit." Chesterton had been asked to give an address on the BBC in the context of a series on "Freedom." He was asked to speak on freedom as it related to Catholicism. (I do not know if this address still exists on tape somewhere).
Evidently, Chesterton's talk produced a myriad of not always complimentary responses. I bring these essays up in the context of whether we can really speak the truth in this or any other republic. We are so much under the influence of the idea of tolerance, the one virtue, that we are not allowed to suggest that any idea or institution can be described in terms of truth. Needless to say, there is a problem of logic, of contradiction even, at work here. If tolerance itself is the only "truth," the only virtue, then the only vice is "intolerance." And what exactly is not to be tolerated in this context? It turns out to be the claim to truth at all. When tolerance is elevated to a theoretic principle, we are left, in the political order, with the inability to call anything at all wrong or evil.
The logic of the "only virtue" was the background of Chesterton's responses to his critics who complained about his talk about liberty. Chesterton's fault against the only virtue, it seems, was his remark that the Protestant notion of freedom was "wrong." Such a remark on the BBC was by definition offensive and intolerable. Chesterton as not asked to prove his position, but to state it and explain it. He was not so much faulted on the truth of his position as on bringing it up in the first place. His view was not wrong but it was uncivil. People do not like to hear that their view is considered wrong. No discourse at the level of soul-searching is therefore possible.
"If, indeed, in this free country where (I am assured) all views can be expressed," Chesterton justly reasoned, "it is unpardonable to suggest that the Protestant view of Freedom is wrong, some responsibility must be shared by those who ask the Catholic to explain why the Catholic view is right." The only other alternative, the one more prevalent perhaps in this country, is never to have an objective position about a serious topic made in the first place in the public media.
I should not, moreover, fail to point out here the delicate subtlety of Chesterton's position. If a country really is "free," this should imply that one has the obligation to state what his position is as he holds it. But if, at the same time, the very stating it "offends" someone and this "offense" is grounds for prohibiting the speech, then we cannot have it both ways. The end of liberty and its discussion is no liberty. The end of tolerance is intolerance.
Chesterton confessed his personal difficulty in dealing with all of these views forthrightly: "For the peculiar diplomatic and tactful art of saying that Catholicism is true, without suggesting for one moment that anti-Catholicism is false, is an art which I am too old a Rationalist to learn at any time of life." Again this sentence is worthwhile spelling out. It is not here a question of the truth of Catholicism, but the truth of logic, of the mind.
If one is invited to state his position and to affirm its truth, if this explication is the purpose of the discussion, then it is necessary, and by implication not at all "intolerant," to suggest that something at variance with this truth is false. Whatever one might think of Chesterton's exposition of Catholic liberty, which he was, in the name of freedom, invited to present, it is impossible not to recognize that positions opposed to it are not the same. This is not a question of religion but of thought. It has no alternative but the cessation of thought.
Chesterton had made this same point in The Thing (same Volume of Collected Works), in an essay entitled "Some Old Errors." Chesterton was discussion whether it was necessary and possible to restate in better language the old truths of the faith. "Now I do really believe that there is a need for the restatement of religious truth," he wrote; "but not (in the process of restatement) the statement of something quite different, which I do not believe to be true."
Thus, as in the case of current unfortunate attempts to rewrite the liturgy, the serious issue at stake is the use of this supposedly laudable and benign exercise to clarify doctrine to be used instead as a tool to change doctrine itself. Thus, "when the Modernist says that we must free the human intellect from the medieval syllogism, it is as if he said we must free it from the multiplication table." Whether the syllogism is a valid form of mental procedure has nothing at all to do with whether the medievals used it. If we free the mind from the way the mind works when it works, from the syllogism, we are not freeing it but enslaving it. We are asking it to work but denying it the very process by which it does work when it is being what it is.
In another essay in The Thing, actually entitled "The Slavery of the Mind," Chesterton wrote, "What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state in which men do not know of the alternative." He suggested that very often we are determinists in historical events and cannot even imagine that it might have been a good thing had Napoleon or the South won their wars. They did not in fact win, but just because one side wins does not mean in principle that the better side won. Chesterton here was not so much concerned with discussing the merits of these positions, but again he wanted to suggest that we are "slaves of mind" if we cannot even imagine the alternative.
In this context, Chesterton referred to St. Thomas, a man with whom he has much affinity. St. Thomas Aquinas begins his inquiry by saying in effect, "Is there a God? it would seem not, for the following reasons"; and the most criticized of recent Encyclicals (Pascendi Dominici Gregis?) always stated a view before condemning it. The thing I mean is man's inability to state his opponent's view; and often his inability even to state his own.
Chesterton did not mind objections to his own Catholic view on liberty provided that the objectors could state it and relate it to their own. Simply to object to it because it was not tolerable made any intellectual discussion impossible.
Chesterton's notion of liberty included the liberty to state the truth as well as the liberty to state why something might be at variance with it. Indeed, to know the truth, as St. Thomas had indicated, one needs to state how something is opposed to truth and why. Or, to follow St. Thomas' example, he needs to know how any error contains some truth that it is the duty of the knower to explain in relation to the whole truth. The very purpose of a discussion of liberty on the BBC after all must not be merely to fill up time or deal out equal proportions of opinions. It must in some sense have the purpose of finding the truth or the good in argument and of recognizing what things are opposed to it.
But Chesterton's problem about tolerance and liberty was not with the BBC whom he thought in the second essay in The Well and the Shallows had "a relatively sound sense of liberty." It did not seem unusual or unfair for the BBC to ask a Catholic what he thought of liberty; nor did it seem unfair to realize in the process that other positions would not agree with the Catholic position. There is nothing intolerant about stating what one holds nor in realizing and stating clearly its difference with other positions. Both of these positions have something to do with the very nature of the human mind and how it operates.
"Having asked me specially for what i thought about Catholicism," Chesterton continued, "I did certainly divulge the secret that I thought it was true; and that, therefore, even great cultures falling away from it, in any direction, had fallen into falsehood." Needless to say, this view is not "politically correct" thinking. It would recognize that all cultures are describable but whether they are true or good needs argument, needs testing, even if this testing requires intolerable conclusion that something is in fact in deviation from the universal measure and standard to which our minds are subject if they work as minds should work.
14) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 5 (December, 1992).
THE COMING OF CHRIST
In April, 1932, during the height of the Depression, Chesterton published an essay in, of all journals, Good Housekeeping (reprinted in The Chesterton Review, February, 1984). Chesterton, of course, loved houses and good housekeeping, as his What's Wrong with the World shows.
But this particular essay evidently was supposed to answer the question, "How would Christ solve modern problems if he were on earth today?" Notice that the question presupposes that Christ is not on the earth today and, more soberly, that modern problems are somehow intrinsically different from ancient ones. Christ's initial solutions, it is implied, were completely bound to His time. They do not apply to us moderns. When we have "post-modern problems," then, we will have to have Christ take a third try at these presumably even newer problems.
Needless to say, this topic of Christ coming to our earth is a worthy one at Christmas season. Are we still convinced that Christ would have come as an infant in some out of the way place, like Bethlehem? Was this method of His dwelling amongst us really a good one, we might ask ourselves? We like to figure, in our more iconoclastic moments, that if Christ had done it right the first time, the world would not be in the mess it seems to be in.
Chesterton's own response in the Good Housekeeping essay is delightfully proper to the occasion and to the issue:
For those of my faith there is only one answer (to this question). Christ is on earth today; alive on a thousand altars; and He does solve people's problems exactly as He did when He was on earth in the more ordinary sense. That is, He solves the problems of the limited number of people who choose of their own free will to listen to Him. He did not appear as an Eastern sultan or a Roman conqueror then; and He would not appear as a policeman or a Prohibition agent now.
Again Chesterton saw that the real problem was the modern question not the Christian teachings.
Chesterton's answer was, then, threefold: 1) Christ is in fact among us in the Eucharist. He does solve problems of those who freely appeal to Him. 2) Christ's initial coming was not a mistake. That He was thought to be Joseph the Carpenter's son, Mary's son, was not something that revealed a kind of inferior strategy on the part of the Holy Ghost about worldly affairs. 3) No matter what form of Incarnation might have been selected, the problem of human free will, its power to accept or reject, will remain.
The Incarnation, then, did not fail. Men can fail because they are free to choose wrongly or to choose well. If we want a universe in which there are precisely human beings, that possibility of the refusal of grace and goodness cannot change, no matter what form of Incarnation we might think of, no matter how Christ might have come into the world today.
On the other hand, we should not conclude from this observation of Chesterton either that there is something intrinsically wrong with being a Sultan, a Roman emperor, a policeman, or, indeed, a Prohibition agent. We still have Prohibition agents today -- only they deal mainly with smoking, drugs, high cholesterol foods we all like, dairy products, and yes even alcohol. And there are not a few Sultans, policemen, and emperors about, not to mention carpenters. If God is going to appear among men, He might conceivably take on any trade or occupation. He seems to have been the son of a carpenter, but Peter was a fisherman and Matthew a tax-collector; Paul made tents, and Luke was called a physician.
Chesterton's Christmas essay of 1908 in the Illustrated London News was entitled, "The Wrong Books at Christmas" (Collected Works, Vol. XXVIII). This title reminds me of the early days of my studies at Los Gatos and at Mt. St. Michael's in Spokane, when we were finally encouraged to read more or less as we chose, and not principally materials directly related to our studies.
There is, I confess, a certain pleasure in finding and reading a book during Christmas season, the days of Christmas, some book we would never otherwise have read because we have some leisure time. If I might dare such a paradox, often the "wrong" book to read at this time is the "right" book. Just as there is something to be said about reading the best, or most popular, or the great books, so there is something to be said for reading just any old book to see whether it is great or not. To find a good book, you really have to read a lot of bad ones, I have no doubt. Otherwise, you will not know the difference.
My friends Mike and Caron Jackson recently gave me Tim Parks' Italian Neighbors: or A Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona. I have just gotten the English couple settled in their apartment and finding the bar with the best capuccino in town, not to be drunk after 10:30 am, however. Previously, the Jacksons had given me Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. Then they proceed to go there just to see if the food was as good as claimed. Evidently, it was.
Then Scott Walter gave me the Sherwood Sugden reprint of Belloc's Miniatures of French History. Thumbing through it, I came across Belloc's essay on "The Death of Chateaubriand" (July 4, 1848) After I read it, I said to a friend, to whom I read it aloud, Belloc is the best essayist in the world, isn't he!
"As he (Chateaubriand) so lay (in Rue du Bac), awaiting her (Jeanne Francoise Récamier, his early love), there returned to his weakened mind a certain phrase of his own writing not so long before," Belloc wrote,
where he (Chateaubriand) had spoken of human affection and had said of love that time changes our hearts as it does our complexion and our years. Nevertheless there is one exception amid all this infirmity of human things, for it does come about sometimes that in some strong soul one love lasts long enough to be transformed into a passionate friendship, to take on the qualities of duty, and almost those of virtue. Then does love lose the decadence of our nature and lives on, supported by an immortal principle (p. 280).
No one writes more beautifully or profoundly than this. The infirmity of human things, the decadence of our nature, immortal principle, passionate friendship -- these all are related, in their own way, to the Incarnation, to the coming of Christ.
Chesterton, in 1908, was rather concerned with the abidingness of religion. "The nation that has no gods at all not only dies," he wrote, in words foreshadowing Francis Fukuyama, "but what is more, is bored to death." The routine transforming of all feasts into mere vacation days, all appearing on Monday, is getting us nearer and nearer to this existential boredom in which nothing new can happen. Chesterton thought that perhaps Christmas would outlast the secularization instinct that replaces Christ with Santa Claus and then proceeds to make him illegal, which replaces all sacred signs with abstract forms and colors with no concreteness. Christmas is the feast of concreteness, or it is nothing.
If faith does come back, "the English celebration of Christmas" will remain, Chesterton observed. Somehow it is too traditional, too beautiful for even the most radical secularists to drive it out. He added, "There is nothing really wrong with the whole modern world except that it does not fit in with Christmas." That is to say, that the criterion of what is human and of what is true is not "does it fit in with the modern world," but does the modern world fit in with the coming of Christ, with Christmas?
"The real basis of life is not scientific; the strongest basis of life is sentimental. People are not economically obliged to live. Anyone can die for nothing. People romantically desire to live -- especially at Christmas," Chesterton concluded. The "desire to live" is not scientific; it is "romantic." To die for nothing, to die of boredom, this is the obverse of refusing to know the meaning of choosing to live.
"He solves the problems of the limited number of people who choose with their own free wills to listen to Him." The very word "romance," Chesterton said someplace, comes from "Rome." To choose is to choose something, to limit ourselves to what we really want. And as in the Incarnation, when we find what we really want, it is through this one romance that everything is returned to us.
Chesterton's friend Belloc had it right about romance, about the "one exception amid all this infirmity of human things." The Nativity and the Resurrection are in fact related. "In some strong soul one love lasts long enough to be transformed into a passionate friendship, to take on the qualities of duty, and almost those of virtue. Then does love lose the decadence of our nature and lives on, supported by an immortal principle."
"How would Christ solve modern problems if He appeared on earth today?"
The Mass for Christmas Day takes the Prologue of John for its text. It is there we read that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us." Nothing is less boring or more particular than this, nothing more romantic. "Anyone can die for nothing. Christ died for our sins. This is where the great romance of freedom meets the great liberty of God. Only bored souls can fail to see the newness that remains the same in all the time in which men are given to live, to live "romantically," to live, that is, as if something really is lovely and given to them to choose.
15) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 5 (January, 1993).
"THE DIVINE VULGARITY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION"
Several years ago, at a book sale somewhere here in Washington, I bought for a nominal price, to wit, 50¢, the Doubleday Dolphin Edition (no date) of Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table. This was a famous collection of chatter, humor, and reflection written between 1831 and 1832 by the famous American physician and author. I have never really gotten into this book, but I have looked at it and read some of it a number of times.
John Peterson had, in the meantime, called my attention to the Methuen collection, G.K.C. as M.C.: Being a Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions. The other day I was looking again at this book, which I had found in the Lauinger Library here on campus. I noticed that Chesterton had written an Introduction to this famous Holmes book for the 1904 British Edition (Red Letter Library, Messrs. Blackie & Son, Ltd.) of The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.
1904 would be quite early in Chesterton's career, four years before Orthodoxy. Holmes, of course, who lived from 1809-94, had comments on all sorts of things, from Cicero's essay De Senectute to "My Last Walk with the Schoolmistress," on which he finally proposed to the young lady in these charming words:
It was on the Common that we were walking. The mall, or boulevard of our (Boston) Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it. At last I got to the question, -- Will you take the long path with me? -- Certainly, -- said the schoolmistress, -- with much pleasure. -- Think, -- I said, -- before you answer; if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! -- The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her. One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, -- the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. -- Pray, sit down, -- I said. -- No, no, she answered, softly, -- I will walk the long path with you! -- The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, -- "Good morning, my dears!"
Such a passage, I am sure, the very philosophic and very romantic young Chesterton must have loved reading.
In his essay on Holmes, Chesterton maintained that Holmes was the most "aristocratic" of all the American writers. Indeed, Chesterton felt that Holmes would be more at home in the South than in New England.
In American literature, indeed, he may be said to be, not by actual birth or politics, but by spirit, the one literary voice of the South. He bears far more resemblance to the superb kingless aristocracy that hurled itself on the guns at Gettysburg or died round Stonewall Jackson, than to Hawthorne, who was a Puritan mystic, or Lowell, who was a Puritan pamphleteer, or Whitman, who was a Puritan suddenly converted to Christianity.
Needless to say, the very theological acumen that could speak so amusingly, yes so paradoxically, of "converting" a Puritan to Christianity reveals much about the mind of Chesterton in formation in 1904 or 1905 when he must have written this Introduction.
Recalling a good deal of the discussion of the "gentleman" and his place in political and social life that we associate with Plato and Aristotle, Chesterton saw Holmes not as a democrat but as precisely a "gentleman," with a breakfast table at which all things might be discussed in a most genteel manner. He was an "autocrat," a self-ruler, not a democrat, a point with theological implications as I shall point out later in this essay.
But Chesterton was initially concerned in his comments with the fact that Holmes was both a physician and a writer.
A good doctor is by the nature of things a man who needs only the capricious gift of style to make him an amusing author. For a doctor is almost the only man who combines a very great degree of inevitable research and theoretic knowledge with a very great degree of opportunism.
The point Chesterton was making was a subtle one, the distinction between fancy and imagination. "Physical science has everything in the world to do with fancy, though not perhaps much in the highest sense to do with imagination." Here we get an initial hint of Chesterton's extraordinary sense of the meaning and nature of modern science and its presuppositions (See Father Jaki's book, Chesterton: A Seer of Science, Illinois, 1986).
Imagination is the capacity to put things into a harmonious whole, things that clearly belong together. Fancy, on the other hand, sees relationships not when things seem to fit together, but when they do not. Reality is more like fancy than imagination; its configuration is divine, not human.
That is, an order to reality exists but it is one that is ordinarily not seen by the human mind logically to follow or consistently to hold together, even though there is a logic and a holding together. Holmes, Chesterton thought, had this latter capacity of fancy because of his combination of medicine and literature.
How Holmes understood God also became a fascinating question for Chesterton. Holmes was not a materialist, nor was he an agnostic, nor did he "rise to a refuge in a luminous mysticism and cleanse deity of all materialistic notions, hanging it alone in the heaven of metaphysics." God was rather like the Father of nature. "His God was practically merciful, but he was mercilessly practical." Holmes protested "against the cruelty of taking human freedom too seriously." And in a passage almost directly out of Plato's Laws, Holmes, in Chesterton's view, tossed "to the images of God the pardon which is due to puppets." That is, these images, these puppets really were not responsible for anything they did. They were not free.
"What was the problem here?" we might ask. Holmes poked fun at the churches Yet, these same orthodox churches "were founded on a certain grand metaphysical idea which Holmes never quite justly appreciated, the idea of the dignity and danger of the imago dei." The dignity and danger of the images of God was that they were not just puppets, but puppets of God, as Plato had said.
Thus, the "images of God" themselves had to choose God. Consequently, He took a considerable risk in creating them. Human freedom might indeed be taken "too seriously," that is, we might in fact not want ourselves to be so free that there is any real risk of not choosing God. This position is what worried Chesterton about Holmes. But if we refuse the risk, we refuse to be human at all. The "autocrat," in Chesterton's view, does not see the universality of both the risk and the this is the same thing as not wishing to be free at all.
Both the Christian religion and the Declaration of Independence recognized this risk that underlay all dealings with men. Both were democratic in this sense that they believed the drama of life and destiny belonged to everyone, not just to the gentlemen, to the oligarchs or aristocrats. "So good a gentleman as Holmes could not really understand the divine vulgarity of the Christian religion."
Chesterton admired Holmes' breakfast table, with its brilliant wit and exchange of remarks. "At the breakfast-table there is something more important even than the amazing cleverness which is lavished upon it. There is a human atmosphere which alone makes conversation possible." The highest things exist in conversation. The Word was made flesh.
Yet, the spirit of Holmes was not democratic but aristocratic. Not understanding the "dignity and danger of the imago dei" in all its forms, Holmes did not grasp the "divine vulgarity of the Christian religion" which presumed that everyone was to take part in the ultimate conversation. "Holmes was the most large-hearted and humorous of philosophers, but he was not the democrat of 'the open road' (Whitman). He was the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table."
The Christian religion, on the other hand, was for the vulgus, for the great multitude of people, for the men and women who would understand Holmes' own "long path" in the light of God's risk in inviting them to take it, to choose it. Once we understand the dignity and danger of the 'imago dei', we will, Chesterton thought, also begin to understand "the divine vulgarity of the Christian religion," even at the breakfast-table, even strolling along the paths on the Boston Common that lead from Joy Street southward to Boylston Street.
16) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 9 (May, 1997).
"THE GREAT TEMPTATION OF THE CATHOLIC IN THE MODERN WORLD"
Chapter Seventeen of The Thing (1926, CW, Vol. III, pp. 236-39) is entitled "The Feasts and the Ascetic." It deals with the fact that there is nothing at all contradictory in having a place for both feasts and asceticism in our lives and a philosophic faith that can explain why. Those who dance can also be those who fast; and indeed it would be unnatural were it otherwise. Chesterton's way of putting it is, as always, apt: "a man who overeats himself on Christmas Eve ... has no appetite on Christmas Day." Indeed, as I read all the advertisements about dieting and slimming, it sometimes appears that the modern non-Christian world has replaced the fastings that used to be proposed to be seasonal, say Advent or Lent, with fasting that is permanent, and increasingly, if I read the signs of the times, obligatory and to be enforced by civil law. What used to be a personal excess is quickly becoming a civil crime. I am thinking of smoking, but hamburgers will be next. And what used to be crimes and horrors -- I think of abortions and mercy-killings -- are now proposed as civil rights.
This chapter deals with "the bewildered barbarian" whom the Catholic, in trying to explain to his bewilderment the simplest of things about the Faith, is tempted to treat as a "dunce." The Catholic is tempted to follow the "very un-Christian logic of answering a fool according to his logic." Chesterton confesses frankly at this point that "the great temptation of the Catholic in the modern world is the temptation to intellectual pride." Why so? Because "it is so obvious that most of his critics are talking without the least knowing what they are talking about." Thus there is a disposition to "luxuriate in secret, as it were, over the much greater subtlety and richness of the philosophy he inherits." Consequently, when someone remarks that Christianity is too much devoted to "merry-making and materialist enjoyment," the temptation is to answer, "this is quite so," with no further explanation. And when the Catholic, on the opposite side, is accused of merely, like the Buddhist, "denying himself the ordinary pleasures," he will likewise respond, "'Quite correct, old bean,' or 'Got it first time, old top,' and merely propose an adjournment for convivial refreshment," again with no further explanation.
Now, such temptations not to take such inquiries seriously, Chesterton writes, "are to be resisted." What needs with great patience to be explained is that what seems to many to be "mutually contradictory is really complimentary." Then Chesterton adds, in a marvelous line, "we are not entitled to despair of explaining the truth; nor is it really so horribly difficult to explain." Now, we might very well agree with Chesterton about not despairing to explain the truth, but we cannot help but being astonished by his claim that it is not "really so horribly difficult to explain."
Chesterton then gives an example of what he means by the ease with which this belief can be explained. "I suggest that people would see the Christian story if it could only be told as a heathen story. The Faith is simply the story of a God who died for men." So let's suppose that we have heard nothing of this Christian background. Let's suppose that "we have nothing but the earth and the children of man pottering about on it, with their normal tales and traditions." How would such a tale about God dying for man be received and what would happen in its retelling?
Suppose there is a fountain on the top of a mountain gushing forth a spring at which people are healed. This story would produce a number of other stories. First, there would be ordinary people, on hearing of the water, who would seek the fountain out just to have the water. Others would undertake long perilous journeys to be bathed in it. Crippled men would walk hundreds of miles in search of it only to die exhausted before reaching it. Some would be beset on the way by robbers and would be killed longingly searching for it. The essence of such a story of a God who died for men is thus relatively simple in its outlines, as are the stories we are told about those who seek it out.
The trouble is, Chesterton adds, that "we in our time have confused ourselves with long words for unreal distinctions; and talking incessantly about optimism and pessimism, about asceticism and hedonism, about what we call Paganism and what we think about Buddhism, till we cannot understand a plain tale when read." If we ever could run into someone who had never heard anything of this now confused background, he could grasp its point much more easily. "The Pagan would have understood it much better."
Another thing that modern critics object to in the account of the God who died for man is that it seems to emphasize the ascetic side of religion too much. But Chesterton points out, this emphasis is "exactly what would happen with any human story, even if it were a heathen story." In the case of the healing fountain on the mountain top, the stories that would be most told and remembered would be those that involved great hardship and difficulty in getting to the place. We would make heroes of those who suffered extreme difficulty. We would forget that many others actually got to the fountain and found water in it. The fact is that "there are more human beings than heroes; and that this great majority of human beings have benefited by it." The preciousness of the faith makes for heroes, but it is also for the ordinary who receive it too.
Again, recalling the effects of the story, Chesterton continues, "it is natural that men should marvel more at the man who deliberately lames himself (getting to the fountain) than at the man who dances when he is no longer lame. But that does not alter the fact that the countries where the legend prevails (the legend of the God who dies for man) are, in fact, full of dancing."
"The great temptation of the Catholic in the modern world is to intellectual pride." There are, I think, very few who suffer this temptation, not because it is not a real temptation, but because there are so few who know enough about the intellectual strength of their Faith to suffer any temptation that might be called intellectual. But Chesterton is right about the dancing because he is right about the asceticism. The story of "the God who died for man" produced in history the very reactions that we might expect it would if it were true.
The barbarians remain "bewildered." The Catholics most tempted to intellectual pride, that is to say, the ones still "pottering about" the earth, know the story is true. They refuse to confuse themselves "with long words for unreal distinctions." They continue to "adjourn for convivial refreshment," knowing about the ordinary man who was filled at the waters and about the lame man who danced because he was cured. In the end, it is "not so difficult to explain."
17) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 9 (December, 1996).
AT CHRISTMAS DINNER
Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News for December 26, 1931, was entitled, "Chaucer and Christmas" (Collected Works, V. 35, pp. 645-50). Normally, we associate Chesterton's Christmas with Dickens, as he does himself in this essay. But he still "finds Chaucer very appropriate for Christmas." Why? Chaucer had the two great Christmas qualities that Chesterton saw in Dickens, perhaps even more than Dickens. These two great Christmas qualities were: 1) that he (Chaucer) was an "extraordinary man who could make friends with ordinary men." And 2) he was an extraordinary man who could be an ordinary man, who "could even look like an ordinary man." Needless to say, to be and look like an ordinary man was high praise for Chesterton, even more than being an extraordinary man. Contrary to what we might expect, we even have the impression that it is, in fact, more difficult to be ordinary than extraordinary.
Men of almost any trade can be poets, Chesterton pointed out -- Goethe was a German professor and Scott was an "acquisitive gentleman farmer." Chaucer seems to have been a man very useful to others. He oversaw the construction of buildings, knew heraldry, traded in wine. He knew the world and had travelled in it. During all his regular life, however, many a poem and song burst out of him. Chaucer did not seem to have quarreled with others, even with himself. Chaucer seems to have been mostly "merry" about life and things. He could write about sober and tragic things but this was not his primary atmosphere. Chesterton thought it was very difficult to describe the mood, the merry mood, that ran through all the works of Chaucer. He could only suggest it by comparing it with how "the greatest of the modern English writers have praised Christmas." Presumably, Chesterton means Dickens most of all here.
Chesterton describes this atmosphere of Chaucer in this way: "Chaucer was wide enough to be narrow; that is, he could bring a broad experience of life to the enjoyment of local or even accidental things." This passage touches a theme that recalls Chesterton's remarks on Thomas Aquinas, about the great Dominican's love for the vast multiplicity of created things. Chaucer's tales were full of all sorts of characters with many and varied experiences. Notice that Chesterton specifically remarked that Chaucer had "a broad experience of life". What did he do with this broad experience? He brought it to the "enjoyment of local or even accidental things."
Are we prepared, I wonder, to grasp the profundity of this seemingly off-handed remark? We are inclined to think that the great dramas of the world are at least national if not international, necessary, not accidental. And yet there may be more drama and excitement in very ordinary things, in the events lived by very ordinary men. We suspect that the Christian revelation, with its local and particular dimensions, has something to do with this emphasis on the ordinary.
The chief defect of current literature, Chesterton thought, was "that it always talks as if local things could only be limiting, not to say strangling." Accidents would only be unpleasant glitches in the great drama of the world. In other words, Chesterton implies by contrast, we should expect that local things will be exciting and accidents extraordinary. And this is how we get to Christmas Dinner.
In the work of a modern minor-poet, who would condescend to describe Christmas Dinner, Chesterton observed, the scene would be one of extreme agony. Uncle George would be deadly dull and Aunt Adelaide's voice shrill and piercing. If we take a look at Chaucer, however, he happened to know the Miller and the Pardoner, ordinary folks. Chaucer would have had no difficulty sitting down to Christmas Dinner with Uncle George and Aunt Adelaide, "with the heaviest uncle or the shrillest aunt". They might well have amused Chaucer, but never would they have angered him.
Why not? What makes Chaucer different from the modern poet bored to death at Christmas Dinner? The reason was "partly spiritual and partly practical." Chaucer had the order of spiritual things rightly set forth in his mind. This meant that Christmas was "more important than Uncle George's anecdotes." You did not throw away its meaning by your boredom. It is quite possible that heavy Uncle George may have told the same stories last years. It is quite likely that Aunt Adelaide's voice has not changed in forty years. Christmas is not about Uncle George's stories or Aunt Adelaide's voice, but about the family gathered there, the family that includes Uncle George and Aunt Adelaide, however heavy or piercing they may be.
Practically, Chaucer had seen "the great world of human beings." He has been around, as they say. What happens to a man who has seen this "great world"? He knows that "wherever a man wanders among men, in Flanders, or in France or Italy, he will find that the world largely consists of Uncle Georges." Recall that this observation is written against the background both of the minor poet hopelessly bored at the Uncle Georges of this world and of the extraordinary man who could make friends with ordinary men. The broad experience of life, the awareness of spiritual order, alone enables us to enjoy the local and accidental things.
What is Chesterton's conclusion from these premises? That "this imaginative patience is the thing most men want in the modern Christmas." We want to have Uncle George and Aunt Adelaide there. But we need deep patience to make us realize that no matter how extraordinary we think ourselves to be, to those who love us, we will be mainly Uncle George and Aunt Adelaide, with our own version of the shrill voiced or preposterous anecdote. If we want to find this "imaginative patience", we could do no better than to read Chaucer, or Dickens, or Chesterton himself.
Patience is called "imaginative" because to see the wonder of local and accidental things, the world full of Uncle Georges and Aunt Adelaides, we have to have enough imagination to see before us a scheme of spiritual things that enables us to look around the Christmas Dinner table to see what is really there. What is there is always a familiar face or a local reality with which most of the world is familiar.
What is there, in most local, accidental places, is not the extraordinary man, but the ordinary man celebrating the Incarnation and Nativity of the Lord. These events too happened in a local, seemingly accidental place, that the great world rejected because, so it thought, what is important and dramatic among men could not have taken place in such a quiet and out-of-the-way locality as Nazareth or Bethlehem. The mystery of the Nativity is that it affirms, each year at Christmas Dinner, that those whom Christ was sent to redeem are the Uncle Georges, with their anecdotes, and the Aunt Adelaides with their shrill voices, whom, be it in Flanders, or France or Italy or at our own Christmas Dinner, largely compose the whole of the human race.
18) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 6 (September, 1994).
THE NATURAL HOME OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
In 1927, Chesterton's book, The Catholic Church and Conversion, was published (Vol. III of Collected Works, Ignatius, 1990). Belloc did the "Foreword" and Chesterton himself wrote his own "Introduction", which he called, not without some amusement, "A New Religion". Both short essays remain of considerable and refreshing interest. Belloc was the "born-Catholic" of the two, so, as he remarks, "it is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the tremendous subject of Conversion." The convert always has the aura of choice; the born-Catholic of tradition, of not having had to change anything, only fulfill the promise already his.
As I was born the year following this publication of this book, also a "born-Catholic", I find both of these essays, that of the born-Catholic and that of the convert, to be of considerable interest. I have always found Belloc's remark in The Path to Rome, I think, that "it is a good thing never to have lost the Faith," to be a comforting one. Both to have the Faith and not to have lost it, to be sure, are graces. We should not be so foolish as to attribute too much to our own powers. And yet, there can be no doubt that being born into the Faith enables us to live in a much more ordered and, yes, delightful universe than we might otherwise have known. Born-Catholics, to be sure, often do not show that angst or earnestness about what they hold to be true as do converts. But this calmness is only because born-Catholics are more aware of and comfortable with the fact that things really do fit together, that ultimate quests are not merely prodding our souls but that these quests are not in vain. They can be reached.
Belloc did, to be sure, speculate on an experience that was no doubt his, about how "born-Catholics" frequently do go through an analogous conversion experience. We are all aware, of course, that a gift given must sooner or later be a gift consciously accepted or else it is not a gift. And in the matter of faith, this acceptance will relate to the depths at which we choose to allow the faith, in its intelligibility, to speak to us.
Belloc continued,
Those born into the Faith often, I say, go through an experience of skepticism in youth, as the years proceed, and it is still a common phenomenon ... for men of the Catholic culture, acquainted with the he Church from childhood, to leave it in early manhood and never to return. But it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon -- and it is to this that I allude -- for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth to discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its various forms, that the transcendental truths they had been taught in childhood have the highest claims upon their matured reason.
The second "conversion" in Belloc's sense, thus, had to do with the sudden realization that the skeptical alternatives did not in fact make as much sense as what had been taught in youth, had we but just been willing to learn and live it.
Belloc's approach was to remark on the many different sorts of men and women who came into the Church as converts from all sorts of backgrounds. We find the cynic and the sentimentalist, the fool and the wise man, the doubter and the man who does not doubt enough. Moreover, we find people entering the Church from all sorts of experiences and nationalities. "You come across an entry into the Catholic Church undoubtedly due to the spectacle, admiration and imitation of some great character observed. Next day you come across an entry into the Catholic Church out of complete loneliness, and you are astonished to find the convert still ignorant of the great mass of the Catholic effect on character."
Belloc remarked that "the Church is the natural home of the Human Spirit." This is a striking phrase, for the Church is not supposed to be the "natural" home of anything, unless, of course, our spirit is made for something that is not merely nature. Belloc found that these myriads of reasons for entering the Church converged because the reality to which they pointed was one. "It is in this convergence of witnesses that we have one out of the innumerable proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion rests." The supernatural religion rests on a solid rational basis.
Chesterton, for his part, the convert, the man not born Catholic, found a paradox, that this ancient religion was really quite new. This amused him. "It would be very undesirable that modern men should accept Catholicism merely as a novelty; but it is a novelty." Today, in a way, the public world has so deviated from Catholicism that Catholicism is precisely a "revolt", something quite different from anything about us, something quite novel, quite new. Chesterton, as I said, called his essay "A New Religion". Needless to say, when Chesterton calls something as old as Catholicism "new", he is probably saying something quite unexpectedly true. "There is something almost legendary about the religion that is two thousand years old now appearing as a rival of the new religions."
During the last decade or so, under John Paul II, the Catholic Church has in many ways recovered itself. It has reformed or better, re-presented its Canon Law, both Western and Eastern, its social teachings, its moral philosophy and theology. The new General Catechism is no doubt the most complete, systematic, and coherent presentation of the whole faith ever offered. Where does this old institution get the vitality to be the new religion on the block? Indeed, most Catholics do not even know this themselves. Most are in great need of a Belloc-type conversion. "The mark of the faith," Chesterton said, "is not tradition (however good that is) but conversion." The Spirit breathes where it wills, but the Church is not an abstraction. It is here to challenge souls, either to accept or to reject. The Church as "the natural home of the Human Spirit" is also witness to the sign of contradiction.
What both Chesterton and Belloc were sure of, however, was that the Church was the home of reason. The modern world will never be humble enough to admit its own scepticism and irrationality. But Chesterton had it right early in the twentieth century, I think. He already saw in the first quarter of this century most of the dire things that would occur at its ending.
(The Church) is already beginning to appear as the only champion of reason in the twentieth century, as it was the only champion of tradition in the nineteenth. We know that the higher mathematics is trying to deny that two and two make four and the higher mysticism to imagine something that is beyond good and evil. Amid all these antirational philosophies, ours will remain the only rational philosophy.
At the end of the twentieth century, at the beginning of the third millennium, a convert, I suspect, could with cold intelligence still make the same claim. Veritatis Splendor is written directly that now more developed "higher mysticism" that imagines that something an be "beyond good and evil." In this light, it should come as no great surprise that Nietzsche and Heidegger are the popular philosophers at the end of the twentieth century.
What needs to be put together, I think, from these two insightful essays on conversion by Belloc and Chesterton is the relationship between "the only rational philosophy" and "the natural home of the Human Spirit". Modernity and post-Modernity have been built on the premise that these two things cannot belong together in the same community, that faith and reason are completely alien to one another. What Chesterton called "a new religion", however, turned out to be the very old faith no longer recognized or intellectually confronted. "Amid all these antirational philosophies" it remains "the only rational philosophy." What Belloc called the transcendent truths of our childhood ironically do have "the highest claims on our matured reason." The Human Spirit does have precisely a "home" because all things converge as "innumerable proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion reposes."
19) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (August, 1995).
WILDE AND WILDER
Readers have no doubt noticed that I have referred to Original Sin quite a bit of late. It is a fascinating topic, to be sure, the one subject about which Chesterton maintained we need no real proof. We just have to go out in the streets and open our eyes. Just how to describe or define Original Sin is always somewhat mystifying. I did come across a brief sentence, however, in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, that comes pretty close.
`The Matchmaker is of course Hello, Dolly. In it, Mr. Horace Vandergelder, the rich merchant from Yonkers, New York, has been talking to his clerk Malachi about Vandergelder's plans for a fateful trip to New York that eventually leads him to Mrs. Dolly Levi, a charmingly sentimental lady who thinks, not entirely without reason, that elegantly spending Vandergelder's considerable accumulation of cash is the cure to his, hers, and the world's problems. When Malachi leaves for his New York errand, Vandergelder, who does not necessarily have a high opinion of clerks, turns to the audience to explain his views about the human condition. "Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world," he tells them, "are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion."
That wonderful statement is not exactly Original Sin, of course, but it hits amusingly close to our normal experience, especially of ourselves, according to which the doctrine of Original Sin is not entirely improbable. Undoubtedly, to recall the persistence of self-deception as a factor in human history, one hundred percent of the human race, like Vandergelder, think they belong to that one percent of the race that worries about the great danger of contagion even though they are not like the rest of men, already fools..
Liberty Fund in Indianapolis recently had a seminar on Thornton Wilder to which I was kindly invited. Out of curiosity, I wrote in advance to John Peterson inquiring about whether Chesterton ever had said anything on Wilder. John put a note in the Midwest Chesterton News, asking if anyone might have knowledge of such a reference. Promptly, he received a note from Mr. Frank Laughlin, Editor of the Chesterton Newsletter in England. It seems that there is at least one poetical reference to Wilder from the G.K. Weekly in 1929-30.
The reference is an eight line poem entitled "On an American Best Seller." The best seller, of course, is Wilder's famous The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a novel we read in preparation for the seminar. Notice what Chesterton has to say in the poem about this book and about Wilder. The poem reads:
The Decadents' bridges broke down in despair: It is something that someone could fling Some sort of Bridge over that dreary abyss In the name of Saint Louis the King. That Art may yet cross to the people, and purify Of the poisonous and slimes that defiles her; For when I was a child half the world had gone Wilde But now half the world have gone Wilder.
When I read this poem to the seminar, everyone laughed at the clever juxtaposition of Oscar Wilde and Thornton Wilder.
The poem was printed in Chesterton's own handwriting and was accompanied by an original Chesterton drawing showing, from the Peruvian abyss, St. Louis the King himself, with shield in his left arm and with his right arm outstretched towards the broken bridge. What was St. Louis the King telling us?
On Friday noon, July 20, 1714, this famous hundred year old, Indian built bridge between Lima and Cuzco collapsed killing five people. The scene is watched by the Franciscan, Brother Juniper, who is exceedingly perplexed by this incident but looked upon it as an opportunity to prove the ways of God to men. Brother Juniper set out to see if he could explain just what it was in the lives of each of the five killed that might show that each died at exactly the right time, before God. The famous last lines of this novel are always worth repeating:
But soon we shall all die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
At first sight, this seems almost Christian. Much of Wilder seems almost Christian. Yet, love here seems here a kind of abstraction from the five, from we ourselves. It is not the "impulses" of love that, hopefully, return to "the love that made them." Rather it is we ourselves who love and are loved. The only survival is we ourselves. The Bridge is not love, an abstraction, but Resurrection, something concrete.
What does Chesterton's poem mean in this light? Chesterton is writing between the Wars, though he does not know the between. He writes after the Great War. The result of progress, of the philosophy of the decedents is precisely "despair". Chesterton compliments Wilder for tossing up "some sort of a bridge" across this dreary abyss of despair. Clearly, Chesterton does not see clarity in Wilder himself, but he recognizes that The Bridge of San Luis Rey does ask the right sort of questions about the meaning of providence, about the relation of life to death. It is not despair even when it is not clarity. The Bridge is in the name of Saint Louis the King, so it is not rooted in doubt. Chesterton sees that what may yet save the common man from this decadent despair might well be "art", novels. Intellectual poisons and slimes defile both art and the people. They need to see that this despair is not right. Brother Juniper and the five who fall into the abyss between Lima and Cuzco in 1714 on a Friday noon in July begin to ask the right questions. When Chesterton was a child late in the 19th Century, half the world followed Oscar Wilde and the decedents. Forty years later, however, Thornton Wilder presented a more hopeful case in his art. The American best seller obviously was addressed to something important, to something that responded to the Decadents in the direction of providence and the meaning of each human life.
Chesterton, no doubt, could not resist the juxtaposition of Wilde and Wilder. Both names seem utter symbolic of what he was driving at. That the decedents should even be considered would be considered by Chesterton to be simply "wild". Once we have gone to the extreme of doubting all and living without a sense of order or providence, the most radical position we can to take is to begin to suspect, even on the scientific and experimental grounds that Brother Juniper first proposed, that what is beyond "Wilde" is something intellectually even "wilder". For what is more astonishing, more "wild", to doubt all or to begin to wonder about why certain five folks were killed one noon walking over the most famous bridge in Peru?
Brother Juniper himself, in the novel, is executed by the Inquisition for even bringing up these theological topics. Some think the reason for this was in fact his effort to himself, by his own powers, know for certain what divine providence had planned for each of us. Brother Juniper, in the spirit of modern science, wanted to be God.
Wilder himself evidently does not quite know what to make of this result of his own novel. He hesitated to save actual souls and saved only "love", the impulses of love return to their source, an idea reminiscent of a kind of pantheism found often in Wilder. That too is pretty "dreary", if you come to think on it. This sentimentality about "love" is, it strikes me, why Chesterton saw in Wilder only "some sort of bridge" across the abyss of nihilism. Wilder was closer to the mark than Wilde. Wilder's bridge between the land of the living and the land of the dead, though better than solecism, was itself an abstraction by comparison with what we really were promised and what we really wanted. But in comparison with the despair of the decedents of all ages, it was already arching over the slimes and the poisons that caused so much hurt to the people who deserved an art that that did lead them out of the abyss of despair. Chesterton gave Wilder credit for his alerting half the world of his time to the something else besides hopelessness.
Perhaps I can leave the last lines to Dolly Levi speaking in the final act to the audience of The Matchmaker about why she has decided to capture the stern heart of Horace Vandergelder, even though she still had great affection for her deceased husband, Ephraim Levi:
Money! Money! -- it's like the sun we walk under; it can kill or cure. -- Mr. Vandergelder's money! Vandergelder's never tired of saying most of the people in the world are fools, and in a way, he's right, isn't he? Himself, Irene, Cornelius, myself! But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or not -- a fool among fools or a fool alone.
There can, I think, be no doubt which of these choices, being a fool among fools or a fool alone, Chesterton would have chosen. His whole concern with the ordinary man and what can save him is already here, half way with "An American Best Seller", and surely most of the way with Dolly Levi's wonderful reflection, so reminiscent both of the Fall and of our individual redemption midst our universal foolishness, yes, in concrete love, in resurrection. Only a fool alone would want it otherwise.
20) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 8 (October, 1995).
WHAT SCIENCE CANNOT COMPREHEND
In these days of doubt about the legal process itself, I came across an essay that Chesterton wrote in the Illustrated London News for April 17, 1909 (Collected Works, XXVIII, 307-11). This essay arose out of a proposal of a Professor of Psychology that all witnesses to jury trials be first examined by said expert to see whether normal witnesses "could be trusted to tell the truth, even supposing that they wanted to." Needless to say, Chesterton was greatly amused by this proposal of the expert to examine the normal man to see if he, the normal man, not the expert, is worthy of belief. Thus, two types of witness would result from this process: those with a scientific seal of approval and those with none. Whether there is also an expert to tell us whether a witness (or an expert) "wants" to tell the truth, Chesterton does not remark, but this would surely involve yet another "scientific" certification. We would first have the witness, then the expert to tell whether he is credible, then the expert to tell whether the witness "wants" to tell the truth. But this is not all. Who checks the expert "even supposing that he (the expert himself) wanted to" tell the truth? This involves in an infinite regress the result of which is that nothing can be known, which in fact may be their purpose of some modern philosophies.
Chesterton, of course, goes the other way in these matters. Normally, we can believe a witness to recount what he saw. Suppose a grocer sees a murder. We need not go back into the man's whole history to determine whether he can witness to a fact that he saw. We recognize no doubt that everyone can err and distort, but this is merely another way of saying we are human. "We only doubt the fact told by the man because he is a man. The fact, when it has passed through a human mind, is always slightly altered."
Does this mean that if the said witness is in turn examined by an expert psychologist whose business it to tell the jury or the judge whether the man is credible, that this expert opinion automatically establishes credibility? Indeed not. "The psychologist expert is also a man; he also has a peculiar physique and mental bias; therefore, when the fact has passed through his mind also, it will be altered yet more." The only way to avoid the consequences of this human status of the expert scientist is to assume "that scientific men are not really men at all.... In short, scientific men are gods and other men are not." Chesterton sees this approach as a dead end. If we are going to find one man to "tell the real truth about another," we cannot do this on the grounds that no one ever tells the truth, which was the original reason for doubting the common man's power to testify to what he saw and on which ability the whole system of justice depends. The fact that we sometimes do not tell the truth, either willingly or involuntarily, does not mean that we do not normally tell the truth.
Chesterton's position on this matter became the subject of controversy between Mr. Wilfred Ward in the Dublin Review and a certain Dr. Warschauer in a sermon printed in the Christian World. The Protestant Minister disputed Chesterton's view that the testimony of the ignorant rather than the expert should be accepted. Chesterton had written somewhere about miracles that the testimony of an "apple woman" should be accepted to affirm what she witnessed, just as the testimony of a grocer should be accepted in court to affirm what he saw in a murder. Chesterton observed that the witness of common people is accepted in all legal systems, democratic or despotic so the question has nothing to do with the form of government under which the witness lives if all that is asked is what he saw. The main point that Chesterton was making, he thought, was this:
A miracle is an incident, true or false, like a murder; and that all that we want in a witness to an incident is that the witness should be honest and in possession of his five senses. One does not need any learning to say that a man was killed or that a man was raised from the dead. One does not have to be an astronomer to say that a star fell from heaven; or a botanist to say that a fig tree withered....
When we are confronted with such incidents, "an ordinary man is either a liar, or he is a madman, or he is telling the truth, there is no possibility of being an expert witness." Moreover, to refuse to allow the witness of ordinary people to what they in fact saw is in essence undemocratic. Implicitly, this doubt about the common man would mean that only a "judge in wig and gown could really have been a witness to a burglary", and this also assumes that the judge is simultaneously a god, an expert, and an honest man.
This background leads Chesterton to question the purpose of science in these matters. If an expert must first testify to the ordinary man's sanity or credibility, it means that the ordinary man's witness is not itself worthy. "Like, nearly all new scientific proposals, it is a proposal to crush the people." Chesterton notices that "no one suggests that we should examine the Judge as to his private life, his politics, and, above all, his enormous income. No one demands that we should allow for the bias and habit of the lawyer...." Needless to say, such was Chesterton's perceptive powers, that these are precisely whom we have begun to examine. The same science that was used to undermine the ordinary man has now turned itself on the judges, lawyers, and experts themselves. Ironically, in defending the veracity of the common man, Chesterton called attention to the grounds on which judges and experts also could be considered credible or incredible.
The assumption that the common man as a normal witness needs scientific examination, not surprisingly, infuriated Chesterton. What is being scientifically examined is not the criminal or the lawyer but the witness, who is the only man in the
whole court who is doing a plain public service for nothing. The witness is, normally speaking, the only reliable man in court. The barristers are unreliable, avowedly and honestly unreliable; it is their duty to be unreliable. The prisoner is unreliable, with even more excuse. The Judge is unreliable, as all human history proves.... The jury, though vastly more reliable than the Judge, is somewhat weakened, and, infatuated by the official atmosphere, may take itself too seriously and become a clique or club for the occasion.
The result of this is that the only one who is trying to tell the truth is the man in the street who witnessed the deed. And this is the man whom science chooses to investigate. The result of this investigation yields only what the theory that governed the examination could allow for. In other words, the subject matter of the veracity and accuracy of the witness was itself beyond this science.
Chesterton's conclusion from these instances of the green grocer who sees the murder and the apple woman who sees a resurrection is remarkable, "All the diseases that devour States it (science) easily passes by -- the rapacity and ambition of magistrates, the leathern cruelty of lawyers, the corruption of experts, and the rust of routine. It is only the healthy man whom science cannot comprehend."
Why science cannot comprehend the healthy man is the charter of our freedom. That is, when it comes to witnessing, to telling the truth, to choosing, to all the activities of a healthy man, no scientific method will tell us better than we can tell ourselves what is happening. The fact that we are human, that things pass through us and become distorted, that we can lie, that we can be subject to self-interest, money, and vanity, none of these needs to be set aside as if it did not happen. But that we need an expert to tell us whether we are credible, that we can find a second expert to tell us whether the first expert who examines us is himself credible, these are proposals that verge onto tyranny and we should not doubt it. What science cannot comprehend by its methods is precisely our honesty, our freedom, our experiences, and even our vices -- all the things, in other words, that really matter. But we can and do know these things and testify to them, even if we are the green grocer or the apple lady or the scientist when he is not being a scientist.
21) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 3 (April, 1991).
G. K.'S WEEKLY: JUNE 18, 1936
For Christmas, I received from John Peterson a copy of Loyola University Press' 1986 "Sampler" from G. K.'s Weekly. This book is a reprint, collected by Lyle Dorsett, of representative issues of this journal that Chesterton edited and published from 1925 to his death in 1936. These essays, comments, reviews, advertizements, and observations are very topical, very much a record of the on-going political and economic scene of the time. Yet, such was the man, when Chesterton was most topical, he was most metaphysical, because he saw that the being of particular things leads to all things in their ultimate origin.
The last issue included in the volume, that of June 18, 1936, is the one that announces and recalls the death of Gilbert Chesterton. In it are brief remarks by the Archbishop of Westminster, by Chesterton's old school friend, E. C. Bentley, by Robert Lynd, with longer commentaries by Mrs. Cecil Chesterton, Father Vincent McNabb, O. P., W. R. Titterton, and finally Hilaire Belloc, who penned a number of obituaries of Chesterton.
Belloc wrote in haste -- "Yet the word must be brief because it is written just as the paper over which he presided for so long goes to press." Needless to say, Belloc writes well when he writes in haste, particularly when, as here, he writes with feeling.
I have known him (Chesterton), and still know him, not only as a most intimate friend from the days when I first came up to London from Oxford nearly 40 years ago, still more as one in whose expression of thought I continually lived. He was the one expression of thought in England which could convey to his fellow-citizens those things they most need to know and from which they are most debarred, and therefore men such as I, for whom those things are vital, sought his expression of them continually as hungry men seek for food.
Belloc, it is to be noticed, did not praise Chesterton for discovering his, that is, Chesterton's own truth. Rather he remarked that Chesterton spoke of the things that the English "most need to know." Such things were present even before there was an England.
Belloc's comments were addressed to the English, even though he thought Chesterton would, in the future, be better received in American than in England and only more slowly received in Europe itself. Chesterton was not an "Englishman," Belloc observed, citing a man by the name of Orage, but an "English man," almost as if to say that the unique Englishness of Chesterton was what enabled him to speak to all the nations.
Belloc was not concerned so much with the truths Chesterton taught, which were not his, but with the fact that they only became alive when "heard." Chesterton was a "journalist ... the chief of that trade," that is, someone who thought that telling the truth to anyone who could read was itself the most worthwhile of enterprises.
The journalist is the man who discovers the truth about important happenings affecting his country in the world even as they happen, and who, having discovered the truth, proclaims it in such a fashion that his fellows shall know it too.
That passage from Belloc is one my friend William Burleigh at Scripps-Howard would like very much. Chesterton did have the uncanny ability to discover the roots of ultimate things in the happenings of every day events which often ceased to be merely ephemeral through his very words.
But Belloc feared that such writing the truth in the press could not be heard in his land. Belloc compared Chesterton to Samuel Johnson. "Dr. Johnson telling some truth was heard by all the England of his time, all the England which counted, in the sense of that word 'heard' when we use it to mean understood and taken for what he was in full. We have no longer the social machinery for such appreciation." The ability to "hear" the truth is also a function of our wills to want to hear it. Belloc saw in Chesterton the journalist who could "most convey to his fellow-citizens those things they most needed to know." It was in this "expression of thought" in which Belloc wanted to "continually live." One almost thinks that the only comparable man in the world today is the Holy Father, the one who speaks the truths we most need to know but whose voice is stilled because "we no longer have the social machinery for such appreciation" of what he is saying.
Belloc looked with some contempt on The Times obituary of Chesterton: "The Times ... published upon hearing the news an obituary so utterly beneath the level of its subject as to be negligible." I have not seen this obituary but Belloc's remark does make me curious to look it up one of these days.
But Belloc's point was that the real problem with Chesterton in the public forum was the truths themselves that Chesterton discovered, not as his own, but as having always been there. Father McNabb put it well:
In control of this vast, densely filled memory (of Chesterton) was a mind of more than average power. It was not just a power of reason -- though few could reason better -- it was an unusual power of instant intuition; which, the philosophers say, is to be found only in a few men; and, as the theologians say, is found in all the angels.
A Dominican is not surprised that Chesterton wrote a biography of St. Thomas, the "angelic" doctor. Both St. Thomas and Chesterton, it seems, possessed that same power of intuition that is found in but a few of our kind. We are not to be envious of this, but glad, like Belloc, proud to have known or read at least one.
It was in this "expression" of truth in which Belloc sought continually to live. To me, there is something touchingly humble in this remark of Belloc, himself an honorably proud man. We live in an age in which "independence" of thought is looked upon almost as the sole virtue, whereas the most valuable person we can encounter is one who leads us to the truth that is not his, but to the truth that is. We can recognize both the truth and him through whose guidance we learned it. It was St. Thomas, after all, who defined the nobility of teaching -- "contemplata tradere," to hand on to others what one has first contemplated.
Belloc called his obituary simply "Gilbert." He was one of the few who could call him this, I think. The rest of us still call him simply "Chesterton." He remains even yet the best of guides to "those things we most need to know."
Of Chesterton, we might all say, as Belloc did in his obituary, "I have known him, and still know him" because we have continually lived, in spite of our times, in the expression of his thought which has guided us. And we are glad of it.
22) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 3 (September, 1991)
SYMPATHY
In his chapter entitled "Great Victorian Novelists," in the Victorian Age in Literature, Chesterton wrote:
Human nature is born of the pain of a woman; human nature plays at peep-bo (sic) when it is two and at cricket when it is twelve; human nature earns its living and desires the other sex and dies. What the novel deals with is what women have to deal with; the differentiations, the twists and turns of this eternal river. The key of this new form of art, which we call fiction, is sympathy. And sympathy does not mean so much feeling with all who feel, but rather suffering with all who suffer (p. 94).
There are many interesting things in this passage, not the least is that Chesterton wrote "peep-bo" and not "bo-peep," as I remember the rhyme and that "human nature plays cricket at twelve."
The very notion of "suffering," of course, brings up the question of "why suffer?" Why is it such a great thing to suffer "with" someone, if it is a pain to suffer in the first place? Is the right question "how do we suffer?" Or should we rebel against a world in which suffering exists at all? Does not "sympathy" merely prolong the agony, make two people miserable instead of one?
And why associate this reality of suffering particularly with the woman, with she who knows our particularity? From Genesis, Chesterton recalled that man is born "of the pain of woman." Human nature is rooted in "what woman deals with," namely, with suffering. But are we not made to delight, to be happy? Eve was created because man was "alone." In the divine order of things is the answer to the aloneness of man the same as the answer to the suffering of man? Our Lady is called in the Litany "Mother of Sorrows."
Earlier, in the same chapter, Chesterton had remarked, speaking of the Victorian novelists, "It is right that womanhood should specialize in individuals, and to be praised for doing so...." Christianity is a religion of individuals who live, suffer, and die. Human persons are the only really permanent things in the physical universe, who find themselves one fine afternoon existing, from out of nowhere. And why do they exist "from out of nowhere?" To whom will they talk about it? To find this out is what their lives are about.
In a recent essay about the late novelist Walker Percy, John Wauck wrote:
The relatedness of love is an affirmation of one's own existence as an embodied self. To know that one is thought of and loved by another person makes it possible to really exist, to live ecstatically, to revel in living. This knowledge is the one thing that can save man from despair.... Finally, love is the solution to Percy's oft-repeated question about what one does with oneself at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon -- whether one is Adam strolling in Eden or Will Barrett contemplating suicide on a golf course. Summing it all up, in The Second Coming, Alison concludes simply: "Late afternoon needs another person" ("Fables of Alienation," The Human Life Review, Spring, 1991, pp. 93-94).
The hour a day -- the novel, Chesterton says, deals with sympathy, with suffering with someone, with the twists and turns of the river of actual, particular life, yes, with the "revel of living." Human persons are not pure spirits, but "embodied selves." What happens at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, the hour a day, is the particularity of existence, a particularity the attention to which is not to be lost.
Why are we unhappy? The very question suggests that we know something about what it is to be happy, else how should we know? And in what does out unhappiness consist? "Love is a celebration of the particularity of personal 'knowing'," Wauck wrote. "Indeed, it almost seems to invent a uniqueness, a specialness that does not, objectively speaking, exist...." (p. 92). But of course, the "specialness" does exist; that is the whole point. Suffering and love are the proof of it. The "uniqueness" does, "objectively speaking," exist. Goodness is found in our particular being. The "suffering with" does not deny that suffering exists, but proves it, even to the one suffering.
On August 30, 1913, Chesterton wrote:
The pagan theory was that man was unhappy because he could not generally attain this human balance. The Christian theory was that man was unhappy because he knew he might be weighed and found wanting, in the heavenly balances. But until these absurd modern people appeared, nobody, heathen or Christian, ever pretended that any man never was unhappy -- or, in other words, that any man was "perfectly happy" (Collected Works, Ignatius, 1988, Vol. XXIX, p. 546).
In what does the fact that we are not "perfectly happy" consist? It does seem strange, but yet profoundly true, that the defense of human particularity, the specialty of woman, in Chesterton's view, consists, for a first step, in denying that we are made to be "perfectly happy" in this life. This contingency means that we will suffer, will be lonely, will wonder what to do on a Wednesday afternoon in our alienation, which arises in the first place because we do not know about sympathy and the particularity of loving, and that we shall not be "perfectly happy" in this world.
"No man has ever laughed at anything until he has laughed at himself," Chesterton remarked in this same 1913 essay. On a Wednesday, on an hour of the day, the differentiations, the twists and turns of this eternal river, the Christian theory is that man was unhappy because he knew he might be weighed and found wanting, in the heavenly balance. The uniqueness of human nature, as Chesterton knew, includes the laughing at ourselves and the sympathy, the awareness we have of the suffering and love of unique others, the only things of which human nature is composed.
23) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 4 (November, 1991).
DEFENDING THE INDEPENDENCE OF DEPENDENT THINGS
Every so often I do a course on St. Thomas. This semester, (Fall, 1991), is one such semester. Among the books I assign, of course, is Chesterton's biography of Aquinas. I assign it as much to give me a chance to re-read the book as to inspire the students, though the latter is not beyond my intentions. Students who are not moved by Chesterton's book I look upon with some curiosity. Not everyone moves everyone, I know. In fact, Chesterton says early in this very book, "nobody can explain everything to everybody," which may not be the same point, but it is worth pondering anyhow.
There are a number of fine books on St. Thomas, in fact. I particularly like, besides Chesterton, Josef Pieper's The Silence of St. Thomas, his A Guide to St. Thomas, and Ralph McInerny's St. Thomas Aquinas. Although there are many "thick" books on St. Thomas, who himself wrote massively in his less than fifty years of life, these shorter books seem to be the best ways to begin to understand what St. Thomas is about. Few students, right off the bat, are ready to read intelligently a question, any question, in St. Thomas, even though St. Thomas was concerned very vitally with those very students who were ready to "begin" their understanding of things. But with a good introduction such as Chesterton, Pieper, or McInerny provide, St. Thomas becomes fascinating to begin. I do not think anyone ever quite "finishes" St. Thomas.
In his own Introduction to his book, Chesterton says that he is writing "a biography." He goes on modestly, "I have taken the view that the biography is an introduction to the philosophy, and the philosophy is an introduction to the theology; and that I can only carry the reader just beyond the first stage of the story." Chesterton does better than that, I think. He carries us to philosophy, to theology, to the things of God because he follows and understands what St. Thomas was about.
Books are curious things. When you give a book that moved your soul to a student, you have no obvious way to know whether he will also be so moved. But often you can tell if he is. We know from Plato that many a "potential philosopher," an intelligent young person deciding what he will choose his life to be, may not hear what a Socrates says because he has not prepared his soul or because he has chosen not to listen. On the other hand, you will notice that other students have their eyes opened by Chesterton and are hence ready to proceed to St. Thomas.
At a recent Thomistic Conference in Rome, the Holy Father gave one of his many moving addresses on St. Thomas. (For one of the best see John Paul II, "Perennial Philosophy of St. Thomas for the Youth of Our Time," The Whole Truth About Man [Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981], pp. 209-27). In a passage reminiscent of something he said also in Centesimus Annus (#5), John Paul II told the Congress:
In the present condition of humanity, which bears in itself the consequences of original sin, be it in the intellectual order or in that of practice, grace is in fact necessary. It is necessary to rejoin fully, what reason can know of God and, by making it adequately coherent with the light of grace, what is proper conduct according to the dictates of the natural law (September 24, 1990).
These themes of grace, original sin, reason, and proper conduct are ones we find throughout Chesterton.
In the First Chapter of St. Thomas Aquinas, we find Chesterton writing, "His (St. Thomas') argument for Revelation is not an argument against Reason; but it is an argument for Revelation." This passage refers to the very first question in the Summa Theologiae about the need of "Sacred Doctrine" as well as to Question I-II, 91, 4, on "whether some divine law was necessary?" Chesterton's way of phrasing the issue -- "an argument for Revelation" -- is a happy one, I think. It prevents the usual temptation of conceiving reason and revelation in opposition to each other in principle, then of wondering how we can get them back together. If we formulate the issue that way, we cannot get them back together, for the very premises make what has to be proved impossible. Chesterton's formula makes it possible to speak of revelation from the point of view of reason in the first place.
In the edition to Chesterton I am using (Doubleday Image), Anton C. Pegis does a brief introduction. Pegis also edited one of the basic editions of the Summa Theologiae in English (Modern Library), in which he pointed out that one of St. Thomas' great adversaries was that version of Platonism that distrusted matter as the origin of evil. St. Thomas' great effort was to save the domain of matter, which meant, effectively, to save sensory knowledge, the goodness of marriage, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection of the Body.
This endeavor was made easier for St. Thomas because of the great figure of Aristotle. Again Chesterton has it right. In current and often laudable efforts to reintroduce Aristotle, St. Thomas is praised because he "saved" Aristotle. No doubt, we read Aristotle today in large part because of St. Thomas. Yet, St. Thomas himself was not about "saving" Aristotle for anybody. St. Thomas was about the truth and found truth in Aristotle. When he did not, as was sometimes the case, Aquinas disagreed with Aristotle. What Chesterton says of St. Thomas on Aristotle is simple and correct: "St. Thomas did not reconcile Christ to Aristotle; he reconciled Aristotle to Christ." Aristotle is not the criterion of Christ, yet with Aristotle, we can understand the proper meaning of Christ in a way that we might not otherwise have seen Him.
But the passage in Chesterton's First Chapter, the one called "The Two Friars," that intrigued me most, as it often has when I read it before, is that in which Chesterton defends the power of God by defending the relative autonomy of things. "If St. Thomas stands for one thing more than another, it is what may be called subordinate sovereignties or autonomies. He was, if flippancy might be excused, a strong Home Ruler. We might even say he was always defending the independence of dependent things."
Chesterton understood also that this question is tied up with free will and the possibility of there being a finite creature whose relation to God must depend not merely on God but on himself. It is possible to seek to "exalt" God by denying either the action or existence even of things other than God. But as Chesterton noted, this position does not really exalt God but denies Him the possibility of any reality other than Himself. "No one would say that he (Aquinas) wanted to divide Man from God; but he did want to distinguish Man from God." This very distinguishing implied, Chesterton thought, "that very Free Will, or moral responsibility of Man, which so many modern liberals would deny."
Chesterton went on, in conclusion, to emphasize the significance of this position in human life.
Upon this sublime and perilous liberty hang heaven and hell, and all the mysterious drama of the soul. It is distinction and not division; but a man can divide himself from God, which, in a certain aspect, is the greatest distinction of all.
To defend the independence of dependent things implies that dependent things can separate themselves from God. But if they could not, there would be no drama, no moral responsibility, no liberty, no love, no damnation. Nothing would be worthwhile but God and we would deny to God the possibility of anything other than Himself.
What follows from this philosophy? What follows is that there are real things and we can know them. "(Aquinas) seems fairly certain that the difference between chalk and cheese," Chesterton concluded,
or pigs and pelicans, is not a mere illusion, or dazzle of our bewildered mind blinded by a single light; but is pretty much what we all feel it to be. It may be said that this is mere common sense; the common sense that pigs are pigs; to that extent related to the earthbound Aristotelian common sense.... But note that here again the extremes of earth and heaven meet. It is also connected with the dogmatic Christian idea of the Creation, of a Creator who created pigs, as distinct from a Cosmos that merely evolved them.
Pigs and pelicans are pretty much what we all feel them to be. This is, of course, common sense, a common sense very dangerous to those who would hold that revelation is an argument against reason. The argument for revelation includes the pigs and the drama, heaven and hell, cheese and chalk. Nobody can explain everything to every body, but a Chesterton, with the help of an Aquinas, can explain the independence of dependent things.
24) Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 4 (December, 1991).
THE STRANGENESS OF THINGS
For Christmas in 1985, I was given Marie Smith's Chesterton collection entitled The Spirit of Christmas (Dodd, Mead). I have frequently reflected on Chesterton's understanding of Christmas. If you want to enjoy Christmas, he seemed to tell us, you must first understand what it is.
In this book on Christmas, I found a brief passage called "The Three Gifts."
There were three things prefigured and promised by the gifts in the cave of Bethlehem concerning the Child who received them; that He should be crowned like a King; that He should be worshipped like a God; and that he should die like a man. And these things would sound like Eastern flattery, were it not for the third.
The gifts foreshadow the life and symbolize it -- crowned like a King, worshipped like a God, and died like a man.
The Chestertonian paradox is here. Normally, when we hear the expression "to die like a man," we mean that the death was noble, not cowardly or whining or bitter, as if somehow all life does not end in death. What is meant by Chesterton here, however, is something more, I think. The gods do not die. The third gift constitutes our faith about the Child in the cave of Bethlehem. Henceforth, to die like a man is also something God knew. It spoke of the courage of God desiring our existence in the first place.
A former student of mine recently gave me a copy of Robertson Davies perceptive Erasmus Lecture, "Literature and Moral Purpose" (First Things, November, 1990). In it, Davies remarked that most people really do not much read great writers. They rather select the "novels that sell in the hundreds of thousands in the drug stores and airports and which are never reviewed in the literary journals."
This observation of Robertson Davies was made not to disparage the great writers nor less to praise the junk that is often found in drug stores and airports. It was intended to remind us of where most people really are before we presume to hint where they ought to be. We have the distinct impression that if Christ was born in Bethlehem and "died like a man," it was for "the hundreds of thousands," for those who know not what to read or how to find the truth of things and yet who are caught up in the real drama of our existence.
Davies continued, "G. K. Chesterton, a perceptive and unjustly neglected critic, wrote in 1905, 'Men's basic assumptions and everlasting energies are to be found in penny dreadfuls and half-penny novelettes.'" Aside from the fact that the cost of these same items is now from eight to fifteen dollars in paperback, not a penny or a half-penny, Chesterton's point remains. We can, of course, sigh with the cynic, "Isn't it too bad that the great unwashed do not read great books?" But we can also ask with Chesterton why these dreadfuls and novelettes somehow touch "basic assumptions" and inspire "everlasting energies"?
In the new Ignatius Press edition of The Thing, I came across this provocative sentence: "The truth is that the modern world has had a mental breakdown much more than a moral breakdown" (III, p. 178). Not forgetting Nietzsche, about whom he wrote, I do not think that Chesterton here meant primarily that the "mental breakdown" that has so affected the modern world refers to those human beings in mental institutions. Rather he meant that the ability to think itself has suffered not because our minds are somehow constituted differently from those of men in past ages but because we do not use rightly the instrument of thought itself.
Most of us, I think, have a strong temptation to suggest that mental or intellectual breakdowns are rooted in moral breakdowns. Chesterton surprises us. We live in an age that breathes heavily at the sound of the word "ethics" or "morality." And there is no doubt that our thinking wrongly often entails our not wanting to think rightly because we know where our thinking might carry us. We do not want to go there. But this latter realization implies not that there is an intellectual breakdown but that an intellectual coherence remains in us that knows very well where ideas lead, why, to recall Richard Weaver, "ideas have consequences."
Chesterton posited a strong relation between thinking correctly and living correctly. He maintained that there was a certain wholeness and consistency about our lives and thoughts. We live in a time that does not want to admit that thinking correctly is important. Indeed, the very hint that thinking correctly is even possible is looked up on as at least fanatic if not totalitarian. And yet, Chesterton is right. The primary breakdown is in the order of thinking.
In the last chapter of his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton remarked on Aquinas' profound concern for things that were not himself or of his own making, of how the mind seeks to be filled with what is, with what is not itself. "There is no thinker who is so unmistakably thinking about things." Chesterton's reading of St. Thomas catches a certain exhilaration about things, about their unexpected, unimagined reality, a reality that we must confront with our senses, with our hands and our eyes and our ears and yes even our noses and our taste, with our senses.
"That strangeness of things, which is the light of all poetry, indeed of all art," Chesterton continued in his reflection on Aquinas, "is really connected with their otherness; or with what is called their objectivity." The strangeness of things -- this is a most memorable expression to me because it hints at something that is always so striking. There is something about everything, especially about everyone one, that we do not cause to be. Yet there it is. Chesterton is right, it is the "light" of all art and poetry. His earlier remark about dreadfuls and novelettes merely suggests that this sense of strangeness is found in all of us, as if there were a mystery about us that we did not ourselves put there.
And no doubt, this leads us to the "strangest" thing of all, that the Child of Bethlehem not only died as a man, but was born as an infant. "The Word was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us." Nothing more strange has happened among us. When we fill our minds with anything, we begin to think. When we fill our minds with this thing, this strangest of events, we have to think well, because we must describe precisely what it is we are to hold about it. The mental breakdown happens, as Aquinas maintained, not by thinking clearly and properly about this Birth, this Death, but by thinking that we do not have to think about it, do not have to straighten our thoughts so we can think at all. The three gifts of Christmas are that Christ is crowned like a King, worshipped like a God, and died like a man. The strangeness is already in the things, even in the divine things. Christmas implies that if we do not think rightly about important things, we will end up thinking wrongly about most things. The "basic assumptions" and the "everlasting energies" begin here at the Cave of Bethlehem.
25) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 4 (January, 1992).
THE TRUE MODERNIST
Volume III of The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, recently published by Ignatius Press (1990), contains a collection of Chesterton essays entitled The Well and the Shallows (1935). Amusingly, Chesterton's "Introduction" does not explain why the book has this particular title -- perhaps the title is from an editor, not from Chesterton. All Chesterton says is that someone suggested that he call the book Joking Apart, to warn the readers that in this book there would not be as many jokes as they have come to expect in his material.
The only trouble with that title, Chesterton added, was that "people more practical than I are convinced that if I say that this is apart from joking, everyone will think it is a joke." This book, Chesterton explained, contained what he really did mean, which many folks thought to be a joke, as they assumed he could not possibly mean what he did in fact mean. Chesterton concluded that he could not "hope to deal only with heresies that amuse him; he must, in common fairness, deal seriously with heresies that bore him."
The first essay in this collection was called "An Apology for Buffoons," so included because "a man fighting for what he honestly believes to be false can hardly preserve the glorious immunity of a buffoon. He is forced to be serious, and even those who despise him most are driven desperately to take him seriously." As long as it appeared that Chesterton could not possibly mean what he said, he appeared to be merely a humorist. When it was discovered that he was serious, he was taken to be rather a buffoon because, well, who could possibly believe such things? Thus, Chesterton himself was mostly amused by those people who could not take orthodoxy and sanity seriously. Sanity amused him; heresy bored him except insofar as it revealed the incongruity of things, which incongruity delighted him.
In this collection, Chesterton wrote an essay called "The Scripture Reader." He began this essay with a wonderful example of what he meant by "taking jokes seriously." Evidently, Chesterton had come across a book by his friend Mr. Bernard Shaw entitled Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. Chesterton called this a "very Protestant tract on the paramount duty of reading the Bible." Why Protestant?
This obligation to read Scripture, to be sure, is solemn enough. Chesterton then added that this Bible reading, in Shaw's view, was to be pursued "in the light of Private Judgment." The only trouble with this principle as a principle is that it really prevents us from ever actually reading the Bible, or anything else, for that matter. How Chesterton delighted in that sort of paradox of the intellectual solemnly advising us to "read Scripture" only to find that, on his own principle, "Bible reading" was rendered impossible! How so?
"For Private Judgment is never wrong." That is, if we have a duty to read the Bible and this duty is based on a theory of private judgment about what the Bible means, then, of course, it does not make the slightest difference whether we read the Bible or not since we can only come up with what we want to find in the Bible. No "common" Scripture exists that would oblige us apart from what we want to find in the Bible. Each of us has the glorious freedom of being his own private Bible in which no one else is present but himself, certainly not God.
Of course, this situation is enormously amusing. Shaw's Bible Tract, Chesterton thought, might now be included in the literature of the British and Foreign Bible Society because "the old stuff that calls itself the Modern Mind has become such a muddy amalgam of Puritanism and Modernism that it does not matter, so long as a man reads his Bible, whether he denies his God." Chesterton had read both the Bible and Shaw enough to know that the theory espoused by Shaw for reading the Bible would deprive it of any possible relationship to Shaw's own beliefs other than to confirm them.
Chesterton did find something peculiar in Shaw, however. Other systems that began in private judgment about the Bible, those that founded Calvinism, Quakerism, or Mormonism, at least had the consistency to stick to their judgments once they had privately acted. Shaw in a sense was more radical. "Alas, Mr. Shaw is a true Modernist in the fact that he cannot complete even his own argument, for fear that it should end by proving something." Shaw's reading of the Bible could not depend on the stability of Shaw's own theories.
Thus, if Bible reading is to be progressive, as Shaw seemed to maintain, this theory meant logically that new forms of God appeared at each step. "The Old Testament Prophets were each of them dealing with a different God; though they seem to have been under the impression that it was the same God." But this thesis put Shaw into trouble, because if each God that appeared in the Old Testament is "better" than the one that went before, then logically "the Second Person of the Trinity was better than the God of Micah and rightly replaced him on progressive principles." If Jesus was what He said He was, then either He was a psychological case or Shaw's theory resulted in unwanted conclusions about betterment.
Chesterton admitted in the end that he could not be shocked by Shaw's novel about the Black Girl in Search of God (evidently modeled on Voltaire's Candide) because Shaw could not decide whether in the end the Black Girl "found God, or failed to find God, or found that there is no God to find." Chesterton felt that Shaw could not really blaspheme because only believers have the privilege of that particular vice. "We Catholics must realise," Chesterton thought, "that by this time we are living in pagan lands; and that the barbarians around us know not what they do."
What Chesterton criticized was the inability of a modern man to speak of Jesus in a sensible way. Shaw, for example, had a long discussion in which "his imaginary Jesus feebly implies the idea that everything can be solved by love, and apparently love of any kind." Chesterton did not know whether to be amused or shocked by such a silly doctrine. The whole point of love is not itself but its object. Two loves built two cities, as Augustine wrote.
"Now there is not a grain of evidence," Chesterton thought, "that the historical Jesus of Nazareth ever said that any such emotion (love), selfish or sensual or sentimental, must be a substitute for everything else everywhere." Rousseau might have held this, not Jesus. "The Church resisted it from the beginning."
Ultimately, Chesterton concluded from this reflection on "the Scripture Reader" that "the attack on the Faith breaks down by its own folly on its own ground." The intellectual content of the Faith includes the elaboration of this folly. Needless to say, this is a very "Thomist" position. Perhaps I would conclude from this reflection on "the true modernist" by saying that the account of the break-down of principles like private judgment in its intelligibility is the first step to a revival of St. Thomas.
Private judgment began as a principle for "understanding" Scripture. It ends as a principle for denying any common truth or any common being in favor of exalting "love," "love of any kind" as the only thing that justifies. In another essay in the same collection, Chesterton wrote, "a philosophy begins with Being, with the end and value of a living thing...." Love follows Being, follows what is, even when reading Scripture.
26) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 4 (February, 1992).
NEVER LESS ALONE
Recently, I was rereading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition with one of my classes. The last lines of this insightful book are these:
Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset -- "Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself."
I called on a student in the back row. "Mr. Freilinger, please stand up and read that sentence to the class." The young man stood up and read the sentence.
"Have you ever heard that sentence before?" I asked him -- we were not about three-quarters of the way through the semester. He could not recall. "Don't you remember what we read earlier in the semester?" I asked him. After some prodding, he did come up with Cicero. We in fact read a couple of things in Cicero. Even I could not recall whether this passage was from the De Senectute or from the De Officiis. He thought it was from the former; I the latter. I actually wondered why Hannah Arendt had attributed the passage to Cato and not Cicero, as I remembered it to be from Cicero.
I looked it up. The next class, I brought the text of Cicero with me. I called on Mr. Freilinger. He was absent. Bad form. So I read aloud the following lines myself from the beginning of the Third Book of the De Officiis:
Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of that family to be called Africanus, used to remark that he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, and never less lonely than when he was by himself. We have this on the authority of Marcus Portius Cato the Censor, who was his contemporary.
So these famous expressions about being alone but not lonely were from Scipio via Cato via Cicero via Hannah Arendt.
The question of solitude, of course, has to do with the interior life. In The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton has an essay called "The Case for Hermits." He began this essay with an account of a child who is being bullied at a party. The normal child's response to such annoyance is "Let me alone!"
The same child never says "Let me enjoy the fraternal solidarity of a more socially organised group-life." None of the modern ideals spontaneously pops into the child's mind under such circumstances. "It is rather interesting that so spontaneous, instinctive, almost animal an ejaculation contains the word alone."
We live in a society that does not leave us alone, Chesterton thought. In fact, "if men do not have solitude, they go mad." And they can want to be alone if all they have is "society" and think it is what sufficient for them. We look with astonishment on "hermits and solitaires as if they were savages and man-haters."
Yet this is "not true" of real monks or hermits. Some solitaires, like Diogenes, were not really solitaires but hung about the marketplace. Some people like Carlyle and Tennyson seemed to need a society of admirers in which to be unsociable. "The hermit, especially the saints, had a solitude in which to be sociable." Men left society to be "more of a human being, not less." The hermits were actually kind men even though they did not talk much to others.
Chesterton thought that there ought to be something of the hermit in all of us.
The reason why even the normal human being should be half a hermit is that it is the only way in which his mind can have a half-holiday. It is the only way to get any fun even out of the facts of life; yes, even if the facts of life are games and dances and operas.
Thus, even to appreciate our activities, even our most happy ones, we need something of the contemplative about us. We need an interior life, solitude, in which to reflect on what is going on about us.
"For the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has already happened," Chesterton continued in a remarkable passage that recalls Cicero.
If men were honest with themselves, they would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive. Mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances. The real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them.
The meaning of things is not immediately clear to us. Often our deepest engagements do seem brief, passing, frustrating, and inconclusive. The most poignant moments, especially the most poignant moments, need depth to see what they really are. An interior life is necessary for any meaningful exterior life.
"Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life." This positive joy of life requires memory and reflection. This is why we find ourselves remembering and pondering and delighting in the things that have happened to us with our friends. If we remain engaged only in action and rush, we will not experience what is really happening to us. We will become superficial. In society, we have an unending series of encounters. But our joys must be savored. And it is to be added that the deepest of our responsibilities also become manifest to us in our solitude. "It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude that they forgive them." That is right, I think.
So if we are "never less alone than when we are alone," it is because we have the joys and the friendships and the dances and the deeds to ponder. We will not know them to be what they are unless we have the quiet, the active solitude of which Cicero spoke. There is not merely a "case for hermits" but a case, as Chesterton said, for all of us to be "left alone," even the normal human being should be "half-hermits" long enough not to turn our friends into acquaintances, long enough for us to discover "the positive joys of life" in what actually does happen in our lives.
27) From Schall on Chesterton., Midwest Chesterton Review, 4 (March, 1992).
THE THINGS THAT CANNOT BE DEFINED
My sister and her husband recently moved from Wisconsin to Medford, Oregon. After his retirement, my brother-in-law has worked a good bit with the St. Vincent dePaul Society. In the course of this work, he has gone through a great number of used books that come, I suppose, into every such organization. Used books and used book stores, as I have written elsewhere (Crisis, September, 1991), bear much of the burden of preserving our literary tradition.
I bring this matter up because my brother-in-law had seen in something I had written a reference to Belloc's little book on Chesterton. (I think he saw it in "G. K.'s Weekly: June 18, 1936," Midwest Chesterton News, April, 1991). My brother-in-law told me later that he looked all over to see if he could find this Belloc book. I once had this book but, I think, I left to the library at the Gregorian University in Rome when I left there in 1977.
In the end, my brother-in-law could not locate this little book, still when I went to Medford at New Year's to visit their new home, behold, there was a good copy of the 1942 Readers Club Edition of Chesterton's Charles Dickens, with an Introduction by Alexander Wolcott. This Edition also includes Chesterton's Entry on Dickens from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Diligent readers of the Midwest Chesterton News will recall that I have recently done two essays on Chesterton's views on Dickens, one occasioned by the Ignatius Press Edition of this biography ("Chesterton's 'Only Two Words'," MCN, July 1990), the second by my finding a copy of The Pickwick Papers ("The Blasphemous Belief," MCN, September, 1990). The last paragraph of Chesterton's Charles Dickens, as I have often thought, is one of the most beautiful passages ever written, the one about friendship and the Inn at the End of the World.
I have not reread the whole of Charles Dickens for some time, but I have never forgotten the end of this marvelous book. Indeed, the first book I ever wrote, Redeeming the Time (Sheed & Ward, 1968), ends with an analysis of this final passage from Charles Dickens. Nevertheless, as I sat down in my sister's lovely front room in Medford, with her grand piano, which she plays for me, I was immediately struck not by the last but by the first paragraph of Charles Dickens.
Chesterton originally wrote this book in 1906, two years before Orthodoxy. Chesterton was still quite a young man struggling to get started when he published this now famous biography. Yet, already here, he understood about "first things," if I might recall an ancient phrase that Hadley Arkes and Richard John Neuhaus have again made popular. Some consideration of this first paragraph, I think, is well worth some further reflection.
Chesterton began by pointing out that much confusion, particularly in religion, begins because we confound two rather different ideas. We think "indefinable" and "vague" mean the same thing. And then we proceed to think everything that is indefinable is just vague. But, Chesterton thought, there exist "facts" of the spirit which at some level are "indefinable." What immediately pops in our mind when we hear this notion of indefinable spiritual fact is that it is something rather "misty," like a cloud with fuzzy edges.
Chesterton first pointed out that this confusion is an error even in logic. How did he explain this error? What cannot be defined is not the vague, misty thing, but "the first thing," that behind which we cannot go because nothing is clearer than itself. What things, for example, are "indefinable" in this sense of being first or most obvious? Well, they are "our arms and legs, our pots and pans." Let us suppose, for example, that someone is looking at a big bean pot. He is lifting it up, feeling it, measuring it. Suddenly, some skeptical friend comes up to ask him what he is holding? The man replies, "I am holding a pot." The skeptic replies, "well, please define a pot so I will know what you are talking about."
The first man naturally flounders around by saying that it is "something you boil beans in" or "something to hold liquids in." The skeptic is not satisfied with such vague descriptions and wants to know the "essence" of "potness." When the first man fails to come up with some more satisfactory information, the skeptic replies, "well, since you cannot define the pot, you obviously do not know what it is." But the man knows very what the pot is.
"The indefinable is the indisputable," Chesterton said. The man holding the pot obviously knows exactly what it is. You cannot find anything clearer to explain it than itself. "The man next door is indefinable because he is too actual to be defined." If someone denies that there is someone next door, or that you know that there is someone next door, all you can ultimately do is to take him over and point. Whatever you add to the definition does not make the man next door more real, even though it is all right to seek to elaborate his attributes.
Having laid down this principle about indefinable things not necessarily being misty or cloudy things, but the first things, the most real things, Chesterton continued, "And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity (as the man next door or the pot); some to whom God is too actual to be defined."
Again, this is very much like St. Thomas. We can properly speaking say what God is not, not what He is. But our saying what God is not is intended not to deny His existence or perfection, but to point out that His existence and perfection have none of the imperfections that our existence and attributes have.
None of this means that we should not try properly to "define" or come to understand anything from pots to our next door neighbor to God. What it means is that some things are so present, so real that our definitions of them will never quite do. Unless we penetrate through the definitions to the reality they stand for, our definitions can be idols, false gods.
Mid-way between the first things that are already so evident, so "self-evident," as it were, that we cannot define anything more clearly than their obvious reality and the second misty and vague things that are so slippery that they mean nothing much by them, there are the third things, the "popular expressions which everyone uses and no one can explain." What Chesterton was getting at was that it is proper to use the word "great" of Dickens, even though someone demand a more clear meaning to the word great.
The "prigs at the debating society will demand" something clearer, but the wise man will "flatly refuse. The first inexplicable term is the most important term of all. The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute." Our words are not merely arbitrary. There is a meaning to which they refer. We can recognize that the same meaning might be had in different languages or even different words or spellings, but words point to a reality that we must experience just as we do the pot, or the man next door, or even God for that matter.
Charlie Brown and his sister Sally are playing poker on the floor. Sally is obviously trying to learn the language of the game, so she repeats to Charlie her understanding of the cards: "Aces are higher than kings, right? Kings are higher than Queens. And Queens are higher than Joes..." Charlie looks up surprised to correct her, "Jacks." "Whatever," she replies.
If everyone knows that "Jacks" are called "Joes" in some card game, the game can be played. Ultimately, if we want to know what a Jack is, we point to it. We see that it is a different symbol than the other cards. We then understand its relation to the other cards, its relation to Queens and Tens. If one person thinks it a glorious liberty to think a Jack is a Ten, or that it is higher than a Queen, or that it is a "Joe," what follows is that we cannot play the game. Nothing is more clear.
The things that cannot be defined are the first things -- the arms, the legs, the pots, the pans, the Jacks, the man next door, God Himself. But because after we know them, point to them, we cannot adequately define them, we are not thereby misty or cloudy thinkers. Rather we are, as Chesterton said, "wise" because we know that when we know something, even a pot, we do not wholly comprehend it by our definitions of it.
"And there are some to whom God is too actual to be defined." Perhaps this is why, in the end, we must describe our ultimate relation to God as a "seeing," as "the beatific vision," so that we will not think that we comprehend Him by our definitions, so that we will be surprised by a reality beyond our legitimate efforts to define it.
The last paragraph of Charles Dickens ends this way:
But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road, the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.
That passage, I submit, is "great." If we need it "defined" by something more clear, we no doubt belong to that unfortunate class of people for whom "misty" means the same as "indefinable." "The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing." Might I hint that the "ultimate inn," the "tavern at the end of the world," by being the last thing is likewise a first thing? The Alpha and the Omega, "which through God shall endure for ever."
28) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 5 (February, 1993.
THE MOST TREMENDOUS QUESTION IN THE WORLD
I have mentioned the book G.K.C. as M. C. (London: Methuen, 1929) a couple of times of late, a book containing many of Chesterton's Introductions to other books. I noticed that one of the Introductions that this book did not contain, something I may have seen, as I once had a paperback edition of this book, was Fulton Sheen's God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy: A Critical Study in the Light of the Philosophy of St. Thomas. This book was originally published by Longmans, Green in London in 1925 and was, I believe, Sheen's doctoral dissertation at Louvain.
As I think I left my copy of this book in Rome, I had to see if John Peterson might be able to locate a copy. He did -- the Doubleday Image edition of the Sheen book retained the Chesterton Introduction. It is a remarkable Introduction in that it suggests that what is obviously characteristic of Catholicism, at least historically -- few, alas, would any longer find this image to be true in the public forum -- is its devotion to reason, not rationalism, but reason.
Chesterton remarked that by 1925 much of the intellectual world had already ceased to identify itself with reason. "Most of the recent free-thinkers are, by their own account rather than by ours, falling from Reason even more than from Rome." In many ways, the situation has grown even worse in our time, the difference being, I think, that the major, if not only, Catholic identification with reason we find today is Rome itself, whereas many of the theologians and increasingly bishops identify themselves, in effect, with movements of politics and "rights" that are seen in the tradition as against reason.
What is of particular interest in Chesterton's reflection is that he is willing to recognize that the word "reason" must be understood in its broadest sense and that the Church has always understood it in this way. "The Church is larger than the world; and she rightly resisted the narrow rationalists who maintained that everything in all the world could be approached in exactly the same way that is used for particular material things in this world." This remark implies, of course, the "reductionism" that the Holy Father often speaks of, the notion that we can understand reality, even spiritual reality, only by certain methods designed for the physical sciences. When these methods are applied to human or divine affairs, they can only yield what the method allows, so that the specifically human and divine reality are necessarily left out of the procedure.
What I especially liked in this Introduction was Chesterton's further explanation of the place of reason in precisely human and divine things. Just because certain quite rational methods within their own limits were not properly used to study man or God did not mean that reason was not to be used. Aristotle had said that a scientific method ought to correspond to the subject matter under investigation. There were different sciences because there were different subject matters. If we are going to study or know human affairs in their uniquely human reality, we must include the fact that our actions are free and could be otherwise. Moreover, they are either good or bad in their intrinsic reality. Unless we understand that this is the case, we will not know the subject matter of human reality as it is.
We are still to use our reason about such things, however. This is how Chesterton put it:
(The Church) never said those things (in the material world) were not to be approached, or that reason was not the proper way to approach them, or that anybody had any right to be unreasonable in approaching anything. She defends the wisdom of the world as the way of dealing with the world; she defends common sense and consistent thinking and the perception that two and two make four. And today she is alone in defending them.
Today, some seventy-five years later, the Church is not only alone in defending the essentials of reason as the conformity with a reality that is not made by man. She is practically alone in defending human life itself and those natural institutions on which its growth and development are based.
The Wall Street Journal recently (30 November) carried an Editorial about the student newspaper at the University of California at Berkeley, which would not even accept an advertizement from a Pro-life campus group simply explaining what happened in an abortion. The political constituency of the paper, evidently, would not allow even an argument to be heard and that argument is not a religious argument but a scientific one. The decline of reason has thus reached even to the basic principle of tolerance that was supposed to have grounded modern reason.
It is not without some irony, then, that Chesterton concluded this Introduction to Sheen's book by pointing out the refusal to accept an argument from reason and not from power or politics is not an fictitious accusation that we Catholics concoct. It is merely the logical statement of what we find, say, in the student newspaper in Berkeley, the irrationality of those who are said, even by themselves, to be the best students.
So Chesterton wrote:
The blasphemy is not ours. It is enough for us that our enemies have retreated from the territory of reason, on which they once claimed so many victories; and have fallen back upon the borderlands of myth and mysticism, like so many other barbarians with whom civilization is at war.
The "civilizational" wars are thus not merely a kind of pejorative description of current controversies, but an accurate indication of what is going on.
The culture wars of our time are precisely with those that deny reason. Multiculturalism is a denial that there is a standard of reason that can and should judge all cultures. Feminism is a denial that there is a difference at the fundamental level between men and women. Ecology is a denial that nature is directly related to man and his purposes. And of course "pro-choice" is a denial that the will has a specific object when it wills. The issue in these cases and so many others, from divorce to homosexuality to the nature of the clergy -- the modern ideological agenda, that is -- is in every instance an issue of reason and its denial.
And where does the possibility of denial of reason come from? What might be its root cause? It has, in fact, something to do with Fulton Sheen's book written three-quarters of a century ago in Belgium. Chesterton says that in this book, Sheen employs "the rational as opposed to the irrational method." And what is the object to which he applies it? It is to "the most tremendous question in the world; perhaps the only question in the world." What is that question, that "tremendous question"? "The subject matter is the nature of God in so far as it an be apprehended at all by the nature of man."
Chesterton then explains, in a most happy analysis that I am sure is not Sheen's, but still is no doubt what he was getting at, that the intellectual problem in understanding what we can, by our reason know is confused because of a "sentimental version of the divine dignity of man." Just what was Chesterton getting at? He was suggesting, I think, that the modern versions of academic irrationality were possible because of a claim that the human intellect was not bound to any order of nature or man that came from God, whereby what was reasonable was what was conformable to what is.
Rather in Chesterton's amusing explication, no one, unless somehow educated to it, would ever confuse "the objective anthropoid in a hat" with something sacred. For Chesterton, the hat was the sign of the human, the odd and funny and poignant human, who could by no means be confused with God. Yet, it is in the religious tradition itself, not reason, in which we are taught that this same anthropoid with a hat is made in the image and likeness of God. What happened was that this vague sentiment of the "divine dignity of man" was true only so far as we realize that man is a creature, an image It became dangerous once we forgot or denied God.
If God is dead and the "sediment and the dregs of our dogma" remain, then, of course, we become ourselves gods. What we mean by reason in this case is no longer what is conformed to reality but what the "objective anthropoid" means when he calls anything reality. Thus, our right to choose does not involve us in terrible crimes against our kind. We will not even allow such philosophical words to be spoken. They upset us, and that shows lack of "compassion." We show ourselves to be concerned with our feelings rather than the objects of our actions.
We do not want to know anything "about the nature of God in so far as it can be apprehended at all by the nature of man," then, because that might just have something to say about what man is in his true being. And this influence would be inconvenient in the kind of "human" world we are busy building with our own independent reason, a "reason" no longer bound to facts or to what is.
The most tremendous question in the world, perhaps the only question in the world is thus not asked among us. We do not want to know about it.
In G.K.C. as M.C., there is an essay entitled "Literary London." I want to cite the very Johnsonesque conclusion to this essay about London because it touches on something about the Sheen Introduction that relates to my topic of reason capable of encountering not what it wants but what is there to behold.
"The whole charm and glory of London consists in the fact," Chesterton wrote,
that it is the most incongruous of cities. Anywhere in London an American bar may be next door to a church built before the Crusades. A man may very well be exasperated with London, as he may be exasperated with the universe; but in both cases he has no business to be bored with it.
We can be exasperated with London or the universe because we do not understand fully by our own reason, by our own methods what goes on in each. We do not understand this matter because in some sense the cosmic city and the human city are subsumed, in their ends, into the City of God.
If we know the final order, of ourselves, of our city, of the universe, God will have to reveal it. But to know whether such revelation exists, we need our reason. We have to be prepared both to know as much as we can by our own reason that He exists and to be exasperated because of the incompleteness of our knowing. We cannot be bored with London nor with the universe when we sense their transcendent purpose. But we can be bored with the explanations and the projections of our own ideas onto the world as the only ones that we will allow ourselves to listen.
We dare not touch "the most tremendous question in the world" in our universities and even in our culture because we are afraid that the answer might not be to our liking since it does not conform to the "reason" we give ourselves for what we are and do.
29) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton Review, 5 (March, 1994).
ON BECOMING INHUMAN OUT OF SHEER HUMANITARIANISM
In the Summer of 1926 (July 3 and 10), Chesterton wrote two essays in The Illustrated London News (Vol. XXXIV of Collected Works, Ignatius Press, 1991) on literature and novels. He began with some advise that I recall my old Professor, Rudolf Allers, had also given some years ago, namely, "read even bad novels." Allers' point was that you will likely find in lousy novels some rather accurate insight into how people are thinking or acting that you will not find in good literature or in your own experience. It is not easy to imagine all of the silly and wrong things that we might perpetrate on one another, yet we need to know this if only to save us from a certain naïveté or etherial innocence.
Chesterton, with considerable amusement, put the case in this way:
I have always maintained that trash is a good aid to truth. I will venture to say that most of our historical ignorance, and even our literary ignorance, comes from our not having read enough of the trash of different times and places.
But it is often difficult to find the trash of other civilizations or times because that "terrible taste of mankind for preserving masterpieces has defeated us."
Neither Chesterton nor Allers, of course, was maintaining that trash was not trash, nor that masterpieces were not masterpieces. The one helped to define the other and vice versa. The point was rather that we must indeed know what can go wrong in ourselves and in others. We do not know what is right without at the same time knowing what is wrong.
Plato had insisted that to know the good we had also to know the bad, not just the elegant bad of the sophisticated tyrant, but the ordinary bad of every day life. Thus, Chesterton, for his part, maintained that "it would be very interesting to try to trace through popular stories some notion of the ideal of conduct which now prevails." In such an effort, Chesterton thought, we would find out better which part of traditional morality remained and which part did not.
In some sense, Chesterton had his friend Bernard Shaw in mind. In the popular tales, Chesterton observed, we will find that "it does not matter very much whether you are divorced. It does not matter very much whether you indulge in conduct calculated to produce a divorce." What matters is that, like Shaw, we still behave in a certain gentlemanly manner, that we do not "attribute any faults to a lady" even though the metaphysical or religious reasons for not doing so are no longer held.
What bothered Chesterton about this situation was that if in rational principle there was nothing wrong with divorce or the acts that might cause it, we should not have to worry about the more general rules of conduct that were designed to support the vows of marriage. Shaw for Chesterton was a model of correct reasoning. "He would have said that, if the sexes were to be equal, the man would have as much right to blame the woman as the woman to blame the man." What happens is that we have retained the vague notion of manners but not the idea of vows upon which manners were premised.
The problem with divorce is not just that we are ignorant of its often dire results but that we do not discuss its alternative. The alternative to divorce is that a "dull, common-place fellow," that is, the ordinary man, can think "that the oath he swore before God really meant something in the way of loyalty to his wife." Moreover, Chesterton thought, "Christianity did succeed in making (this) loyalty comprehensible to a large number of common people." The usefulness of the often trashy stories and novels that assume the opposite, that is, that vows mean little or nothing, is, in Chesterton's view, to record precisely what such disloyalty might entail if accurately described.
Chesterton then went on to discuss in the July 10th column "intellectual novelists." Already in 1926, he perceived the problem with compassion and sincerity theory that has become the instrument for overturning any conception of a stable and defensible morality. (See my essay "On Sincerity, the Most Dangerous Virtue," in The Praise of 'Sons of Bitches': On the Worship of God by Fallen Men). Chesterton was fascinated with "the modern mind," with the way it can "almost destroy itself." Chesterton, then, was struck with "the way in which people have become inhuman out of sheer humanitarianism."
What did he mean by this humanitarian "inhumanness"? We cannot wholly neglect the Christian suspicion that one cannot be fully human by human means alone. Chesterton had already remarked in his St. Francis of Assisi, I believe, that whenever men set out to be purely natural, they end up being quite unnatural. Needless to say, this phenomenon is something we see every day in the streets of any of our cities or advocated in the halls of our legislatures or pages of our newspapers.
The process, Chesterton thought, could be traced quite easily:
They (the humanitarians) begin by saying ... that it is our duty to sympathise with everybody. They started sympathising, in an abnormally sensitive fashion, with abnormally sensitive perople; and ended in actually sympathising with their lack of sympathy. First you were a Christian and were kind to the man whom all men hated. Then you were a Christian or humanitarian psychologist and sympathised with the man who hated all men. And then you practically ended up by being a misanthrope and hating all men yourself. At any rate, you ended up by having quite a disproportionate sympathy with the people who could not be sociable, and an entire lack of sympathy for people who were sociable.
Needless to say, if we follow the modern moral history of divorce, homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion, and any number of other wrongs that have become "rights," we will see this peculiar pattern repeated over and over. We must marvel at Chesterton's understanding of its process.
Chesterton saw this process as what we might call today an essential aspect of the "culture wars." What amused him about the intellectual novelists who propagated this mentality was their utter lack of sympathy for those people who in fact tried to be sympathetic to others as a matter of ordinary living. "Why are we only to be humane to the unreasonable person, and never humane to the reasonable person?"
Just like the impoliteness of ever raising the problem of the unromantic nature of breaking vows by divorce -- Chesterton thought that keeping vows was in fact the most romantic thing available to us for it alone guaranteed the notion of love -- so the unsocial nature of humanitarian sympathy with those who do odd and unnatural things reveals a certain anti-humanness. "Are we so to encourage human beings to be such very sensitive beings that they cannot be social beings? Are we always to insist on the clumsiness of conventional people and never on the callousness of unconventional people? ... It never seems to occur to the highly intellectual novelist that people ought to be able to get on with one another, even if they do not understand each other, as nobody can understand except God."
We have seen the notion of culture in our time turn into the notion of private rights. We are not asked to endure or pardon the faults and disorders of others. We are asked to approve them and adjust our lives to them, no matter what they do, lest we be unsympathetic. The culture wars are about those descriptions of human lives that are in some sense unnatural that we are politically required to acknowledge as "normal." Hatred is what the new "rights" promoters vent on those who are simply ordinary. We are to be sensitive to all sorts of disorder and we are even required to praise them lest we be accused of "verbal harassment." This means simply that we must keep the exterior form of politeness apart from any consideration of the moral basis on which it is to be rightly founded.
Chesterton had been discussing the case of a novel in which the normal wife was busy in the kitchen and her poet husband called her out to look at the beauty of the stars. She was accused of un-sympathy for not dropping everything and rushing out to this supposedly unrivaled experience. Needless to say, Chesterton's sympathies were with the wife, not the modern poet.
"The novelist and the critics yearn with sympathy of the tenderest sort over these sensibilities," Chesterton concluded.
It seems to be admitted that nobody could be expected to endure such things from their fellow-creatures. It never seems to occur to anybody that people ought to be taught to endure their fellow-creatures. It never seems to strike them that the sane culture and training of a citizen ought to strengthen him to resist the shock of a loud sneeze or a large ear. Culture seems to mean the cultivation of disgust.
What the ordinary people are now asked to do is to deny that any difference exists between one form of conduct and another. We are asked to endure what is in fact most disgusting and call it culture. What began as sympathy for the abnormal ended up as hatred for the normal. Chesterton wondered why the abnormal was so unsympathetic.
If we bring these two strands of Chesterton's thought together, that is, the way setting out to be human can end up with inhumanness and the fact that we should read trashy novels in order to know what things are praised, even if they be wrong and corrupting, we can see that he had already begun three quarters of a century ago to sense the direction our culture would take.
Our culture has come to accept the breaking of vows and to call it romance, when their keeping was the only romance worth having. Meanwhile, our culture set out to be human and seems to be ending up by sympathizing with all the disorders of our kind and caling them "rights." We are not to be in the slightest considerate with the normalcy of mankind who saw such things simply as what they were, trash. The callousness of unconventional people has set the tone of our time wherein we have, neglecting grace and logic itself, become "inhuman out of sheer humanitarism."
30) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 5 (April, 1993).
"WOMAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS"
Quite by chance, I happened to pull out of my files the February, 1985, issue of The Chesterton Review on the day after I had happened to see an amusing headline in USA Today (February 5, 1993). The headline read: EQUALITY OF SEXES? GIVE IT 1,000 YEARS. As it turned out, this headline was based on a Report of the International Labor Organization, on a forty-one nation survey about the "progress" of women.
Why the authors did not survey all one hundred and seventy nations in the world on this perplexing topic, I do not know. But given the lengthy time range, I guessed they would eventually get around to it. As Rex Harrison sang in "My Fair Lady," "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" According to this report, as I understand it, "progress" means when she does become more like a man, in a 1,000 years or so. She will be, a rather boring and startling prospect, no doubt, to most normal women and men, exactly more equal to a man.
Apparently, this U.N. sponsored research discovered that it would take women "another 1,000 years to match the political and economic clout of men." As there is not a woman alive who can wait that long, naturally this report was disturbing to me. I had an additional problem as I did not happen to know any women who particularly wanted "to match the political and economic clout of men." Indeed, few thought that this goal was what being a woman was about or worth doing even if they could.
In any case, the report contained such horrendus statistics as these: It would take 500 years for women "to hold equal managerial posts of men" and 475 years for them to reach "equal political and economic status." Just what happened in the 25 years (500 minus 475) that would cause women to pass from equal political and economic status to equal managerial status was not made clear. I decided, however, it must be a cumulative statistic. That is, it would take 475 years to reach political and economic equality, and another 500 or so to become top managers. This must be where the 1,000 years came from.
Other shocking facts were reported: "Women make up 3.5% of Cabinet posts worldwide" (figures made before Clinton Cabinet was formed); "Greece and Paraguay had a drop in female managers." "Women hold 40% of management posts in Australia and Candada; 8.3% in Japan and 4% in South Korea. Bangladesh ranks last with 1.4%" Conclusion? The richer you are the more your women work?
The only comment in the article about this frightening information came from Eleanor Smeal, President of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. This too startled me as I did not know feminists wanted to be a majority, nor that they needed a fund for it. Mrs. Smeal, however, pithily said it all: "It's a worldwide disgrace. Half the Earth's population is relegated to permanent under-status."
When I first came across this piece, I did not save it. To have my own copy -- otherwise this perplexing essay would not exist! -- I chanced to go out on a cold Sunday morning and luckily found a previous day's edition of USA Today in "Le Croissant Chaud" on N Street. I had been struck, however, on first cursorily reading the report, that the criteria of what it is to be a successful or equal women -- that is, to be managers, politicians, or cabinet members -- were exclusively economic and political ones, ones often used to decide the success of men.
At first sight, it seemed that if you wanted to be a successful woman in 1,000 years and did not want to be part of a permenent "under-class," you would end up exactly like a man. It hardly seemed worth the wait to me. Surely there were other criteria for a good and successful woman? I find it difficult to believe that among the half the world's population that has ever lived on this Planet up to this time, let alone in the next 1,000 years, that we have practically no examples of feminine success. I know a few myself, it seemed to me, but none of them were managers, politicians, or cabinet members.
It so happens that The Chesterton Review that I happened to be looking at just after reading this ILO report had reprinted a review that Chesterton wrote in 1901, in The Speaker, of the English translation that the Rev. T. A. Seed made of the French of Alfred Fouillée's book, Woman: A Scientific Study and Defence. Chesterton's review is entitled, "Woman and the Philosophers." When I read Chesterton's review, I was truly sorry he did not have a copy of the ILO report and Mrs. Smeal's comment. But as I read his analysis, I realized that he did not need his own copy as the situation, contrary to what we might expect, had not much changed in the century between his review and the ILO report.
Chesterton began with this delightful introductory passage: "The title of the work before us is Women: A Scientific Study and Defense. It never occurred to us before that woman stood in need of a defence of any kind; and what the women of our acquainatnce would think of being made the subject of a 'scientific defence' we shudder to conceive." On the crucial issue itself, Chesterton did not think that science had anything to say. "Whether woman is structurally different to man is a matter of physical science, whether she is superior or inferior or equal is not a matter of physical science; it is a question of what you happen to want."
The French author, it seems, to state the presumed scientific basis for the inferiority of women, had cited Herbert Spencer to the effect that "the interest of women is generally directed rather to persons than to ideas." Since men were said to come to abstract ideas last, this feminine predeliciton for persons was supposedly a sign of their inferiority.
Naturally, Chesterton had great fun with this evolutionary dogma holding that something that comes last is necessarily better. All concrete ideas of justice that a woman is likely to have are better than an abstract idea of justice which a man is apt to have. Real justice is concrete, not abstract. The fact is that "to understand a man (as many women do) is to underestand one of the most complex and untranslatable cryptograms conceivable, to understand a 'cause' is to understand the clumsiest thing created...." Besides saying that a thing is better because it comes last is like arguing that "playing on a typewriter" is "superior to playing on the organ."
The next philosopher to be taken up in this discourse is Schopenhauer who did not much like the human race, male or female. Evidently, Schopenhauer thought women inferior and therefore "the best guardians of children" because women themselves were "puerile, futile, limited." Chesterton obviously plunged into this argument with great zest. Evidently, the argument implies that women are the best guardians of children because women themselves are "puerile," though that seems like an odd adjective in context.
To this thesis, Chesterton immediately observed: "Now we know what women do for children; they nearly kill themselves over them with work and anxiety." To test the validity of Schopenhauer's thesis we should logically ask, "what do children do for children?" We do not find, however, little boys of seven killing themselves working for other little boys of seven. No indeed. "A (little boy's instincts) lead him to kick his (another little boy's) shins and to run away with his toys." This argument will never do. "In fact," Chesterton concluded, "the whole of Schopenhauer's theory of the childishness of women is capable of the shortest and simplest answer. If women are childish because they love children, it follows that men are womanish because they love women."
Efforts to prove the superiority of anything by some sort of biological analysis are most dubious. The French book wanted to argue on a biological basis that from the very beginning "the two sexes have certain types and functions which may still be traced in their moral and mental attitudes." Chesterton thought there might be some truth in this view. "But while we suspend our judgment on the truth of the biological contention we are heartily in agreement with the moral contention, and cannot see that it requires any biological machinery at all. The divinity of woman is to be decided by what she is, not by how she was made."
The subject of the inferiority, equality, or superiority of women ought not to be seen as if there were nothing wondrous about the particular, diverse being of man or woman. The drive to make the criterion of whether a woman is "in a permanent under-status" is logically a drive not to see her at all. Even if we could prove
ten thousand times over (it has not yet been proved once) that woman laboured under eternal mental as well as physical disadvanages, it would not make us think less but rather more of that brilliant instinct of chivalry which saw in her peculiar possibilitis and put her to highest uses.
That is to say, whatever the difference between woman and man, what it is to be woman has its own genius that need not be judged in terms of the proportionate number of prime ministers who happen to be female at a given time.
"The whole romance of life," Chesterton continued, "and all the romances of poetry lie in this motion of the utterly weak suddenly developing advantages over the strong. It is the curse of the modern philosophy of strength that it is ridden with the fallacy that there is only one kind of strength and one kind of weakness. It forgets that size is a weakness as well as littleness...."
Just what form the dignity of woman was to take in the modern world, Chesterton remarked, was yet unclear at the beginning of the 20t Century as it will, no doubt, be at the beginnong of the 21st. Chesterton was not "out of sympathy" with the effort to define this dignity. "We believe firmly in the equality of the sexes, and we agree, moreover, that to use woman merely as a wooden idol is as bad as to use her as a wooden broom."
Yet, what might this equality really mean? Equality of pay? Equality of honors? "But in the interests of equality, we must say that we doubt whether the mere equalisaiton of sports and employment will bring us much further. There is nothing so certain to lead to inequality as identity." Colleges must now spend an equal amount of money on men's and woman's sports. Sports pages must devote an equal amount of space. Or to quote again the USA Today article, "Women hold 41% of management jobs in the USA -- 11% high-ranking, 3% top-level." In the meantime, children are said to need mothers at home and mothers say they work because their husbands cannot support the family.
"A mere struggle between the sexes as to who will make the best tinkers, tailors, or soldiers, is very likely indeed to result in a subordination of women infinitely more gross and heartless than that which disgraced the world up to now. What we really require is a revised and improved division of labour."
That is to say, that Chesterton, in 1901, thought that the equality of sexes in 1,000 years in which all jobs would be 50-50 was a scheme to dominate women. Chesterton put it bluntly -- "Whatever solution may be best (we do not pretend for a moment to have decided) it must emphatically not be based upon any idea so paltry and small-minded as the idea that there is anything noble in professional work or anything degrading in domestic."
The elevation of woman ought not to be like "the elevation of the worst type of working man" in which the garb of work replaces her memories of hearth and home. If we do this, it will be an ironic twist, Chesterton thought. "For (the intellectual woman) will have toiled to reach the haughiest eminence from which she can look down upon the housemaid, only to discover that the world has become sane and discovered that the housemaid is as good as she."
Can we not think that the two good ladies appointed to the Office of Attorney General were both shot down because they hired housemaids while they were away at work? Chesterton's point was not that the work in a cabinet was not worthy, nor even that a woman could not do it. He wanted to know whether what she did, if she did not do this public work, was not itself a more worthy vocation? This domestic work need not be compared with equality statistics of economic and poliical officeholding.
We might suggest, to conclude, in the spirit of Chesterton, that women, "half the world's population," have never really been relegated to "permanent under-status." The discovery that the housemaid is as good as the woman cabinet member will send a shock through the world, but only if we remember that most housemaids, from Salvador or Mexico or wherever, are working because they want a home, because they know that somehow that is a better place than in a top managerial post or in a cabinet. In the end, the housemaids are smarter than the intellectual women who want to occupy cabinet posts because the housemaids better understand that economic and political criteria are not the final definiion of womanly success. This seems to be Chesterton's final word in 1901 on "woman and the philosophers."
31) From Schall on Chesterton, Gilbert!, 1 (October, 1997), 15. GILBERT CHESTERTON AND HIS MURDERING WAYS
In the last chapter of his Autobiography, which chapter is entitled, "The God with the Golden Key," Chesterton begins, one summer evening, by reflecting back on his own life. He sits quietly to take what he calls "a serene view of an indefensibly fortunate and happy life." This is said in all candor and humility, without a trace of vanity or boasting. We ourselves wonder if we have ever met anyone who could say the same of his own life? We know too of the passages about Chesterton's youthful moodiness and even despair. We know that the reason he gave for becoming a Catholic was "to get rid of my sins." Nothing less. Chesterton, like Aquinas, knew of the dark and even diabolic side of human life, including his own. He also knew with the Greeks that we should "call no man happy until he is dead."
Yet, we would miss much if we took this passage to be merely light-hearted hyperbole. I think every word of what he wrote is true. Chesterton's life in many ways recalls that passage in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, about "grace upon grace." Chesterton was one of those men to whom "more" was always given in that unaccountable abundance of God's grace that is not parsimonious. Nor is it based on some sort of political equality doctrine that demands that everyone receive the exact same. The whole mystery of Chesterton's charm and attraction to us consists largely in the fact that he knew more, loved more, and lived more than most of us will ever dream of or have the courage to pursue. And yet, though I have some intellectuals recently doing so, few of us resent him or are envious that he was given so much and delighted in it all. His grace is our blessing, if we will.
But, in the very next words after admitting his happiness, Chesterton talked about the number of murders he had committed, the number of corpses he had hidden or even decapitated. Indeed, he "strongly recommended the young student, except in extreme cases, to give expression to his criminal impulse...." Of course, what Chesterton was suggesting was not mass murder, but the exercise in writing novels and stories to concoct and describe mass murder, or any other kind. In this sense, Chesterton was very un-Platonic, though even Plato wanted his young guardians to know about murder and injustice in the only way it was morally possible for them to learn of them, that is, through tales and stories and records.
I have often pondered this very odd position of Chesterton on committing murder in novels, in the mental exercise that it takes to figure out how a criminal might think and act. There is a school of thought that worries that if we think about murder, we will be susceptible to doing such violence. Chesterton seems to have been of the opinion that the best way not to murder is to murder, but in a story. Anyone who has read the Father Brown mysteries knows the delight and the soberness that exist in Chesterton's murder stories. Millions of subsequent readers have likewise enjoyed these murders and their solutions. I have never heard of someone, on being asked why he murdered some victim, reply that "he got the idea in a Father Brown mystery."
What, we might ask, does this murder discussion have to do with an "indefensibly fortunate and happy life?" What, for that matter, does it have to do with "the God with the golden key?" A major constituent part of any happy life, no doubt, has to do with the simple fact of not doing evil. To do evil and to think evil are no doubt related. That is, all murders begin in the mind in their plottings or lack of control. This is why revelation tells us not merely not to murder (or steal or commit adultery or lie) but not even to think of doing these things. And yet, here we have Chesterton, an obviously good man, telling our young precisely to think these things. How odd!
What is it that we do when we write a murder mystery? We concoct a plot with probable characters. We begin an action that involves any number of people who are, within the time of the story, interrelated in some way. The murder happens, but by whom? why? To write such a story, we have to know much about the potential of human nature, what things are feasible. We have to know that we are good by nature but that there was The Fall that reached all of us.
We also have to consider the distinction between right and wrong. We cannot write a murder mystery if there is nothing wrong with murder. Behind the murder mystery stands murder. Behind murder stands the commandment not to murder. Without this, there is no drama.
The knowledge of evil is not evil. Indeed, it is good to know clearly and deeply what is wrong and how evil may wend its way through human lives. Spiritual direction consists in knowing the strange paths of evil in our minds and souls, in our wills. The murder mystery does not neglect the "why" of the murderer. If this is not attended to, the story is very unsatisfactory. Every evil act has a "reason," a justification, that can be spelled out once we get to the bottom of things.
Now, this peculiarity of the murder mystery of finding in the end its way to clarity, to intelligibility in relation to will, explains why Chesterton might begin his last chapter about "the God with the Golden Key" with a discussion of murder mysteries and why we ought to write them ourselves. When we read murder mysteries, we seek to know the plot, "who dun it?" Chesterton was convinced that the mysteries of human life, both the mystery of evil and the ever so much greater mystery of the good contained some order of intelligibility for us if we would only consent to listen to the hints and guiding light that are found scattered throughout our universe and history and hearts. Chesterton reasoned and reflected about every mystery and concluded that the key found in the Christian revelation unlocked, solved, every enigma that we confronted. Just as when we finish the murder mystery, we see the unravelling of the plot, so when we finish the accurate account of Christianity of itself, of what it maintains about God, world, and ourselves, we are surprised to see how everything "fits," even though we have much yet to know.
The reason Chesterton lives such an "indefensibly fortunate and happy life," I think, is because he realized that his happiness was precisely "indefensible," that is, he could see that he did not "deserve" such a life, yet he had to acknowledge what he experienced. Chesterton did not confuse the happiness of his "this" life with eternal life, but he did acknowledge that he was happy as human beings can be happy. And the fundamental reasons for this were first, that he did no evil, and secondly, that he thought evil and knew that it was evil. Ultimately, his defense against evil was his knowledge of the ways of evil. The other side of this knowledge, no doubt, is a life free of evil and its temptations, a happy life, in other words.
32) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (December, 1995).
CHRISTMAS AND THE MOST DANGEROUS TOY
The last chapter of an obscure book I published in England was entitled, "Of God's Jokes, Toys, and Christmas Trees" (The Praise of 'Sons of Bitches': On the Worship of God by Fallen Men, Slough: St. Paul Publications, 1978). I was reminded of this chapter when I came across Chesterton's 1921 Christmas column in the Illustrated London News (Collected Works, V. XXVII, pp. 301-04). What had occasioned my earlier reflections on Christmas and toys was an essay in the Wall Street Journal about the dubiousness of the idea that giving little boys toy guns for Christmas was somehow dangerous or immoral. I was delighted to see that Chesterton's 1921 column was entitled, "On Dangerous Toys".
Already here, in 1921, we find Chesterton concerned by the tendency to locate the problem of evil in things and not in wills, even in the case of children. In many ways, modern culture and society have almost completed the closed net by which individual human actions have no significance of their own or source in the individual person. The individual is not viewed as a being able to control his action by responsible choice or self-discipline, even if that discipline takes time and we can often err. The state is now in charge of our errors and seeks to counter them by its own policies and authority. Why we do wrong is not because we choose to do so, but because of our class, race, or gender or some other external cause. Things are out of our control, but they are in control of the state and those who manipulate its ideas about what can or cannot be expected of a human person.
Chesterton, it seems, had been in a toy shop talking with the proprietor. He was told that not too many toy bows and arrows were made because bows and arrows were considered dangerous for little boys. To such a proposition, Chesterton remarked with considerable humor and not a little pointed criticism of a flawed ideology, that certainly toy bows and arrows might at times be considered mildly dangerous. But it was always "dangerous to have little boys." We will not stop the possible dangerous use of any toy by banning the toy. We can only eliminate this dangerous use by abolishing all "little boys." Here, Chesterton found yet another classic example of modern mind's inability to distinguish between "the means and the end, between the organ and the disease, between the use and abuse."
To examine this question further, Chesterton proposed scrutinizing this question of "the dangerous toy." It turns out, of course, that just about everything a little boy runs into is potentially dangerous. In fact, "the most dangerous toy" is about the "least dangerous thing a little boy is likely to run into." Thus, there is hardly a domestic utensil that is not more dangerous than a little bow and arrow -- tea kettles, carving-knives, or fireplaces; almost anything about the house that can be broken is more dangerous than a toy. Any little boy could do much more damage with a stone he picks up in the garden than with a toy bow and arrow.
What is the cure for the danger that any little boy might find with a toy bow and arrow or the stone? Surely, the answer is not to empower the state to ban such toys, but rather to "trust your private relation with the boy, and not your public relation with the stone." That is, if a boy does damage with a stone, the answer is not to abolish all stones. "If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him where to shoot an arrow; if you cannot teach him anything, he will always have something to throw."
These reflections are, no doubt, even more pertinent today than they were when Chesterton wrote them in 1921. We are empowering the all-caring State to take care of us in everything. The State is eagerly seeking this power to enter our homes and our minds to instruct us about what is dangerous for us, as if we could not figure this out ourselves. "The notion that the child depends upon particular implements, labeled dangerous, in order to be a danger to himself and other people, is a notion so nonsensical that it is hard to see how any human mind can entertain it for a moment." Yet, such nonsense today enters quite a few minds, itself a sign of tremendous cultural change. If we ask, but how is it then that human minds do entertain such radical ideas that would relocate the whole problem of evil and will?
The answer seems to be that we have internalized an image of the person, little boys included, in which free acts do not exist and good habits cannot be formed. Since all little boys are dangerous to themselves because they too have wills, we will make it impossible for them to be little boys, in which condition they normally learn to act responsibly because they can so be taught and guided by their parents. Since all parents fail, the State becomes the large parent. "The truth is that all sorts of faddism, both official and theoretical, have broken down the natural authority of the domestic institution." The documents proposed at the recent Bejing Conference, among other places, were little else but extreme applications of these ideas that Chesterton already perceived in the 1920's as those that would most undermine human worth..
"So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves.... Thus, we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder.... To such intellectual levels may the world return." Chesterton thought that there was something even lower than this effort to abolish evil by abolishing things or by trying tomahawks for murder. The example he discovered to make his point came, not surprisingly, from America. Chesterton, it seems, ran across a story according to which some American proposed that the reason why the little boy should give up bows and arrows or toy Christmas canons was "to assist the disarmament of the world." Chesterton actually hoped that some little boy and not his elders thought of this silly principle. Yet, the proposition to abolish war by abolishing toy canons was proposed in a "reverential spirit." This was in fact another step not in progress but in "cerebral decay."
We could see the absurdity of this logic of abolishing war by abolishing toy canons by carrying the principle out to its logical conclusion. That is, we should not only abolish the toy canon to achieve world peace but also photos of canons or spears or bows and arrows. We would have to clear out most art galleries, of course, and even more all the great libraries of the world where we could read about wars and rumors of war. When we finally had abolished all toy bows and arrows, all photos of bows and arrows, and all stories of bows and arrows, it would finally begin to dawn on what rational being was still left among us that there must be "something wrong with the moral principle" by which such things were abolished. We could abolish all weapons and toys and still have wars with sticks and stones.
"What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. Arms, like every other adventure or art of man, have two sides according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of wrong." The little boy with the bow and the arrow is playing out in a bloodless way this serious realization that some things need defending and that it is wrong not to defend them. What the little boy needs to learn is precisely the difference between good and evil so that he can use those things that defend the one and defeat the others in the right way. He does not learn this by abolishing his games with toy guns or bows and arrows.
The danger, again, is not in the bow and arrow, but in the boy. The whole purpose of religion, education, and morals is to teach the good use of material things by beings who can admittedly use them ill because of their free wills. The purpose of little boys is to be little boys growing up to be good or bad men now using real bows and arrows. The purpose of the state is not itself to impose its own rule on every act of life so that nothing can to be done by anyone because any possibility of our acting dangerously, that is morally, is taken away from us. What this theory of taking away dangerous toys means, is that state power alone decides what is or what is not to be taken away. The state is left with full free play to command what it wants. The now grown up little boys have been both physically and morally disarmed. They were taught to believe that the cause of evil is in things and not in themselves. The state now has all the bows and arrows in its unlimited hands, the use of which is defined only by itself.
Chesterton was already right in 1921. The most dangerous Christmas toy was in fact the little boy endowed with free will and able to use anything for his purposes. Ultimately, we will only be "safe" if we are not "free", that is to say, we will only be "safe" if the kinds of beings we are are denied existence. But if we are free and we do exist, the what will save us is not the state but the Incarnation. When God risked creating little boys, He risked Himself. Such is the meaning of the most dangerous toy in the season of Christmas.
33) From unpublished Schall on Chesterton column, 1995.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
John Peterson, in generous exchange for my old paperbound Chesterton anthology of Father Brown stories printed during World War II, a volume he had never seen, kindly sent me The Father Brown Omnibus: Every Father Brown Story Ever Written. This is the Dodd, Mead Edition of 1951, listing copyrights going back to 1910. I have not in fact read many Father Brown stories. I tell myself that I do not like detective stories, though I like them well enough when I get into them.
What first struck my eye in the Index was the story entitled "The Invisible Man." I vaguely recall that I read this short detective story at one time or another. I am going to reread it again for this essay, but I believe I can recall the general plot of this short mystery story. The "invisible man" is the most obvious man that we do not see because we see him too easily, like the postman.
The original "invisible man" story, or at least the first one I know of, is in the Second Book of Plato's Republic. In its Platonic context, this story is designed to show that most people do not practice justice for its own sake. It has philosophic purpose as a story. It is designed to prove a common opinion that we are only just or virtuous because of another reason, namely fear of the laws. The story recounts a shepherd who finds a corpse. On this corpse, he notices a marvelous ring which he promptly pockets.
The shepherd next begins to examine the ring. A small node is found on the ring which he begins to turn back and forth. He discovers that when he turns the node to a certain angle, he becomes invisible; when he turns it back, he becomes visible. This quality of the magic ring gives the shepherd new power and temptation. What does he do with this new ring? He makes himself invisible. He goes into the palace. He kills the king and seduces the queen. Suddenly, he is in full command of the kingdom. The moral of the story is that the only reason we do not kill the king is because we fear punishment of the law. But we would be unjust if we could. Thus, this story is designed to demonstrate that all of us are unjust by preference but just by force or coercion.
Chesterton's story is of an entirely different slant, though perhaps I can find a strange relationship. The plot of "The Invisible Man" is cast in the form of a love story. A young Scotsman, John Turnbull Angus, is in love with Laura Hope, who is a lovely young lady, a waitress in a pastry shop. Angus, in true Chestertonian fashion, is a disinherited artist. It seems that his uncle, an admiral, cut off Angus' inheritance "for Socialism". At first you expect the young man to have been the Socialist, but rather it is his uncle who learns that Angus "had delivered" a lecture "against that economic theory."
Angus tries awkwardly to propose to Laura over a halfpenny bun and a small cup of coffee. Though she is interested, she is not to be rushed. "'You don't give me any time to think,' she said. 'I'm not such a fool,' he answered; 'that's my Christian humility.'" I have puzzled what this might mean. Christian humility prevents us from being fools by allowing us no time to think. I take it that in matters of the heart, such as this, humility is truth. We should not allow ourselves to get caught up in a lot of reasonings that do not explain the already evident fact of a mutual love.
Laura, in any case, came from a town called Ludbury in the Eastern Counties, where her father owned an inn called "The Red Fish", where she used to serve in the bar. The place was a simple inn for a few commercial travellers, "and for the rest, the most awful people you can see, only you've never seen them." Here already is the theme of the invisible man. Into this bar came two distinctly odd men, one a dwarf by the name of Isidore Smythe and a stranger man with "an appalling squint" by the name of James Welkin. Both gentlemen were somehow in love with Laura, but she could have nothing to do with them because "they were so impossibly ugly." Of course, she was too polite to give this as a reason, so she told them instead that she could never marry anyone who only had inherited wealth, who did not make his own way in the world.
Isidore Smythe, as a result, sets out to gain his fortune and does so by inventing a sort of mechanical robot to do house work, "Smythe's Silent Service". Laura tells Angus that she is now afraid that Smythe will turn up with his fortune, but she is more afraid somehow of Welkin. Suddenly she receives two letters from Smythe, almost at the same time she seems to hear Welkin's voice and his eerie laugh. She thinks there is something Satanic about it, or that she is going mad. Angus does not think she is mad. In a bit of classic Chestertonian doctrine on madness, he tells her, "If you really were mad, you would think you must be sane."
About this time the tiny Isidore Smythe appears in haste in his red roadster at the pastry shop. Someone has mysteriously placed some stamp paper on the window of the pastry shop on which are written the words, "If you (Laura) marry Smythe, he will die." This appears to be Welkin's handwriting. Angus, who recognizes Smythe as a rival, nevertheless goes to Smythe's apartment to help him. Angus knows Flambeau the detective and promises to go fetch him for Smythe.
In the meantime, on his way to Flambeau's, Angus tells the porter, a workman, a policeman, and a seller of chestnuts to keep their eyes on the flat in which Smythe is staying and not to let any one else in. When Angus gets to Flambeau's nearby headquarters, Father Brown is also there. Angus tells the story of Smythe and his invisible enemy who has threatened his life. The three of them rush back to Smythe's apartment. They ask each of the four "guards" if anyone has entered into the flat. No one has seen anyone. It seems to be a late Fall day, with snow just beginning to fall. Father Brown, however, wants to know why, if no one has seen anyone, are there footprints in the snow leading to the apartment? Again, the Invisible Man.
Flambeau and Angus burst into the apartment, find blood, but no Smythe. Now we have an invisible murderer and an invisible corpse. The two of them try to find the policeman, whom Father Brown, who has not gone into the flat, has sent to check the canal. The policeman comes back announcing that the body of Smythe was found in the water, but he was stabbed; he did not drown. Father Brown wants to know if anyone has found a "light brown sack"? Angus cannot make heads or tails of this question. So Father Brown explains the problem to him in his usual philosophic manner: "We always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can't begin this story anywhere else." Of course, we should expect him to begin precisely at the facts or concrete end of things, not at the theory end.
Father Brown begins his analysis in this manner: "Have you ever noticed this -- that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean -- or what they think you mean." He gives the example of someone going to a country house for the week end and asking whether "anybody is staying there?" The answer is "no", even though the parlourmaid, the butler, the cook, and the handyman are there. "All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly." Thus, when the four men -- the porter, the policemen, the chestnut seller, and the workman -- said that they did not see anyone enter the flat, they were not lying. They did not see anyone who looked like a murderer.
The real murderer, Father Brown, implies to them is "mentally" invisible. Father Brown explains the facts of the case in this light. If Laura heard Welkin laugh when the street was empty, but seconds later she received a letter from Smythe, then the street was not empty. The postman had to have been there, unless, he adds humorously, the letter was delivered by "carrier-pigeon". As Flambeau, Angus, and Father Brown discuss these philosophic points, it becomes clear that the most obvious man is invisible; because he is ordinary, we do not see him. The postman had walked by the lookouts, gone inside, killed the tiny Smythe, put him in the mail bag, and carried him out to the canal.
Now what is rather unclear to me is the ending of this story. Brown says to Angus, "You are not mad, only a little unobservant. You have not noticed such a man as this, for example." At this point Brown steps forward three paces and places his hand on the shoulder of an ordinary postman apparently just passing by unnoticed. Father Brown says, not unkindly, "Nobody ever notices postmen somehow; yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily." It is not clear if Flambeau and Angus get the drift of this situation. At this point, the postman ducks against the garden fence, turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, apparently no one else but Brown notices him. He remains invisible to them. "All three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint." So this is clearly Welkin, who has killed Smythe because he courted Laura, who, in her turn, was not in love with either of Welkin or Smythe.
The last paragraph of this story tells us not that Welkin was arrested, but that Flambeau went back to his office, Angus goes back "to the lady at the shop." "But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known."
Now, I take it that neither Flambeau or Angus nor the policeman, nor the other three realized that Father Brown had solved the mystery of the invisible man, even though he had given them the principle on which to solve it. What does Father Brown do? Evidently, he goes back to find the postman by the garden fence. Welkin was said earlier to take long walks. Brown walks with the murderer for hours in the snow. The two talk to each other. Is Welkin mad? Evidently not. No, he is a man with "passions like other men". The fact that he thought Smythe was his rival with Laura not Angus made no difference. I would presume that, in the end, Welkin is redeemed. When Chesterton concluded that "what they said to each other will never be known", he had to be referring to the seal of Confession.
34) From Schall on Chesterton, Midwest Chesterton News, 7 (January, 1995).
OF LAWYERS AND PRAYER-BOOKS
Let me begin these remarks by citing the two random incidents that occasion them. The first is simply a statistic which I ran across the other day in The Washington Times, to the effect that there are 61,000 lawyers in the District of Columbia. I believe that I also once read that there are more lawyers in the State of California than in all of Japan.
The second incident is a passage from a letter of one of my good cousins out in California. She wrote, "How much our Church needs to come back to the truth of authentic Catholicism and to the basics! We in our (local) church with a liturgical priest are becoming increasingly dismayed with what does not come from liturgy or preaching. The Gospel readings are cut. I don't hear the confession of sins at the beginning of Mass, subtle changes here and there. We hear a social gospel. We are thinking of trying another parish to be fed."
On September 22, 1906, Chesterton wrote a column in the Illustrated London News (Collected Works, V. XXVII, pp. 285-90), entitled "Fancies and Facts". This title recalls a favorite Chesterton theme, namely, that it is almost impossible to use in writing some illustrative example so outlandish that will not occasion two very opposite letters in reply. The first will maintain that the "thing is too violent and absurd" to be employed. The second will insist that the very outlandish thing actually "happened to the writer's aunt".
Chesterton was trying to explain his habitual use of sometimes far-fetched examples to make a simple point, only to find out that they were not so exaggerated as he thought. This is what surprised him. For example, Chesterton noted, to illustrate his point, "that I have argued with an intelligent atheist and have said, 'By the same argument by which you doubt God's existence you could doubt your own existence.' And the unhappy man has said, quite simply and with a heart-breaking fair-mindedness, 'I do doubt my own existence.'" Nonsense happens.
At this point, Chesterton paused for a brief but wonderful reflection on the nature of the human mind itself -- what are its reaches and what it is for. Chesterton advised us never to mention anything as "a mere inconceivability -- as something that literally cannot be conceived by the human mind." This admonition recalls the classic discussion of the nature of the mind -- our faculty of being all things, capax universi. Moreover, the mind can imagine a whole world of things that cannot or might not exist. It can imagine a past that did not exist and a future that never will come about. It can even imagine that we ourselves exist.
Thus, novels, detective stories, science fiction, are filled with accounts of things that never happened but might have at least been conceived to have happened. "The mind is an infinity, even if it is an infinity of nonsense." It is from passages such as these in Chesterton, I might add, that I get the title, Some Sense and Nonsense, that I use for my monthly column in Crisis.
The fact that the mind can know both what is and imagine an "infinity of nonsense" is a reflection on the power of the kind of being we are. "The mind of man is divine, even in the unfathomable nature of its darkness. Men can think anything seriously, however absurd it is. Men can believe anything, even the truth." We will never read more insightful sentences than these. The mind is divine, even in its darkness. What might this mean? Of course, the mind begins by knowing nothing. It is a tabula rasa, a power with nothing yet in it, a light with nothing to shine on. We seek to fill it with reality. But the reality we fill it with itself causes us to wonder about other realities that might be. We can come up with many explanations, some we take seriously, some we know are nonsense.
We can think absurd things precisely because the mind has the capacity to check the absurdity, even the capacity to believe the absurdity. But this praise of the extensive power of the human mind, the divine faculty as even Aristotle called it, leads Chesterton to the brilliant paradox, that "Men can believe anything, even the truth." The atheist who doubted God's existence, doubted his own existence. If men can believe absurdities, they can also believe the truth which bears all the marks of wonder that can be found in any imagination, with the added touch, that what we can also know is likewise true. For those of us who are not divine, reality has all the earmarks of an uncanny absurdity that we cannot figure out because we did not make it.
As an example of these points, Chesterton recalled an amusing case that took place in the Irish Court. A judge in Limerick, it seems, was annoyed by someone coughing in court. He announced that the coughing gentleman would be held in contempt of court if he coughed again. Of this judicial decision, Chesterton said dryly, "One has a certain respect for a man who invents a new crime." Chesterton brought this incident up to suggest that the English prefer to have their despots to be somewhat eccentric and personal. They did not like the despotism of great bureaucracies such as that of Rome or Germany. On the other hand, if the judge could make coughing a crime, he could by the same token make wearing a waistcoat a crime. He could even make being ugly a crime, by which rule, Chesterton quipped, "some distinguished legal gentlemen will be in serious danger."
The point of this is that it would not be so bad that judges have personal eccentricities except that "the whole world around them, the newspapers, the tone of opinion, encourage them to use it in a very personal way." What, then, might prevent this personal use of arbitrary power? Here is Chesterton's almost prophetic, to recall my initial remarks about lawyers and clergy, response:
In our legal method there is too much lawyer and too little law. For we must never forget one fact, which we tend to forget nevertheless: that fixed rule is the only protection of ordinary humanity against clever men -- who are the natural enemies of humanity. A dogma is the only safeguard of democracy. The law is our only barrier against lawyers. In the same way, the Prayer-Books is our only defence against clergymen.
Too much lawyer and too little law -- Mary Ann Glendon has written a new book entitled, I believe, A Government Under Lawyers, an utterly paradoxical Chestertonian title. My friend B. F. Smith, moreover, has suggested that the one thing we need to do in our churches is to get rid of the pamphlet missals and all of us buy a Roman missal with all the parts so we can see what ought to be there in Mass, what is left out, what is made up. My cousin is dismayed at what does not come from liturgical preaching.
The idea that we need the law to defend ourselves from lawyers, that we need dogma to protect our democracy from the clever lawyers, and that we need prayer-books to defend ourselves from clergymen -- these are paradoxical ideas indeed. It seems absurd and nonsense that fixed law, dogma, prayer-books are needed to protect ordinary humanity from the depredations of clever men. Yet the prevailing doctrines in law schools and the courts and the legislatures run by lawyers is a kind of relativist positivism that knows no self-evident truths, no law but its own will.
Within the Church, it has taken almost the single-handed and superhuman energies of a great Pope to be sure we have in our ordinary hands documents like Cenesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church to make us believe that we can still find and hold the truth over against those who would teach us their own doctrines and practices, not the Chruch's. These are no doubt things of vast inconceivability. They have happened in our time. "Man can believe in anything, even in the truth" -- this, in the end, is the most outlandish thing we might ever expect.
35) From Schall on Chesterton, Gilbert!, 1 (September, 1997), 14.
CHESTERTON IN IRELAND
"I am going to give you, as a belated birthday present, a book of Chesterton I bet you do not have," my friend Scott Walter said to me one evening in April after we had heard an AEI lecture with the wonderful title, "Political Tears: Moist Eyes from Rousseau to Clinton." The book, which I indeed did not have and never had read, was a 1920 Edition of Chesterton's Irish Impressions (New York: John Lane). The book was an account of a trip Chesterton made to Ireland just after the Great War. Because of the "troubles" between Ireland and England at the time, it was a delicate trip. Chesterton spent a good deal of his life seeking to understand and explain the Irish to the English and the English to the Irish. Chesterton was not yet a Catholic though he was naturally sympathetic with the traditional faith of the Irish.
In some sense, this book is quite unlike any other book of Chesterton I have read. It contains much paradox of course -- "The essence of Calvinism was certainty about salvation; the essence of Catholicism is uncertainty about salvation" -- and much description of chance meetings and conversation through which he further explained the meaning of Ireland. In these post-Great War days, however much he might criticize points of English or Irish policy, the only real enemy or object of Chesterton's dislike in the whole book was Prussia. Whether in Belfast or Dublin, Chesterton thought that too much trafficking with that odious side of the German character was something that made the understanding of the Irish situation overly confused.
Chesterton's view of the Irish is centered on their own view of the family as the central institution of humanity. "The chief charm of having a home that is secure is having leisure to feel it as strange.... All the most dramatic things happen at home, from being born to being dead." The fundamental question in Ireland was not whether Mr. Murphy was a man, but whether he was a Murphy. Yet, the question of whether Murphy was a man and entitled to the dignities of any man seemed to Chesterton to be at the heart of what was wrong with the way the English looked at the Irish.
In a passage of remarkable eloquence, Chesterton concluded his chapter on "The Family and the Feud" in this manner:
The real case against the Union is not merely a case against the Unionists; it is a far stronger case against the Universalists. It is this strange and ironic truth; that a man stands up holding a charter of charity and peace for all mankind; that he lays down a law of enlightened justice for all the nations of the earth, that he claims to behold man from the beginnings of his evolution equal, without any difference between the most distant creeds and colours; that he stands as the orator of the human race whose statute only declares all humanity to be human; and then slightly drops his voice and says, "This Act shall not apply to Ireland."
I cite this eloquent passage from Chesterton in 1919 because it contains that contradiction that is still most prevalent in the world today wherein nation after nation, international body after international body proclaims such lofty ideals, but lowers its collective voice to add that they do not apply to the unborn, or to Christians in many Muslim lands, or to Baptists in some Catholic lands, or to Catholics in liberal lands.
With the present turmoil in the Irish Church and culture over the validity of the very things Chesterton admired in Ireland, his concluding reflections seem most poignant. Chesterton tells of getting on the return boat at an Irish port. As the boat pulls out, he looks back on the rainy hills of Wicklow. He thought of his own thoughts as he returned to his own country. He found that he had gained one sentiment that he could not "transfer" to England. "As I looked back at those rainy hills," he tells us,
I knew at least that I was looking, perhaps for the last time, on something rooted in the Christian faith. There at least the Christian ideal was something more than an ideal; it was in a special sense real. It was so real that it appeared even in statistics. It was so self-evident as to be seen even by sociologists. It was a land where our religion had made even its vision visible. It had made even its unpopular virtues popular. It must be, in the times to come, a final test-place, of whether a people that will take that name seriously, and even solidly, is fated to suffer or to succeed.
This passage is amusing in many ways -- that reality could finally be seen by statistics and grasped even by sociologists.
On the other hand, the passage is prophetic about Ireland, about the taking the name of Christian seriously, on whether Christianity is fated "to suffer or succeed." We are today, I suspect, less sure how Ireland might relate to the question of whether Christianity suffers or succeeds.
There are passages in this book on Ireland that, like so much in Chesterton, cause one to stop and reflect. Let me conclude with but two. The first has to do with the nature of Christianity and the second with the nature of wonder, with revelation and with reason, as it were. "The old tradition of Christendom was that the highest form of faith was a doubt. It was the doubt of a man about his soul." This position is contrasted to the change of focus to worry not about our own sins, but about those of others. Chesterton makes his point by citing the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats: "Men were thinking then (in medieval Catholicism) about their own sins, and now they are always thinking about other people's."
Aristotle had remarked in a famous passage that wonder is the reason we begin to think -- not fear or greed or desire, but simply wanting to know about something. Chesterton puts it this way, in relating it to the poetry what we see so much in Ireland. "The more we attempt to analyze that strange element of wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, the more we shall see that it must depend on some subordination of the self to a glory existing beyond it, and even in spite of it. Man always feels as a creature when he acts as a creator." The wonder we have is based on the fact that reality is broader than ourselves, that we do not create it from nothing, that what is important is that we realize is first our own sins.
"Some subordination of the self to a glory existing beyond it, and even in spite of it" -- these words of Chesterton from Ireland touch the heart of the existence of our kind in this world.
The final test-place of Christianity may or may not be Ireland and its choices, but it certainly will be about whether we have a glory to wonder about, one that we did not create, even when we do create artistic things like poems and paintings from things that already exist.
Series II.
1) Published in Gilbert! 4 (July/August, 2002), 8..
“MORE RADICAL THAN THE RADICALS”
The Defendant, the journal of the Chesterton Society in Western Australia, kindly sends me a copy of their Quarterly. In the March, 2001 issue, we find a page entitled “Hannah Arendt on Chesterton,” which reproduces an article that originally appeared in The Nation in September, 1945. Arendt was a well-known German thinker who came to the United States during the Hitler era. She actually wrote here doctoral dissertation, I believe, on St. Augustine. I often used her The Human Condition in class.
It was in The Human Condition, I recall, that she said that Christ’s most political act was to introduce the idea of “forgiveness” into the world. She also maintained, citing the American President John Adams, that hell was the doctrine with the most immediate political consequences. I have always taken this latter comment to mean that, once we no longer have any doctrine about ultimate punishment, the burden on the state to punish wrongdoers becomes almost a divine power in its trying to be the place wherein all evils are righted. Ironically, get rid of hell and the state almost by default becomes all-powerful. We deny doctrine at our peril.
The burden of Arendt’s essay had to do with the “anti-bourgeois” spirit in Chesterton, Péguy, and Bernanos. She did not think any of the three were “great philosophers,” which may indicate something more about her own philosophy than about any of the three Catholic writers. “Since the turn of the (20th) century,” she writes, “these converts, it would seem, have felt that their proper field was politics and their task to become true revolutionaries, that is, more radical than the radicals.” What might it mean, to be “more radical than the radicals?”
The first thing we must realize is that the self-styled radicals cannot image anyone more “radical” than they are. They are essentially narrow since they cannot conceive anything really different, really radical. Chesterton in particular is aware of the foibles and contradictions of the defenders of modern cultural presuppositions. Chesterton’s great gift was humor, almost as if one needs to be witty to observe flakiness. Ideologues, especially liberal ones, are singularly humorless. Their standard reaction to seeing their cherished silly idea laughed at is to take every means to suppress any criticism of themselves. Arendt understood that “The great advantage of these neo-Catholic writers was that when they went back to Christianity they broke with the standards of their surroundings more radically than any other sect or party.” The people most likely to be out-of-date are those who fancy themselves to be quite up-to-date.
The ultimate threat against humanity is often the political program that promises a perfect humanity. This perfectionism is a heresy, if you will, that recurs often in the history of philosophy, politics, and religion. No matter how often we see the pursuit of perfection end up in something so horrid that no one would want to live in it, the fact is that a generation later similar political utopias are again proposed. “They (Chesterton, Péguy, and Bernanos) realized that a pursuit of happiness which actually means to wipe away all tears will pretty quickly end by wiping away all laughter.” Hannah Arendt was a Jew and, perhaps for that very reason, was able to see more clearly than most the connection between the pursuit of perfection and the destruction of laughter.
Arendt added, “It was again Christianity which taught them that nothing human can exist beyond tears and laughter, except the silence of despair. This is the reason why Chesterton, having once and for all accepted the tears, could put real laughter into his more violent attacks.” Nothing human can exist beyond tears and laughter except despair – that is a remarkable insight into Chesterton.
What is being said here? What can it mean to say we must both laugh and attack? In some sense, the worst attack is laughter itself. Very few people can stand to be laughed at, especially when they are indeed oblivious to their own contradictions and the dangers of their own systems. Arendt gave this amusing example: “When Chesterton ... denounces the ‘moderate philanthropist’ who does not give up ‘petrol or servants’ but rather ‘some simple universal things’ like beef or sleep, because these pleasures remind him that ‘he is only a man’ – then Chesterton has better described the fundamental ambition of the ruling classes.” The essence of humor is to see the relationship of things. The essence of satire is to point out how some people do not see their own foibles. They pursue in their own minds what it is “only to be a man,” while, at the same time, they deny to others the normal human things like beef and sleep in the very name of their being only a man.
Chesterton was “more radical than the radicals” because he understood the truth of revelation, something that was true from the source of truth itself and hence quite unlike the alternatives to it that we concoct for ourselves. In a world in which freedom is an idol claiming no content but what we choose to make of it, it is the height of radicalism to read that it is “the truth that will make us free.” The radicalism of Chesterton, the humor of Chesterton, are both based on the liberty we have when we understand that we do not create either the world or ourselves. Only then can we delight in what is because it is. Only then can we know what is really not ourselves and, to use the great Chestertonian word, be grateful for it.
2) Published in Gilbert! 2 (July/August, 1999), 8.
THE MIND “POISONED” WITH PARADOXES
In 1914, J. M. Dent & Sons republished Chesterton’s The Defendant, originally published in 1901. For this edition, Chesterton was persuaded to write a new introduction, entitled, naturally, “In Defence of a New Edition.” Chesterton’s introduction begins with his wondering why would anyone republish these such essays? The best reason to republish them would be that the earlier edition was completely forgotten so that new readers look on the text as something never before seen.
Chesterton imagines that Shakespeare or Balzac “moved to prayers” would prefer not to be remembered. Why? They would be pleased with this very thought that they were suddenly unknown to a new generation of readers. So good are they, that “if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and read.” After all, no one writes unless he hope that he will be read, even though no one knows, on writing anything, whether he will be read or not or in what era. Many a book became much read only after the death of its author. Chesterton then asks why is it that we ourselves do not see the wonder of Shakespeare or Balzac? He states the principle: “It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are.”
If there is any phrase that better sums up Chesterton than any other, I think, it is this one, his admonition to us to see “things as splendid as they are.” We can sometimes, but not always, see this splendor in things on seeing them for the first time. But, and this is peculiar to Chesterton, we can see it, perhaps ever more clearly, by seeing things again – in their original splendor. God delights, as Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, by doing and seeing things again and again, because of their wonder.
Chesterton, surprisingly, tells us that he is a bit concerned about the title of the book, The Defendant, which is a series of short essays defending marvelous things like “rash vows,” “skeletons,” “nonsense,” “ugly things,” “detective stories,” “baby-worship,” and “slang.” Chesterton’s worry is that the book’s title is, properly speaking, “inaccurate.” A defendant refers to the law, a defendant is concerned primarily to “defend himself,” whereas Chesterton is concerned to defend “the character of King John” or “the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog,” in short, everything but himself.
Someone, evidently C. F. G. Masterman, in The Speaker, had attacked Chesterton’s book. He said that Chesterton displayed a “mind” “poisoned ... by paradox.” For those of us who love Chesterton, we are as eager as Socrates to drink this same poison. Chesterton is not annoyed by this accusation about his mind and does not intend to defend himself against it. Paradox is not his poison but his delight.
Masterman, whom he calls “my excellent friend,” had also accused Chesterton of the vice of optimism. This finding of good in ordinary things, Chesterton’s penchant, Masterman thought, prevented us from devoting our energy to reform things. Chesterton confessed that the only reason he wrote this new introduction was “ethical,” not literary; that is, it was necessary to defend what he thought true. Pessimism, evidently, should be the source of improvement, Chesterton argued, because if things were bad, people would want to change. But it did not seem to work that way. The reason is that if you think that something is bad, as a pessimist does, you can have no desire to improve it because you do not, according to your theory, think it capable of improvement.. To change bad things to good or ugly things to beautiful, there must already be in them “some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired.” This passage recalls Chesterton’s remark, again in Orthodoxy, I think, that Rome did not first become great, then men loved her. Men first loved her, therefore she became great.
What prevents progress? Chesterton’s answer is properly metaphysical: “(It) is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving.“ If the world is already good, we are some odd sort of revolutionaries to want to change it. But if it is evil, we “must be conservatives.” I presume he meant by this that to conserve what little good there is in an evil world, we cannot change much lest we are left only with evil..
Finally, Chesterton gives his ultimate reason for republishing such wonderful essays, even in 1914, such a symbolic year, the “Guns of August,” World War I, surely a time that ended two centuries of optimistic progressive theory. These essays, he thought, may or may not he considered “serious literature.” But they are ethically “sincere.” Why so? Because they seek “to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.”
This is the mysterious truth, isn’t it? If I say, I will not love you until you improve to be worthy of my love, the consequence is that I will never love you and you really have no reason to improve. In order to improve things, we must first love them. It is no wonder that we read in Scripture that God first loved us. Unless we do what God does, we will never understand either what God is, or why he loves us. Unless someone first loves us, we will never know that we are loveable. But if someone has first loved us, we know that this love could not have been because we were already perfect. This is why God loves sinners, because He sees in them what in them is beautiful and what is good. We can reject God, no doubt, but in doing so, what we reject is our opportunity of seeing the splendor in what is already in us beautiful and good.
3) Published in Gilbert! 5 (April/May, 2002), 18-19.
ON “DEPRIVING HUMANITY OF DIVINITY”
Recently, I was in the Jesuit Community at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Just off their dining room was a small library. After breakfast the last morning I was there, I had a few moments to browse. Before my eyes was a copy of the Chesterton collection, The Common Man. This collection was published in 1950 by Sheed & Ward. I had seen it before but I did not have a copy. I noticed that the copy in the Rockhurst library was not accessioned. So, suppressing the strong temptation to steal it on the grounds that no one ever looked at it, I took it to the Father Minister of the house. I explained to him that I do these columns on Chesterton, that this book had no markings on it, that I would be glad to purchase it. Naturally, good man that he is, the Minister said, “keep it.” So now, thanks to up-to-date things in Kansas City, I am the proud possessor of The Common Man.
In this collection is an essay called “God and Goods.” It is an essay about atheism written in the context of the then popularity of Bolshevism. Actually, the essay is something of a brief history of modern atheism, on how very difficult it is for an atheist to figure out what he stands for if he is against God. Indeed, “those who in modern times have tried to destroy popular religion, or a traditional faith, have always felt the necessity of offering something solid as a substitute. The queer part of it is that they have offered about a dozen totally different things; some of them entirely contradictory....” It is most difficult to come up with an alternative to the truth of religion. When forced to explain any proposed alternative, it turns out to be embarrassingly thin and does not last. Indeed, it seems odd today to be reading an article of Chesterton on Bolshevism, surely another contradiction that did not work, however popular it once was.
Chesterton points out that the atheists of the French Revolution proposed for our edification someone called “natural man” or the “noble savage.” These enlightened philosophers did not like parish priests, and killed not a few of them during the French Revolution, but they did not understand what any parish priest knew namely, “that it is rather more difficult to be a happy animal, than to be a happy man.” By any empirical evidence, the “savage” who was “noble” turned out to be closer to Aristotle’s notion that man when bad is worse than the animals than to any virtuous soul. Chesterton added, “a man cannot be an animal for the same reason that he cannot be an angel; because he is a man.” We cannot escape what we are and some of us, at least, think we should not try. Those who insisted on burning down the churches found out that man was not happy in their gardens and parks.
Hence the great 19th Century discovery with Ricardo was that nature was not benign but “cruel.” Dogs did eat dogs; big fishies did eat little fishies. So if gardens would not make us happy, maybe factories and commerce would. We certainly produced a lot of things, covered a lot of land. But things got worse Chesterton pointed to a third alternative to religion that tried to solve the failures of the first two. “Men did not become perfect through being free to live and love; men did not become perfect through being free to buy and sell. It was obviously time for the atheists to find a third inevitable and immediate ideal. They have found it in Communism.”
This third alternative to religion was not the same as the earlier alternatives. What the communists wanted was “the betterment of humanity.” This “betterment” was a sort of “bribe for depriving humanity of divinity.” If we want to “better humanity,” the theory went – an ancient theory going back to the Epicureans whom Marx studied – we had to deprive them of their belief in the gods. When we tried out this alternative, of course, what we got was Marxism, Bolshevism. It did not work at all well. In fact, it was a horror.
Today, where we seem to be going, as Chesterton saw in his 1922, Eugenics and Other Evils, is in the direction of reconfiguring the human corpus at its most radical core, changing how we beget and how we educate our offspring. We are going to solve the problem of evil by genetics. This involves our rejecting the notion that human nature has a criterion for its own betterment that it did not give itself, that not even nature gave to itself. But the “amiable atheists,” as Chesterton called them, of the French Revolution found out that man did not become “perfect thorough being free to live and love.” With our new biological theories, I suspect, we are much closer to destroying out own kind than the Bolshevists, the atheist revolutionaries, or the commercial industrialists ever thought of.
What is the lesson that Chesterton draws from this analysis of “gods and goods?” It is a familiar one with him. Once we reject the truths of revelation and sanity, we have to come up with a workable alternative. Once we put these alternatives, embraced with so much enthusiasm, into actuality, we find they do not work. They create monsters, literally in the case of the biological theorists and practitioners. The “hope” of something better flounders on the classic “hope’ which somehow always turns out to be better than any of the atheist alternatives. “Every one of the revolutionary hopes that they (the atheist thinkers) themselves have offered has in its turn become hopeless.”
So it was a worthwhile trip to Kansas City to find out about gods and goods, about hope and hopelessness. Again, why Chesterton remains important is because he sees the intelligence of faith and the gods not just through themselves but more especially through the alternatives that are proposed to replace them. We should not be surprised that the alternatives do not work. We should be surprised that our kind insists in not drawing the obvious conclusion from its own man-made enthusiasms. By depriving mankind of its divinity, we end up with neither mankind nor divinity. We end up with our own ideas that are, when lived out, dangerous in the extreme and attractive to no one, including ourselves.
4) Published in Gilbert! 4 (January/February, 2001), 18-19.
THE ESSENCE OF TRINITY
Recently, Ignatius Press published the Twentieth Volume of Chesterton’s Collected Works. This volume includes these four Chesterton works – Christendom in Dublin, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, A Short History of England, plus a number of shorter essays. George Marlin had asked me to write the Introduction, which has the improbable title, “The Home, the Crown, and the Cross: On Explaining Humanity to Itself.”
In a section in The New Jerusalem, Chesterton has some very interesting comments on Islam. This book was written in 1920, and my Introduction was written before September 11, 2001. I had occasion recently to return to what Chesterton had said about Islam, particularly when I read an article in the Washington Times, about a Catholic priest in Rome who seemed to suggest that it was an advantage of Islam, and an implicit criticism of Catholicism, to be so “simple” in its theology. I had recalled that Chesterton had himself remarked in The New Jerusalem that it was precisely the relative “complexity” of Christian thought, in comparison to Islam, that indicated the fact that Christianity was much closer to reality, which is itself complex.
I had been reading Belloc’s remarkable, prophetic reflections on Islam. Belloc had indicated that Islam’s “simplification” of the Godhead denied any possibility of Trinity or, consequently, Incarnation. This position left God and us with no intermediary. Chesterton had said that it was the main intellectual mission of Thomas Aquinas to protect the idea that something other than God existed. This “other than God” (the rational creatures) had a certain freedom and autonomy that is not significant if no inner life if found in God nor any possibility of God to become man. An inert or arbitrary God has no chance of communicating with creation, nor creation no possibility of an ultimate meaning.
I had recalled that Chesterton had someplace remarked on this topic. It turned out to be the a passage in The Everlasting Man. Chesterton had been talking of the early heresies that wanted either to subordinate the Son to the Father, or make the Incarnation merely an apparition, whereas the central Catholic doctrine was that within the Godhead were three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, while one of these, the Son, became flesh and dwelt amongst us in order to redeem us.
In this context, Chesterton made the following remarkable observation when he came to speak of Islam’s denying these two “complex” doctrines (Trinity and Incarnation) in the name of simplicity: “The Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified deity in the religion of Islam” (CW, II, 360).
Every time I read this sentence, it became more astounding to me. In attempting to glorify God, Islam has sought to simplify Him. This process means taking away anything overly complicated. No doubt, there is something remarkably subtle in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation. To remove them breaks any significant relation between God and man, any relation that would actually demand something of man’s reason and will in terms of intelligibility or logic. God becomes pure will. Man becomes submissive to whatever God wills. Religion is simply and unquestioningly doing whatever Allah demands.
But what struck me about Chesterton’s comment as simply remarkable was the brief reason he gave, almost as an after-thought, for rejecting this Islamic simplicity, namely, “the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love....” That is to say, if the relation of God to man is not one of absolute “submission” – the real meaning of the word, Islam – the reason must be that God is not “simple” in the sense of having no diversity or otherness within the Godhead. This consideration goes back to Aristotle’s famous wonder in The Ethics about whether God was “lonely.” If God is “lonely,” He might need a companion. Where is this companion to come from? One thesis is that the reason for creation is the loneliness of God. The world is created so that God would not be lonely, so that He would have a friend.
Needless to say, this position will never do. For as Aristotle also intimated, God is too exalted to man ever to think that man or creation could adequately make Him less lonely. God is not “less lonely” whether He creates or not. The Trinity, Chesterton affirms, is the “logical” side of love. What can this mean? Clearly, it must mean that if God is love, as St. John affirms, it cannot because this love’s object lies outside of Himself. The “otherness” in God is the “logic,” the condition of there being love within the Godhead, three Persons, one nature.
And it is from this Trinitarian “complexity” in God that we can conceive of an Incarnation whereby one Person within the Godhead should become man. The reason for this possibility is this same “logic” of love. God does not “have” to become man. If He is indeed all powerful and all knowing, it seems possible that He may do so if He has some adequate reason. This “adequate” reason is not something we might figure out by ourselves. But it may be there if God is not merely “pure will” but a God who knows each of His creatures, especially those who themselves possess the powers of knowing and choosing, especially too if they choose wrongly. In other words, Chesterton had it exactly right. Behind all our external dealings with Islam lies this central theological issue of the nature of Godhead. Get this wrong, and everything else will go wrong. Perhaps the meaning of this war is that God is tired of neither Islam nor Christianity getting the issue straight in relation to each other.
The Trinity implies that there is an abundance within God such that there is no reason for God having to “create” anything outside of Himself. The proper expression of this abundance is Trinity, a non-scriptural, but accurate, word. But it may be quite possible to envision that this same Trinity might choose to associate other personal beings within its inner life. It need not do this, but it can. And if this intention is carried out, it must be because what is created is created in that love that fires the life of the Trinity itself. If man uses his freedom against this love, which is possible by the very terms of the creation of a rational, free, personal creature, God is not prevented from doing something about it, provided He does not destroy our freedom in the process.
We are not asked to be “submissive” to God, but to love God. And this requires the complexity, as it were, of our theology, of our understanding of God whereby our response to God as well as God’s address to us includes the “logic” of love. We become more godlike not by being “submissive” to an arbitrary Godhead but by loving God and our neighbor in the freedom in which we are created to be what we are. It is only with such intellectual “tools” that we can properly “explain humanity to itself.”
5) Published in Gilbert!, 3 (January/February, 2000), 9-10.
ON THE CHEERFULNESS THAT COMES FROM THEOLOGY
In Chesterton’s book on Chaucer (CW, Vol. XVIII), Chesterton remarks that no one was so rich in that middle ages that he could “have sent a herald to every man’s house every morning, to challenge with trumpet and tabard any other view than that which this particular rich man wished to promulgate.” Needless to say, Chesterton was referring to the morning newspaper and, I suppose by analogy, to the morning or evening TV broadcast. What was found in such sources seemed to be, Chesterton thought, “unanswerable because it is unanswered.” If we have no resources of our own, from our own faith or reason, then often what we read will seem unanswerable because we have no idea how to answer what is presented to us.
As a thought experiment, Chesterton imagined the sort of books that someone like Chaucer must have known. Even if these few books were “borrowed or copied or translated or mistranslated,” they were not in themselves limited books. Suppose, for example, that Chaucer had only three books, say, the works of Aristotle, the Divine Comedy, and the Summa of St. Thomas. Granted that these are rather hefty tomes, with such books, he would not, as Chesterton put it, “possess books” but he would “possess the world.” One could have all the morning newspapers in the country with all the journals, book clubs, and NPR at his fingertips, which is possible with Internet, still he would be “without having anything like such a cosmic conspectus, or complete consideration of all sides of the real world” that would come from these three books.
No doubt today, Aristotle, Dante, and St. Thomas are likewise found on Internet so the competition is not merely possessing the books but knowing them. Christianity is often accused of being “narrow.” The fact is that it is just the opposite. “Nobody can read St. Thomas’s theology without hearing all the arguments against St. Thomas’s theology.” Chaucer was able to depict such a wide variety of character and idea precisely because he knew from such sources that “the universe was a many-sided thing.” Chaucer was broad-minded “from his theology.”
For Chaucer, “his theology was a thing that broadened his mind. It bought him into contact with great minds like Dante and Aquinas; it linked up his country with all Europe; it even referred him backwards to the greatest sages of pagan antiquity.” So if medieval education seemed slow or narrow, what it did know was broad and universal. “Chaucer, though a courtier and a diplomatist, might have only one or two books; little trifles tossed off by Aristotle or Dante.”
Chesterton observed that, throughout its history, there have been many movements that tried to “simplify” Catholicism. This effort to simplify Catholicism “has never wrought anything but ill to Christendom.” What is at stake here? Chesterton is concerned that Chaucer’s wide variety of character and personality be appreciated, even in its faults and sins. The Church is a Church of sinners, but a Church containing Pardoners who forgive the sinner but know about sin. “If there is one feature that stands out ... from the literary personality of Chaucer, it is a curious sort of hilarious half-ironical welcome to people more cynical than himself. He has an impulsive movement to applaud what he does not approve. It is as if their impudence gave him so much pleasure, that he could not withhold a sort of affection based on gratitude.” This is a remarkable passage, a kind of literary commentary on what it must mean to leave the wheat and the tares in the world, that it is not we, but God who does the final separating. At the same time, it reminds us that perhaps there is something good in the sinner from which his renewal can arise and about which we can be amused.
Chaucer, it is to be recalled, was rather delighted by the foibles of monks and nuns. The whole point of his wit about them, as Chesterton pointed out, was not that they were monks or nuns but that they were not very good ones. “Neither Chaucer, nor anybody else in Chaucer’s day, ever dreamed of complaining that monks were monks. They only complained, as Chaucer did, because monks were not monks.... He might, like many another medieval writer, deal rather scandalously with the scandal of monks or nuns who broke their vows. He would never, like a modern writer, think it scandalous that they kept their vows.” As Chesterton said somewhere else, the modern mind has no problem with monks and nuns who break their vows. What confuses it and challenges it are the monks and nuns who are faithful to their vows.
“All healthy and vigorous minds have great pleasure in explaining anything....” Sometimes it is said that Chaucer or other medieval writers are long and boring, given to detailed and intricate explanations. Chesterton was quite sure that the reason why we did not often come to the truth is because we cut off argument too soon. We were too busy with minor things to consider the important ones. We never missed reading the morning paper or listening to the evening news, but we never got around to Aristotle, Dante, or Aquinas. “A living and logical gusto for giving long explanations of everything, though it may be an infliction on the sensitive, is itself an attribute of the strong. To anyone who knows what logic is, the sustained lucidity and consistency of the Parson’s Tale is itself sufficient proof that writing it was, for Chaucer, not merely a moral toil, but an intellectual joy.” To know the truth is, precisely, an “intellectual joy.” This is the teaching of Aristotle; this is the teaching of Aquinas. These are the words of Chaucer.
Thus, it is not surprising that Chesterton finds Aquinas and Chaucer see the same things from their different angles. “He (Aquinas) does lift Faith above Reason but he does not lower Reason. He does put the supernatural higher than the natural; but does not lower the natural. He says that the lower thing is in every sense worthy; except compared with the higher it is worthless.” Chaucer too could enjoy and see the lower things and the higher things. He did not think it right to avoid the wonder of the lower things because of the reality of the higher things. “A man like Chaucer had originally reached the sort of balanced and delicate habit of mind, the habit of looking at all sides of the same thing; the power to realize that even an evil has a right to its own place in the hierarchy of evils; to realize, at least, that in the abysmal realtivities of Hell and Purgatory, there are even things more unpardonable than the Pardoner.”
Of Chaucer, Chesterton says, “He had Charity; that is the heart and not merely the mind of our ancient Christendom.” The origin of the “cheerfulness” of Chaucer was clear: “Now I will here advance the thesis that this cheerfulness or sanity came from theology.” It did not come from just any theology, not from a simplified theology, but from that found in the books of Aristotle, Dante, and Aquinas. This is the first passage in which I have ever noticed that Chesterton identified “cheerfulness” with “sanity.” That is to say, if we are not sane, we will not be cheerful. And we will not be either cheerful or sane without Charity which vivifies both the heart and mind of our ancient Christendom.
6) Published in Gilbert!, 3 (December, 1999), 8-9.
CHESTERTON ON “THE SERVILE STATE”
In his Illustrated London News column of September 10, 1921 (C.W., Vol. XXXII), Chesterton wrote on “What Mr. Belloc’s Servile State Means.” Belloc’s book, I believe, had been published in 1913 and received rather widespread attention. But Chesterton suspected that this notoriety of the book had little to do with whether it was actually read. Indeed, Chesterton said that many of the really great books, so called, are never read. “The books that influence the world are those it has never read.” As examples of this fame of non-read books, Chesterton cites Darwin, Locke, Marx, and Newton.
Chesterton thought his friend Hilaire Belloc’s book, The Servile State, fell into this category of well-known, unread books. Every one liked the title, in fact. It seems pithy, pungent. And everyone could put whatever meaning he wanted on it. But this new meaning was not Belloc’s. I have often thought that Belloc’s book deserves rather prophetic attention (see my “Freedom, Property, and The Servile State,” The Chesterton Review, XII (May, 1986), 185-94). Both Chesterton and Belloc were anti-capitalist and anti-socialist. The Servile State was a tract on how it was possible for citizens in capitalist societies, in effect, to become slaves again, largely by their own choosing. To be sure, they would be happy slaves, well-fed slaves, and above all, would not call or feel themselves to be slaves, but they would still bear all the marks of a people whose lives were provided for them by someone else, not themselves.
Belloc’s thesis was somewhat in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, who asked in the Brothers Karamazov whether in the future, given a choice, men would choose bread rather than freedom. Obviously, the great Russian thought they would choose bread and give up their freedom. Belloc did too. If there is any problem with Belloc’s thesis, and perhaps one of the main reasons that it is considered rather a maverick thesis, is that he thought that it would be the modern corporation, not the state, that would be the agent of this slavery. Mind you, it can never be called precisely “slavery.” It would probably be called “liberty,” in act. But Belloc was not interested in names. He wanted to know what sort of freedom that men actually had and whether it gave them control of their lives.. The term “servile state,” Chesterton points out, is a very popular one. Since few have read the book, they have various speculations about what it might mean. Thus, there is a certain liberty to give it whatever meaning we want. “If it be a triumph to have popularized a name, Mr. Belloc might truly claim that nearly everybody by this time has heard of him and his Servile State.” It turns out, of course, that Belloc had something definite to say about the modern state that was quite different from the meanings given to his phrase by those who never read the book.
First, the socialists thought Belloc’s book was a continuity of Herbert Spencer’s ideas of competitive capitalism. Thus they thought that Belloc meant that the future would be servile because it would be socialist. On the contrary, Chesterton points out, Belloc thought that the future would not be socialist because it would be servile. Nor is the servile state a criticism of the too rigidly coercive state that would be “servile” on that account. In Belloc’s view, the servile state did not come from the public sector, but from the private sector. The private corporate relations would in effect make the workers or employees of corporations to be servants and, eventually, slaves, though we do not like to use that term.
Capitalists thought Belloc was predicting some horrible disaster in the future. But Belloc was not predicting some catastrophic event in the future. He was observing a very gradual tendency that would arrive at the servile state almost without any notice. Everyone would have been already conformed to its tenets and practices for a long time before it was ever analyzed. Belloc thought that we were already “servile,” dependent, in our relations, but refused to recognize it.
At the time Chesterton writes, he notes the problem of widespread unemployment. The good capitalist responds to this situation by protesting that he would be glad to give employment to the needy. But if he does, he cannot afford them for them later on to go on strike. The employer would pay the workers even if they did not work. He would promise them security. This situation, Belloc thought, is very near, in principle, to the ancient definition of slavery. As long as we think of slavery as something to do with race, we will never get what Belloc was driving at. “The whole point is that the master does undertake the whole support of the slave, idle or busy, but receives in return the right to decide when he shall be busy and when idle.” People will be supported in all life’s concerns, provided they do not demand any independent say. Many corporate leaders think this is a fair arrangement. The only trouble, Belloc thought and Chesterton agreed, was that the relationship was in principle servile, not free.
What are we to make of this discussion? Was Belloc correct in think that the future (now ours) would reintroduce a kind of prosperous, beneficent slavery to western society, indeed to the world? The catch most of us would have, I think, with Belloc’s thesis is the public/private aspect. Much depends on what we think of the current state as itself the principal guarantor of all our crises in life – employment, health, education, old age, morals. Is this dependency a form of slavery or a form of freedom? It is true that corporations themselves, as well as individuals, can provide for many of these things through the private sector, though usually behind this provision there is both the power of past strikes and the power of the state mandating the lines along which such provision will occur and guaranteeing against any failure.
Do we call this modern well-being state “servile?” We call it the liberty of the people to provide for themselves by laws, when we do not want to use the word “welfare.” Is there anything servile about it? It means that none of these basic things are available except on the conditions preempted by the state. There are distributive or subsidiarity movements among us that seek to return a modicum of non-servility to the people. Tax-cuts are opposed on the grounds that they will deprive the sate of the monies necessary to take care of us. Vouchers to send children to schools of one’s choice removes some of the servility of the present education system which takes tax monies and allows everyone to participate in education, provided that norms mandated by the state be agreed to. Home schooling is a kind of Bellocian challenge to this essentially servile system.
Belloc never thought, and this might surprise us, that the modern “slaves” would be unhappy or discontent. They were concerned mainly with security. In fact, he thought this secure contentment would be the most serious problem. People would be very pleased if someone else agreed to take care of them. They would rebel against anyone suggesting that some way involving one’s own initiative might be superior both in security and in freedom. One cannot help noticing the servility aspect of the many current discussions about social security. Ultimately, it appears, people want the government to take care of them; or they want the government to demand that the corporations take care of them, just like the government takes care of its own vast employees.. Government itself retains and increases its power precisely by generously volunteering to take more and better care.
We cannot, of course, read contemporay events back into Belloc’s thesis. Essentially, it was that men would give up their freedom in return for servile security and would be happy doing so. From this angle, I am sure that The Servile State was the prophetic book the folks who never read it thought it was. Belloc perceived something most dangerous in incipient modern thinking about the relation of people to government to corporation. He was convinced that slaves could be well-educated, content, prosperous and quite oblivious to their real status. The Servile State remains, I think, a seminal source for seeing what we are. The word opposed to “servile” (no servile work on Sundays) is free, where free means the actual control of one’s own life and property. Property was the main guarantor of the capacity not to be dependent on the state or the corporation or the societies claiming the “right” to make us secure. The Servile State still forces us to ask whether we live servile lives in our state, in which our happiness is to be pursed.
7) Published in Gilbert!, 2 (January/February, 1999), 8-9.
"PRAISE ENOUGH"
In 1921, the famous historian at the University of London, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, edited a volume entitled, Medieval Contributions to Modern Civilisation. Hearnshaw himself wrote the introductory Chapter, "The Middle Ages and their Characteristic Features." His thesis was that there were two "extreme" views about the middle ages, one that undervalued it and the other that overvalued it. As I read along in this essay, which I had not read in years, I was astonished to learn Hearnshaw's view that it was precisely Chesterton and Belloc who were the chief exaggerators.
What Hearnshaw's problem was is not altogether clear. He began by recalling that Chesterton, in 1917, wrote a book called A Short History of England. In criticism, Hearnshaw cited not this book itself but a review of it by George Bernard Shaw, in which Shaw wittily describes the book as "something like a history of England." This was, no doubt, intended as a put-down. Hearnshaw added, "It deserved the qualified praise which Mr. Bernard Shaw gave to it; but it deserved it on quite other grounds." Evidently, Shaw's reason for slighting Chesterton's book was not that of Hearnshaw.
The book was, in Hearnshaw's view, "nothing like a history of England; it was very much like Chesterton's other writings." Now, Hearnshaw is gentleman enough to grant that Chesterton, writing as he normally does, his paradox, is "praise enough" of any piece of writing. Presumably, this praise means that Chesterton is witty, refreshing, entertaining, but, clearly, quite wrong. Chesterton was "marvellously skilled" in standing (literally) upon his head. As a result, Chesterton describes in "inverted language" the topsy-turvy scenes "which he beholds from this depression." In other words, Chesterton's description of England and the world is accurate enough, but "up-side-down," that is, exactly the opposite of the truth.
Chesterton, of course, makes a point, a sore point, that provokes Hearnshaw in his professional status. Namely, modern historians are not in fact, by their modern methodology, seeing what was there to see in the middle ages. The popular histories (the ones written by the academic dons), Hearnshaw cites Chesterton as saying, "trample on the popular tradition." Chesterton then "proceeds to revive the 'popular tradition' of a medieval 'merrie England' free from Puritans, utilitarians, vegetarians, and teetotallers." Evidently, in Hearnshaw's view, anyone who would come up with such a conclusion about English history is seeing the world while standing on his head. Chesterton would undoubtedly have agreed with Hearnshaw that someone was iundeed standing on his head, but he would have hinted that it was not himself.
I do not know whether Chesterton ever came across this amusing account of his position. Without denying their right to exist and be what they are, Chesterton would no doubt have thought that England would have indeed been more "merrie" without "Puritans, utilitarians, vegetarians, and teetotallers." In context, it is difficult to imaging how anyone could deny this. Evidently, Mr. Hearnshaw was content with all these folks in their penitential fervors. And he thinks, unlike Chesterton, that the common folks of medieval England really wanted these sorts of ideologies to rule their lives. Chesterton's point about the difference between popular histories and popular traditions was that people made the traditions, traditions of beer, holidays, beef, and things for their own sakes. These things, in the short history of England, were eliminated not by the people themselves, as the dons say in their learned books, but by sundry elites imposing these rigid systems on them.
If we look at the popular traditions, they tell us that the people of England resisted all these modern things. The people lost, but to see English history from Chesterton's angle, up-side-down, if you will, is to see it not as a triumph of reason or providence or evolution, but as a sort of tragedy and violence that took away precisely those things which, if left alone to develop, would have made a more human and noble and happier -- a merrier -- England. Shaw -- whom Chesterton called precisely a "Puritan" and Hearnshaw fault Chesterton for seeing these things, these alternatives, as real possibilities, as real alternatives for real people. Chesterton did not think that what did happen had to happen. And he maintained that it did happen against the best interests and desires of the real folks of England and indeed against the real instincts of human beings wherever. I believe certain histories of England are finally beginning to see Chesterton's point.
From Chesterton's book on Dickens, George Marlin, in The Quotable Chesterton, dug up the following entry: The teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is making a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man of himself. The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself. But nothing connected with a human and artistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature. The only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller.
We live after the time when the effort to prohibit drink and make us all teetotallers, and hence more beast-like, failed but during the time when we zealously seek to ban all tobacco but evidently not all drugs. We can agree with Hearnshaw that when Chesterton writes like he does, that is "praise enough." And we can also begin to realize that when Chesterton saw the world up-side-down from the view of the popular histories and historians, it was because he was seeing things as they were. What was up-side-down was not in Chesterton's mind but in that of the historians who could not see what might have been and therefore could not understand what was.
8) Published in Gilbert!, 4 (June, 2001), 20-21.
“TO TRACE THE LINES OF A FORM – AND OF A FACE”
The Holy Father’s Apostolic Letter (Novo Millennio Ineunte, [OR, 10 Jan. 2001]) reflected on the meaning and import of the Jubilee Year. In this letter are several sections (#16-28) devoted to the Face of Christ. “At the end of the Jubilee ... our gaze is more than ever firmly set on the face of the Lord” (#16). This is a theme that the Pope previously brought up in his reflections on the French philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas. “Lévinas ... offers a remarkable formulation of this fundamental commandment of the Decalogue – for him, the face reveals the person. This philosophy of the face is also found in the Old Testament...” (Psalm 26[27]:8; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 210).
Chesterton’s chapter “The Demons and the Philosophers,” in his Everlasting Man, ends with these remarkable words: “Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form – and of a Face” (CW, V. II, 268). The cave artists, of course. did something no mere animal could do. They revealed that something had already crossed the line of rationality long before our theories would admit it. The figure of God in creation, likewise, points to a face that cannot be imagined except in a Word made flesh, of which we have all received in our own finite way.
Chesterton further implies that philosophers as such could never imagine this idea that the divine had a particular human Face in the Incarnation. Even the best philosophers -- he rightly identifies Aristotle -- “cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds.... None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate” (268). Our human faces exist not as the result of any human philosophy.
Chesterton’s survey of philosophy in this chapter, ending with his reflections about Chinese, Hindu, and Buddhist philosophies, carefully avoids any premise of philosophic nihilism. Chesterton first remarks that the demons, as they are depicted in various primitive religions, are invariably understood to be against children, against innocence. This puts a new light on “the culture of death” and the industry that systematically kills the unborn. The ancient city that was most associated with the slaughter of children was Carthage. “Carthage also was a high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised civilisation. And Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice” (253).
Carthage was a colony of the Phoenicians. Some of its foul practices are found condemned in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy (18:10), reads, “Any Israeli who presents his child to be burned to death as a sacrifice to heathen gods, must be killed.” Yahweh manifests an abiding and continued hatred of child sacrifice, for whatever motive, in whatever form. “Certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic,” Chesterton continued. “There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war upon children” (254). One only needs to read of certain children’s “rights” conventions and certain policies against “unwanted children” to realize that our time is deeply involved, whether it admits it or not, in a practice once attributed only to demons. One has to add fetal experimentation and cloning which do not respect the new face or prevent a really new face from coming to be.
The key philosophic counter-point to this practical demonology is precisely the existence of a reality outside our minds, a reality with definite lines, a reality we are only given, we do not make, a reality that everywhere bears the sign of gift, not logical consequences.. “Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are truly there; or in other words that things are really things. In this Christianity is at one with the common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it” (267). Things are really there. Things are things. Cheese is cheese. Goats are goats. Eggs are eggs. Again we have pointed out to us that natural things are not preserved by natural things. “How odd it is!” we say to ourselves. “For realism is more impossible than any other ideal” (261). The natural philosophers and the natural religions, as this extraordinary chapter indicates, have invented everything but what is. “Why is that?” we wonder.
I am fond of citing a sentence that I found in Latin in E. F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed. It reads: “Homo non proprie humanus, sed superhumanus est” (38). (Man, properly speaking, is not human, but super-human.). Schumacher attributes this sentence to “the Scholastics,” but I have never located just who said it first. What it means is that God created man for Himself, not for man himself. Yet, imagine my utter astonishment when I re-read -- I had read it before but never “noticed” it – the following sentence in Chesterton’s reflection on demons and philosophers: “But it is true that Nature is really looking for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural” (261-62). Nature is always longing to see God “face-to-face” and this longing is primarily expressed, for all of creation, in the lines of our very own faces.
9) Published in Gilbert!, 5 (March, 2002), 16.
“THE CASE FOR CLASSICAL EDUCATION”
In the Adoremus Bulletin, for January 2002, I came across the following letter to the editor: “Can you give me a good response to answer this question which was posed to me by my friend? ‘How do I answer my kids when they ask me why we would use a dead language in Mass? They grew up with the Mass in English?’“ The editor’s response was simply that a) Latin is not a dead language and b) it is a universal language. Besides that even “living languages” often become less intelligible because of natural changes – try reading Shakespeare without a dictionary, for example.
Our library has a Chesterton collection. Recently, while browsing there for something on Belloc, I came across Chesterton’s essay, “On the Classics,” in Come to Think of It. Chesterton begins the essay with an account of a young man “in fine frenzy” who maintained in public that “the study of Latin and Greek is not of much use in the battle of life.” As an alternative to the study of the “dead languages,” the young man proposed that we study something practical, like Health, that is, “the facts and functions of the body.” To this Chesterton himself admitted that “I, for one, consistently neglected to do any work at the school in which I was supposed to be learning Latin and Greek....” Chesterton recalls, however, that he did pick up some Latin that came in very handy. He observed that both Samuel Johnson and Robert Louis Stevenson had “this weakness for traditional scholarship,” but that neither did “badly in fighting the battle of life.”
Chesterton is most amusing and goes to the heart of the matter. “The trouble about always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do it without destroying the health of the mind. Health is the most unhealthy of all topics.” This passage is mindful of a comment in Aristotle in which he remarked that medicine is directed to health as bringing it about, if possible. But when one is healthy, he has no use for a doctor. Health is directed to the things of health, which never are concerned with the body.
Indeed, Chesterton remarks that concern for our health can be quite morbid. There is nothing wrong with knowing what bodily functions are. The young man admitted there is no sense in talking medicine to babies or little children – to which admission Chesterton quips, “every man has a sane spot somewhere.” But he thinks that “big boys” should study something practical like health studies. The trouble with the young man is that he does not understand boys. “If you talk to a child about an aortic aneurism, he will not be frightened, he will only be bored. If you talk to a boy of fifteen or sixteen about it, and give only a few fragmentary hints of what it is like, he will very probably come to the rapid conclusion that he has got one.” What the boy lacks is that sense of proportion that he would get from a classical education. “Youth is a period when the wildest external carelessness often runs parallel to the most gloomy and concentrated internal cares.” I believe it was Chesterton’s friend, Shaw, if not Chesterton himself, who said that the only thing that youth lack is hope because they do not have enough experience to see alternatives.
So if we revise our school curriculum, which we have indeed, to make our primary study that of the body and not that of the mind, we will put our youth in a most dangerous state. “To throw a medical encyclopedia at the head of a young man in this condition is simply to provide him with a handbook of One Thousand Ways of Going Mad.” He will be convinced that he has every disease he reads about. Indeed, Chesterton recalls of talking to a professor of medicine who told him that in spite of all the precautions, that medical students themselves often suffer from this problem of finding a recently discussed disease in themselves.
What is the issue here? Redolent of the passage in Orthodoxy that the madman is the man of one fact, Chesterton points out that advocates of “facts” in education do not really understand what a fact is. “Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit. Facts by themselves can often feed a flame madness, because sanity is a spirit.” And this gets to the heart of what Chesterton is driving at. Madmen lack a sense of “proportion in a thing.” They really believe that Herodotus wrote Homer, or that the Great Pyramid “was a prophesy of the Great War.” Thus, we begin to see that “classical education” is not so “useless in the battle of life.” It is not facts that are important but what lies behind and in them, their spirit.
We hear much of the idea of culture. “What culture does, or ought to do, is to give a health of the mind that is parallel to the health of the body. It is ultimately a matter of intellectual instincts. A sane man knows when something would drive him mad, just as a man standing up knows at what angle he would fall down.” What causes this sanity is the careful reading of the Latin and Greek works, including the words of Scripture. “That is why the great men I have named, so different in their natures, felt that the classics did count somehow in the battle of life.” Practical education is not enough. “Here is the door, here is the open air, Itur in antiquam silvam,” we know that for such a mind lunacies will always be lesser matters and sanity be like the open air.” The careful reading of the classical authors gives us the image of an ordered soul and ordered city when this ordered life does not exist in the polity or culture to which we belong. This is why is can be said that in the battle of life, the classics free us. This is why we still read them.
10) Published in Gilbert!, 3 (October/November, 1999), 8-9.
ON BEING STILL IN EDEN
The book of Chesterton in my position that comes closest to the very beginning of the 20th Century is his The Defendant, published in 1901, a book probably written during 1900. Needless to say, the things worth defending in 1900 are still worth defending in 2000, and presumably in 3000. The only way to defy the culture today is to suggest that there are things about any culture that will abide, that what was essentially wrong in the First Century A.D. remains wrong in the year 2000 A.D. Or as Chesterton would have put it, what was right then is right now, that the essential battle is about making what is wrong in any century to be right in any century. It goes without saying that this does seem to be what is going on among us, the effort to make what is wrong to be right just because it happens that we do wrong things in our time.
The Introduction to this collection of essays does not neglect to mention even Christmas: “I have found that every man is disposed to call ... the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is.” Chesterton believes that the main problem with men is not that they are too prideful but that they are too humble. As a result, they underestimate the world. Someone must be around when “the worldlings despise the world” to defend the goodness of the world. If worldlings despise the world, it is the prophet who has been sent to tell us of its worthiness, of its goodness. And the prophets who tell us about this goodness are usually, as Chesterton imagines in the beginning of his Introduction, stoned.
There is, Chesterton remarks, a “weird and terrible humility.” The real fall of Adam is a spiritual fall. Many spiritual men, like General Gordon, Chesterton remarks, actually go about looking for the exact location of the Garden of Eden. Then Chesterton adds, in a remarkable phrase, that “most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.” No doubt, Chesterton has no intention here of denying the biblical account of the expulsion from the Garden, nor does he think that we already have a paradise on earth. But he does think that the earth is good and that we are too humble, too doubtful of the riches given to us, to recognize its real worth. When Chesterton says, speaking of the location of Eden, that “only our eyes have changed,” he, probably intentionally, wants us to recall those rather terrible words recorded in Genesis at the Fall wherein the eyes of Adam and Eve were “opened” and they saw that they were naked. In other words, their eyes were really more open when they walked in the Garden than when they could “see” after their Fall. We long for eyes that see what Adam and Eve saw in the Garden.
The only way you can change something, Chesterton thought, is not to see how bad it is, but to see how good it is. “It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them all that they are all sons of God.” Both Socrates and Christ are already in this sentence. Obviously, since we do not know or accept our real dignity, the dignity that says that we are chosen by God to be and to be with Him, our humility is something that makes us incapable of seeing what we are. The great revolutionaries, Chesterton thinks, have been “indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of man to realize its goodness.” What Chesterton has in mind is what lies behind his whole “defense of everything,” that is, that it is all right to be less than perfect, otherwise we could not be at all.
“Let me explain a little,” Chesterton continues. “Certain things are bad as far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a toothache good in itself, but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed.” The distinction between good and bad is not the same as the distinction between finite and infinite or between imperfect and perfect. I may have imperfect hearing or sight, but what I have is certainly better than nothing. And even in the case of sinners, when we rightly call their deeds “evil,” we do not intend to seek the elimination of the sinner but his conversion. The last lines of Chesterton‘s Introduction in defense of “defense,” are these: “A counsel for the defence would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men.” Man rejected by men. What is Chesterton getting at here? It does, after all have something to do with Eden and our “eyes that have changed.” When men rejected Man, the counsel for the defence, who was also on the Cross, said to the good thief, “this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” He did not destroy the world, but redeemed it.
The primitive prophets were stoned, Chesterton thinks, not because they said the world was bad, something that most people agree with, but because he said that “the grass was green and that the birds are singing in the spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.” Chesterton, a hundred years ago, had this uncanny sense that the real objection that we have to existence is that it is not as good as we would have it to be. We are too humble to see the wonders around us and too impatient to admit that it is all right that what is not absolutely the best still exists and it is lovely if only we open our eyes, not to see that we are naked, but to see that the grass is green and that we are still in Eden, in the place that the drama of our existence, our finite existence, is being worked out.
11) Published in Gilbert!, 5 (October, 2001), 20-21.
“THE ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY”
Liberty cannot make us “free.” It can in fact enslave us. I might be free to take a drink or to take dope, but if my freedom is not limited by something else, which is not more freedom, I will end up quite unfree, a slave to my desires. What is more likely to deprive us of our freedom, personal and political, is precisely, and ironically, our freedom. One rather excellent sign of the mysterious truth of Scripture is that Christ told us that it was the truth, not liberty, that would make us free.
Chesterton has a chapter in Eugenics and Other Essays (Vol. 4, Collected Works) entitled “The Eclipse of Liberty,” in which he wants to show the importance of how we think before we can reasonably talk of how we act. Let us suppose, he amusingly tells us, that you are peacefully asleep one night when you suddenly discover your next door neighbor coming through the skylight into your home. Obviously, the first thing you say to him is not, “Oh, good evening Harry, hope you are enjoying your evening outing.” You want to know, “What gives?”
Your neighbor, for his part, is busily trying to explain why he is coming through your skylight. Your first thought, of course, is about the “fine old family jewellery” stashed away in your attic. The more outlandish is your neighbor’s explanation, however, the more likely is it to be true. Thus, if he were to say that he happened to fall out of an aeroplane onto your roof and was trying to get down to the ground, this would be an odd, if not likely to reason. Or if he told that he ran across a mad dog and was running for his life to seek safety on your roof, you might just think it plausible.
But suppose your neighbor was a philosopher who told you that “after all, property is theft. Why after all should material objects be materially attached?” You would not need to be an intellectual genius to reach for your shotgun and chase him out of your property. If all property is theft, then your family jewelry is his as well as yours. The doctrine of private property no longer limits your neighbor’s freedom to take whatever he wants.
Chesterton has a marvelous capacity to spell out the consequences of ideas that we do not otherwise see. We live in a culture that proposes for itself not “self-rule” but maximal “freedom” as its defining characteristic. We do hear sometimes, less and less, the old caveat that your freedom is limited by my freedom. But even this restriction seems indefensible on the principle of a “right” to be free, or better, our right to define our own happiness, which the Supreme Court seems to have embraced. If I can define my own happiness and my neighbor can define his, there is little reason why he should not have a right to my jewelry if it is essential to his happiness defined by his liberty.
“Liberty has produced skepticism,” Chesterton observes, “and skepticism has destroyed liberty.” Why would “liberty produce skepticism?” we might ask ourselves, though if it does, we should have little trouble with understanding the consequence, “that skepticism destroys liberty.” If it is doubtful that liberty is true, then it is doubtful that we can have it. And if we cannot defend it, there is no sense going around claiming to be free.
“The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined,” Chesterton continues. In other words, there is a connection between defining a thing and having it. If liberty is “unlimited,” it can be the opposite of itself. Indeed, it cannot even have a self to be opposite to. To say what a thing is involves the effort to say what it is not. It is impossible to be a lover of anything if we do not have any idea of what it is we love. Indeed, the last thing we want of something we love is that it be so free that it can become something else. We don’t wish this of our wife; we do not wish this of our father; we do not wish it of God Himself.
“They thought they were only leaving it (liberty) undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.” We cannot really defend a thing that we cannot define. To be sure, we have to know in some intuitive way what a thing is before we can proceed properly to define it. If a thing is real, it can be defined since all that is, is directed to our intellects, to know. This includes freedom.
“Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom.“ If men are the causes not just of the proper wording of definitions, but of the thing itself to be defined, they need not define what is, even freedom, according to its own being or nature. That being or nature would limit their autonomy. That is, if the definition of freedom is “freedom,” then nothing really exists at all. Both the definition and the thing to be defined are subject only to our own freedom which cannot be limited even by itself..
Chesterton’s conclusion is blunt: “But the important point to seize about this reactionary skepticism is that as it is bound to be undermined in theory, so it is bound to be undermined in practice.” That is to say, if there is no theory of freedom, there will be no practice of it either. The practical disorders in the world begin in the theoretical disorders in the mind.
If the man who comes through our skylight is a philosopher who thinks property is theft, we should defend our property. If the man who educates our youth is a philosopher who thinks that the definition of freedom is freedom, then his freedom and our freedom have no truth or content. Since his freedom cannot be pinned down, then we will soon dwell in a freedom that is anything he, or better, the most powerful among us want it to be. The freedom to be free and the freedom not to be free are the same thing if the cause of freedom is freedom, not truth.
12) Published in Gilbert!, 5 (September, 2001), 20-21.
“A VERY ALARMING PLACE”
The Cannes Film Festival this year was given a fourteen minute preview of the New Zealand setting for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings which is due out in three segments in this and the following two years. One wonders if he should vow never to see this film in order to preserve its real wonder that can only come with one’s own reading and imagination wherein he knows that what he reads, as opposed to what is seen on the screen, is really the Tolkien story. No doubt some will go from the film to the books, and others will not forget the books on seeing the film, but I suspect those who only see the film, however good or bad, will miss the real drama of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, a drama not to be missed.
Meantime, Michael O’Brien, the Canadian novelist, has written a long essay in Catholic World Report (April, 2001) raising concern about what are more recently being called innocently “fairy tales.” In his essay, “Harry Potter and the Paganization of Children’s Culture,” O’Brien is particularly attentive to the occult in such “children’s” stories. O’Brien sees in these popular tales something that is not merely the account of good and evil but the subtle praise of evil.
Ironically, we find, alongside occult-tinged stories, a movement to restrict and rewrite classic fairy tales on the grounds that they are too scary for children. This notion is not new and was already prevalent in Chesterton’s time. It was mainly against this latter position that Tolkien himself in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories” and Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy argued. In the meantime, my colleague, Fr. Ronald Murphy, S.J., has written an important book, The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 2000) in which he argues that the Grimm brothers consistently wrote and symbolized the classical fairy of German and other traditions in a Christian, not simply pagan German, context.
In Robert Knille’s collection, As I Was Saying (Eerdmans, 1985), we find several brief accounts of the meaning of fairy tales in Chesterton. Chesterton was quite concerned about any manifestation of the occult, especially in children’s stories. But he did not think fairy tales were bad because they contained goblins and orcs and I know not what frightening monsters. In an essay entitled, “Dragooning the Dragon,” from A Miscellany of the First 500 Issues of G. K.’s Weekly, a book I never heard of before, Chesterton begins, “We all know people who think it wicked to tell children fairy tales which they are not required to believe, though of course not wicked to teach them false doctrines or false news which they are required to believe.” That pretty much says it all. The daily newspaper probably contains more damaging lies and outlandish monsters than fairy tales ever thought of.
The principle at issue is whether children only know about evil from fairy tales, so that if they never read a fairy tale the thought of evil will never occur to them. Chesterton thinks that ordinary kids are quite aware of evil from life itself; they do not need fairy tales to teach them about it, though fairy tales do help them to recognize it. But in an amusing aside, Chesterton reminds us that all of us can look pretty scary at times to any child. “Schoolmasters discussed the question (of fairy tales) recently in the light of the most recent psychology of esthetics,” he wrote. “For our part, we have seldom seen a schoolmaster who was half so decorative as a dragon. And though a giant may appear gross or grotesque, he is not necessarily less so when (as in the case of one or two professors) he is reduced to the dimensions of a dwarf. The human race must be a very horrible sight to the human child, if he is really so sensitive an esthete as all that.” It is perfect Chesterton humor to be able to imagine what a little child must think on first seeing his Uncle Harry or his Grandmother Sadie peering from above into his crib. Neither Uncle Harry nor Grandmother Sadie will be surprised if the child screams in horror on first seeing them, even though he may also eventually “goo” in delight after he gets used to them.
The main point that Chesterton wants to make about fairy tales, however, is almost the opposite of the accepted view that the goblins in fairy tales scare kids. That is to say, fairy tales are important to the child not because they frighten him, which they may, but because they teach him that fright is not everything. “The child learns without being taught that life contains an element of enmity. His own dreams would provide him with dragons; what the legend provides is St. George.” That is to say, the most surprising thing about us is not that there are dragons but dragon-slayers. Fairy tales provide us with hope even while acknowledging our fright in the world, even in our dreams which are there before the fairy tales. “The fear,” Chesterton wrote in a comment from Tremendous Trifles, “does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.”
Chesterton often repeats the same basic principle that we do not protect children from things that will scare or frighten them by thinking that the main cause of this fright is some fable read to them. “The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world because this world is a very alarming place.” To pretend otherwise is not in the least to help the child figure the world out. “Fairy tales are not responsible for producing fear in the child...; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child the first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is the first idea of the possible defeat of bogey.” How sane, how amusing such a comment!
No doubt what Michael O’Brien worries about in more recent occult tales is their obscurity about the good, something that is not found in classic fairy tales. The modern world for all its optimism is not sure, often does not want to be sure, that, in the end, the good will win, or even that it exists. For if it does, that places a demand on us that we may not want to accept. The classic fairy tale, in Chesterton’s view, finds its real worth not in minimizing the reality of evil, but in teaching the child that redemption is possible. Of this redemption, Tolkien wrote near the end of his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” “There is no tale (the redemption) ever told that men would rather find was true.... For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary act, that is of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”
One suspects that the acceptance or rejection of this ultimate tale is what lies behind the furor over fairy tales, the sadness or the wrath. Chesterton, and the children he knew, stood for the truth that fear and horror and evil exist. What they all needed to know more clearly was whether these were the ultimate realities. This is why all good fairy tales, as Tolkien and Chesterton hinted, are reflections of the redemption. In the end, the real mystery is not the alarm over evil but the reality of joy.
13) Published in Gilbert!, 4 (October/November, 2000), 9-1.
ON GOOD CAUSES WITH BAD ARGUMENTS: CHESTERTON ON LINCOLN
In an Illustrated London News column (CW, XXXII) for December 17, 1921, Chesterton had noticed that on the London stage, the poet and playwright, John Drinkwater’s play about Oliver Cromwell followed his successful play about Abraham Lincoln. Chesterton did not see either, of course, but, as is his happy wont, he read about them in the papers, the Morning Post, to be exact. The implication of the plays, evidently, was that Cromwell and Lincoln had rather much in common both in theory and in practice, a position with which Chesterton was heartily to disagree.
The column begins with this remarkable principle: “A good cause deserves to be defended by a good argument.” But Chesterton immediately added: “But there is a sporting spirit in most of us, I hope, which prefers that even a bad cause should have as good an argument as it can get. And it is the strangest thing it seems so often to have a positive preference for as bad an argument as it can find” (285).
Naturally, it turns out that Chesterton did not think that either Lincoln, with his good cause, nor Cromwell with his dubious one, were always supported by good arguments. St. Ignatius Loyola remarked that we should strive to put the best possible interpretation on the opinions of others. Chesterton’s “sporting spirit” that we should like to see the best arguments made even for bad causes seems to come close to what St. Ignatius meant. In principle, we really need to know what is the best argument to be made for a bad cause. Thus, we can see its attractiveness to others and know, so that we can prevent its badness from spreading, the essential and most logical argument against it.
What caught Chesterton’s eye was a remark in the Morning Post that “Cromwell and his followers ‘would have no class privilege at the upper end of the scale’” (287). Cromwell, it is said, “did his work upon the principle of pure human equality, like Lincoln’s, and removed the monarch’s crown, with his head attached to it, because it was a symbol of social privilege.” But Chesterton did not think that Lincoln held the theory of “social privilege” that apparently justified Cromwell’s removing the king’s crown with his head attached. In fact, Cromwell did not appeal to social equality. He ended up with his own version of “social privilege,” usually founded on confiscated monastic property.
“I can imagine a person of the practical sort preferring Cromwell to Lincoln,” Chesterton wrote,
but not on the grounds of a greater democracy, or of democracy at all. Now the people who do not like logic and abstract theories have no business whatever to like Abraham Lincoln. They might as well dislike fun and like Rabelais; or dislike poetry, and like Shelly. Lincoln was a dogmatic democrat, but he was also what would be called a doctrinaire democrat. He was much more democratic in theory than he was in practice (287-88).
Chesterton’s examples of lack of logic – fun and Rabelais, poetry and Shelly – are most amusing and to the point. What then does he mean by Lincoln’s being a “dogmatic democrat,” or a “doctrinaire democrat?” And can one really be “more” democratic in theory than in practice?
Cromwell’s efforts, in Chesterton’s view, lead not to democracy but to aristocracy, or even oligarchy. Chesterton did not think that one, such as Cromwell himself, became a “democrat” merely by “killing a king’ (Charles I, 288). On such a principle, Chesterton quips, “We must recognize the pure republican ideals of Henry the Fourth or King Richard the Third” – both tyrants. In general, Chesterton maintained that Cromwell was in fact more moderate in practice than more radical Puritan ideologues behind him.
When Chesterton turns to Lincoln, he begins by remarking that “the lesson of Lincoln is the lesson of logic.” What does this mean? “It is the lesson of value, not merely of vague ideals, but of clear ideas.” Chesterton has always been the primary enemy of sloppy thinking, of vague emotions as principles of thought. Listen to how Chesterton describes Lincoln. “Lincoln was a man who knew what he wanted in this rare sense, that he could distinguish what he wanted from what he got.” Notice the “anti-pragmatic” spirit of this remark. Chesterton does not praise pragmatism for its own sake, but he does praise what used to be called “prudence” by the classical authors. Prudence did not mean some sort of slick compromises. It meant a clear judgment about what was possible in a particular situation. Chesterton adds these remarkable lines: “Almost alone among politicians, he (Lincoln) was an opportunist who was not twisted by his own opportunities. Most politicians have no politics. They are entirely made by the circumstances and even accidents of their career.”
Most politicians have no politics! To have “politics” means that one clearly understands the principles or the logic involved in the actions in which one is immersed within a political community. Compromises do not, in principle, obviate the principle unless they are seen to be themselves the logic or principle. “Lincoln kept clear in his head from the first to last his pure theory of politics. He never compromised by an inch in the statement of his principles, even when he had to compromise in the application of them” (288-89). It is all right not to get everything at once. But it is not all right to say that one’s principles are not worth striving for even if they cannot be achieved in practice. One thinks in this regard of the similarity of Lincoln’s position about slaves as less than human with the modern parallel that declares the unborn not to be human or equal in the human race. The principles that Lincoln held were “the principles of equality.”
What is the lesson that Chesterton draws for Englishmen from the logic of Lincoln? It is not the “hazy rhetoric about ruggedness and righteousness, but that more virile form of idealism that consists of having a clear head” (289). To have a “clear head” means to keep in mind what one wants to accomplish in reality even if he cannot accomplish it. It means not to get so lost in compromise and detail that he sees nothing but compromise and detail. The “dogmatic democrat” kept the principle of equality before his mind even when he could not achieve it as he wished. Lincoln was willing to keep the union, even if he had to keep slavery for a time, because he understood that it was only in the union wherein slavery could really be dealt with. When it came finally to go to war, to the Emancipation Proclamation, he understood that what was at stake was the principle involved which now had to be achieved by another means.
Chesterton wanted good arguments for both good and bad causes. He was sympathetic to the South in fact. He thought it had some very good arguments, but there was one good cause that it needed to deal with also with good arguments, arguments which Lincoln supplied. Had the South accepted the principle, the history of this country, the revolts and the compromises, would have been quite different and slavery removed by a more peaceful means. “Now the lesson of Lincoln is the lesson of logic.” Most politicians have no politics. “The people who do not like logic and abstract theories have no business whatever to like Abraham Lincoln.” Chesterton, like Lincoln, had a “clear head.” Chesterton was not a politician but he had a “politics.”)
14) Published in Gilbert!
“THE LAST LIE IN HELL”
At the beginning of his section on “education” in What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton recalls the book he wrote on Bernard Shaw. “I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist.” If we spell out the problem here, namely, what’s so bad about being a “common Calvinist?” we will, as usual, run into startling truths.
What bothered Chesterton in Shaw was the suspicion that he (Shaw) thought that we were predestined, if not by our religion, at least by our genetic structure. This meant, in effect, that there really was no such thing as “education,” as there was no possibility of our making any difference in our own lives if we were predetermined to be what we are. Shaw evidently affirmed that “Calvin was quite right in holding that ‘if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him.’” Chesterton rejected this position with uncharacteristic vehemence – it is “the last lie in hell.” The “last lie in hell,” I take it, would be that someone, some responsible rational creature, is damned because of nothing that he himself actually did or chose. He would be condemned for his being, not for his action or thought.
This remark of Shaw led Chesterton to explain the difference between Calvinism and Catholicism. It was not about the sacred actions or gestures of the priest. “To the Catholic, every other daily act is a dramatic dedication to the service of good or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity, because the person doing it has been dedicated from all eternity, and is merely filling up his time until the crack of doom” (Ignatius, 129). Whether one be a strict Calvinist or an ancient or modern scientific determinist, the effect would be the same, namely the explanation of our actions apart from our own will and reason.
To be sure, there is a “Catholic” understanding of predestination that would accept what the Calvinists were trying to defend, namely, the omniscience of God, but would include the simultaneous freedom of man. The divine foreknowledge includes, but does not necessitate, the free components in human acts. If I know that someone decides to walk across the street, my knowledge does not determine that act, but it does include, for an adequate understanding of what it sees, the other person’s free decision to cross the street. No one shoved him, not even the divine impetus that keeps him in being, keeps him standing outside of nothingness.
What is at stake here? Nothing less than the proper understanding of the significance of our lives. Chesterton spent his whole life enjoying and defending ordinary things, including ordinary lives. He was not oblivious to the grandeur of the great battles of the world – The Ballad of the White Horse, for instance, or his poem on Lepanto. But we do not need to be King Alfred or Don Juan of Austria to lead a life filled with romance and wonder. None the less, we do need a theory of reality that explains to us what we are.
“To a Christian of my kind,” Chesterton explains, “this short earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years and ten are the battle.... To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is the epilogue.” Chesterton himself did not actually live out his allotted scriptural “threescore and ten years,” but his life was thrilling and precious to those of us who still happily read him. If there be an “epilogue” to Chesterton’s life, it is his constant rejection of “the last lie in hell,” the lie that tells us our choices do not have ultimate consequences, even our daily choices. No human day is unimportant.
Chesterton, of course, has a remarkable way of applying these apparently abstruse theological theories to our lives. Indeed, he says that his book is not a theological one, hence it must restrict itself to the “very narrow limits which the absence of theology always imposes.” Again, note the subtle turn of wit that Chesterton sees – narrowness and determinism are not the products of a sane theology, but the result of its lack.
This discussion of education is designed to make one point, that education is not a thing itself but a way to teach the child what is true. In the process, however, modern sociological, eugenic, and materialist theories are “Calvinist” in principle. “They are chiefly occupied with educating the child before he exists” (130). The drama is not whether what is taught is true, but what one’s ancestry or inherited genes determine for us. Calvinism does have its better doctrines, Chesterton acknowledged, such as “belief in an intellectual design or an everlasting happiness,” the latter at least for a few.
Chesterton’s final remark is most amusing. The “logic” of the idea that we are determined by something other than our own choices, and hence the importance of our personal lives results in a reversal of the whole conceptual order. “But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death, they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is born.” We could only be “judged” after death if our choices while alive made any ultimate difference, if our lives were a drama and not a preordained unfolding of what had to be.
Everywhere we turn in Chesterton there is this constant rejection of the last lie in hell, the lie that would evaporate our lives of any ultimate significance. “To a Christian of my kind, this short earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious.” Chesterton did not need all of his “threescore years and ten” to figure this out. There is a correspondence between what we think and how we live. Those who accept “the last lie of hell” may or may not end up there, but we can definitely suggest that while they are here, their lives must seem to them intensely dull and utterly insignificant.
15) Published in Gilbert!, 4 (September, 2000), 9-10.
ST. LUBBOCK, PRAY FOR US!
Currently, I have been editing the volume of Chesterton’s works containing A Short History of England. In the process, I came across Chesterton’s mentioning a “St. Lubbock.” That name sounded suspicious, but stranger saints names have occurred. I looked everywhere for a reference to this “Saint Lubbock.” I looked in the search engines – in Yahoo, in Megacrawler, in Infoseek, in AltaVista, in HotBid. I also looked in encyclopedias, in dictionaries, in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, surely the definitive work. When neither Britannica nor Butler had it, I became dubious. Who was this “St. Lubbock” anyhow? Why pray for his intercession? In what cause?
Actually, some search engine came up with the fact that “St. Lubbock’s Day” is cited on page 292 of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. I looked it up. Here is what it says: “if the so greatly displeased diorems in the St. Lubbock’s Day number of that most improving round show, Spice and the Modern Woman....” I am hard pressed to figure out what that passage might mean. It looks like there was a magazine, called Spice and the Modern Woman, which is improving, though the photos (diorems) in the issue of St. Lubbock’s Day were pretty unpleasant. Of course, unless you are an expert, practically any page of Finnegan’s Wake is unintelligible to the average man. Maybe it would help to be Irish. At least Joyce let me know that the hunt for St. Lubbock was not in vain..
Naturally, in search of a solution besides Finnegan’s Wake, my mind went to Lubbock, Texas, which has indeed a web site. I knew of Texas Tech. I thought maybe the library public library in Lubbock, which has an inquiry e-mail, might know. I tried to send them a query. I looked at the Diocesan web page figuring that if the name had a Catholic origin, they would emphasize it. Not a word. I looked at the Episcopal Church there, same thing. It seems that Lubbock is a proper name of a man who fought for the South in the Civil War, a Texas Ranger. His brother was once Governor of Texas; he settled in Lubbock. The question then became, was this man named after some saint in England or Ireland someplace? Obviously, it was not an Indian name, not a Chinese name. But it certainly could be old English, like “bullock.” Indeed, the Library in Lubbock later kindly mailed me an identification from a dictionary of last names. Lubbock is an English place name referring to a merchant who dealt with the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, in Northern Germany. Actually, I have been there, beautiful city. It comes from a Wendish word meaning “lovely.”
Anyhow, I was about to declare “St. Lubbock” to be unknown, when a reference librarian here at Georgetown suggested I try the search engine, “Google.” Sure enough, there I found what I was looking for. Essentially, “St. Lubbock” means a “bank holiday,” that is, a public holiday on which banks are closed. Bills that are due on this day become due the following day, so there is a day of grace. I suppose the idea is familiar to English bankers.
On further investigation, I came across an article in the Stanford Humanities Journal (#1, 1996) by W. B Carnachan, entitled, “Where Did the First Great Books Come From Anyway?” One of the sources of 19th Century attempts to list “great books,” long before Mortimer Adler, came from a Sir John Lubbock, First Baron of Avebury. Sir John, it seems, was a man of many talents. He appears to have been a professional member and chairman of dozens of committees designed to do good. His family -- he had eleven children – sometimes thought he went to a different meeting every day of the year. He was the Principal of a Workingman’s School. He published a widely read book called, Ants, Wasps, and Bees. At supper one evening, I mentioned this account of finding Lubbock to Fr. Patrick Heelan, one of my colleagues here. He promptly told me that he actually had a copy of this very ant-wasp-bee book!
Lubbock, however, was also in his spare time a banker in London and a member of Parliament. He proposed the Bank Holiday Act of 1871. It is from this later reference that we get “St. Lubbock’s Day.” The British decreed in this Act a summer bank holiday. This meant an extra closing day, while the bank clerks could, presumably, go to the beach at Margate. Since so many European holidays are held on saints’ days, this holiday playfully became known as “St. Lubbock’s Day.” So, if you go ahead and “pray” to St. Lubbock, you will not find him in any Lives of the Saints. He is rather a tribute to that British humor which Chesterton appreciated. Alas, nothing is pious about St. Lubbock’s Day. No church or basilica in Lubbock, Texas, is dedicated to St. Lubbock. Actually, numerous Quakers, sometimes called “saints,” were early settlers of Lubbock, Texas. Even “Bat” Masterson was there in a famous battle with the Indians. But I very much doubt, though they should, that the city fathers of Lubbock have an annual parade on “St. Lubbock’s Day,” when the banks are closed.
Yet, when I went back to read Chesterton’s passage in A Short History of England about this “St. Lubbock,” I was struck that, in context, Chesterton made a profound point when referring to this unusual “saint.”. The passage in which “St. Lubbock” occurs concerns Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” What did those who took part in the pilgrimage understand they were doing? The medieval people going together to Canterbury, in Kent, to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, were “taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though much more genial and leisurely.” The clue is here. What is behind this comparison is the different evaluations by moderns and medievals of sainthood or of what constitutes a worthy life. The medievals could understand an “eminence merely moral” that was not incompatible with “stupidity or unsuccess.” A saint could be an idiot or even a bankrupt farmer, or perhaps a bankrupt banker.
To understand this difference, Chesterton gives this example: “If you entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache.” The medieval would not have been so surprised. Or take another example: “If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt.” Yet the “innovation” in the world of the Christian idea made it possible to see worthiness in these two figures who were patient or generous even in ordinary situations.
It is at this point that Chesterton’s reference to St. Lubbock, the one that I have been tracking down, came up. Here is the line: “Chaucer and his friends did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate thinks about St. Lubbock.” The clerk at the beach at Margate on St. Lubbock’s bank holiday is trying to forget the bank. Since there is no “St. Lubbock,” he need not be grateful to him or dedicate the day to him in partial reparation for his impatience or lack of generosity. But the folks on Chaucer’s pilgrimage did think of the example that St. Thomas gave before Henry II. St. Thomas à Becket stood for a principle that would not be in the world without Christianity. “The Church was the machinery of pardon, while the state could only work with a machinery of punishment. It (the Church) claimed to be a divine detective who help the criminal escape by a plea of guilty.” I cannot help but see a reflection of Father Brown in that passage.
Alas, we have no St. Lubbock to pray for us, nor a St. Lubbock’s Day when all the banks are closed while we march in the streets, like Chaucer’s collection of pilgrims, to realize that the sacrifices that make for sainthood are not, as Chesterton said, found in the lists of kings and battles, but in the lives of those who suffer toothaches patiently and those who kindly take care of their half-witted maiden aunts. In our fancy, we can imagine that one or other of these latter saintly models bore the name of “Lubbock.” If so, there is a real “St. Lubbock,” and we ought to pray for the same graces.
16) Published in Gilbert! 4 (October/November, 2001), 20-21.
A ‘RIGHT’ TO ALL EXPERIENCE?
Sometimes, things next door are brought to our attention from across the world. The June 2001 issue of The Defendant, from the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, contains an account of photos and newspaper articles of Chesterton’s first visit in the United States in 1930. It turns out that this information comes from the Special Collections in the Georgetown University Library, just next door. My impression of all Australians is that once they leave their native shores, they always return home from by traveling around the world. In my case, this comment on Chesterton’s visit to Syracuse University on December 4, 1930, taken from the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N. Y., serves the same “round-the-world” function. If the world were not round, I would never know what is next door to where I live. And we ought not to forget that a somewhat similar theme is found in Orthodoxy wherein Chesterton tells of the man who sails around the world to find some exotic land, which, on finding, turns out to be his native England, a land he never really noticed before because he was too familiar with it.
What interests me here, however, is a brief comment that Chesterton made before a student audience of 2,300 at Syracuse. The student-author of the piece in the Syracuse paper was one Franklin Williams. He tells us that the general theme of Chesterton’s lecture was “on the then prevalent theory of the younger generation that there is no experience which they cannot have.” This topic is mindful of something found in Karl Marx’ works when he described his ideal state in which one could experience all different professions or works during the course of one day. The only thing that would prevent this experience, in Marx’s view, was the present organization of property. Modern philosophy has a million variants of this theme, not excluding that slogan from U. S. Army advertisement, “Be all that you can be.” This latter phrase makes us wonder just what, after all, can we be? Or are there some things we cannot “be” even if we be our all?
Chesterton, needless to say, was most skeptical about this “no experience you cannot have” view. In fact, he denied it. “No person has the right to all experience.” We think of those current notions that men “ought” to have babies or that women “ought” to play tackle on the Redskins. Evidently, Chesterton saw this issue in relation to Freud. And what is most interesting about this account of not having a “right” to every experience is Chesterton’s surprising response to the reason why we cannot have all experience. His answer is almost the opposite of what we might at first expect.
We think that the reason why we cannot have all experience is because we are, say, determined to what we are, to time and place. So something outside of ourselves prevents us from “being all that we can be,” experiencing all that we can experience. But this is not what Chesterton gives as the reason. Rather, he says, “it is about time we got back to a belief in free will.” Evidently, the reason why we cannot have all experience has little to do with those aspects of our being that are determined but everything to do with our free will.
Why would Chesterton maintain that it is precisely free will that suggests we do not have this popular “right” to every experience? To answer this question, we might recall his famous essay on “Rash Vows” in The Defendant. There Chesterton remarked that the only freedom worth having is the freedom “to bind ourselves.” It might be nice for a man to think of marrying fifteen women either at once (polygamy) or separately (divorce) or even of having them but marrying none of them. It might appear at first sight that the multiplicity of objects is the essence of our freedom rather than the choice of one of them. But what the polygamist or the divorced or the libertine person cannot have is precisely first love, or one love. So the effort to have multiple experiences leaves us missing the one we really want or the one that would really correspond most with what we are.
Somehow, it is amusing to think of Chesterton, speaking before 2,300 students in what must have been the predecessor to the Carrier Dome (which I believe holds 23,000 basketball fans) to tell them to recover their free will and forget about having “all” experience. Free will enables us to have those experiences that really matter. There are, after all, some experiences we just do not want to have even if we could have them. Plato intimated that we could have the experience of murdering someone but that we should not want to have it on our souls.
Williams, of course, in his newspaper article, describes Chesterton’s “overflowing” weight in a chair, his geniality, his smoking a cigar “but there is no ashes on his clothes,” his views on America, on modern women – “They have accepted the standards of the modern world, they are part of it with all its chaos and its wretched social conditions. They might have stayed apart and helped to rectify some of them. Now they accept everything.” Again the theme of “accepting everything” and losing one’s free will and someone else’s rights..
Williams’ final assessment of Chesterton in Syracuse follows: “Chesterton enjoys life to the utmost. You see it in the twinkle of his eyes, the frequent chuckles, his kindly outlook. There is no bitterness, no cynicism. He is a big man in every sense of the word.” I cannot help but wondering if there is not some fundamental connection between Chesterton’s own “kindly outlook,” his enjoying life to the “utmost,” and his realization that we do not have a “right” to every experience. We do have a free will that, in its real purpose, limits us to what we are. In the end, it is remarkable to think that by not having a “right” to every experience, we are free to choose those experiences that really do cause our eyes to twinkle, that free us from the cynicism and bitterness that comes from our failing to be what we never ought to be or from doing what we never ought to do.
17) Published in Gilbert!
“THE FIRST USE OF GOOD LITERATURE”
In my Another Sort of Learning, there is a chapter entitled “Why Read?” Basically, I think that we underestimate the importance of reading. It may be possible to “overestimate” this importance, but we have to ask, “overestimate” it against what? Reading today is almost our only protection over against the “overestimation” of television or absorption in the business of the culture itself.
Recently, while talking to a friend. I somehow had with me The Education of Henry Adams., as I wanted to use it for a commencement address I was to give in California. My friend wanted to know if it was a good book? I assured her that it was. “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught,” Adams wittily wrote. My friend told me offhandedly that she “reads all the time, sometimes a book a day.” I remember being pleased to find this habit out; it revealed something I did not know, that good things go on in this world even though one does not know anything about them..
In an earlier column, I had mentioned finding Chesterton’s The Common Man in Kansas City (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950). Looking through it, I noticed his brief essay, “On Reading” (22-24). I wondered if I had used it in my earlier essay. It turns out I had not, but I did use something from Belloc’s The Four Men – “Beware of perfection. It is a will-o-the-wisp. It has been the ruin of many.” Chesterton’s essay is a treasure, especially for those given to reading. One does not, of course, need a justification for “reading all the time,” but it is well to be aware of what such a happy activity can do for us. Reading is one of those human things that has its own pleasure connected with it, though I do not forget that “reading” must have an object. Read what?
Chesterton begins by telling us that the prime purpose of reading great masters -- i.e., “read what?” -- is not literary, nor is it for style or emotional inspiration. Rather “the first use of good literature is that it prevents us from being merely modern.” How many of us, I wonder, ever worry about the danger of being “merely modern?” Indeed, why is it a danger? To be merely modern, Chesterton continued, “is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness.” I used to have a kind of motto that went “to be up-to-date is to be out-of-date.” Originally, I probably found that in Chesterton someplace. Chesterton makes the same point here in this way: “to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned.” Why is that? Obviously, because styles in hats change so often that if we cannot buy another, the one we have will soon be dowdie and out of style.
But Chesterton expands on this idea in his usual paradoxical manner. Recently, I was reading a manuscript on the Epicurean orgins of modern moral views. Epicurus is one of the origins of Marxism, in fact, as Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus, the Greek atonists who also are at the origin of the idea that religion just frightens us so we should with draw and protect ourselves from any worries or ideas that might disturb us. “The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.” Just when something “really new” comes up, we happen to come across the same idea in Plato, usually who goes to the trouble to point out it is a lousy idea.
When new things appear, Chesterton suggests, they appear as fads, intellectual or otherwise. They used to be called “heresies.” They “always consist of undue concentration upon some one truth or half-truth.” Rarely is the new fad or idea completely wrong. Indeed, it is usually a truth, but out of context, without the original balance. “The heretic (who is also a fanatic) is not a man who loves truth too much; no man can love truth too much. The heretic is a man who loves his truth more than truth itself.” Thus, we will be conscious of a new “idea,” then we will be reading along in Virgil, or Dickens or Fielding or Homer and there is it. What we thought was brand new is ancient. But we would never have known this if we did not read. “You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fac because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.”
In one of the courses I teach, we happen, by design, to read Machiavelli before we read Plato. The modern student remains charmed by Machiavelli. He sounds so fresh, so witty, so “realistic.” I suggest that there is really nothing in Machiavelli that is not found in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas. None of these thinkers would have been surprised by what Machiavelli comes up with because they all said pretty much the same thing. The only essential difference between the teaching of Thrasymachus in Book One of The Republic and Machiavelli is that what the latter says is a good idea, the former says is a terrible idea. This is why Machiavelli sees Plato, the builder of “imaginary kingdoms” as his real enemy.
Chesterton makes the same point with regard to Nietzsche. “Nietzsche, as every one knows, preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior types to fight and rule them.” If some modern man thinks that this is a new idea, it just means that he does not read or know much. It is in Shakespeare’s Richard III, for instance when Richard Crookback says to his nobles, “Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.” Chesterton thought this passage alone from Shakespeare was enough to remind us that these modern philosophers like Nietzsche were old hat. “This case alone ought to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophers are modern in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them. It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea; he saw it, and he saw through it.”
One final notion that Chesterton thought worthy of a test of past philosophy was his friend Mr. Bernard Shaw’s idea that poverty is “a crime and the mother of crimes.” If this be so, then, logically, the poor have no free will. Their sins are necessitated. To deal with this especially today popular idea, Chesterton recalls from Thackery, Becky Shark’s comment that “it is easy ato be moral on £ 1,000 a year, and so difficult on £ 100.” Becky Sharpe was a woman “not without sincerity,” but she was “profoundly unacquainted with all the deeper emotions which make life worth living.” The point of this remark that it is an insult to the honorable poor to tell them that they cannot be virtuous because they are poor. “It is simply not true to say that the very poor are as a whole more insincere or more grovelling than the very rich.”
The “the first use of good literature,” then, is to remind us that the human race has already learned a good deal before we came along, a good that is true, a good deal that is true but which we have rejected for no really profound or defensible reasons. There is nothing particularly wrong with being modern, medieval, or ancient. But there is something wrong with being wrong. In the end, it is much more honorable to stick with Plato because he is right than with some modern thinker just because he is modern even though he be wrong. To know the difference, it helps to read things that take us out of our own particular time and place where, alone, we can see the oddness of our own time and place.
18) Published in Gilbert! 3 (April, 2000) 9-10.
LONDON
It has been perhaps a quarter of a century since I have been in London. This is no tragedy, of course, and may well be a blessing for the Londoners. I have never seen Quebec or Seville or Savanna either, for that matter. We need not see everything to be human, while seeing too much often results in seeing too little. However, George Marlin, the general editor of the Collected Works of Chesterton, has asked me to edit Volume 30, a volume that will contain Chesterton’s books, A Short History of England, The New Jerusalem, Irish Impressions, and Christendom in Dublin. In addition, a number of shorter essays that seem appropriate for this volume will be included. Among these latter is an short typescript essay, from 1914, entitled simply, “London.” Charmingly, we read on the essay’s cover, “Privately printed for Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edmund D. Brooks and their friends.” I do not recognize either of these two latter gentlemen. In this rather poorly typed text, George III is written “George 111,” the word “proclaimed” it typed over the previous “procaaimed,” and the word “creative” is spelled “craerive.” No matter.
For England, 1914 was the beginning of the Great War, though none of it comes up in this essay which undoubtedly predates the war. Chesterton begins this essay with an amusing account of several “rustics” who come to London and, in their innocent confusion, never manage to get out of the Underground railway system. One good lady keeps trying to back out the car-door at each stop, only to have a kind policeman, thinking she is trying to get in, push her back into the car. It turns out, however, in Chesterton’s view, that the rustics who never get out of the Underground may well have comprehended more of the true London than if they had stopped at each station marked “Temple,” or “Charing Cross,” or “Blackfriars,” or “Mansion House.”
Why so? It is because, the very names on the Underground stops, as their street-level modern restructuring often do not, recall a real past, a real medieval London, that has largely been changed or destroyed when we go above ground to look at these places with the noble names. Names, Chesterton thought, in a striking phrase, can be “nobler than the things.” Chesterton cites, with some wit, Max Beerbohm to the effect that the said rustic, on ascending above ground at St. James Park, would never have actually encountered the real St. James. Nor would he have met the Knights at the Temple, nor seen any Blackfriars or Whitefriars roaming the streets above that bear their names.
London, Chesterton thinks, is very unlike other cities such as “Paris or Berlin or Chicago.” “London is a medieval town, as these names [on the Underground] testify; but its soul has been sunk deeper under other things than any other town that remembers medievalism at all. It is very hard indeed to find London in London.” Chesterton recalls London’s Roman, Saxon, and Norman history. London was where Parliament was. Even the King had to have the Lord Mayor’s permission to enter the City. It was the Londoners who were crucial to many historic battles in English history. London is almost too English to be the capital of England.
The political structure of London has changed, no doubt, since Chesterton wrote. But he does notice the lack of Napoleonic Avenues in London – “no roads that could properly be decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with his cannon.” London remained something of a “rabbit warren.” Whitefriars (the Carmelites) street became the center of the publishing and newspaper industry – where, as Chesterton put it, “now [in his time] rascals of a more mournful kind write Imperialist newspapers.”
Chesterton concludes his reflection on London with a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral, or rather with advice on how to view St. Paul’s. The great scenes in London, he thought, are not open and wide as in other cities. Of the great things in London, you just catch glimpses. St. Paul’s must be seen from the bottom, looking up. The devil takes us up to the top hill to have us look down on kingdoms he would give us if only falling down we would adore him. Evidently, because of its tightness, the devil has a more difficult time in London tempting us with such a vast vision. “There is no finer effect of St. Paul’s than that from the foot of its hill in delicate and native weather: for the English climate (I may remark) is the finest in the world.” What is one from California to make of such a remark about the cold, chilly London climate?
Had the French or the Prussians built St. Paul’s, Chesterton thought, they would have cleared the area of the buildings around it so that we could have unobstructed views of its place. But if this clearing were done, Chesterton reflected, almost to himself, “I should not like it so much.” Why not? “But then I was born in London.”
I sometimes think there is not a more personal line in all of Chesterton’s vast and varied works than that touching admission that he likes London as it is, that he thinks its weather is the “finest in the world,” and that, in the end, he loves London simply because he was born there. But as the whole essay shows, not simply born there, but also raised there. He had walked these familiar streets, seen these places. He knew what was beneath the surface of the streets; he knew that the names on the Underground recalled a vast culture and history that often the modern Londoner did not know or keep.
It is, Chesterton tells us, “very had to find London in London.” Is difficult to think, on finishing this lovely essay, that Chesterton had not found London. If many buildings and city-scapes were torn down so that we could see the “big” buildings and monuments better, he thought, we would, God forbid, make it like Paris or Berlin. But should we do this, he still would “not like it so much” because he could remember, being born there, what it was like. He could remember the names and recall that it was possible to “see” more of the city in signs and words than in seeing it with our own uncomprehending eyes that did not see what was torn down to give us what we have left. London is London. Chesterton was born there.
19) Published in Gilbert! 5 (July/August, 2002), 16-17.
“THAT MOST MONSTROUS OF ALL MONSTROSITIES”
Josef Pieper, in his remarks on the relation of St. Thomas to Aristotle (A Guide to St. Thomas, states that St. Thomas did not cite Aristotle as if he were a mere authority. If St. Thomas quoted Aristotle, it was because Aristotle had a good argument about the topic at hand, an argument any intelligent reader was supposed already to have read and understood. St. Thomas, however, did not hesitate to disagree with Aristotle when he thought him wrong or unclear, which he thought him seldom to be. But Aquinas did defend him in this sense, that if Aristotle’s argument seemed at first sight to be dubious or against the faith, it mostly turned out, on examination, to present a real argument. A better argument may have existed but often the prod of revelation was needed to formulate this better argument. Aristotle did not have this prod, but he did have the mind.
A good example of this point was whether Aristotle’s argument for the “eternity of the world” was “heretical.” We know from revelation that the world was created in time, thus with a beginning. St. Thomas, however, maintained that, on theoretical grounds, there was no intrinsic reason why God could not have created a finite world existing from eternity. This position meant that while the world did not in fact exist from eternity, nevertheless, it could have without contradiction. That is, even if eternal by God’s power, it would still be finite as something created. Thus, Aristotle was not philosophically wrong, though another philosophic point was true as a matter of fact. Later in the same chapter Chesterton remarks that “falsehood is never so false as when it is nearly true” (471). Or, we might say, truth is never so true as when it is nearly false.
Chesterton’s chapter on “The Aristotelian Revolution,” in his St. Thomas Aquinas, deals in part with the philosophy and theology of Islam as it was through the Muslim philosophers that St. Thomas came first to meet Aristotle after he had been largely lost for many centuries to western thought. St. Thomas studied with Albertus Magnus in Cologne. St. Albert was probably much more an experimental scientist than was St. Thomas. Indeed, Albert is often recognized as standing at the origins of modern scientific investigation. And Albert too was a student of Aristotle. It is of Albert that Chesterton spoke when he remarked that “he had studied many specimens of the most monstrous of all monsters; that is called Man” (C.W. II, 458). Chesterton recognized that Albert drew “direct attention to the study of natural facts, if only through fables..., but the monster called Man awaited a much more subtle and flexible vivi-section.” This latter “vivi-section,” of course, was to be supplied by St. Thomas himself. Thomas, however, was always ready to honor Albert, to whom, with Aristotle and Augustine, he gave “thanks for all his teaching.” The thing to remember about St. Thomas was that he was always his own man, even when he was citing another man, even another man telling the truth or coming close to the truth.
Christof Cardinal von Schönbrun once remarked that St. Thomas was the first person ever canonized for doing nothing else but thinking. At one point, Chesterton compares the Franciscan mystics, especially St. Bonaventure, to St. Thomas. Notice how Chesterton states the contrast while affirming the truth contained in both traditions: “The Mystic is right in saying that the relation of God and Man is essentially a love-story; the pattern and type of all love-stories. The Dominican rationalist is equally right in saying that the intellect is at home in the topmost heavens; and that the appetite for truth may outlast and even devour all the duller appetites of man” (460). Actually, though Chesterton is much worried about the over-emphasis on spirit in Plato, this is a very Platonic passage, both on the side of the mystics and on the side of the philosopher’s “appetite for truth.”
Let me look briefly at Chesterton’s concern about both Plato and Augustine. The following passage must be read in the light of the fact that Augustine himself said that almost all heresies, especially the most dangerous ones, begin in asceticism, in pride, in something of the spirit.
The earlier Christian ages has been excessively anti-corporeal and too near the danger-line of Manichean mysticism (i.e., that matter was evil, only spirit good). But there was far less danger in the fact the saints macerated the body than in the fact that the sages neglected it. Granted all the grandeur of Augustine’s contribution to Christianity, there was in a sense a more subtle danger in Augustine the Platonist than in Augustine the Manichee. There came from it a mood which unconsciously committed the heresy of dividing the substance of the Trinity. It thought of God too exclusively as a Spirit who purifies or a Saviour who redeems; and too little as a Creator who creates (468).
The Creator creates a good world, a world that includes matter, an incredible amount and variety of matter. It is, to be sure, the same Creator who is, in Himself, Spirit and who redeems a fallen world. The Trinity and its work of creation and redemption is not divided.
Chesterton thought that St. Thomas’ use of Aristotle was fundamental. In Chesterton’s view, it saved Christianity from trying to explain itself in terms that de-emphasized matter and its goodness. One of the fundamental reasons we know matter is good is from the revelational doctrine that one of the Persons of the Trinity became man – which could not happen if matter were, as such, evil, the Manichean position. Chesterton, with his usual wit and insight put it this way:
Only the West made realistic pictures of the greatest of all tales out of the East. Hence, the Greek element in Christian theology tended more and more to be a sort of dried up Platonism; a thing of diagrams and abstractions; to the last indeed noble abstraction, but not sufficiently touched by that great thing that is by definition almost the opposite of abstraction: Incarnation. Their Logos was the Word; but not the Word made Flesh (467).
What is both amusing and profound about this latter remark – “Their Logos was the Word; but not the Word made Flesh” – is that these very words are directly from Augustine’s Confessions. He is the first, in encountering the Platonists, to realize that they did not have the Word made Flesh.
But Chesterton’s instinct is a true one – the great scandal is precisely the Incarnation, the fact that true God becomes true Man, that the world is good in the Word. The Trinity is not divided and what proceeds freely from it, both in creation and in redemption, has but one purpose, that all things, through the free rational being, return to their source, to God. The most outlandish doctrine of all, the resurrection of the body, was fully prepared for in its own way by Aristotle’s understanding of the unity of matter and form in one human substance, in one person. The “most monstrous of all monstrosities” is the finite being in everlasting life. Chesterton is right; we cannot draw the contrast too sharply. And it was likewise Aristotle who first remarked that we would not want our friends to be gods. We would want them and ourselves to be what we are. How this is possible is addressed by Aquinas, by the goodness of creation, by his treatises on Creation, Trinity, and the Incarnation, the grounds for which “the Aristotelian revolution,” as Chesterton termed it, paved much of the way.
20) Published in Gilbert!, 5 (June, 2002), 18-19.
ON NATIONS AND THE “WORLD-STATE”
Walter Berns began his excellent book, Making Patriots, (University of Chicago Press, 2001), with the following words: “For what we can only presume to be good reasons, God willed that there be many nations, each with its own language (see Genesis 11: 5-9) and, inevitably, its own interests.” Unlike Walter Berns, we seldom today stop to spell out what these “good reasons” that God had in mind might be, or whether there are “bad reasons” for absorbing the many nations into something that would be much too large ever to call the result precisely “a nation.”
Chesterton’s Illustrated London News column for June 4, 1921, (CW, XXXII, 178-81), was entitled “The Intrinsic Value of the Nation.” This was the time immediately following the Great War when the “League of Nations” were being formed in Geneva. Chesterton had chanced across a book of H. G. Wells entitled The Salvaging of Civilization. Chesterton said he would not review this book as it always takes another book to review any book of Wells. But of this book, Chesterton quipped, “it might well be called The World-State, being largely a plan for avoiding wars by a cosmopolitan commonwealth.” Wells, Chesterton thought, could not understood what is implied in a “world-state” because he (Wells) “was hardly enough of a nationalist to reconcile the nations.” The swords of nations, Chesterton remarks, are not borne “in vain.” Their heros are real heros in real causes. Unless we can understand this fact, we cannot understand out kind.
“Now, all this international idealism tends inevitably to the depreciation of nations. To avert national quarrels, men minimise national memories. It almost amounts to insulting a man in order to make him feel more friendly,” Chesterton observed. Behind the internationalist mentality is a failure to understand the nature either of human friendship or of reconciliation. We can forgive our enemies and those who hate us but only if we have some basis to understand our enemy. “We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another.” Love, even love of our nation, always tends to the particular and unique thing that is our way of life, to our way of being human.
We do not have to cease being good Englishmen or good Frenchmen to be good Europeans. Unless we see and love our own nation, we cannot see why other people might love their own nations. “I believe we must see the intrinsic value of the nation before we see its international value to other nations.” If we cannot imagine the heroism of other nations, we cannot appreciate what they are and why they are as they are.
The mere “avoidance of war” at any cost as an “ideal” is often in the modern world the other side of the idea that nothing is worthwhile or worth defending on the local level. Many a theoretician have come to believe that only certain internationalist ideas are worthwhile. “Whether or no we are to have a world-state, it is certain that we shall never get it so long as its exponents despise the deepest sentiments of the most democratic States in the world,” Chesterton writes. “History will never deny that republics have been even excessively patriotic; and, whatever can be said against patriotism, no one will deny that it is popular.” One notes in America since September 11 a rise in precisely patriotism because of a sudden realization that there are many who hate its way of life, who define its heros as villains.
National views may be narrow or dangerous, no doubt. But their cure is not a world-state, but, in Chesterton’s view, some knowledge of “the nationalist literature – of other people.” The English boy needs to know of French heros and French boys of English heros. The solution is not to pretend to be “above” all heroism, but in it. The basis of the relation of one nation to another is not the subsumption of all states into one world-state.
Nations have, as the word implies, a certain naturalism about them. The division of mankind into differing states is not a bad thing, however much there may be, from time to time, “bad” regimes. Most really appalling attacks on mankind have, ironically, originated in thinkers who want to impose on the rest of us “the best state” – and I do not mean Plato here. The real dangers have come from and still come from the internationalist ideologies. Far more horror stories about the “reconstruction of mankind” for its “own good” come today from United Nations’ sources than are ever found in actual nations.
It is amazing that Chesterton already saw the outlines of this issue in 1921. “I think that modern wars have been ruthless in proportion as they have been rationalistic. It was not a love of Germany that excited the Germans to aggression; it was a universal scientific theory of the anthropological value of Teutons, and the economic necessity of empires. In our efforts to get a world-state, we are only too likely to get half-a-dozen world-states, with half-a-dozen world philosophies.”
In this light, there is something healthy about nations and patriots. Chesterton was right to worry about the “world-state.” Walter Berns’ recollection of the nations in Genesis, reminds me of what the famous Protestant theologian, Oscar Cullmann, remarked about the Apocalypse of St. John about the alternative to “the nations.” The absolute and world state is seen as that which is most dangerous to God’s purpose in the world: “It belongs to the Devil’s inmost nature that he imitates God. This is particularly characteristic for the satanic State described here (ch. 13).... With its totalitarian claim it demands what is God’s, but it generally advances this claim by applying to itself all God’s attributes. It is just this religious claim of the State which constitutes the satanic!” (The State in the New Testament, 75). As it is often remarked, behind every political issue is a theological problem. “Half-a-dozen world-states” and “half-a-dozen world philosophies” in sequence will always be the consequences of a failure to understand the nature of human friendship and forgiveness, to understand that we have heros and ways of life that we do not want replaced by something more rationalistic, by something, yes, more satanic.
21) A Shorter Version of this Essay appeared in The Chesterton Review, XX (February, 1994), 55-64. The full text is in Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 3-20.
G. K. CHESTERTON: JOURNALIST
And among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist.
--
G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography
Peter Milward, in an
essay in The Chesterton Review, has speculated on the problem which an
unsuspecting cataloguer at some famous library might have in first confronting
the works of Chesterton. How would they be identified? Works in literature? in
theology? in philosophy? in poetry? in detective stories? in humor? in science?
in literary criticism? in politics? in English literature? in apologetics? in
economics? in history? in biography? in travel?
At the same time, of course, we would be even more than amused to discover that this Englishman who identified himself as simply a journalist did not think that you found much truth in a newspaper, nor that the "daily" papers had anything much to do with what was actually going on that day. "The plain truth is that, from official journalism, we cannot get the plain truth," Chesterton quipped on May 16, 1914.
The
daily paper is a rich and suggestive document: personally, I love reading the
day before yesterday's daily paper. Some of the finest fun and wisdom in the
world can be found buried in the files of old newspapers. But the daily paper is
never daily. The daily paper is never up to date.
The minds of those who owned and wrote in the papers were condition by an earlier era and could never quite distinguish what was really going on. In his Autobiography,
Chesterton admitted that "the profound problem of how I ever managed to fall on
my feet in Fleet Street is a mystery; at least it is still a mystery to me."
I think
I owed my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and
rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who
had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and
doing the exact opposite.
In pursuing this approach, he continued, "I think I became a sort of comic success by contrast." There is, I think, in Chesterton's journalism a kind of metaphysical humor, yes a kind of divine comedy which explains the abiding attraction of his "comic success."
The "advice" that
Chesterton would give to budding journalists, moreover, was that they should
write two articles, one for the Sporting Times and one for the Church
Times and then proceed to put them in the "wrong envelopes." Subsequently,
if these articles were reasonably intelligent and finally accepted, the sporting
men would go about happily calling to each other across the greens or courts,
"Great mistake to suppose there isn't a good case for us; really brainy fellows
say so." And likewise the clergymen would go about congratulating each other,
"Rattling good writing on some of our religious papers; very witty fellow."
Chesterton, of course,
was amused enough to call this unique hypothesis "a little faint and fantastic
as a theory; but it is the only theory upon which I can explain my own
undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet Street."
Chesterton could not help but being delighted by all of these ironical turns of events that prevented him from being an academic or an artist, let alone a real estate agent in a family enterprise, while enabling him at the same time to earn his living in journalism.
The
autumn of 1905 was to bring considerable relief to the Chestertons' financial
worries. Sir Bruce Ingram offered Gilbert the well-known "Our Notebook" column
in the Illustrated London News on the death of L. F. Austin. This column,
which had achieved a world-wide reputation during the time it was written by
George Sala, gave Chesterton a regular weekly income for life, since he wrote it
with hardly any interruption for the next thirty-one years until he died. The
editor suggested a payment of £350 a year, which virtually doubled his income.
Yet, he reflected later on in his Autobiography, the dedication to journalism did not arise either from his financial situation or from his lighter side, however much he might have enjoyed it all.
"But it was not the superficial or silly or jolly part of me that made me a journalist," Chesterton explained.
On the
contrary, it is such part as I have in what is serious or even solemn. A taste
for mere fun might have led me to a public-house, but hardly to a
publishing-house. And if it led me to a publishing-house, for the publishing of
mere nonsense-rhymes or fairy tales, it could never thus have led me to my
deplorable course of endless articles and letters in the newspapers. In short, I
could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling
naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women. But I
could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.
This passage is most illuminating. It hints at the reason for Chesterton's evident kindness towards those with whom he debated and radically disagreed. Chesterton ever respected the man with whom he argued, but he insisted on dealing directly, even bluntly, with the man's idea as such. He was enormously charitable to individuals, but he was incisive, logical, and unrelenting about their ideas. Chesterton seems to have remained exceedingly well-liked even when he left his opponent with no intellectual leg on which to stand.
Chesterton thus realized
that ideas had to be considered in themselves as real forces in the human city
and in the human heart. In an almost prophetic column, entitled "Conversion
without Creed," (March 30, 1912), Chesterton wrote of the missionary and China.
"Unless the Chinaman is a republican, China is not a republic," he observed.
(The
missionary) is the last representative left of the idea of changing a community
from the inside: of changing it by changing the minds of its citizens.
Or, rather (to preserve free will, the only basis of political freedom), to get
the citizens themselves to change their minds.... Missionaries do try to alter
society from the inside; while all statesmen and sociologists, reactionary and
revolutionary, old-fashioned and new-fashioned, try to change it from the
outside.
Needless to say, the whole future controversy
about liberation theology, if not the Chinese revolution itself, was anticipated
in that brief passage. One could not ultimately start or end with institutions,
but with ideas that support them. China, Chesterton thought, was conquered by
arms, that as a nation of philosophers it has never been converted to ideas that
might support a republic.
Chesterton understood
that someone had to pay attention to ideas as such, for it was on the validity
of these ideas that kingdoms and empires ultimately rose and fell, that men and
women lived humanly happy lives or not. "The ideas of logical and dogmatic men
(especially the skeptics, those very dogmatic men)," he mused, "are disputable;
and I always wanted to dispute about them."
Opinion is the suspicion that one side of a contradictory proposition has more evidence for it than its opposite, but did not yet reach certitude, so that either side ultimately might be true. Opinion, doxa, not truth, is the condition of ordinary human life -- opinion about war, peace, song, God, virtue, sex, sports, sin, angels, devils, business, property, poverty, socialism, wealth, foreigners, schools, the Irish, divorce, females, humor, punishment, parliament, poetry. This wealth of divergent views and judgments on everything that is constitutes the life of the people in the cave, in Plato's famous analogy, the life of any polity.
In Aristotle's Rhetoric, opinion is where we begin to know anything, where we begin to examine life.
The
'reputable opinions' (endoxa) on any particular subject are usually
confused and even apparently contradictory, but Aristotle assumes that in most
cases they manifest at least a partial grasp of the truth, and, therefore, that
any serious inquiry into moral or political subjects must start from them....
Rhetoric involves opinions in their original state without the refinements of
philosophical examination....
We may or may not succeed in rising above opinion to truth, though this effort is the natural function of the human intellect. But we cannot avoid beginning with opinion for it already surrounds us wherever we may be.
Chesterton found this raw material which he sought to engage in argument in ordinary conversation but mainly in the press, in the daily and weekly newspaper.
There is no more strange and even amusing modern figure than the Foreign Correspondent of an English paper. I mean the man permanently placed at Paris or Rome or Constantinople, and sending a thin, continuous stream of information to London.
Thus he began his column of April 2, 1910, on
"English Ideas about the French," a favorite theme of Chesterton.
But Chesterton took what
he read quite seriously, even when he found it amusing. He would begin an essay
entitled "Carrie Nation and Teetotalism" (December 26, 1908), with utter
delight, "I was inflamed with joy when I heard of the arrival on our shores of
Mrs. Carrie Nation, the enthusiastic American lady who breaks other people's
bottles with a large axe...."
We distinguish, furthermore, between common sense and learned opinion. Yet we do this recalling Aristotle's admonition about who is the best judge of a feast or the best judge of whether a shoe fits. There was a sense in which the wearer of the shoe, not the cobbler, was the best judge of the fit; the many were the best judge of the feast, a principle that grounded Chesterton's democratic instincts. But there was also a sense in which the finest cook was the best judge, a principle that grounded Chesterton's own philosophical stature. The fact is, however, that we could not escape the beginnings in opinion, nor the need to refine opinion to see what truth was found in it. The chaos of opinion was not to be allowed to remain simply chaos.
Chesterton's preference for journalism then was, if you will, both a political and a metaphysical preference. He was really concerned that the common man could come to the truth within the myriad of swirling theoretical views that engulfed him. This concrete situation was why, in his view, it was more worthwhile to write weekly columns than metaphysical books. Indeed, Chesterton did both, but the latter, the metaphysics, proceeded from the former, from the context of daily opinion.
What I propose to do
here is to follow Chesterton's way of journalism. I will use substantially his
Illustrated London News columns from 1905-1913, for no worse reason than
that they are delightful, recently republished, and I have been reading them.
Admirers of Chesterton like W. H. Auden did not appreciate his life-time devotion to journalism. Auden wrote:
Chesterton's insistence upon the treadmill of weekly journalism after it ceased
to be financially necessary seems to have puzzled his friends as much as it
puzzles me.... Whatever Chesterton's reasons and motives for his choice, I am
quite certain it was a mistake.... His best thinking and best writing are to be
found, not in his short weekly essays, but in his full length books where he
could take as much time and space as he pleased.
Few will disagree that Chesterton's best writing is in his longer works. Yet, on reading and re-reading his weekly columns, it becomes clear that he hammered most of his ideas out originally in some controversy or column that he composed for a hasty deadline. And even his early columns which have two or three different topics, oftentimes not apparently related, (i.e., May 12, 1906, "St. George and the English; Women, Worrying, and the Higher Culture"; December 9, 1905, "Public Houses; Christianity and Christian Science; Noses and Compliments") make very good reading for the newspaper audience who might not have realized what he was about but who came to understand Chesterton's sudden and profound insights.
One of the most
memorable chapters in Orthodoxy, for instance, was that entitled, "The
Ethics of Elfland." Anyone who remembers this extraordinary chapter will not be
surprised to find a column in the London Illustrated News for December 2,
1905, three years before Orthodoxy entitled, "Education and Fairy Tales,"
while his column for February 29, 1908, was called "The Ethics of Fairy Tales."
Chesterton had a life-long aversion for the word "education" which, as he
insisted, was not a "subject" of knowledge, but merely a description of how
knowledge was passed on. Nevertheless, "without education we are in a horrible
and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously," he mused in the first
essay.
What had occasioned this
column, however, was naturally an incident in the morning paper. The Duchess of
Somerset had been going about to School Boards to inform them that the teaching
of fairy tales was "nonsense," that the children should be taught about "Julius
Caesar and 'other great men'." Needless to say, Chesterton could hardly resist
challenging this preposterous, but popular, proposal. "Civilisation changes," he
pointed out, "but fairy tales never change." Chesterton went on to illuminate
the philosophic point: "Fiction and modern fantasy and all that wild world in
which the Duchess of Somerset lives can be described in one phrase. Their
philosophy means ordinary things as seen by extraordinary people. The fairy tale
means extraordinary things as seen by ordinary people."
And in the second essay, Chesterton was even so brash as to compare elves and fairies with journalists. In this, he brought out a second great theme of his, that behind the whole of human creation lies a veto which alone can make life dramatic.
Fairies
and journalists have an apparent gaiety and delusive beauty. Fairies and
journalists seem to be lovely and lawless; they seem to be both of them too
exquisite to descend to the ugliness of every day duty. But it is an illusion
created by the sudden sweetness of their presence. Journalists live under law;
and so in fact does fairyland.
And of course, this law under which even journalists and fairies live is an ancient one, and it is the only one that gives life an absolute meaning.
Here is how Chesterton, on an ordinary morning, explained this ultimate truth:
A girl
is given a box on the condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the
evils of this world rush out at her. A man and a woman are put in a garden on
the condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in
the fruits of the earth. This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore
-- the idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends
on one negative."
Clearly, Chesterton had this uncanny ability of seeing where the ordinary but strange ideas of the Duchess of Somerset might lead. That is, he saw ultimate truths in the daily paper. Perhaps this is why, in a way, he was really the ultimate journalist, the man who took the "daily bread" of ordinary life and saw how it necessarily rose to the everlasting nourishment of the mind. This is the highest dignity, really, to which journalism, let alone education, can strive.
In these weekly essays, we cannot but be aware that a very active mind is thinking its way through idea after idea, fad after fad, principle after principle, philosophy after philosophy, thinker after thinker. Yet all of this is while he is discoursing on favorite themes like Christmas, or fairy tales, or progress, or censorship, or beer, or witches, or why Shakespeare could not have been Bacon. We cannot be but struck by Chesterton's awareness of underlying philosophical and religious themes even when the context in which they were argued may be unfamiliar to us. This context was familiar to everyone who read him at the time, which familiarity is, after all, what a daily or weekly newspaper is about.
Chesterton wrote, moreover, of the deaths of Edward VII, George Wyndham, Ibsen, Swinburne, Andrew Lang, and George Meredith. He wrote on "The Silliness of Educated People" (April 27, 1912), on "The Payment of Politicians" (October 23, 1910), on "Books on How to Succeed" (November 2, 1907), and on "The Naming of Children" (April 29, 1911). Chesterton talked about progress, the Suffragettes, Christian Science, Mormonism, Montessori, prisons, the Welsh, Jekyll and Hyde, the Jesuits, faith healing, South America, ghosts, the theatre, Tolstoy, pageants, punishments, and vegetarianism. Yet what he had to say was never merely ephemeral. Chesterton, as I have suggested, always saw some universal principle or import in everything he reflected on. Chesterton saw, in other words, how all things are connected, and he insisted further that even ordinary people could and should see this connection.
We read along, for instance, in an essay on "The Character of Kind Edward" (June 4, 1910), expecting to find I know not what and suddenly we are almost stopped cold by the following utterly lovely reflection:
There is
the tragedy that is founded on the worthlessness of life; and there is the
deeper tragedy that is founded on the worth of it. The one sort of sadness says
that life is so short that it can hardly matter; the other that life is so short
that it will matter for ever.
Chesterton was quite right. The purpose of his sort of journalism was to state clearly what no one else was saying. Chesterton was not afraid of ordinary erroneous ideas that fill the daily papers because he could see that, when properly analyzed, even these ideas contained some glimpse of truth. The catching of this glimpse was the very purpose of a real journalist, which Chesterton considered himself to be first of all.
The first thing that strikes the reader in these some three hundred and fifty essays is, as I have suggested, that they almost always contain something Chesterton had just read in the newspaper or in a book or perhaps some popular idea he ran across in a Fleet Street pub. That is, he always began with common opinion, something that was being bandied about in the public. There are two things one could do with such chaotic opinion. One could simply ignore it as unworthy of consideration. Or one could do what Chesterton in fact did, consider it, argue with it, see where it went.
His column for March 31,
1906, for example, began this way: "I do not know why it is that some paragraphs
in newspapers are very funny."
Or else Chesterton began with some rather provocative view that he had just been thinking or talking about.
It is sometimes said that our age is too fond of amusements: but there are further facts to be remembered. One of them is this that it so often happens that the amusing entertainments are the only places where the serious truth is told.
So he began a column on "Wisdom in Comic Songs,"
on July 10, 1909.
Chesterton wrote rather
often about journalism as a profession and how it was perceived. He is actually
one of journalism's most ardent defenders and most incisive critics. He held, to
be sure, that no one could really find the truth in newspapers. Indeed, what one
should be reading in a newspaper was not the meaty articles or sober editorials,
but the "snippets" and mistakes that appeared in it. Indeed, he held that the
most interesting and truthful aspect of journalism was probably the obituaries
which could finally tell the truth about someone. "It is by this time
practically impossible to get the truth out of any newspaper, even the honest
newspapers," he wrote on January 23, 1909. What is interesting about this remark
and instructive about what Chesterton thought he was doing in journalism was the
reason for this difficulty in finding truth in any newspaper: "I mean the kind
of truth that a man can feel an intelligent curiosity about -- moral truth,
truth that is disputed, truth that is in action and really affecting things."
The point Chesterton was
making was of some importance in understanding his particular genius in
journalism. "One can find the fact that a man is hanged, but not the truth about
his trial; one can believe the journalist when he says that war has broken out,
but not when he says that war was inevitable."
It is in this context
that Chesterton's statement of why he became a journalist is of some interest.
We have seen his explanation for his selection of this profession in his
Autobiography, that it was something of a happy "mystery." On August 21,
1909, Chesterton wrote a column entitled, "Succeeding in Journalism." Every
journalist, even unsuccessful ones, he remarked, is asked "how to succeed in
journalism." With some delight, he responded that the only advice is the
ordinary advice we give to anyone -- that is, not to get drunk, but to prefer
that to drinking, not to be insolent, not to be servile, "to write in a legible
hand, and to take notes of everything of which one could not remember."
In any case, Chesterton did not advocate writing about what a paper thinks it might want.
My own
effect, such as it is, is entirely due to this simple process. I began by
reviewing books, about printing, and sculpture. Into these I introduced
disquisitions on theology or folklore, disquisitions which would have seemed
quite ordinary in the Hibbert Journal, but which attracted attention when
abruptly introduced apropos of Etruscan Pottery, or "The Treatment of Poplars by
Corot." Very often, while the journalist is doing his best to imitate the tone
of the paper, the editor (torn with despair) is trying in vain to find someone
who will alter the tone of the paper.
If Chesterton was a popular journalist, which he was and still is, it is because of these theological or philosophical aspects he introduced into his disquisitions.
But of course, it was
not just that Chesterton was both witty and philosophical. He combatted
precisely the content of the philosophies he disagreed with. He was not a
skeptic or a relativist and made it very difficult for his readers to be either.
In a column he did on the 200th Anniversary of the death of Henry Fielding (May
11, 1907), Chesterton brought up the question of what was a good book. He noted
a change in the definition of this proposition, for the worse. Fielding's Tom
Jones, he noted, was called a "bad" book because Jones did a goodly number
of bad things. But Chesterton did not see this as at all immoral. Fielding never
called these things good. "The modern instinct is that if the heart of man is
evil, there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the
heart of man was everso evil, there was something that remained good -- goodness
remained good."
Again, such a
disquisition reveals the marvel of Chesterton's capacity to draw forth first
principles in the most normal of topics, that of literature itself. Right
existed outside of human error and weakness. This understanding was in Fielding,
and it was in Shakespeare (whom Chesterton unaccountably sometimes, as in this
case, spells Shakspere). "Whenever (Shakespeare) alludes to right and wrong it
is always with this old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it.
Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it."
Chesterton, indeed, did
not think that newspapers really were able to see important contemporary events.
In a thoroughly delightful column entitled "What the Newspapers Don't See"
(September 30, 1911), Chesterton pointed out that the press was too much devoted
to speed and the swirl of events ever to have noticed the important things as
they actually happened. Had Roman dailies appeared after Caesar was killed,
Chesterton speculated, it would indeed have had an account of the murder,
interviews with Anthony and Cassius. "But the papers would display no notion of
what was really happening. The editors would never have noticed that Caesar
crossed the Rubicon. They certainly would not know that when that little river
was crossed the Roman Empire was founded."
Chesterton is sometimes said to be too flippant, too prone to wit to be taken seriously. Allan Massie wrote:
Both
(Samuel Johnson and Chesterton) were professional writers who knew that they
must please the reader if they were to influence him (only solemn and tenured
blockheads can afford not to do so). Both were moralists. Chesterton was proud
to be a journalist, if only because he knew that more people read newspapers
than books. His preferred form was the essay because it is by nature delightful
and didactic.
The accusation of over jocularity was something that particularly annoyed Chesterton.
Part of this annoyance, no doubt, was due to the fact that Chesterton thought life itself was mostly more amusing than he was. In a very profound essay entitled, "Incompatibility in Marriage," (September 19, 1908), a theme that appears full blown in What's Wrong with the World, Chesterton recounted with utter delight an explanation of one Ferdinand Earle about his divorce in America. Here is what Chesterton read:
My first
wife and I were extremely happy, and our happiness increased when we came to
live at Monroe by the birth of our son. But soon things began to arise between
us -- call it what you will: Incompatibility of temper, conflict of ideas. We
did not explain, but I, who am an artist, and have the artistic temperament,
sailed for Europe. On the voyage I met a young woman, who, I found, was, like
myself, a Socialist. We quickly realised that our marriage was foreordained
before our births.
Chesterton did not make this passage up. He found it in a newspaper. Of this extraordinarily absurd narrative, he simply said, one can just see him throwing up his hands in laughter: "It is impossible to parody that passage." Like Malcolm Muggeridge, he would have agreed that the life of a humorist is difficult because life itself is more amusing.
Chesterton himself
addressed the topic of his own delight in humor in a column on May 21, 1910,
"Jokes and Good Sense." Chesterton's column appeared in the very beginning of
the
Illustrated London News. He mused, "I introduce myself on this page every
week with all the feelings of the stage villain when he exclaims, 'At last, now
I am alone'."
Noting this aloneness of
page one, Chesterton decided to address in it the complaint about the wit found
in his writing. Most people were sometimes telling jokes and at other times they
were serious. However, "when I tell the dull truth about anything, it is said to
be a showy paradox; when I lighten or brighten it with any common jest, it is
supposed to be my solid and absurd opinion."
To this response, which
Chesterton thought "courteous, relevant, and reasonable," the journal's reaction
was to cast "up its eyes and clasp its hands, and ask distractedly how it could
be expected to argue with such a wild, elusive, ever-changing, fantastical, and
irresponsible jester as myself."
How does one conclude,
sum up Chesterton, the journalist? When we finally ask what was Chesterton, we
are not wrong to reply as he did. He was a journalist. The very word means that
he was concerned with what went on the day on which he wrote. Chesterton's
columns began with common opinion, with, as it were, the news of the day. "I
have been to a large number of dinners, and heard a large number of successful
and unsuccessful Parliamentary candidates make long speeches, occasions which,
of course, were very delightful when they were not a little too long."
But where does Chesterton go with this idea? He immediately pointed out that just because a speech is long does not mean that it is "unworthy of attention." As an example of this, he cited Thomas Carlyle, who, when asked to say grace at meals, "had a cheer way of reading to the company the whole of "The Book of Job," no small feat. Chesterton immediately pointed out that the "Book of Job" contained some truths that the modern agnostic and even the modern Christian may have never really heard.
From it
("the Book of Job") the modern Agnostic may for the first time learn
Agnosticism: a sane and a sacred and manly ignorance. From it the modern
Christian may with astonishment learn Christianity; learn, that is, that mystery
of suffering may be a strange honour and not a vulgar punishment....
Chesterton, in other words, used journalism to teach agnostics agnosticism, Christians Christianity.
We might even go further
to suggest that Chesterton used his column in an ordinary journal to teach human
beings the uniqueness of their lives. His column for March 16, 1912, "Free Will
in Life and in the Drama," began: "What fun it would be if good actors suddenly
acted like real people!" His column had the most serious of purposes. He pointed
out that the actors already know the end of the drama they are engaged in. The
difference (between drama and life) is that all events in genuine art are
decided: all events in genuine life (in anything worth calling life) are
undecided."
Every
human life begins in tragedy, for it begins in travail. But every human life may
end in comedy --even in divine comedy. It may end in a joy beyond all our jokes;
in that cry across the chasm, "Fear not, I have conquered the world." Real human
life differs from all imitations of it in the fact that it can perpetually alter
itself as it goes along.
It is in this sense that, in a sense, comedy is more profound than tragedy. But Chesterton concludes by also claiming tragedy itself.
Political philosophy, tragedy itself, founded in the city that asked the question about who is the best man. Chesterton has seen that the best man might suffer, that he might stand for joy. And in seeing this, in the human condition, we can see the dimensions of the opposite:
I think
"MacBeth" the one supreme drama because it is the one Christian drama; and I
will accept the accusation of prejudice. But I mean by Christian (in this
matter) the strong sense of spiritual liberty and of sin; the idea that the best
man can be as bad as he chooses.
All of this, I say, was written by a journalist on March 16, 1912, by a journalist who did not hesitate to take his readers seriously, who did not hesitate at the same time to tell them that sins and jokes belong to the same philosophy.
Chesterton knew, of course, that his readers would probably be surprised at that thesis, because such things were not the common fare of their daily or weekly journals. He had, again, as it were, put the right article in the wrong envelope and sent it to the wrong journal, which accepted it. The delight of G. K. Chesterton's philosophy itself remains the unexpected surprise and gift that this truth exists at all midst the confused gyrations of daily opinion so often based on the "heretics" of other ages apart from the common sense of our kind.
Chesterton's gift to
journalism was simply that he took the time to think things out clearly. "There
is a kind of work which any man can do, but from which many men shrink," he
wrote during the Great War, "generally because it is very hard work, sometimes
because they fear it will lead them whither they do not wish to go. It is called
thinking."
37) From Dossier, 4 (May-June, 1998), 17-23.
ORTHODOXY: CHESTERTON ON THE "DELIGHT" OF TRUTH
I.
This essay might be about the "splendor" of truth rather than about its "delight," but John Paul II has famously claimed the "splendor" for himself -- Veritatis Splendor. Chesterton simply rejoices in truth, but not just for the sake of his own rejoicing, but because there is something to rejoice about. "I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy" -- this is Chesterton's startling reaction to his discovery that man is not made only for this earth but through it for eternal life. The "splendor" of truth, I suppose, stresses its own luminousness, its own shinning, its reality, while "delight" indicates our proper reaction to what is, that it is at all, to what sheds its light before us when we realize at last that we need light, that there is light.
But doesn't everyone see this luminous truth? Why was Chesterton any different? To be sure, no one lacks the power to see truth. The power is given with what we are. But many, evidently very many, having the power to see it, choose -- the word is important -- not to accept it. Chesterton is different because he saw, accepted, and affirmed it. His enthusiasm for reality, for what is, is our grace. If our lives are disordered, however, it is likely that we do not experience any delight in truth because we actively prevent ourselves from seeing the splendor that is there. We can seek, like the young Augustine, all those beautiful things, without letting ourselves aver to why they might be beautiful in the first place. We want things before we appreciate what they are in their fullness -- the exact opposite of the right order of things.
We oftentimes suspect where truth might lead us, so we cleverly refuse to go there without ever honestly spelling out to ourselves what we are doing. We choose to deceive ourselves. We build an apparently plausible "counter-truth" to justify how we choose to live. We quietly put aside in our hearts any comparison between what we do and what we ought to do. The good, the true, and the beautiful, however, are interrelated in ways that can hide their inner-connections from those who do not want to see what is there. "The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom" is Chesterton's way of expressing his realization of the truth that the good is really good even though he did not himself create it, perhaps primarily because he did not create it. He is grateful that he did not hide from the truth that he saw. He wants to know, in fact, who "caused" it, since he knows he didn't, yet it is there.
Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy in 1908. He was a young man at the time, already into his journalism career. He had an uncanny, almost supernatural, knack for discerning in their incipient principles what events would come about later in the twentieth century, even to its end, because he simply "saw" things, saw the truth in them and, more importantly, affirmed it. His What's Wrong with the World (1910) spells out the cause of almost every societal aberration about which we read in our papers each day. Chesterton indeed was one of those remarkable people who learned about truth not from itself but from the common and fashionable errors he saw all about him. They left him perplexed because he could see that they were not true, in spite of their popularity.
Chesterton delighted in things because he was acutely conscious of the fact that they need not exist at all -- "every man in the street is a great might-not-have-been," as he put it. Every might-not-have-been in the streets, including ourselves, is filled with a divinely guaranteed dignity. We are all like the penny, he said in his Charles Dickens, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine King. Yet every actual existence is so overwhelmingly unexpected that everyone who exists at all seems like the result of some huge, improbable choice.
When he realized that the world need not exist (the doctrine of Creation) and that God did not need to create it (the doctrine of the Trinity), Chesterton knew that he was free of all the depressing philosophies of necessity that implied that he had no other purpose of existing but necessity itself, that reality was merely an unraveling of what had to be. If the world was the result of choice, however, so much the more so was he. Yet, if a man did not need to exist, what was the "golden key," as Chesterton called it, that could account for the wondrous fact that he did exist without his having anything to do with it? At a minimum, every person, who might not have been at all, is at least vaguely aware that his own particular existence rose out of nothingness through no input of his own.
II.
Heretics, Chesterton's first major book in 1905, explained, in a still penetrating read, just why he was not a follower of various modern intellectual movements, most of which are still around in some form or another at the turn of the twenty-first century. Basically, he did not follow them because he understood them; he understood their disorder. He knew that the purpose of a mind was to know reality, to come to a conclusion about claims to be right or true. "I am a rationalist," he explained in Orthodoxy. "I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me to believe that he fell, and I find, for some odd psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise of free will if I believe that he has got it." Chesterton always had the deadly capacity to see our implicit contradictions.
To meet the mind of Chesterton is to meet a mind that will not let our intellectual errors remain hidden from ourselves, however much we might prefer not to them boldly spelled out. The most wide-spread contemporary intellectual error is no doubt something known as cultural relativism. Chesterton is always amusing when he points out the error some such theory that asks us to maintain its contradictions as if they did not exist. "An imbecile habit has risen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays." About the principle at issue, little further needs to be said in any age, in any place.
Chesterton insists on putting blame where it belongs. Many, like Marx, have blamed God for man's problems to claim that they could do better for man by leaving God completely out of the picture. Chesterton was not so sure. "The secularists have not wrecked divine things, but the secularists have wrecked secular things." A human error about the nature or reality of the divinity does not lead to a change in or threat to the divinity, but it does, like Marxism eventually did, ironically wreak havoc among human lives and institutions. We may not be able directly to test the divinity, but we can test what men do because of their mis-understanding of the divinity, or whatever they have chosen to take its place. Our culture is wont to teach us that ideas make little difference. Chesterton thinks that any difference there is comes from our ideas. The real issue is whether ideas are true or not.
The provocativeness of Heretics, its charming reduction of well-known philosophic and religious positions to humorous absurdity, annoyed someone so much that he challenged Chesterton to write a book explaining, not what he was against, but what he was for. This challenge energized him even more than his enterprise of pointing out the errors of his friends and critics in Heretics. Chesterton, incidently, was, even in issues of great and passionate controversy, an amazing sort of man who never lost a friend because he pointed out the impossibility of his ideas. This is a rare gift and speaks much of the greatness of Chesterton.
Thus, when confronted, Chesterton took up the writing of Orthodoxy, in which he set forth what he did hold. He discovered that what he did come to maintain, which he thought so original, was in fact what all Christians profess in the Creed, many of whom, I might add, unlike Chesterton, profess the Creed without seeing its wonder, its standing at the foundation of all healthy and human things. Orthodoxy is itself one of the best and most profound commentaries on the great Christian Creed. Chesterton explains in his own way what it affirms and why what it affirms is directed to the freedom and dignity of man because it is first directed to the revelation of who God is.
Because Chesterton later wrote his own Autobiography, itself a marvelous book, Orthodoxy is not an autobiography, though it is completely autobiographical. Though he was not a Catholic when he wrote it, it is nevertheless completely Catholic. Though it is written in a completely unscholarly and familiar style, it is thoroughly scholarly and formal in its argumentation. When everyone else found "orthodoxy" to be a bad word, Chesterton found it to be the exact description of what keeps us sane. "Whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth."
III.
To begin to understand Chesterton, it is worth recalling the last sentences of Heretics, as they reveal his soul perhaps as well as anything he ever wrote -- not denying that Chesterton's great soul clearly shone through everything he did write, even his shortest essay. But fully to comprehend what Chesterton concluded at the end of Heretics, we have to be familiar with one of the great scenes in the New Testament, with the passage that, perhaps more than any other in our literature, has consoled ordinary folks who, while bearing constant witness to the difficulties of belief and its living, nevertheless still believe.
The scene is of the Apostle Thomas, the famous "Doubting Thomas," who will not believe reports of the Risen Lord until he sees the wounds of Christ's body and hands. When the Lord appears to Thomas and fulfills his demand to see and to touch, evidential things, Christ says to him, with His own paradox, which Chesterton surely noticed, "Blessed are they, Thomas, who have not seen but who have believed." We cannot be unaware that this latter group includes the vast majority of mankind who have continued to believe.
"The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied," Chesterton concludes his analysis of modern thought in an almost prophetic voice.
Everything will become a creed. It is a rational position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.... We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.
Unlike Thomas before the Lord, who now believes because he has seen, Chesterton is talking to those modern philosophers who see the ordinary things before their very eyes and still do not believe in their existence, in their existence that reaches to the order of what is. Chesterton intimated, in fact, that in our era, we will need the faith to believe in what is evident to our senses, to our reason. The subsequent history of modern philosophy does not in the least prove that Chesterton was wrong in his supposition.
The end of Heretics, thus, reveals Chesterton's profound insight that the ultimate result of the rejection of the evidence for belief in modernity would end up with a doubt about the existence of the world itself. Logically, in order to "prove" that God does not exist, we have to maintain at some point that the world and its order -- the very point at which we started -- do not exist. Somehow in some albeit unexpected wisdom, to maintain the existence of natural things as they are involves the belief in supernatural ones. Chesterton makes this observation not as a matter of doctrine, which it isn't, but as a matter of historical fact, of what happens in the minds of those who consistently reject belief and its evidence and then try to explain consistently what they are doing.
It would most often be the scientists, the philosophers, and the academics who would come to doubt their senses and any concrete extra-sensory object they might reveal to us as existing. This observation was one reason that Chesterton was a democrat and loved ordinary folks -- "the common man" as he called him. They were, as he knew them, less susceptible to an intellectual "proof" that the world did not exist since they saw quite clearly that it did, no matter what the specialists might tell them. Chesterton's philosophy, as he put it, allowed him to accept or reject miracles on the basis of evidence. But a determinist philosopher is not free to accept or reject any mere evidence, because his philosophy has already precluded any possibility of miracles or evidence for them. His philosophy, in other words, has caused him to doubt his senses.
IV.
The title of Orthodoxy means literally right opinion. First of all, it implies that there can be a wrong opinion and that the difference between the two makes considerable difference in how we live. It means further that how we live is directly affected by how we think. Almost a hundred years after Chesterton, we live in an age that doubts everything about itself -- that the mind can know the truth, even that it ought to know the truth, that it ought to know anything. We advocate a kind of relativism or multiculturalism that, far from simply pointing to the myriad differences in the reality of time and space, maintains that nothing is certain, that there are no standards, particularly no human standards. Therefore, because there are no standards, no truth, we are said to be "free." In this system, it is not the truth that makes us free. We make ourselves free by denying any criterion outside of ourselves. Everything is permitted because not only is nothing known, but nothing can be known. We choose our choices so that we are enslaved by what we want.
Secondly, orthodoxy implies that it is possible to establish what right opinion is by examining all opinion, especially wrong opinion. Chesterton's favorite book list seems to have been the famous Index of Forbidden Books. It was from errors in the most popular and most scientific positions that he found the raw material of truth. "All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen.... I never read a line of Christian apologetics." Nietzsche was a favorite author if only because he put what was wrong so well. Literally, as he tells us, Chesterton learned truth from the weirdness of the constant error he read.
On the basis of the impossibility of what theories the great modern philosophers used to explain reality, Chesterton set out to found his own "heresy," as he delighted in calling it. He himself, however, as he conceived it, was the ultimate "heretic"! And when he found the truth, he discovered to his astonishment that it was invented some eighteen hundred years before his time and was called "orthodoxy." He was glad that he did not have to invent the "heresy of orthodoxy" himself but could simply recognize it as already having been invented -- a fact that made him even more curious. Invented by whom?
Chesterton was constantly amused by the fact that the most true and delightful teaching was the one to which most opposition was found. It was quite contrary to what was actually taught in the modern schools. Yet, "there never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy," he reflects. It was "perilous" because it affirmed that our choices were infinitely serious and potentially dangerous; it was "exciting" because it showed us that our choices could lead either to damnation or to what was infinitely worthwhile. Chesterton defended the possibility of excitement by defending the doctrine of free will and the fact that it could choose rightly or wrongly, but freely, not necessarily. We may not want to have this choice, which logically means that we may not want to be what we are. But the fact is that denying our freedom leads not to excitement and drama, but to dullness and indifference. Chesterton preferred the world of freedom and excitement with its dangers and its glory.
Chesterton as a young man never heard of Christian truth, but he knew that what was proposed, especially against the faith, on examination could not be true. He could understand contradictions and therefore errors. Chesterton was converted intellectually by the heretics, not by the orthodox. He could not at first understand the odd nature of the opposition to the classic faith, but what he did notice made him wonder, finally, if it might be true because it could not be all the contradictory things said against it. "Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church." This was, I say, not something he expected as a matter of theory, but something he observed as a matter of fact. He reflected that something against which every sort of accusation is made, even if it be contradicted by another accusation, might be very odd indeed, but it might also be the normal. For to the abnormal, it is only the normal that looks most grotesque. Somehow most modern philosophy seemed to picture an utterly abnormal world that bore little relation to what was true.
V.
One of the chapters in Orthodoxy is called the suicide of thought. Roughly, this means that no one can think if he maintains that his organ of thinking cannot know anything or that his organ of will cannot decide anything about what is known. Moreover, no one allows his organ of deciding to decide anything if there are, on the basis of what he knows to be true, certain things that will be forbidden to him. If it should so happen that some things are right and true, we may just not want to know about them if we suspect that they might interfere with what we have already chosen to do. When we act on this failure to know what we should know, we sin, to use the classic word that indicates both the seriousness of our thoughts and the choices that follow from them. Not surprisingly, then, when asked, the reason Chesterton himself gave for his final conversion to the faith was that he wanted to get rid of his sins. He knew that the structure of reality was such that they were possible, and he knew himself well enough to know that he, no one else, committed them.
Chesterton liked to talk about sin, no doubt because it was so serious and so common. Indeed, in his Father Brown stories, he liked to write about it. He thought we should be sinning all the time, not by actually murdering or stealing or committing adultery, of course, but by writing about such aberrations. Though he loved the sinner, he did not have any sympathy for those who refused understand the reality or depths of sin. He often suggested, furthermore, that those who know most about sin are not the simmers themselves but the pure of heart, those who have decided not to commit it. The knowledge of sin and its attraction is not itself a sin but a necessary element in our understanding ourselves. But the existence of sin and its terribleness was part of the risk of the universe that contained the finite free creature. If God wanted to create a finite person who could love Him freely, He had to accept, as in all love, the possibility of being rejected.
Chesterton was acutely aware that what made the universe particularly interesting was not the existence of sin in it, with its pre-condition of free will, but the possibility and condition of its forgiveness. In determinist theory, "the cosmos went on forever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will." Free will meant that we could sin and were responsible for it. It also meant that we could be grateful for existence itself. Forgiveness meant that even if we sinned, what we sinned against could forgive us, that sin was personal both on our parts and on the part of what we sinned against. "Such ... was the joy of man; ... happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do, but which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do it." All romance depended on not doing what ought not to be done. Sometimes on crucial things, we simply had to obey. "Thou shalt not...."
Chesterton, moreover, thought that the doctrine of original sin grounded democracy and was the only reason we could give for not absolutely trusting a ruling elite. "The unpopular parts of Christianity (like original sin) turn out when examined to be the very props of the people." Original sin explained why we needed to bind even our rulers by law, morality, and sanction. They too were sinners and lived in the worst possible occasion for sin -- the life of power, publicity, and comfort. "In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the fall of any man, in any position, at any moment...." But no matter in what sort of society or situation in which man lived, sin is always caused by will, not by something external to us. No arrangement of society or state, contrary to Rousseau and his tradition, would ever eliminate the possibility of sin and wrong doing from among us, especially from the elite. "For she (the Church) has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man." This awareness of the possibility of sin in anyone, even rulers, is one fundamental element of any charter of liberty, of any understanding of responsibility.
What is surprising at first sight is the amount of attention that Chesterton gives in Orthodoxy to questions of sin, original sin, and free will. These three are, no doubt, essential doctrines of the faith and its philosophic support. If there is such a thing as sin, the deliberate choice of a thought or action against God and man, there must first be a free will to choose such thought or action. Moreover, it is clear that from time immemorial, man has had difficulty in living virtuously, even when he wanted to and chose to do so. Indeed, this difficulty in living virtuously will seem to justify theories which maintain that sin is the normal condition of mankind, so we should not worry about it but expect it, even excuse it, make it "normal" because it is so frequent. Chesterton's response to this position is again amusing: "Men may have had concubines as long as they have had horses; still they were hot part of him if they were sinful." The frequency of any sin does not somehow indicate its rightness but its wrongness.
VI.
The greatest thing about Orthodoxy, however, is its enthusiasm for and delight in what is. The structure of Orthodoxy is cast in the form of the adventure of a man who set out around the world to discover some strange land. Finally, his ship reaches this distant land; only there he discovers that it is England, his original home. The analogy, of course, is to Chesterton's own spiritual adventure in discovering orthodoxy to be the home he was looking for all along only he did not recognize it right before his very eyes. One of the mysteries of his life, Chesterton tells us, was why he could be "homesick at home." This homesickness-at-home is a most striking image, for Chesterton loved home and thought it the noblest word in the language. Yet, he understood that even when we have everything, even when we do not sin, we feel that there is something missing to us. We seek our true home even at home.
In his musings about what it is we want, what sort of freedom is the greatest, even at home, Chesterton argued that it is the freedom to bind ourselves. "I would never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself." This freedom of binding oneself was for Chesterton the key to the highest wisdom about the most basic things of life. "I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restrictions on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.... Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I could only be born once." Chesterton was capable of elevating this principle to the more universal idea that our individual uniquenesses, in being bound by love, lie at the heart of all true relationships. "I want to love my neighbor not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different."
And because God too is entirely different and stands at the heart of all binding promises, of all freedom, it is possible to love Him because we know we are first chosen, that being ourselves is not enough. Our ideas of God decide our ideas of the world. "By insisting especially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation, Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself." In transcending himself, in what he might expect of himself, man does not cease to be himself. We do not become "gods." We love God and this is our joy. Eternal life comes precisely to us, as we are.
Chesterton ends Orthodoxy by suggesting that the only thing that the Incarnate God did not show us while He was on earth was his "mirth," his joy. He did not show us this mirth because we could not bear it now, not because this was not of the essence of His being. "The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. ... Joy ... is the gigantic secret of the Christian." This at last is the secret of Chesterton and of his Orthodoxy. All that is is created in joy because this is what God is. Life is our seeking to find wherein joy is our home. And we can finally only have a home if we bind freely ourselves. Only this philosophy, this "heresy" of "orthodoxy" -- which Chesterton discovered and in discovering leaves its gift of sanity to us -- "has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but it true." Ultimately, this truth, in its splendor, is the delight of orthodoxy.
38) From Vital Speeches, LXIV (July 15, 1998), 590-95. This text also appears in Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays onTimeless Paradoxes (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 226-41.
ON THE ENEMIES OF THE MAN WHO HAD NO ENEMIES
I.
Chesterton (1874-1936), the great English essayist, journalist, and philosopher, was a man of singular good will, engaging charm, and broad interests. From all eye-witness reports about him, he never really had any enemies. He does not seem to have loved those who hated him for the singular reason that no one hated him. Even those who most disagreed with him on a given issue still had great affection for him and enjoyed his company. To be bested by Chesterton in an argument was a sort of badge of honor that someone of Chesterton's stature would take another's arguments seriously even if he proved them wrong. Chesterton was evidently difficult not to like. He was a man of great girth and of enormous wisdom, the two qualities that somehow seemed, in his case, naturally to go together, as the similar combination did in the lives of St. Thomas and of Samuel Johnson, both of whom Chesterton greatly admired. Along with Aristotle, St. Thomas, Johnson, and Chesterton were probably the "sanest" -- a favorite word of Chesterton -- men who ever lived.
Chesterton personified, in a remarkable degree, that very Christian and very delicate notion of hating the sin but loving the sinner. He did indeed hate sin; he sharply attacked error. We seem nowadays, by contrast, to be living in an age wherein loving the sinner, as a condition, explicitly involves approving the sin. We cannot, apparently, figure out how our actions and our ideas do not belong together. We end up defining wrong subjectively. We have an inalienable right to do whatever we will. Even less can we figure out how it is that what we will to put into effect may not be what ought to be put into effect. Our rights have come to be tied up with what we will, no matter it is what we will. Rights are will-rights, not reason-rights. We end up insisting that we be praised for what we ought not to do simply because we will to do it. We charge those who refuse to praise our deviant ways with intolerance, with lack of compassion. We establish sin and moral disorder as just another "will-right" of the public order. We call it anything from multiculturalism, to progressivism, to liberalism, to tolerance, to compassion.
In a sense, what Chesterton has to teach us is precisely how to deal with with those whose ideas or actions are wrong in some objective sense. We do not, if we think about it, want to end up by approving what is wrong or evil in errant actions. Neither do we want to deny either the intrinsic dignity of the person in error or the fact that free people can do evil things that ought not to be done. It was characteristic of Chesterton, who loved controversy and debate, clearly to grasp the logic of ideas or passions that would, if uncorrected, lead a person or a society of persons into error or sin. In an almost uncanny way, he saw the consequences of where ideas, if not attended to, would lead. As I read him today, I almost think Chesterton foresaw in thought and argument all the errors of the 20th century before they happened in reality. But he always paid his opponent the compliment of taking his ideas seriously, even when he took them humorously. Sometimes, perhaps, the only way we can take an idea seriously is if we take it with some amusement. Chesterton had no doubt that the origin of all disorder was found in will, but he also knew that will referred back to and depended on intellect, on ideas, so that the work of thinking was in some sense prerequisite for right doing.
II.
But if Chesterton had no "enemies," how can I boldly talk of the "enemies" of the man who had no "enemies?" In an Illustrated London News column from December 3, 1921, he wrote, "People are professing nowadays that it is perfectly easy to love their enemies, so long as they are not asked to be just even to their friends." Not only does loving one's enemy include being just to him, Chesterton implies, but it likewise includes being just to his friends. We are not, after all, to be indifferent or unjust to our friends jut so that we might have the glory of loving our enemies. It is not a virtue to love our enemies but have no friends.
The only way that "loving our enemy" can be "perfectly easy" is if we treat him like our friends to whom we are unjust. Besides, the Christian tradition has never intimated that being just to our friends was not also quite difficult. And no one in his right mind ever really thought that loving his enemies could really be "easy." If it were, we would not need specific, revealed instruction on the matter. Neither was loving our enemy conceived to involve some naive downplaying of real hostility, as if enemies were just figments of our imagination or a simple misunderstanding, easily corrected. It included, to be sure, the possibility of an action that sought grounds whereby enemies could be friends. It realized the possibility of suffering injustices.
The word "enemy," it would seem, always connotes a someone who opposes us for some, probably illegitimate, reason of his own, not forgetting that, because of our willful acts, we ourselves can well be the cause of legitimate hatred in others. The very word, enemy, implies injustice and probably hatred. We speak of "enemies" of our country or of our faith or of our language. In this case, we are opposed not necessarily for anything we ourselves do personally but for what we are in our birth or heritage. We are thus taken as members of a collectivity of some sort. We bear a kind of corporate guilt because of what we are. Any culpability we bear in this regard is usually not directly due to something we actually did to someone else as it usually is in the case of person-to-person hatreds. We can in this sense also speak of codes of honor among enemies, among those who recognize a common basis of humanity or chivalry even in their struggles. We think of Grant and Lee at Appomattox.
Many of history's saddest episodes are the results of enemies fighting one another but for a public or collective cause -- Romeo and Juliet in a broad way falls into this category. The individual soldier or citizen has nothing in particular against the individual immediately fighting against him. In other circumstances, they might well be friends. Chesterton himself, a man who lived through the Great War and saw the early stages of World War II, never showed much sympathy for the Prussians, their ways or their ideas. He never considered spelling out the dangers of Prussianism to be somehow contrary to his Christian duty to love his German foe or to his intellectual duty to state the truth. Indeed, he thought that this elaboration of what was wrong with Prussianism was part of his Christian and intellectual duty whereby we could arrive at an understanding of what was right both for the English and the Germans.
Too there is the more personal enemy, someone who seeks vengeance against us in particular, someone who will, if given a chance, destroy our reputation, work, family, or even life. Loving this sort of enemy does not mean giving up all common sense about self-protection or all sense of justice that ought to exist between any given individuals. Love of enemies does not imply approval of injustices; it implies just the opposite. The love of enemies is designed to uphold the truth, not to relativize it. Though he talked a good deal of dueling, however, Chesterton himself was never challenged to a duel. As much has he enjoyed a pint in a raucous English pub, he never was known to end the evening in fisticuffs. And of those whom he criticized or opposed in print, his main profession, he always treated them fairly and with that courtesy that he praised so much from the Middle Ages.
A happy laughter was thus never far from his pen. I recall in Orthodoxy, for example, Chesterton commenting on a man by the name of Grant Allen, who had evidently written a book about his (Allen's) ideas of God. Chesterton quipped that he would much rather read of God's ideas about Grant Allen than Grant Allen's ideas about God. Chesterton's wit was sharp. Grant Allen could not have helped but feel a little silly. Chesterton had deftly taken the measure of the shallowness of Allen's philosophy. But the fact is that Chesterton could only reply after he had read the ideas of Grant Allen and found them both wanting and amusing. The danger of writing in his time was that Chesterton, a voracious reader, on coming across someone's vapid thought, might well take delight in responding to it.
III.
So what do I mean by the "enemies" of the man who had no "enemies?" Chesterton, who seems to have been a very good and honorable man in his own personal life, was by no means so innocent that he did not know that there was plenty wrong in the world. It is one of the acute mysteries of the life of Chesterton that he knew so much about evil but did not himself learn this evil from practicing it. He learned of it from thinking about it. He does seem to have wrestled with evil and, like St. Thomas, seemed to have understood its charm and reality quite well and to have written of it at length. Whenever Chesterton spoke of evil, we cannot help but having the impression that he knew that whereof he spoke. It takes a good man, to recall both Plato and Aristotle, to know both good and evil, to do the one and avoid the other.
Indeed, recalling his awareness of profound disorder in the world itself, Chesterton wrote a wonderful book in 1910. In retrospect, it was a very prophetic book about what did happen in the 20th century. The book was entitled, exactly, What's Wrong with the World. The book's title does not have a question-mark behind it, almost as if to say that Chesterton thought he had a pretty good idea about what is in fact wrong with the world. Anyone who does not think that there is anything wrong in the world, Chesterton thought, was simply not paying attention, even to himself.
This particular book, as we recall, was written, as so many of Chesterton's books were, as a result of a kind of dare or challenge. It seems that one of the London newspapers had advertised an essay contest. Readers were supposed to write in their answers to the rather grandiose question, "what's wrong with the world?" Chesterton, characteristically not being able to resist such a challenge, immediately sat down and wrote a brief, two sentence reply. It reads: "Dear Sir: 'What's wrong with the world?' I am. Signed, G. K. Chesterton." One is almost stunned to notice the profundity of this succinct response. It went to the heart of the matter. The disorder in the world is not to be located in some Rousseauian external reorganization of society or property, not in matter, not in someone else, but in our own wills and souls. If we do not know this location of evil's cause, then nothing much else that we do know will matter.
Chesterton could see the import of original sin in the very midst of popular journalism. Could it be that our main enemies are in fact to be found within ourselves? Are we our own enemies? Are we looking in the wrong direction when we seek to remedy what is wrong? Did Chesterton's own early mental struggle with evil prepare him for the dire results that appeared in the world as the result of the actions of those who did not successfully struggle with it, of those who positively choose it? But this conclusion is surely a Chestertonian paradox. We are not just sure what to make of it.
We are, for the most part, unused to the idea that we could choose against our very selves, as if our selves bore in them already some standard whereby we are called to be most ourselves. We hesitate to imitate St. Paul, who, in a famous passage, acknowledged that the good that he would do, he did not. Yet, that very acknowledgement seems to be one of the core things we must do, if we are honest with ourselves. Chesterton's abiding enemy is the person who denies what seems obvious, namely original sin, the one Christian doctrine, so he thought, that need not be revealed to us. All we had to do was to go out in the streets and open our eyes.
IV.
Yet, we need to be careful when we locate the blame of what is wrong with the world in ourselves. We can easily mislocate the source of the problem. Indeed, we oftentimes want to mislocate it since it serves to keep us from facing our own responsibility for the things we do. It seems fitting here, at a college dedicated to St. Thomas, to recall Chesterton's famous biography, St. Thomas Aquinas, a book not to be missed. In it, Chesterton recalls that both St. Augustine and St. Thomas spent a good deal of intellectual energy in combatting the Manichees, combatting the idea that matter explains the existence of evil among us. Things are good, in this view, if they are spiritual; things are bad if they are material. Therefore, the spiritual means escaping from matter. Matter was necessary, so it had to happen. We are not responsible. Therefore, we are not responsible for the famous sins of the flesh. We need not blame ourselves.
Chesterton did not think, in fact, that St. Augustine was always careful enough in these matters. Thus, Chesterton, like Aquinas, is always found, not at the end of a process wherein great errors are visible to everyone, but at the beginning wherein their slight deviation from the good is barely noticed. But these initial deviations can be foreseen by a man of wisdom as they might work their way through the human condition. Augustine learned the errors of Manicheanism by being himself a Manichean for a time. He soon discovered that the thesis he used to justify himself and his own deviant ways did not in fact explain himself to himself. In the end, he was honest enough to recognize this fact. Aquinas figured this difficulty out intellectually, perhaps after having read Augustine, without the necessity of going through the latter's much publicized sinful life.
Augustine himself has warned us about the relation of heresy and spirit, that the most dangerous heresies arise, not from being too worldly or too materialistic, but, paradoxically, from being too spiritual. The devil in his being, after all, is an angel of light, not a beast or a dragon. Here is how Chesterton saw the problem with Augustine and ultimately with Plato:
Granted all the grandeur of Augustine's contribution to Christianity, there was in a sense a more subtle danger in Augustine the Platonist than even in Augustine the Manichee. There came from it a mood which unconsciously committed the heresy of dividing the substance of the Trinity. It thought of God too exclusively as a Spirit who purifies or a Saviour who redeems, and too little of a Creator who creates. This is why Aquinas thought it right to correct Plato by an appeal to Aristotle; Aristotle who took things as he found them, just as Aquinas accepted things as God created them. In all the work of St. Thomas the world of positive creation is perpetually present (St. Thomas Aquinas, Doubleday Image, p. 84).
Imagine calling attention to a heresy that "divided the substance of the Trinity" as if it were the most vital thing in the world! But of course, the goodness of real things is in fact, certainly for us, the most vital thing in the world. To find God, we do not have to escape the world, or our very material bodies, even though God is not the world or our bodies. Thus one of Chesterton's main enemies is the idea that things as things are not good.
Compared to other thinkers, then, Chesterton thought St. Thomas was quite unique in his attention to things, to almost anything. Just as a thing was, just the fact it existed at all, this was the marvel. Chesterton was astonished at the existence of any thing at all and figured that God was astonished too or it would not exist. St. Thomas, Chesterton tells us, was "avid in his acceptance of Things; in his hunger and thirst for Things. It was his special spiritual thesis that there really are things; and not only the Thing; that the Many existed as well as the One" (p. 136). Thus, reality as such is not our enemy. If something is wrong in our world, it is not reality itself; it is not what is.
V.
Chesterton himself sometimes explained how he dealt with critics. In another column from the Illustrated London News (March 25, 1922), he distinguished between defending his "opinions" over against defending his "writings." "My opinions, as opinions," he explained, "are all quite correct. Any thinking person will see that to say this is only saying that these are my opinions. A man has not got a conviction if he is not convinced of it." On the other hand, Chesterton pointed out, "my books, as books, are very far from being all correct; and I wonder that they are not more often corrected." What Chesterton puts in his books are his convictions for which he has arguments. He is not just explaining his opinions, which are simply what they are, namely, his views. He is setting down his reasons. Chesterton acknowledged that he often made errors of small fact. But everyone could see that the error was not deliberate. He called a nephew, for instance, what was in fact a brother-in-law. He has, he thinks, likewise, written books badly on subjects about which others might have written well.
Chesterton next proceeded to comment on the various critics of his book Eugenics and Other Evils. Anyone who reads this book will still realize that the proponents of eugenics were then and would still be now Chesterton's enemies. He saw them as enemies of human nature as such. His book may have been a bad "book," Chesterton thinks, but he wants to criticize the critics of this book, not about being wrong about the book, but about their being wrong about "the subject of the book," that is, eugenics.
Indeed, Chesterton thought that perhaps in fifty years -- Eugenics and Other Evils was published in 1922 -- the book would be unintelligible because people in the meantime would have seen the errors of the arguments for eugenics. Alas, this has not been the case. The errors that Chesterton saw in 1922 are far more popular and far more dangerous today than when he examined them. We actually practice many of them. Chesterton saw in eugenics, the effort to manage who is born by "scientific" and political methods, to be the sure path to tyranny in future years in which those judged not worthy of birth would be eliminated or prevent from being born. Needless to say, the prevention of birth is a growth industry today.
One of Chesterton's favorite adversaries and friends was Bernard Shaw. What Chesterton criticized, in this regard, was Shaw's having an "almost religious idea of evolution." Shaw will not see that this very idea of evolution -- which Chesterton once remarked in another context, meant merely the survival of those who have in fact survived -- leads to the empowerment of the state when what in fact is evolving is not to our liking. "The ignorant must be controlled so long as they are not controlled by the instructed." That is, the logic of eugenics leads to the political control of who is to be begotten or an intellectual instruction about what to do about life.
Another of Chesterton's critics on this issue was Dean Inge who had accused Chesterton, in his Eugenics book, of wanting to bring back the Dark Ages. To this view, Chesterton replied that it seemed curious that Inge warns of Chesterton's bringing back the Dark Ages "when he himself (Inge) is always warning us of a Dark Ages in the future; and has to trust the next generation with all the powers of tyranny, when he will not trust it with the rights of freedom." Those in favor of eugenics, in other words, think that normal begetting of human beings by human beings, those activities which result from the "rights of freedom," will lead in the future to some degeneracy of the race so, to prevent it, we must grant tyrannical power to the state to decide who is or is not to be born or who is or is not to die. These proposals to deny the basic rights and dignities of the human family Chesterton genuinely hated.
What is to be noticed here is that Chesterton, much like St. Thomas, was able to understand what was implicit in ideas and arguments. He was not concerned with his own opinions, which were just that, opinions. He was concerned with the subject to be addressed. If he was accused of wanting to bring back the Dark Ages, he was quite clear that this unenlightened age is precisely what, in effect, his critic wanted to establish not in the past but in the future, an age in which the intelligent ruled the supposedly ignorant with an iron hand and could not tolerate anything other than what the intelligentsia themselves wanted. Chesterton, of course, hoped that by spelling out where ideas led, he could both prevent the tyranny implicit in them and make the proponent see what was implicit in the argument. Neither Shaw nor Inge were Chesterton's "enemies," though both held ideas that would, Chesterton pointed out, lead in their logic to a tyranny that placed the state in charge of all begetting, of all living and dying, because it could not trust the "rights of man" and his freedoms.
VI.
Chesterton's hatred of eugenics was the reverse side of his love of marriage, of its romance, of its bindingness. Chesterton could see that the condition and reality of the child is the heart of both religion and of society. For him, the Incarnation was no mere accident, as if the stable at Bethlehem was merely an incidental event in the history of religion. Rather it was at the heart of religion that God becomes man, not as a philosopher or a banker, but as a child in an obscure part of the world. These are the places in which all the great romances and adventures begin and end. If someone told Chesterton that, after he chose her, he was still free to choose another wife, he would have told them that they understood neither what a wife was or what choice was. Chesterton genuinely hated those who made the things we really want impossible.
"I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave me liberty for which I chiefly cared," he declared in his chapter on "The Eternal Revolution" in Orthodoxy, "the liberty to bind myself." And he added, as an after-thought on the metaphysics of it all, "complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun." Would it be too paradoxical to maintain that the enemies of Chesterton are those who do not allow us to have any fun?
Chesterton completes the essence of his argument in these memorable and beautiful lines about the meaning of romance and promises:
For the purposes of even the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and this is why it is the chief subject and center of all our romantic writings. And this is the last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honor to myself. All my modern Utopian friends look at each other doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there" (Orthodoxy, Ignatius, p. 328).
Modern utopian friends whose promise for happiness lies in what is in effect the "dissolution of all ties" are Chesterton's enemies. He knows that what we want is not to be free of our own promises, but to be bound by them. No romance can begin without a commitment. This is why, for Chesterton, obligations alone can result in adventures. If we are free to break our promises, we will have no real adventures.
VII.
One of Chesterton's earliest books (1905) was entitled precisely Heretics. This book made everyone sit up and take notice. The supreme irony of this wonderful title, Heretics, is, of course, that, in terms of modern thought, the heretics whom he treated -- Wells, Shaw, Kipling, George Moore, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Lowes Dickenson, Whistler -- were quite the avant-garde of what everyone thought, or was about to think. The only real, genuine "heretic" around was, of course, Chesterton himself, who was "orthodox," as he stated in his next book, Orthodoxy, a book again written as a challenge from those who claimed that they knew what he was against but not what he was for. If a "heretic" was someone who said something different from everyone else in the neighborhood, then the only real heretic in England in the first third of the 20th Century, indeed in the whole century, was Chesterton himself. The "orthodox" Chesterton did not burn anyone at the stake, of course, but he did make many a standard argument look silly and its authors burn with a kind of embarrassment. But again, it was all both light hearted and devastating.
Chesterton loved Francis of Assisi, but he was dubious of the Franciscan insight when it was taken out of some higher context and was proposed for its own sake. In a sense, Chesterton was the enemy of simplicity. "One great complaint, I think, must stand against the modern upholders of the simple life in all its varied forms, from vegetarianism to the honourable consistencies of the Doukhobors," he wrote in Heretics. "This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things" (Ignatius, p. 110). Things like "diet, costume, etiquette, and economic systems" are not where the drama of life exists. We can have simple garment, eat bread and water, say "yea" and "nay" all the time, and still miss the point of the human condition and where its problems lie. The real differences and problems lie in philosophy, not dress. Or as Chesterton put it most amusingly: "It does not very much matter whether a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind."
What is Chesterton getting at here? There is a simplicity that makes a difference, the "simplicity of heart, the simplicity which accepts and enjoys." After all, our whole problem with the world is that it is something we have been given; it is given precisely for our enjoyment. It is not at all clear to Chesterton that the convoluted system of the simple life is at all simple, is at all the best use of the world. "There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle." It is well to recall that "grape-nuts" were themselves historically rooted in a kind of religious fervor to get rid of the breakfast of mush and beer. Thus, eating "grape-nuts" on principle told us much more about a very complicated view of the world than eating caviar because it was good.
Those leading the simple life will not be improved by what they affirm to be "high thinking and plain living," Chesterton thought. Again we have a touch of Manicheanism here, a refusal to believe how abundant the world really is. What those of the simple life lack is a lack of festivity, that highest act of our culture and of our appreciation of what we are. How remarkably clear did Chesterton see that those who profess the simple things as a way to exalt and aid humanity missed its very essence. "A little high living ... could teach them the force and meaning of human festivity, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world." What a wonderful sentence that is -- the meaning of human festivity, the banquet from the beginning of the world. Chesterton saw these things, saw that what might at first sight be so attractive was in fact a narrowing of our vision and of our destiny.
Such proponents of the simple life, Chesterton thought, needed to learn that, in a very real way, "the artificial was older than the natural," that is to say, that what is natural was given for us, to be our dominion. The natural is for us; we are not for it. "A little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike a blow." Chesterton understands that the love of one's country is a wholly proper thing and the refusal ever to strike a blow simply results in empowering the wicked in the name of a simplistic virtue. "Plain thinking will ... decisively reject the idea of the inevitable sinfulness of war." There can be, given the complexity of human nature, as much sinfulness in not fighting as in fighting. The "man in sandals and simple raiment, with a raw tomato in his hand" who tells us that family affection and love of country are enemies of human love, in Chesterton's view, simply do not understand the particularity in which all concrete love exists.
"Nothing is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure as purely material." In the classical writers, pleasure as such is not evil or wrong. It is rather what accompanies all of our activities. There are intellectual and material pleasures, all good. Pleasures can be used wrongly but this is not the problem of pleasure itself, but of the will that seeks to direct them to ends in which they do not properly flourish. Nothing misunderstands matter itself more than to think that the difficulties we have with matter come from matter itself.
"Our conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change of habit or social routine. The things we need most for practical purposes are all abstractions." This too is a remarkable sentence. Chesterton has just told us that we need to see that pleasures are good, that we need to be festive, that we need abundance and joy, and here he is telling us about our practical need for "abstractions." But of course he is right. The real enemies are those who do not have things in proper order, as St. Thomas says.
Somewhere Chesterton tells us that when something goes wrong with, say, our automobile, we may need a mechanic. But if the mechanic cannot figure out what is wrong, we may need the original engineer and designer. And if there are things he cannot handle, we may need the impractical scientist or philosopher, who cannot tie his own shoe laces. The "abstractions" that we need are those that tell us what we are and how we are to live, who God is and what the world is about, what is good and what is evil. We cannot live a "simple life," or any other kind of life, if we do not know what we are. If Chesterton finds in the proponents of a simple life to be enemies of what is good -- I suspect their current names are ecologists or environmentalists -- it is because he can see that the world is made for something other than keeping itself in existence forever down the ages.
VIII.
In conclusion, the last enemy that I want to point out that Chesterton, from a very early age, fought was the enemy of that power which made our vows and promises possible, namely, the enemies of free will, the determinists of whatever hue. Chesterton has always maintained that he came to philosophy and theology not by directly studying them but indirectly because of the contradictions that modern thinkers themselves displayed in their attacks on religion and human taught. In his Autobiography, Chesterton recalls something of his early arguments from 1905 with Robert Blatchford, whose ideas seem themselves to have come from the scientist Theodore Haeckel. Chesterton was not at first interested in divine election or the Trinity, but he was concerned with the idea of responsibility itself, that what we did and enjoyed was in fact ours.
Chesterton states his case graphically: It is not that I began by believing in supernatural things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving in even normal things It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist who told me, at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I rather like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look around for some spiritual asylum that was not a lunatic asylum (Ignatius, p. 172).
The imagery of "the lunatic let out for the day" remains. Chesterton's enemies were those who made it impossible, by their "abstract ideas," for those who, like Chesterton, rather liked being treated as "responsible beings," for those who make the vows and keep them.
In the end, the man who had no enemies knew that there were ideas and choices that made sane and normal human existence impossible. He knew we were not determined, that we were free, but that we could choose wrongly. He knew that matter and body were not evil. He knew that the world was not parsimonious, that festivity and joy were closer to its essence than fasting and poverty, though these too had their place. He understood how we could turn ourselves over to eugenists and forget what we really are. Chesterton, in short, knew what we really wanted. We wanted promises that would be kept, worlds that would be ordered, lives that would be chosen in the light of what we are first given. He knew what we should love the sinner but hate the sin, but he also knew that sin existed and that we could choose it.
The great freedom is the freedom to bind ourselves, to bind ourselves to the wonder and goodness of all that is, to all that is given to us, but especially to one another. For Chesterton, we are all like Grant Allen; he would rather know what God thinks of us, than what we think of God. But if we do think of God, Chesterton knows that it is important to think rightly even about God lest we think erroneously about ourselves. Only when we think rightly about God can we understand why festivity tells us more about ourselves than the simple life or indeed than the sinful life.
39) From World & I, 8 (August, 1990), 560-73. James V. Schall, S. J. "NEVER ENOUGH OF NOTHING TO DO": ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF G. K. CHESTERTON I. Cicero, the great Roman
philosopher and orator, who, in his articulateness and good sense, is
responsible for much of the form and content of civilization itself, began a
letter to his son, Marcus, then studying in Athens, with this famous passage:
"Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first of that family to be called Africanus, used
to remark that he was never less idle than when he had nothing to do, and never
less lonely than when he was by himself."
Gilbert Chesterton began
the tenth chapter of his Autobiography,
which he entitled, "Friendship and Foolery," by noting that some people complain
about a man "for doing nothing." He continued, "there are some, still more
mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do."
In words that more than anything explain the way he looked at his own life and what he did to reflect and write about it, Chesterton continued in this same passage:
When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, (such men who do not appreciate the freedom of having nothing to do) will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards or a little ball. (Chesterton never liked golf!). I speak only for myself; I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I never can get enough Nothing to do (p. 202).
What is the purpose and content of this ironic "nothing" that Chesterton could not get enough of?
In a revealing phrase he remarked, that he felt that he never had in his lifetime the leisure "to unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts." When we consider the enormous output of Chesterton, we can indeed wonder about this nine-tenths of him we do not have recorded but which occupied his packed time. Then he added, that in his sometimes "morbid" boyhood, he was often in a quite horrible sense, even "solitary in society," but that in his manhood, he had "never felt more sociable than ... in solitude." How one's aloneness and one's friendship can be parts of the same person, of the same reality, how the richness of friendship cannot exist without the depth of solitude, this was one of the fundamental questions that formed the intellectual life of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. What I would like to consider with you here is what Chesterton did with this time in which he had "nothing" to do. Freed in a remarkable way from the pressure of always having something to do, he discovered what is, he discovered what was not himself and why he was not at home even when he was at home. G. K. Chesterton, as far as I can tell, is the only man I know who has solved the problem of writing one's own autobiography. He simply wrote it before he lived it. The "Autobiography" of G. K. Chesterton is found in his most famous book Orthodoxy.
What we have in the book he called his Autobiography is rather the calm retrospective survey of a man who, having written his autobiography in its intellectual lines as a young man, looked back over his now lived life -- Chesterton died in 1936, a few months after completing his Autobiography -- to detail the incidents that elaborated in the concrete moments of his own unique life the theoretical truths he knew already by 1908, if not uncannily in his infancy. I do not mean that Chesterton considered that thinking was more important than living, but he did hold that his thought arose directly out of the living wonderments and problems of his actual life in all its vivid detail, a detail he seems to have remembered almost wholly and verbatim.
To be sure, we could also maintain, as Chesterton himself seems to have indicated, that every book he ever wrote was really his own Autobiography. Speaking of his book on Robert Browning, Chesterton wrote of himself:
I will not say that I wrote a book on Browing; but I wrote a book on love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art, or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity. There were very few biographical facts in the book, and those were all wrong (p. 101).
I believe Chesterton's book on the history of England managed to accomplish that chronological feat without ever citing a date! Often from just one essay in the London Illustrated News we get the impression that we are also reading the "autobiography" of G. K. Chesterton.
Chesterton's own book on himself is written in the same mood of accounting for everything worthwhile in the very act of accounting for a life, this time his life. Like his books on Browning and on England, he managed to tell us in his Autobiography the truth of those things about which we really want to know -- that is, about love, liberty, poetry, God, religion, optimism, pessimism, and the hope of the world -- without too much worry about the studied paraphernalia of academia. Some cynic might even hint that lack of these scholarly trappings was the very reason why he could tell the truth, that he was not an academic, but a journalist, as he called himself, someone who had leisure, someone who had time to write about nothing in particular because he had time for everything, time for the dramatic search for the highest things both in solemnity and in foolery.
When he completed his Autobiography, in fact, Chesterton asked himself, "Now why do I offer here this handful of scrappy topics, types, metaphors all totally disconnected?" Anyone who knows Chesterton, no doubt, will not give too much count to his modest description of his own life and works, for few men have ever had a more unified and consistent life than Chesterton. No one was more able than Chesterton to connect things from hats to dandelions, to sunrises, and ultimately to their origins. His Autobiography did not, however, he insisted, present a "religious system." Rather this book of his was a "story." Indeed, it was a "romance" and even a "mystery-story," a genre which made Chesterton famous. He answered, as he affirmed at the end of The Autobiography, only questions he asked in the beginning of the same book. Life even in its very beginnings first presented him with certain questions about which he realized he must find out the truth at the risk even, he seemed to insist, of madness if they are left unaddressed and unanswered.
We should know from the beginning, furthermore, that for Chesterton throughout his life, however evil and sorrow might have been perplexing to him as to all men, and he knew they were, they were not nearly so perplexing as existence itself and especially the existence of gladness and joy. In his Autobiography he wrote, "The real difficulty with man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes; that is the practical problem which the philosopher has to solve" (p. p. 323). Chesterton always felt that if you seek to explain pain, evil, and sorrow on the one hand, and delight and gaiety on the other, the latter were by far the more difficult and profound intellectual and moral enterprises to explain. And he was right in this.
From his childhood, Chestertron knew that gladness and joy existed; and, what is even more disturbing to any but a most humble man, he knew that he did not cause them, that he did not have, as the modern world claimed, a "right" to them (pp. 324-25). "I, at lest, leaned more and more to the old philosophy which said that (men's) real rights came from wherever the dandelion came from," he continued,
and that they never will value either without recognizing its source. And in that ultimate sense uncreated man, man merely in the position of the babe unborn, has no right even to see a dandelion; for he could not himself have invented either the dandelion or the eyesight (p. 325).
Yet both the dandelion, which he liked, and the eyesight existed and he enjoyed them both immensely.
Listen further to how Chesterton, in a most touching passage, described what he intended to do in his own Autobiography:
I have said that I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness, which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome (p. 329).
We should not read this remarkable passage without at the same time recalling that Chesterton, who seems like such a good, honorable man, which he was, nevertheless affirmed in this same Autobiography that when asked why he finally became a Catholic, he humbly and yet surprisingly responded "To get rid of my sins" (p. 319).
Indeed, the amount of attention paid in The Autobiography both to sacramental confession of sins -- "for there is no other religious system (besides Christianity) that does really profess to get rid of people's sins" (p. 319) -- and also, beginning from his boyhood, to the question of evil is remarkable. In a famous passage in The Autobiography Chesterton' conversed with Father O'Connor about the depths of evil. He contrasted this conversation with the views he had just heard of the two superficial young Cambridge undergraduates on the same topic.
From this we can realize that an almost innocent but highly intelligent man, like a Chesterton or a St. Thomas, has in fact in his intellectual life a thorough understanding of the reality and nature of the evil that does exist in the world (pp. 317-18). Similar to C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, George MacDonald, and Belloc, a most profound and I find disturbing realization of evil and sin is found in Chesterton. And Chesterton never talked like he merely imagined this evil. Rather in some sense we feel in reading him that he experienced them and wanted to get rid of them in his own life. This fact perhaps explains his constant attention to free will as an essential element in our very being, the very basis of our possibility of sin or glory.
Yet, for all his solemnity about the confession of sins and the nature of evil, Chesterton was continually bemused by life and, as he remarked, he was never "bored" with his life. In spite of the sorrow and the sin, he retained a positive sense of joy that so puzzled him and constituted the abiding theme of his life. We have the unshakable impression that everyone, even those who disagreed with him most radically, not only admired Chesterton but loved him and loved to be with him. How is it, he often wondered, that we have within our lives this experience of delight and joy which he found from his very infancy? He did not think his life either morbid or depressing, even though from what we gather from his chapter on lunacy, he knew morbidity and depression and he often joked about his Autobiography being quite morbid and depressing.
II.
Thus Chesterton, having said all of this heavy stuff about morbidity and depression, could quite happily write at the end of his life, "Some time ago, seated at ease upon a summer evening and taking a serene review of an indefensibly fortunate and happy life, I calculated that I must have committed at least fifty-three murders..." (p. 312). We all should commit numerous sins and crimes, Chesterton thought, not in fact of course but in our novels and writings and imaginations. Indeed, he playfully continued in the same passage, he once drew up a list of some "Twenty Ways of Killing a Wife." He actually figured that he did away with twenty spouses in his books, which, he laughed to himself, had certain advantages for it enabled him to commit the crime and "keep his original wife" at the same time (p. 312). This is a most Platonic passage, I might add, one mindful of the discussion in The Republic about how good judges and men are to know about evil without ever doing it.
Too, we should not forget that Chesterton not only seems to have loved his wife Frances very much but he also needed her. He told himself in The Autobiography of his once calling her on the phone, being at the time lost in some railway station, to inform her that he was in Hanwell and to ask humbly, "Where ought I to be?" Like many a great man, he needed not only a wife who loved him but a keeper to enable him to do what he wanted to do. Chesterton was fortunate in having both in the same person and he knew it.
In Orthodoxy, I have always found generated more intellectual excitement about the discovery of the truth than in any book I know. What the Autobiography does, as I think of it now, is to reassure us that that truth really did flow from the experiences of reality that Chesterton had as a boy and as a young man. Chesterton asked himself near the end of his Autobiography just what he was doing in this book. He insisted again that it was not a book of "religious controversy." He maintained that he had already written a number of such argumentative books and would probably write some more unless, as he quaintly put it, "violently restrained by my friends and relatives."
Chesterton was always bemused by his own willingness at the drop of a hat to speak or to write about everything when he had, as he insisted, nothing to say. Delightedly, he tells us, "My last American tour consisted of inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm" (p. 300). In the passage about the nature of what he was doing in his Autobiography, we can see, perhaps better than in any other place, the unity of the life of G. K. Chesterton. "I am here engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines (as Penance and the divine love) on my own feelings and actions," he attested.
And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of my childish happiness and boyish brooding. And they specifically affected one idea; which I will not say is the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted (p. 320).
This is the great theme of the life of Gilbert Chesterton as he saw it in his own broodings and experience, the fact what we owed gratitude to at least some one for the very fact of our existence, indeed for the very fact that anything at all exists in the first place.
Chesterton, as I have said, was most modest about the scope of his Autobiography. When we first pick it up, it is a book seemingly full of disparate anecdotes, accounts of grandparents, of his brother, of famous and not so famous folks he met and liked or liked to disagree with, sometimes as in the case of Shaw, both at the same time. In his recollection of Belloc, for example, Chesterton recalled returning to Belloc's house when he was just getting to know him. They had all been out seeking the sources of the Arun, the great river of England which Belloc so wonderfully described in his Four Men. All were in an exuberant mood except that the feminine half of the party, namely Belloc's wife Elodie and Chesterton's wife Frances, were quite chilly and did not particularly enjoy traipsing merrily through the woods in search of England as did Belloc and Chesterton.
To make matters worse, moreover, once inside the warm house Belloc, always leaving the door open to the chilly breezes, kept running in and out to a telescope he had in his garden and "hallooing to the ladies" to come out and look through it to "see God making energy." Elodie declined this as less interesting enterprise than staying warm by a fire. To this rebuff Belloc replied in verse no less as was his wont, spontaneously imitating something in Coleridge:
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise And the doors stood open at our feast; When there passed us a woman with the west in her eyes And a man with his back to the east.
In Belloc's house, Elodie ruled, so they ceased watching God "making energy" and had something hot to drink. No wonder Chesterton thought that the home was more mysterious than the universe!
Chesterton went on to recall more of these random sorts of antics, to add, a propos of an autobiography:
Those are the sort of silly things that come back to me in memory; and a real life of anybody would almost entirely consist of them. But a real life of anybody is a very difficult thing to write; and as I have failed two or three times in trying to do it to other people, I am under no illusion that I can really do it myself (p. 205).
Needless to recall, moreover, the books that Chesterton modestly accuses himself of "failing" to write well include his wonderful biographies of St. Thomas Aquinas, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Browning, some of the most delightful and insightful literary "failures" one could ever want to read.
Chesterton began his chapter on his friend Hilaire Belloc in this same vein by assessing his own works:
Apart from vanity or mock modesty (which healthy people always use as jokes) my real judgment on my own work is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time. There is reason for this; and it is really rather a piece of autobiography than of literary criticism. I think Napoleon of Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure it was ever written (p. 276).
Chesterton went on to suggest that his novel The Ball and the Cross was quite a good plot because it concerned two men prevented by the police from ever fighting a duel about the "collision of blasphemy and worship," over an issue which all modern respectable people would call "a mere difference about religion." The subject sounds almost contemporary, doesn't it? The essence of this plot, however, in Chesterton's opinion struck at the heart of modern civilization. "I believe," he observed, "... that the modern world is organized in relation to the most obvious and urgent of all questions, not so much to answer it wrongly, as to prevent it being answered at all" (p. 276). This passage, of course, gives the reason why Chesterton is so dangerous to the modern mind because he does bring it to the most obvious and urgent of all questions that are not being asked in our universities, or our media, or our politics, or even, alas, oftentimes in our religion.
III.
Here, I will make only one main point about the relation between Orthodoxy and The Autobiography. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton wanted to show the uniqueness of Christianity in comparison with other philosophies and faiths, which he seems to have encountered intellectually at a very early age. Chesterton came to Christianity, as he held of himself, not because he understood it from the beginning and found it true, but because he tried all other alternatives and found them consistently, when left to themselves, wrong. "If I had wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw," he observed of himself, "and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood" (p. 327). Chesterton always suspected that the intellect needed something more than intellect consistently to discover and keep the truth.
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained how he looked at the intellectual task he set out for himself:
To the Buddhist or to the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to the Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must, so to speak, be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't.... All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? -- that is the only thing to think about if you enjoy thinking (Vol. I, p. 341).
This is Chesterton as a young man. He knew of the philosophies of the world. He knew about Christianity. He knew about the joys of thinking and the sober, thrilling delight of choice which results in the story of any life, including his own or the life of characters in our novels.
Where did Chesterton get this idea of the drama of existence? In his Autobiography, Chesterton spent two chapters on his family, his infancy, and his boyhood, especially his schooling and his friends. Of boyhood itself, including his own, for example, he reflected: "Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy" (p. 61). Yet, in Chesterton's account of his own life, it is very clear that he already had sensed the essential problems and agonies of existence from infancy and boyhood in some unarticulated way.
Chesterton is enormously amusing, of course, in the process of describing his life to us. I know that there are some who do not appreciate always his paradoxical humor, though I cannot for the life of me understand why. I think it has something to do with the fact that Chesterton held that there is a direct relation between humor and truth. Indeed, I think it is because he suspected that without the faith you will not have the fun, so that he felt sorry for those who did not realize that they were missing anything. Yet, Chesterton, however much he too loved laughter and good red wine, never set out to be merely funny. In fact he said in Orthodoxy, "I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it" (p. 213).
Chesterton loved to parody the intellectual fads of his time or, as it turns out, such is the pertinence of his thought, of any time. Indeed, he began his Autobiography with one of the most delightful spoofs on modern literary and biblical criticism that anyone can imagine, no less valid today than when he wrote it. The very first chapter in fact is called "Hearsay Evidence," and reads like this:
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campton Hill, Kensington; and baptized according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated the ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian (p. 21).
With this charming account of his immediate origin, we already have some fundamental insight into his attitude toward the modern intellectual and to the sources of knowledge and truth that were to develop into his life. We even perhaps catch here a touch of the amusing way that he always referred to his own girth, about which he seems to have been most good natured, however much his wife wanted to drape it so that it would not show too much.
IV.
From whence did Chesterton derive the idea that life was a story, that stories include adventure because they include choice, and that this choice of the adventurer is what all else in existence is about, including God's "making energy" which Belloc saw through the telescope in his backyard? The second chapter of The Autobiography is entitled "The Man with the Golden Key." The title of this chapter was taken from the earliest childhood experience that Chesterton could recall. He clearly remembered seeing a young man walking across a bridge. The man had a curly moustache and a swagger. He carried in his hand a very large yellow metal key and wore a golden crown on his head. The young man was walking towards a castle out the window of which looked down a young and lovely lady. Chesterton even said of this young lady "I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks" (p. 39).
Already here, then, in his first memory, Chesterton not merely implicitly understood chivalry, but he was willing to go to war over the validity of his senses, over his recollection of the lady he saw in the toy theater. Chesterton indeed, like Aristotle and St. Thomas, insisted on beginning and ending his philosophy with "the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses" (p. 331). The surprising existence of real things like dandelions, about which he spoke so much in The Autobiography, and the Incarnation, of wich he spoke in Orthodoxy and The Evelasting Man, were for Chesterton merely two related and essential aspects of the same truth, tht the Word was made flesh.
What was remarkable about this passage about the man with the golden key, however, was not that Chesterton had actually seen such an event, for he had, but that the scene he saw was really from a toy theatre which his father had made for him as a child. What is important about this first memory for Chesterton was that for him it symbolized, if it did not actually incite him, to search for that key which would explain all the things he really did see and sense. The search for the golden key was from the very beginning the story of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
In explaining why this incident was the first thing he chose to recount in his Autobiography, we first touch on that doctrine of limited creation that alone makes this world possible and the God who created it intelligible insofar as we can pursue thinking delightfully about both, as Chesterton remarked. Here is how Chesterton put it, humorously continuing his gentle chiding of the modern disciplines while showing that common sense philosophy which so clearly puts Chesterton in the tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas:
I am no psychologist, thank God; but if psychologists are still saying what ordinary sane people have always said -- that early impressions count considerably in life -- I recognize a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas. All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits.... (p. 40).
We are indeed limited beings who know that we can reject our limits, and that if we do, this too will be the story of our lives. For Chesterton the very drama of our individual story consists in the choice of whether we choose to see that the limits of what is are indeed granted to us not as pains or penances but as gifts and wonderments, almost as if we were loved before we even were.
In this sense, Chesterton felt, I think, that when all was said and done, he was the one true "heretic" of our time. Indeed, his book, Heretics, in which he recounted what he felt to be wrong in the major thinkers of his time, an account he recalled in his Autobiography, was the occasion for his writing Orthodoxy. For he was challenged -- something he could never resist -- to write a book to explain not what was wrong with what everyone else held, but what was right with what he held. The result was what he called "the romance of orthodoxy" or, better in The Autobiography, "the crime of orthodoxy." Chesterton recalled of himself and his school companions that "we really devoted all out boyhood to one long argument, unfortunately interrupted by meal-times, by school-times, by work hours and many such irritating and irrelevant frivolities" (p. 160). It was argument, he held, that brought him to the romance and crime of orthodoxy.
This lifelong argument with his friends, however, was serious but not without its solemn delight. "I have never understood, from that day (in his youth) to this ... why a solid argument is any less solid because you make the illustration as entertaining as you can" (p. 163). Chesterton recognized that the very title of his first "autobiography," as I have called it, of Orthodoxy, was that it was "provocative." That is, it claimed in terms of clear argument with precisely the modern mind that Christianity was quite true. This is why Chesterton even today remains a kind of rock against which to test the modern mind, including the modern religious mind. Chesterton maintained that it is the arguments for modernity, for positions against Christianity that are, on examination, contradictory in logic and in argument.
The arguments which were said to "disprove" Christianity and the philosophy which it implied, consequently, were precisely the arguments, in their inconsistencies, which proved to him that Christianity must be correct. "I had begun to discover that, in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy" (pp. 171-72). Chesterton was most perceptive. He realized that in the beginning everyone thought his brand of paradoxical argumentation was a "kind of pose or a paradox," or even a "stunt" or, for the kinder, a "joke." "It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true."
V.
I want to conclude these reflections on Chesterton's Autobiography, by recounting a scene in which he described his hosting a party on the occasion of Belloc's sixtieth birthday. He held it was "one of the most amusing events" of his life (p. 288). Some forty people were invited, many rather important men of their time, friends of both Belloc and Chesterton. Chesterton knew most of the people there, but it was extraordinary, he thought, that such varied people were in one place. Just seeing them there, he remarked, "stirred in me the memory of a hundred controversies." Chesterton always seemed to remember controversy not in anger but in fondness.
At this dinner, it is important to note, there were to be "no speeches," though Chesterton, as honorary chairman, was permitted to say "a few words." The assembled group were to present Belloc on this occasion with a golden cup on which were written Belloc's famous lines:
"And sacramental raise me the divine Strong brother in God and last companion, wine" (p. 289).
Chesterton was convinced that Belloc's verse would last, as it has. Belloc acknowledged the moment, however, with, as Chesterton put it poignantly, "a sad good humor."
Belloc went on to quip that he discovered that by the age of sixty, "he did not much care whether his verse remained or not." And added, "But I am told that you begin to care again frightfully when you are seventy. In which case, I hope I shall die at sixty-nine" -- which of course he didn't. Everyone then settled down with old friends to the feast at which there were to be no speeches.
However, near the end of the dinner, someone mentioned to Chesterton that he really ought to acknowledge the man whose idea it was to have this affair for Belloc in the first place. By the time he wrote his Autobiography, Chesterton had forgotten who it was who did the arranging but he recalled thanking him anyway. But the man who was so thanked got up to say that he appreciated the compliment very much but that it was not he who organized the dinner but Johnny Morton, who was sitting to his right. Morton got up next to the welcome applause of the forty but protested that it was not he who did the organizing either but the man to his own right, a man by the name of Squire.
Naturally, Squire very courteously stood up and thanked everyone but indicated that neither was he responsible but the man to his right, Mr. A. P. Herbert. Herbert rose and gave the whole proceeding a new twist by pretending that he was the oratorical official of some Workmen's Benevolent Society. He was a fine orator and eloquently claimed that he did not organize the dinner either. "I shall never forget," Chesterton said, "the exactitude of the accent with which (A. P. Herbert) said, 'I'm sure, friends, we're all very pleased to see Ex-Druid Chesterton among us this evening'" (p. 290). Everyone else subsequently picking up the play, the mantel next went to Duff Cooper, then to Eccles, to E. C. Bentley. Each in turn solemnly swore that he did not organize this dinner for Belloc but the man next to him did.
Bentley had been one of Chesterton's first boyhood friends, as he had already recounted in the early chapters of The Autobiography. "Bentley gave one glance to his own right," Chesterton continued,
and rose with exactly that supercilious gravity that I had seen forty years ago in the debating-clubs of our boyhood; the memory of his balanced eye-glasses and bland solemnity came back to me across my life with such intensity as stirs the tears that are born of time (p. 290).
Those are the words, for in their own way they sum up the man, that I want to leave with you in reflecting on Chesterton's own Autobiography, his memory across his life of the joyous solemnity that, on reflecting on its own story, "stirs the tears born of time."
Chesterton finally concluded this dinner for Belloc with these words: "It is the only dinner I have ever attended, at which it was literally true that every diner made an after-dinner speech. And that was the very happy ending of that very happy dinner, at which there were to be no speeches" (p. 291). I would leave you with these very happy diners at which there is much talk where there is to be no speeches, with memories of those "tears that are born of time." Chesterton was grateful for this life he led, for its humor and its particularity. He knew that it was the only life he had and therefore the only life he had to be grateful for. This is why he could end his Autobiography, as we have seen, with the glorious spiritual gift of the "senses" and with the laughter which, as Chesterton remarked when he finished Orthodoxy, was the only secret of God's inner life that God had withheld from us in revelation, not, to be sure, because it did not exist but because its existence was really to be given to us only when we could receive it.
Here is the last sentence of Orthodoxy, the sentence, like the dinner for Belloc, that brings the happy memory of Chesterton to the final heresy that Christianity is indeed what explains the joy we cannot explain by ourselves, the joy for which we are to be above all else grateful. Chestertn concluded, "There was one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth" (p. 366). Here is the ultimate source and nature of the "nothing" that we are to do when we are given everything. Cicero was never less idle than when he was alone. Chesterton for his part loved the gift of "loneliness" which was, as he said, the gift of "liberty."
"Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome."
"Will a man take this road or that? -- that is the only thing worth thinking about if you enjoy thinking."
"All my life I have loved edges.... All my life I have loved frames and limits."
"For my part, I can never get enough of Nothing to do."
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