GK's Weekly, The Thing, Logic And Lawn Tennis

A few weeks ago I start to serialise Gk Chesterton's book, The Thing each Saturday and called it GK's Weekly in honour of his newspaper of that name. (First part here) A number of people have said it is too long, the typeface is too small, it needs pictures etc. So I've used a larger font, put in photos, but will still put up a whole chapter each Saturday. Today's chapter is half the length of last weeks! People are reading it so there we have it. You can get a short daily GKC quote from here if you prefer. Clearly not a course of action that Mr Murry would approve of.

LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS (V)

WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited-- all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, "I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs," is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.

Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three-quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood; which is really something misunderstood.


For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. "Nothing can save English Tennis," he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows:


(1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis.


(2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will.


(3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life.


(4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the preservation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues.


That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody's duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.

In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.

The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word "Guild" for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.

The Catholic Church Is Obviously Right, But Is There A God?

"The only little difficulty that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it."

Johnston Stephen

I found this in Chesterton's Autobiography and just had to print it!

GK's Weekly, The Thing, The Drift From Domesticity

(Sorry, but when reading this chapter I could not help but remember this photo of me. It was taken 13-15 years ago, and shows me watering plants in the rain!)

THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY (IV)

IN the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, whenyou can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you."

Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home. That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all. They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down without even pausing to ask why it was ever put up. It is true that only a few of them would have avowed this object in so many words. That only proves how very blind and blundering they are. But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist. It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual. We are merely told that in this or that case a particular temperament was tormented by a particular environment; but nobody even explained how the evil arose, let alone whether the evil is really escaped. We are told that in this or that family Grandmamma talked a great deal of nonsense, which God knows is true; or that it is very difficult to have intimate intellectual relations with Uncle Gregory without telling him he is a fool, which is indeed the case. But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all. Much of this business began with the influence of Ibsen, a very powerful dramatist and an exceedingly feeble philosopher. I suppose that Nora of THE DOLL'S HOUSE was intended to be an inconsequent person; but certainly her most inconsequent action was her last. She complained that she was not yet fit to look after children, and then proceeded to get as far as possible from the children, that she might study them more closely.

There is one simple test and type of this neglect of scientific thinking and the sense of a social rule; the neglect which has now left us with nothing but a welter of exceptions. I have read hundreds and thousands of times, in all the novels and newspapers of our epoch, certain phrases about the just right of the young to liberty, about the unjust claim of the elders to control, about the conception that all souls must be free or all citizens equal, about the absurdity of authority or the degradation of obedience. I am not arguing those matters directly at the moment. But what strikes me as astounding, in a logical sense, is that not one of these myriad novelists and newspaper-men ever seems to think of asking the next and most obvious question. It never seems to occur to them to enquire what becomes of the opposite obligation. If the child is free from the first to disregard the parent, why is not the parent free from the first to disregard the child? If Mr. Jones, Senior, and Mr. Jones, Junior, are only two free and equal citizens, why should one citizen sponge on another citizen for the first fifteen years of his life? Why should the elder Mr. Jones be expected to feed, clothe and shelter out of his own pocket another person who is entirely free of any obligations to him? If the bright young thing cannot be asked to tolerate her grandmother, who has become something of a bore, why should the grandmother or the mother have tolerated the bright young thing at a period of her life when she was by no means bright? Why did they laboriously look after her at a time when her contributions to the conversation were seldom epigrammatic and not often intelligible? Why should Jones Senior stand drinks and free meals to anybody so unpleasant as Jones Junior, especially in the immature phases of his existence? Why should he not throw the baby out of the window; or at any rate, kick the boy out of doors? It is obvious that we are dealing with a real relation, which may be equality, but is certainly not similarity.

Some social reformers try to evade this difficulty, I know, by some vague notions about the State or an abstraction called Education eliminating the parental function. But this, like many notions of solid scientific persons, is a wild illusion of the nature of mere moonshine. It is based on that strange new superstition, the idea of infinite resources of organisation. It is as if officials grew like grass or bred like rabbits. There is supposed to be an endless supply of salaried persons, and of salaries for them; and they are to undertake all that human beings naturally do for themselves; including the care of children. But men cannot live by taking in each other's baby-linen. They cannot provide a tutor for each citizen; who is to tutor the tutors? Men cannot be educated by machinery; and though there might be a Robot bricklayer or scavenger, there will never be a Robot schoolmaster or governess. The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary; the force of natural affection for his young, which exists even among the animals. If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.

It is now necessary to recite these truisms; for only by doing so can we begin to get a glimpse of that REASON for the existence of the family, which I began this essay by demanding. They were all familiar to our fathers, who believed in the links of kinship and also in the links of logic. To-day our logic consists mostly of missing links; and our family largely of absent members. But, anyhow, this is the right end at which to begin any such enquiry; and not at the tail-end or the fag-end of some private muddle, by which Dick has become discontented or Susan has gone off on her own. If Dick or Susan wish to destroy the family because they do not see the use of it, I say as I said in the beginning; if they do not see the use of it, they had much better preserve it. They have no business even to think of destroying it until they have seen the use of it.

But it has other uses, besides the obvious fact that it means a necessary social work being done for love when it cannot be done for money; and (one might almost dare to hint) presumably to be repaid with love since it is never repaid in money. On that simple side of the matter the general situation is easy to record. The existing and general system of society, subject in our own age and industrial culture to very gross abuses and painful problems, is nevertheless a normal one. It is the idea that the commonwealth is made up of a number of small kingdoms, of which a man and a woman become the king and queen and in which they exercise a reasonable authority, subject to the common sense of the commonwealth, until those under their care grow up to found similar kingdoms and exercise similar authority. This is the social structure of mankind, far older than all its records and more universal than any of its religions; and all attempts to alter it are mere talk and tomfoolery.

But the other advantage of the small group is now not so much neglected as simply not realised. Here again we have some extraordinary delusions spread all over the literature and journalism of our time. Those delusions now exist in such a degree that we may say, for all practical purposes, that when a thing has been stated about a thousand times as obviously true, it is almost certain to be obviously false. One such statement may be specially noted here. There is undoubtedly something to be said against domesticity and in favour of the general drift towards life in hotels, clubs, colleges, communal settlements and the rest; or for a social life organised on the plan of the great commercial systems of our time. But the truly extraordinary suggestion is often made that this escape from the home is an escape into greater freedom. The change is actually offered as favourable to liberty.

To anybody who can think, of course, it is exactly the opposite. The domestic division of human society is not perfect, being human. It does not achieve complete liberty; a thing somewhat difficult to do or even to define. But it is a mere matter of arithmetic that it puts a larger number of people in supreme control of something, and able to shape it to their personal liking, than do the vast organisations that rule society outside; whether those systems are legal or commercial or even merely social. Even if we were only considering the parents, it is plain that there are more parents than there are policemen or politicians or heads of big businesses or proprietors of hotels. As I shall suggest in a moment, the argument actually applies indirectly to the children as well as directly to the parents. But the main point is that the world OUTSIDE the home is now under a rigid discipline and routine and it is only inside the home that there is really a place for individuality and liberty. Anyone stepping out of the front-door is obliged to step into a procession, all going the same way and to a great extent even obliged to wear the same uniform. Business, especially big business, is now organised like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I should say, a militarism without the military virtues. But anyhow, it is obvious that a hundred clerks in a bank or a hundred waitresses in a teashop are more regimented and under rule than the same individuals when each has gone back to his or her own dwelling or lodging, hung with his or her favourite pictures or fragrant with his or her favourite cheap cigarettes. But this, which is so obvious in the commercial case, is no less true even in the social case. In practice, the pursuit of pleasure is merely the pursuit of fashion. The pursuit of fashion is merely the pursuit of convention; only that it happens to be a new convention. The jazz dances, the joy rides, the big pleasure parties and hotel entertainments, do not make any more provision for a REALLY independent taste than did any of the fashions of the past. If a wealthy young lady wants to do what all the other wealthy young ladies are doing, she will find it great fun, simply because youth is fun and society is fun. She will enjoy being modern exactly as her Victorian grandmother enjoyed being Victorian. And quite right too; but it is the enjoyment of convention, not the enjoyment of liberty. It is perfectly healthy for all young people of all historic periods to herd together, to a reasonable extent, and enthusiastically copy each other. But in that there is nothing particularly fresh and certainly nothing particularly free. The girl who likes shaving her head and powdering her nose and wearing short skirts will find the world organised for her and will march happily with the procession. But a girl who happened to like having her hair down to her heels or loading herself with barbaric gauds and trailing garments or (most awful of all) leaving her nose in its natural state-- she will still be well advised to do these things on her own premises. If the Duchess does want to play leap frog, she must not start suddenly leaping in the manner of a frog across the ballroom of the Babylon Hotel, when it is crowded with the fifty best couples professionally practising the very latest dance, for the instruction of society. The Duchess will find it easier to practise leap frog to the admiration of her intimate friends in the old oak-panelled hall of Fitzdragon Castle. If the Dean must stand on his head, he will do it with more ease and grace in the calm atmosphere of the Deanery than by attempting to interrupt the programme of some social entertainment already organised for philanthropic purposes.

If there is this impersonal routine in commercial and even in social things, it goes without saying that it exists and always must exist in political and legal things. For instance, the punishments of the State must be sweeping generalisations. It is only the punishments of the home that can possibly be adapted to the individual case; because it is only there that the judge can know anything of the individual. If Tommy takes a silver thimble out of a work-basket, his mother may act very differently according as she knows that he did it for fun or for spite or to sell to somebody, or to get somebody into trouble. But if Tomkins takes a silver thimble out of a shop, the law not only can but must punish him according to the rule made for all shoplifters or stealers of silver. It is only the domestic discipline that can show any sympathy or especially any humour. I do not say that the family always does do this; but I say that the State never ought to attempt it. So that even if we consider the parents alone as independent princes, and the children merely as subjects, the relative freedom of the family can and often does work to the advantage of those subjects. But so long as the children are children, they will always be the subjects of somebody. The question is whether they are to be distributed naturally under their natural princes, as the old phrase went, who normally feel for them what nobody else will feel, a natural affection. It seems to me clear that this normal distribution gives the largest amount of liberty to the largest number of people.

My complaint of the anti-domestic drift is that it is unintelligent. People do not know what they are doing; because they do not know what they are undoing. There are a multitude of modern manifestations, from the largest to the smallest, ranging from a divorce to a picnic party. But each is a separate escape or evasion; and especially an evasion of the point at issue. People ought to decide in a philosophical fashion whether they desire the traditional social order or not; or if there is any particular alternative to be desired. As it is they treat the public question merely as a mess or medley of private questions. Even in being anti-domestic they are much too domestic in their test of domesticity. Each family considers only its own case and the result is merely narrow and negative. Each case is an exception to a rule that does not exist. The family, especially in the modern state, stands in need of considerable correction and reconstruction; most things do in the modern state. But the family mansion should be preserved or destroyed or rebuilt; it should not be allowed to fall to pieces brick by brick because nobody has any historic sense of the object of bricklaying. For instance, the architects of the restoration should rebuild the house with wide and easily opened doors, for the practice of the ancient virtue of hospitality. In other words, private property should be distributed with sufficiently decent equality to allow of a margin for festive intercourse. But the hospitality of a house will always be different from the hospitality of a hotel. And it will be different in being more individual, more independent, more interesting than the hospitality of a hotel. It is perfectly right that the young Browns and the young Robinsons should meet and mix and dance and make asses of themselves, according to the design of their Creator. But there will always be some difference between the Browns entertaining the Robinsons and the Robinsons entertaining the Browns. And it will be a difference to the advantage of variety, of personality, of the potentialities of the mind of man; or, in other words, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Please Tell Americans About 'Magic'

I copied the following from here.

Nashville's Blackbird Theater in August will mount a rare production of Magic - a play by the great, if largely forgotten, literary figure G.K. Chesterton - with performances at Shamblin Theatre on the David Lipscomb University campus, running August 12-27.

Magic is described as "a funny, fiercely dramatic, unabashedly romantic play that involves an aristocratic family whose conflicting beliefs and doubts about the supernatural are all challenged by the arrival of a mysterious conjurer."

Its author, G.K. Chesterton, though unknown to most people today, was one of the towering intellectuals of the early twentieth century. He was a renowned journalist, acclaimed debater, and perhaps most famously an influential defender of the Christian faith whose humor and profound prose were a great inspiration to many of the last century's most esteemed writers, including J.R.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, John Updike, Neil Gaiman, and C.S. Lewis.

The play will be directed by Blackbird's Artistic Director Wes Driver who counts Chesterton as one of his favorite writers.

"Chesterton was one of the most original, most penetrating thinkers of the 20th century, and this play captures his thought and joyous spirit so perfectly. It's funny and romantic, but dark and mysterious, too. And it features that sort of drama the Edwardians did so well and we at Blackbird relish-passionate debate about big ideas," Driver explains.

Although largely neglected for the last 75 years, Chesterton and his works are beginning to experience a renaissance of sorts, with a surplus of new books being released about his life and writings and more and more people being turned on to his unmatched imagination and insight.

"We hope our production does its small part in introducing audiences to the brilliance of this forgotten figure," Driver says.

Blackbird's production of Magic stars David Compton as the Conjurer and Amanda Card McCoy as Patricia, both of whom have entertained audiences on a number of Nashville stages, including performances with Tennessee Repertory Theatre and Nashville Children's Theatre. Both Compton and McCoy were among stars of Blackbird's inaugural season production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The play also features notables Alan Lee, Daniel Hackman, Zack McCann, Chris Bosen and Robyn Berg.

For further information about Blackbird, visit the company's website at www.BlackbirdNashville.com.

The Times, On GK Chesterton's Sainthood

Here follows an article from The Times Literary Supplement June 8th, 2011. Yes it is too long for a post on my blog and no, I don't agree with it all, after all I did not write it! But here it is anyway, for it is nice to see The Times even consider what many in the Church have not even heard of, The Holiness of GK Chesterton! For Chesterton Prayer Cards. Also sign up to say a Rosary for Bishop Peter Doyle, Bishop of Northampton, the diocese were Chesterton died.

The miraculous G. K. Chesterton?

The Christian virtues and unacknowledged failings of an indefensibly happy writer

By Bernard Manzo

G. K. Chesterton once said that he had been “indefensibly” happy for most of his life. There is a note, not simply of happiness, but of joy, in much of what he wrote; but what meaning should one give to this happiness? Is there a self-delighting, whimsical, even wilful obliviousness in the merriness of Chesterton? Was he just a bit silly? T. S. Eliot once said that he found the cheerfulness of Chesterton entirely “depressing”. Yet Chesterton claimed that his levity came from his deepest beliefs: “Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery and blasphemy; just as their prototypes, the sad and high-minded Stoics of old Rome, did mistake the Christian joyousness for buffoonery and blasphemy”. That is, of course, the sort of thing that Chesterton often said, the sort of thing not likely to satisfy anyone in a captious mood. (T. S. Eliot had been a Christian for just under a year when he said that he found Chesterton depressing; but then it is difficult to imagine Eliot ever being wholly in sympathy with the high spirits of Chesterton.) It could be that Chesterton saw Christianity as “jolly” because he was temperamentally inclined to be cheerful; but it could also be that this made him responsive to something essential in Christianity.

The happiness of Chesterton came not from anything in particular but from everything in particular. For Chesterton, the best thing to rejoice in is everything – existence itself – and to contemplate existence, to realize in a “sunlight of surprise” that there is something when there need not be anything, is to experience joy. While this joy is of a transcendent character – a response not to a definite situation but to the very existence of things – it depends on the particularity of things, because it is in seeing what makes each thing itself that one can delight in its very existence. This joy is “a certain silly exuberance” – “silly” in every sense, including the older senses of “simple”, “innocent”. It was a joy that Chesterton could see in St Francis of Assisi, who “understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing”. To perceive existence against nothingness, to realize that reality “stands on nothing”, is to see the “whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God”: it is to realize that existence is a free gift from God, and it is to become capable of gratitude to God.

While the importance of Chesterton has often been questioned, there are signs that he is now – in Catholic circles at least – being taken very seriously. In the past couple of years, a number of works examining Chesterton as a thinker have been published – a meticulous study of the early development of his thought by William Oddie, an assessment of Chesterton as a theologian by Aidan Nichols, and now a full intellectual biography of Chesterton by the Newman scholar Ian Ker, and a collection of essays (to which Oddie, Nichols and Ker have all contributed) considering whether there might be a case for the canonization of Chesterton. St Gilbert of Fleet Street and Beaconsfield (his attributes a pint glass and a swordstick) would not, perhaps, be such a bad companion for St Francis, the saint Chesterton described as “the court fool of the King of Paradise”; or would this be a bad joke?

Ian Ker provides an account of the thought of Chesterton that surpasses, in its comprehensiveness, anything that has been previously written about him. He does not offer a picture of the character of Chesterton that differs markedly from that presented by the earlier biographer Maisie Ward (who had the advantage of being able to speak to people who knew Chesterton well, and of having access to personal papers now lost), but he gives a sympathetic and exhaustive presentation of his subject’s ideas. Ker contends that Chesterton should be appreciated as a thinker and controversialist, a sage in the tradition of the Victorian sages, whose achievement should be measured by a half dozen or so of his works of philosophy, biography and criticism. Chesterton wrote much more than half a dozen books, of course, and most of what he wrote was avowedly ephemeral, but he considered the ephemeral to be highly important – of one of his books he remarked that “it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks” but that “in the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill . . . it will matter to us greatly on which side we fought”. Ker concentrates mostly on the journalistic pieces that Chesterton considered worth collecting in volumes published during his lifetime, and although he
acknowledges that Chesterton, almost inevitably for so prolific a writer, repeated himself, one cannot but feel that some of the journalism is given too full an exposition by Ker – particularly since Ker’s approach is purely expository, lacking a critical edge. This is unfortunate, because Ker acknowledges that, if the reputation of Chesterton is to endure, it will be on the strength of books like Orthodoxy (1909) or Charles Dickens (1906), not his (sometimes ill thought-out) journalistic pieces.

Ker celebrates Chesterton as a defender of the “common man” who opposed the tendency of many thinkers of his time to conjure up images of sub-human “masses” (and political proposals to match the images; H. G. Wells, for instance, was able to contemplate the extermination of biologically “inferior” sectors of the population with equanimity). Chesterton honoured the romance and fullness of ordinary lives, and he was a fierce opponent of modes of thought that he saw as an assault on the dignity and freedom of those lives. He celebrated William Cobbett, because “he was not merely concerned with what is called the welfare of the workers”, but “he was very much concerned for their dignity, their good name, their honour, and even their glory”. He claimed that the true ideal of democracy – to which he was fully committed – depended on recognizing that “the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary”.

His appreciation of “ordinary things” was an expression of his sense of the splendour of existence. Human beings, in all their ordinary limitations, are holy: “man has been made more sacred than any superman or supermonkey . . . his very limitations have already become holy and like a home, because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small”. The Incarnation gave a new dignity to human nature, but it also revealed a dignity that was already there, a dignity intrinsic to human nature. For Chesterton, if something was “like a home” it was already “holy”, because it was by being limited, distinct, that things were most fully themselves; and when a life was lived in reference to definite limits, adventures were possible. He wanted a cosmos composed of small, distinct, varied things; he recoiled from visions of enormous, homogeneous combinations of things. He was, then, predisposed to accept the political ideals of Hilaire Belloc, who believed, developing the ideas presented in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, that political liberty could be preserved only through a wide distribution of property – a vision of a world of small owners, not vast organizations.

Ker does not fully assess the extent to which Chesterton was influenced by Belloc (and, more generally, in his care to expound the manner in which Chesterton argued his way to various positions, Ker can sometimes make him seem a rather more solitary thinker than he was); certainly, the image of the “Chesterbelloc”, invented by Bernard Shaw, exaggerates the extent to which Chesterton and Belloc were at one in their views. Yet Belloc – who seemed to be influenced by almost no one, other than Cardinal Manning – did have a clear, if sometimes cartoonish, vision of political affairs that seemed to be taken up by Chesterton, and his brother, Cecil. Both Chesterton and Belloc acquired a reputation for anti-Semitism during their lifetime; how fair was the accusation? Fairer than admirers of Chesterton might wish; but the picture is not simple. While Belloc was, it must be said, quite capable of analysing anti-Semitism as a “delusion”, he seemed, in his worse moments, to believe that all modern political events could be explained as the result of a conspiracy between corrupt politicians and cunning Jewish plutocrats who pursued international financial interests at the expense of national interests. Chesterton himself saw Jewishness as an identity potentially inimical to national identity. In The New Jerusalem (1920), he claimed that his “heresy” consisted “in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen”, but he claimed that the inference he made from this was Zionist – that “Jews should be represented by Jews and ruled by Jews”, that they should have their own homeland, and that Jews who did not live in that homeland should be given “a special position best described as a privilege; some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions”. (Chesterton had, at the age of nineteen, jotted down in a notebook that “No Christian ought to be an Anti-Semite. But every Christian ought to be a Zionist”.) A measure of this kind would, as Ker recognizes, “simply create the kind of ghetto that had facilitated the persecution of Jews”, but Ker seems right in judging that “this cannot be said to have been Chesterton’s intention, which sounds perfectly sincere even if quite impractical – or worse”. One can read a vast amount of Chesterton without encountering any anti-Jewish remarks at all, but he did sometimes make such remarks – concerned mostly, as Ker says, with a “perceived cosmopolitanism and involvement in international finance” – one of the most obnoxious of which was his suggestion that any Jew wishing to occupy a public position should be “dressed like an Arab” as a marker of foreignness. Against this, one should recognize that Chesterton abominated all theories of racial superiority, and that he was an early and fierce opponent of the “racial religion” of Nazism, remarking that he found it “staggering” that “a whole huge people should base its whole historical tradition on something that is not so much a legend as a lie”. Aware of the persecution of German Jews in the years before his death in 1936, he declared himself “appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities”. Yet one should recognize, too, that he failed to understand the character of Italian Fascism, or to oppose it adequately.


The virtues of Chesterton, by most accounts, greatly outnumbered his failings; but could he really be regarded as a saint? In The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton, some distinguished traditionalist Catholic thinkers consider this question. John Saward examines the Chestertonian philosophy of wonder, likening it – in its celebration of the clear and vivid perceptions of childhood experience – to the “Little Way” of St Thérèse of Lisieux, and interpreting it as an expression of true, childlike humility. Aidan Nichols assesses the orthodoxy of Chesterton, considering whether he could be regarded as a Doctor of the Church. Ian Ker examines the account Chesterton gives of the virtues involved in humour, the virtues of self-forgetful abandonment to a good joke, and of a humility that can acknowledge the “inconsistency” of things without seeking to overcome it: an account which provides a way of seeing the humorousness of Chesterton himself as virtuous. Nicholas Madden and Bob Wild offer opposing perspectives on whether Chesterton can be considered a mystic, their debate centring on whether or not there can be a “mysticism” of ordinary life. William Oddie defends Chesterton against allegations of anti-Semitism. Sheridan Gilley reflects on the possibility of regarding him as the patron saint of journalists, the profound “democratic faith” of Chesterton being the correlate of his belief in the dignity of humanity – so that for him “the journalist was the tribune of the people”. Gilley is right to observe that there was a genuine self-forgetfulness in his commitment to campaigning journalism: “he was more interested in his causes than in himself, and more interested in mankind than either”. All the essays are admiring of Chesterton – none presents a “case against” – but then one cannot honestly consider whether someone might be considered a saint without, at the least, thinking highly of him or her. It is not for nothing that there needs to be a miracle or two before someone can be declared a saint, because it seems impossible to pronounce on whether or not a person has lived a genuinely holy life. None of those who have contributed to this volume would claim to be able to do so; their essays seek to show how Chesterton, in certain respects, was unusually virtuous – and in this they are largely successful. Yet one cannot but feel, at times, that he is viewed, by most of the contributors, with too unqualified an admiration. The absence of the devil’s advocate is felt.

Any attempt to assess the achievement of Chesterton must, ultimately, involve a judgement on his “silly exuberance”. Such a judgement is relevant not only to the question of whether there is much of substance in his philosophy, but to the question of whether one can speak of him as a “mystic”, for his “optimism”, or, better, his loyalty to existence, first emerged out of an experience he described, in a letter to his friend E. C. Bentley, as an experience of “speaking to God face to face”.

In his Autobiography (1936), he wrote of a period in his life when, as a student at the Slade School of Art, he had been overcome with a “mood of unreality and sterile isolation”. The dominant artistic mode of the time was Impressionism, and Chesterton believed that the technique of seeking to render things as immediately perceived implied the “metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all”, a philosophy close to the “philosophy of Illusion”. Influenced by this attitude, he thought his way to a “denial of fundamental things”. While “dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind”. The traces of this experience are preserved in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a “nightmare” vision of an attempt by a philosophical detective to unmask a group of anarchists, in which there is not so much a narrative as a sequence of vivid scenes, with each scene in succession being shown to be illusory, and with the sequence of images culminating in a question about the ultimate nature of the world: is everything – as the experience of “nightmare” might suggest – ultimately absurd? Chesterton threw off this “incubus” of extreme doubt when he recognized that “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting . . . . Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare”; and existence becomes all the more “exciting”, when its otherness, its reality, is recognized: “how much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”

Chesterton chose to be happy, and it was a choice that made it possible for him to believe in something more than personal choice, to get out “in the open” and to believe in objective reality. In Orthodoxy, his first complete articulation of his religious beliefs, he defended Christianity as creating a particular state of existence – a sense of life as a “romance”, in which one can “contrive to be astonished at the world and yet at home in it”. It secured this way of living by appealing to something beyond human existence: that is, it established the dignity of human life through the idea of a God who so transcended the world as to be capable of becoming, in Christ, one with it. Chesterton sought to show that Christianity sustained forms of life that other philosophies tended to destroy; it was not proved by this, but if one were predisposed to value these forms of life, one would be disposed to accept Christianity, or, rather, one might already have a degree of implicit belief in Christianity. In an essay written a few years before Orthodoxy, Chesterton maintained that to make aesthetic experience the supreme value was to render oneself incapable of aesthetic experience; one could only take pleasure in something as simple as sparks flying from a bonfire if one lived in a certain way: “the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of virtues. That red fire is only the flower on a stalk of living habits, which you cannot see . . . . That flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues . . . . Be really bad, and they will be to you like the spots on a wall-paper”.

Dogmas, for Chesterton, create thought; they create the possibility of argument, and perception (“with this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them”). Whether one accepts or rejects Christianity, one must ultimately avail oneself of dogma (“every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly”); so that one cannot so much prove the dogmas of Christianity as show that the alternative dogmas (of materialism, fatalism or whatever) issue in absurdities and contradictions, and that the dogmas of Christianity sustain values that would be lost if those values were affirmed in isolation. To affirm, for instance, the total autonomy of reason could be to destroy reason – because reason can doubt itself, and annihilate itself. One must have faith in reason. To affirm the goodness of the world might be to countenance a kind of quietism; but Christianity affirms all at once the goodness of the world, its separateness from the highest good, and its fallenness from its own intrinsic perfection: the world is good, but one must fight for goodness in this world – we must “hate [the world] enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing”. More than that, for Chesterton, Christianity maintained a balance between potentially competing ideas and values – indeed, potentially dangerous ideas and values – and the achievement of this balance was in itself an intimation of its divinity. Reflecting, in Orthodoxy, on the “gigantesque” and wild “diction” of Christ – “full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea” – Chesterton remarked that “Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other”, and that “the one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis”. The danger here is that one might call mere contradiction “mystery”; but Chesterton took the view that the reasonableness of the “startling synthesis” of Christianity could be shown by its making sense of experience as a whole, where other philosophies issued in contradictions, or in a denial of certain aspects of common experience. For Chesterton, the mysteries of Christianity made sense of common sense.

Mountains might be hurled into the sea not only in a gospel story, but in a fairy tale, containing not just “gigantesque” words but angry giants; and Chesterton claimed that such tales – which “touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment” – evoke wonder at sheer existence because by reimagining the form of the world they point to something gratuitous about it: even if one could get to the deepest laws of reality, governing everything, one could still ask why those laws in particular were in place, and the “test of fairyland [is that] you cannot imagine two and one not making three but you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail”.

Chesterton valued fairy tales because he saw them as renewing the way in which we perceive the world; they showed that existence was strange, that it was good, that goodness was sustained by limits. He valued the grotesque in art – a matter of definite outlines, exaggerations, wayward individualization, of “the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way” – because it rejoiced in the particular. To present something in a grotesque manner, to stress what makes it peculiarly itself, is “to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself”. (He was strongly appreciative of the energies of the grotesque in Browning and Dickens.) He valued humour because it involves openness to the ways in which reality exceeds any ideas one might form of it: “the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist”, and it involves humility, because one must abandon oneself to a joke to be funny: “do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon”. The humour of Chesterton was of a kind that finds the thing laughed at precious and admirable in its laughableness, and he saw laughter as inseparable from love. He once remarked that “there was some 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”. Far from seeing mirth as a kind of irresponsibility or forgetfulness of reality, he saw it as a response to the truth of things, a perception of the whole; and he maintained that in Christianity “joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small”, because it sees the joy of God as the ultimate cause of things.

Chesterton considered that the office of art was to reveal reality by transforming it: the “object of the artistic and spiritual life” is to “dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy”. His criticism was very much an exploration of the nature of things, and an articulation of his own philosophy, and his greatest works of criticism – the works on Browning, Chaucer, and, above all, Dickens – were efforts to show how these artists had got something right about the way things are. In Heretics (1905), he discusses several contemporary writers not “in a merely literary manner, but in relation to the real body of doctrine which they teach”, insisting that one could not treat the aesthetic as something apart from “doctrine”; yet he did not reduce artistic works to philosophical statements, and sought always to discern how artistic forms showed something that could not be shown in any other way. There was, indeed, something quasi-aesthetic in his response to Christianity – his sense that its strangeness fitted the “oddities of life”, that it was “like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years” – and he celebrated Christianity as the “philosophy of stories”: by affirming the reality of human freedom, and by declaring the world to have a meaning, Christianity declared life to be like a story, and stories to be true to how things are.

His own stories are generally sequences of vividly rendered gestures or actions, in which the actors are not so much fully realized characters as types, and in which the presentation is characterized by a violent simplicity of outline, an opacity without depth. (All his life he enjoyed putting on toy theatre shows.) The Father Brown stories, though elaborately plotted, usually centre on a single, odd, puzzling or striking action, with Father Brown detecting the deeper forces at work in a situation by perceiving the meaning of a gesture, in an act of intuition informed by his understanding of human nature. For all their charm (not a little of which comes from the way Father Brown voices some of the philosophical views of Chesterton himself), many of the stories have a certain unreality: they are all about sudden, preternaturally acute insights into character and motive, and take place in a universe conveniently filled with symbols. In this regard, it is striking that The Man Who Was Thursday ends with a masquerade, the dancers representing, in their costumes, the random variety of the world – “every couple dancing seemed a separate romance; it might be a fairy dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon”. Chesterton delighted in the individuality of individuals and the thinginess of things, yet things and individuals, for him, are always turning into symbols, the world into a pageant. So, too, in his historical and biographical writing, one feels that he is concerned only with those facts that suggest to him a larger meaning. In the case of his books on Dickens and St Francis, the method works well, because the central insights are so powerful (he speaks of St Francis as “a poet whose whole life was a poem . . . a series of scenes in which he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful crisis”), but it is an approach that allows for much to be made of a few facts, and much, potentially, to be disregarded. Often, with Chesterton, one feels that positives are presented without negatives having been fully taken into account. Belloc was astonished to hear that Chesterton had converted to Catholicism (“faith is an act of the will and as it seemed to me the whole of his mind was occupied in expressing his liking for an attraction towards a certain mood, not at all towards the acceptation of a certain Institution as defined and representing full reality in this world”), and he felt obliged to write to Chesterton about the distinction between “mood” and “truth”: “the Catholic Church is the exponent of reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts”.

Chesterton certainly acknowledged the distinction between “mood” and objective truth, but he was less inclined than Belloc to discount the revelatory potential of moods – for moods correspond to ideas about the world, are a response to such ideas, or can imply the presence of such ideas. Perhaps the difficulty posed by the thought of Chesterton to someone like Belloc is that it centres on wonder, and wonder seems too fleeting, too unsteady a thing to make much of. Belloc praised Chesterton in his essay “On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters” for his “supreme talent for exact logic”, his “precision in reasoning”; yet the real power of Chesterton is something other than “precision in reasoning”; it has more to do with sudden insights and realizations, and with the evocation of a sense that one should expect much of the world, that one should expect it to mean something. He said of himself, “I have had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness . . . . Existence is still a strange thing to me and as a stranger I give it welcome”. In the mid 1890s, he jotted down in a private notebook the reflection

"there is one thing which gives radiance to everything, streets, houses, lamp posts, communities, politics, lives –
It is the idea of something round the corner."
In the same notebook he asks the question
"Have you ever known what it is to walk
Along the road in such a frame of mind
That you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?"

It was a mood that he would seek to evoke in many of his writings over the following decades and it was a mood for which he saw the justification in Christianity. Perhaps this is simply to say that the greatest of the gifts of Chesterton was hope.

Ian Ker
G. K. CHESTERTON
A biography
747pp. Oxford University Press. £35 (US $65).
978 0 19 960128 8
William Oddie, editor
THE HOLINESS OF G. K. CHESTERTON
152pp. Gracewing. Paperback, £9.99 (£17.99).
978 0 85244 725 3

Organ Donation Fears In Wales

The following letter appeared in Wales on line and shows what good job SPUC's National HQ is doing! Deerstalker tip to John Smeaton's blog for this lead.

SIR – Members of the Welsh Assembly have rejected calls for people’s consent to organ donation to be presumed. Instead, the Assembly’s Health Committee wants potential donors to be encouraged to register their intentions.

The British Medical Association is disappointed. Regrettably, the committee has not completely ruled out so-called presumed consent, but in an age of twisted ethical logic one should be grateful for small mercies.

Our concerns regarding presumed organ donation is the risk that eager medics could hasten a patient’s death to get fresh organs for a person in need, well-intentioned but wrong. Earlier this year, a patient in Paris, presumed dead, revived as surgeons began to remove his organs. The International Forum on Transplant Ethics proposed that certain patients be given lethal injections so that their organs are in better shape for transplant.

Presuming consent isn’t the same as obtaining it, so it’s not really consent at all, and such a presumption effectively nationalises everyone’s bodies.

Some countries which presume consent actually get fewer organs than are obtained in this country where consent is still needed. While organ donation can be a generous act, none of us is morally required to do it and government has no right to require it of us.

PAUL BOTTO

SPUC Information Officer (Wales), Cardiff

GK's Weekly, The Thing, Is Humanism A Religion?

IS HUMANISM A RELIGION? (III)

I HAVE just been reading Mr. Norman Foerster's book on "American Criticism"; and I hope it is no disrespect to the bulk of the book, a series of very thoughtful studies on American thinkers, if I say that the whole point of it is in the last chapter; which propounds a certain problem or challenge to modern thought. It is the problem of whether what he calls Humanism can satisfy humanity. Of his other topics it would be easy to talk for ever. He generally says the right thing; he sometimes says the last word, in that suggestive or provocative style that tempts somebody to say one word more. In my own estimate of his subjects, Whitman would be very much larger and Lowell very much smaller. About Emerson he seems both sensitive and just; and Emerson certainly had distinction; but just that dry sort of distinction to which I should always be afraid of being unfair. A Puritan tried to be a Pagan; and succeeded in being a Pagan who hesitated about whether he ought to go and see a girl dancing. But all these things are stimulating but secondary to the question which I will take the liberty of attacking separately and attempting to answer seriously. I fear that answering it seriously must mean answering it personally. The question really is whether Humanism can perform all the functions of religion; and I cannot but regard it in relation to my own religion. It is only just to say that Humanism is quite different from Humanitarianism. It means, as explained here, something like this. Modern science and organization are in a sense only too natural. They herd us like the beasts along lines of heredity or tribal doom; they attach man to the earth like a plant instead of liberating him, even like a bird, let alone an angel. Indeed, their latest psychology is lower than the level of life. What is subconscious is sub-human and, as it were, subterranean: or something less than earthly. This fight for culture is above all a fight for consciousness: what some would call self-consciousness: but anyhow against mere subconsciousness. We need a rally of the really HUMAN things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers. Nevertheless, my first duty is to answer the question put to me; and I must answer it in the negative.

I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism. I do not believe it because of a certain truth to me so concrete as to be called a fact. I know it sounds very like something that has often been said in conventional or superficial apologetics. But I do not mean it in that vague sense; so far from inheriting it as a convention, I have rather recently collided with it as a discovery. I have realized it relatively late in life, and realized that it is indeed the whole story and moral of my own lifetime. But even a few years ago, when most of my moral and religious views were pretty finally formed, I should not have seen it quite sharply
and clearly; as I see it now.

The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands. That is, very briefly, the thesis I maintain; and it so happens that the book called AMERICAN CRITICISM might almost have been meant for a text-book to prove my point.

I will begin with a particular example with which the book also deals. My whole youth was filled, as with a sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman. He seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam the First Man. It thrilled me to hear of somebody who had heard of somebody, who saw him in the street; it was as if Christ were still alive. I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether a true Gospel of Jesus were scrawled on parchment or stone. I never had a hint of the evil some enemies have attributed to him; if it was there, it was not there for me. What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exultation in the mere fact that men were men. Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and comforting as a comrade. The point can be put most compactly in one of Whitman's own phrases; he says somewhere that old artists painted crowds, in which one head had a nimbus of gold-coloured light; "but I paint hundreds of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light." A glory was to cling about men as men; a mutual worship was to take the form of fellowship; and the least and lowest of men must be included in this fellowship; a hump-backed Negro half-wit, with one eye and homicidal mania, must not be painted without his nimbus of gold-coloured light. This might seem only the final expansion of a movement begun a century before with Rousseau and the Revolutionists; and I was brought up to believe and did believe that the movement was the beginning of bigger and better things. But these were songs before sunrise; and there is no comparison between even sunrise and the sun. Whitman was brotherhood in broad daylight, showing endless varieties of radiant and wonderful creatures, all the more sacred for being solid. Shelley had adored Man, but Whitman adored Men. Every human face, every human feature, was a matter of mystical poetry, such as lit like chance torchlight, hitherto, a face here and there in the crowd. A king was a man treated as all men should be treated. A god was a man worshipped as all men should be worshipped. What could they do against a race of gods and a republic of kings; not verbally but veritably the New World?

Well ... here is what Mr. Foerster says about the present position of the founder of the new world of democracy: "Our present science lends little support to an inherent 'dignity of man' or to his 'perfectibility.' It is wholly possible that the science of the future will lead us away from democracy towards some form of aristocracy. The millennial expectations that Whitman built upon science and democracy, we are now well aware rested upon insecure foundations.... The perfection of nature, the natural goodness of man, 'the great pride of man in himself' offset with an emotional humanitarianism--these are the materials of a structure only slightly coloured with modernity. His politics, his ethics, his religion belong to the past, even that facile 'religiousness' which he hoped would suffuse and complete the work of science and democracy.... In the essentials of his prophecy, Whitman, we must conclude, has been falsified by the event." This is a very moderate and fair statement; it would be easy to find the same thing in a much fiercer statement. Here is a monumental remark by Mr. H.L. Mencken: "They (he means certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers) have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth saving." That is the New Spirit, if there is any New Spirit. "I will make unconquerable cities, with their arms about each other's necks," cried Walt Whitman, "by the love of comrades, by the lifelong love of comrades." I like to think of the face of Mr. Mencken of Baltimore, if some casual comrade from Pittsburgh tried to make him unconquerable by putting an arm around his neck. But the idea is dead for much less ferocious people than Mr. Mencken. It is dead in a man like Aldous Huxley, who complained recently of the "gratuitous" romancing of the old republican view of human nature. It is dead in the most humane and humorous of our recent critics. It is dead in so many wise and good men to-day, that I cannot help wondering whether, under modern conditions of his favourite "science," it would not be dead in Whitman himself.

It is not dead in me. It remains real for me, not by any merit of mine, but by the fact that this mystical idea, while it has evaporated as a mood, still exists as a creed. I am perfectly prepared to assert, as firmly as I should have asserted in my boyhood, that the hump-backed and half-witted Negro is decorated with a nimbus of gold-coloured light. The truth is that Whitman's wild picture, or what he thought was a wild picture, is in fact a very old and orthodox picture. There are, as a matter of fact, any number of old pictures in which whole crowds are crowned with haloes, to indicate that they have all attained Beatitude. But for Catholics it is a
fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude. It is true that the shafts are feathered with free will, and therefore throw the shadow of all the tragic possibilities of free will; and that the Church (having also been aware for ages of that darker side of truth, which the new sceptics have just discovered) does also draw attention to the darkness of that potential tragedy. But that does not make any difference to the gloriousness of the potential glory. In one aspect it is even a part of it; since the freedom is itself a glory. In that sense they would still wear their haloes even in hell.

But the point is that anyone believing that all these beings were made to be blessed, and multitudes of them probably well on their way to be blessed, really has a sound philosophic reason for regarding them all as radiant and wonderful creatures, or seeing all their heads in haloes. That conviction does make every human face, every human feature, a matter of mystical poetry. But it is not at all like modern poetry. The most modern of modern poetry is not the poetry of reception, but of rejection, or rather, of repulsion. The spirit that inhabits most recent work might be called a fury of fastidiousness. The new man of letters does not get his effect by saying that for him a hump-backed Negro has a halo. He gets his effect by saying that, just as he was about to embrace finally the fairest of women, he was nauseated by a pimple above her eyebrow or a stain of grease on her left thumb. Whitman tried to prove that dirty things were really clean, as when he glorified manure as the matrix of the purity of grass. His followers in free verse try to prove that clean things are really dirty; to suggest something leprous and loathsome about the thick whiteness of milk, or something prickly and plague-stricken about the unaccountable growth of hair. In short, the whole mood has changed, as a matter of poetry. But it has not changed as a matter of theology; and that is the argument for having an unchanging theology. The Catholic theology has nothing to do with democracy, for or against, in the sense of a machinery of voting or a criticism of particular political privileges. It is not committed to support what Whitman said for democracy, or even what Jefferson or Lincoln said for democracy. But it is absolutely committed to contradict what Mr. Mencken says against democracy. There will be Diocletian persecutions, there will be Dominican crusades, there will be rending of all religious peace and compromise, or even the end of civilization and the world, before the Catholic Church will admit that one single moron, or one single man, "is not worth saving."

I have therefore found in my middle age this curious fact about the lesson of my life, and that of all my generation. We all grew up with a common conviction, lit by the flames of the literary genius of Rousseau, of Shelley, of Victor Hugo, finding its final flare up and conflagration in the universalism of Walt Whitman. And we all took it for granted that all our descendants would take it for granted. I said the discovery of brotherhood seemed like the discovery of broad daylight; of something that men could never grow tired of. Yet even in my own short lifetime, men have already grown tired of it. We cannot now appeal to the love of equality as an EMOTION. We cannot now open a new book of poems, and expect it to be about the life-long love of comrades, or "Love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives." We realize that in most men it has died, because it was a mood and not a doctrine. And we begin to wonder too late, in the wise fashion of the aged, how we could ever have expected it to last as a mood, if it was not strong enough to last as a doctrine. And we also begin to realize that all the real strength there was in it, which is the only strength that remains in it, was the original strength of the doctrine. What really happened was this: that the men of the eighteenth century, many of them in a just impatience with corrupt and cynical priests, turned on those priests and said in effect, "Well, I suppose you call yourselves Christians; so you can't actually DENY that men are brothers or that it is our duty to help the poor." The very confidence of their challenge, the very ringing note in the revolutionary voice, came from the fact that the Christian reactionaries were in a false position as Christians. The democratic demand won because it seemed unanswerable. And it seemed unanswerable, not in the least because it is unanswerable, but because even decadent Christians dared not give the answer. Mr. H. L. Mencken will always be happy to oblige with the answer.

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church's bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the
strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed "Psalms" or "Gospels"; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon. They were quite surprised when people called "infidels" here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy. Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vitus's Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all. They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not "lie awake and weep for his sins."

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men. And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists. They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else. They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed. But it is not so; and the process can still go on. There are still traditional charities to which men cling. There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity. They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats. It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves. But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints. There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment. Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

I do not therefore believe that Humanism and Religion are rivals on equal terms. I believe it is a rivalry between the pools and the fountain; or between the firebrands and the fire. Each of these old intellectuals snatched one firebrand out of the undying fire; but the point is that though he waved the torch very wildly, though he would have used the torch to burn down half the world, the torch went out very soon. The Puritans did not really perpetuate their sublime exultation in helplessness; they only made it unpopular. We did not go on indefinitely looking at the Brooklyn crowds with the eye of Whitman; we have come with singular rapidity to regard them with the eye of Dreiser. In short, I distrust spiritual experiments outside the central spiritual tradition; for the simple reason that I think they do not last, even if they manage to spread. At the most they stand for one generation; at the commonest for one fashion; at the lowest for one clique. I do not think they have the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity. For an antiquated, doddering old democrat like myself may be excused for attaching some slight importance to that last question; that of covering the common life of mankind. How many Humanists are there supposed to be among the inferior crowd of human beings? Are there to be, for instance, no more than there were Greek philosophers in an ordinary rabble of jolly pagan polytheistic Greeks? Are there to be no more than there were men concentrated on the Culture of Matthew Arnold, among the mobs who followed Cardinal Manning or General Booth? I do not in the least intend to sneer at Humanism; I think I understand the intellectual distinction it draws, and I have tried to understand it in a spirit of humility; but I feel a faint interest in how many people out of the battered and bewildered human race are actually expected to understand it. And I ask with a certain personal interest; for there are three hundred million people in the world who accept the mysteries that I accept and live by the faith I hold. I really want to know whether it is anticipated that there will be three hundred million Humanists in Humanity. The sanguine may say that Humanism will be the religion of the next generation, just as Comte said that Humanity would be the God of the next generation; and so in one sense it was. But it is not the God of this generation. And the question is what will be the religion of the next generation after that, or all the other generations (as a certain ancient promise ran) even unto the end of the world.

Humanism, in Mr. Foerster's sense, has one very wise and worthy character. It is really trying to pick up the pieces; that is, to pick up all the pieces. All that was done before was first blind destruction and then random and scrappy selection; as if boys had broken up a stained-glass window and then made a few scraps into coloured spectacles, the rose-coloured spectacles of the republican or the green or yellow spectacles of the pessimist and the decadent. But Humanism as here professed will stoop to gather all it can; for instance, it is great enough to stoop and pick up the jewel of humility. Mr. Foerster does understand, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not understand, the case for humility. Matthew Arnold, who made something of the same stand for what he called Culture in the mid-nineteenth century, attempted something of the same preservation of chastity; which he would call, in a rather irritating manner, "pureness." But before we call either Culture or Humanism a substitute for religion, there is a very plain question that can be asked in the form of a very homely metaphor. Humanism may try to pick up the pieces; but can it stick them together? Where is the cement which made religion corporate and popular, which can prevent it falling to pieces in a debris of individualistic tastes and degrees? What is to prevent one Humanist wanting chastity without humility, and another humility without chastity, and another truth or beauty without either? The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.

Fr Z, One Of My Followers Has A Blog & Likes Cooking

I have noticed that Father Z (a follower of this blog, have I mentioned that) has cookery on his blog from time to time. Well I thought, always happy to learn from my followers, maybe that will bring in a few readers, so here we go.

Breakfast (a Catholic word meaning, to break the Eucharistic Fast after Mass, it was the rule until the 1950s to fast from Midnight until after Mass if you were going to Holy Communion) today.

It is important to choose the right drink to go with a meal. Open the fridge door, apple juice unopened, pineapple juice open, right pineapple juice it is then.

Toast one slice if bread, while heating a little oil in a frying pan.Remove the shells from 4 or 5 eggs, I'm just having four today. Add eggs to the pan, add salt & coarse pepper to taste. Butter toast.
Flip over the eggs to cook on both sides as this is the Catholic thing to do, symbolising Scripture & Tradition, not just cooking them on one side in a mean-spirited protestant way.

When slightly over done, flip out onto the slice of buttered toast and eat.


Four eggs on one slice of toast? Quail eggs of course!

God Bless The Legion Of Mary

When in Oxford for the Chesterton Conference last weekend, I went for a stroll along the High Street. There were two muslim information stalls, a protestant one, some music and a Catholic information stall. Yes Catholics standing in the street on a stall! It seemed to be The Legion of Mary, free Rosaries, Miraculous Medals, Alfie Lambe & Edel Quinn Prayer Cards and general Catholic leaflets. God bless them!

Jews, Muslims, Purple/Pink Hair & A Chesterton Conference

Having missed the bus to Oxford, by 30 seconds, I still arrived at 9.59am for the 10am start of The GK Chesterton Society Oxford Conference. Nothing much happened for the next 10-15 minutes as this was a mostly Catholic gathering. Dr Oddie's opening remarks did refer to the Catholic sense of time! He said some interesting things about Jews & GKC, he talked of a Jewish problem in Chesterton's day, which was summed up by Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism thus, "We are aliens here, they do not let us dissolve into the population, and if they let us we would not do it. Let us go forth!"(Appendix A, of The Holiness of GK Chesterton) He felt that people may look back in the future on the worries that some have today about muslim integration and wonder why the fuss, just as many now look back on the Jewish problem. Lynette Burrows then spoke, and I think she was not so confident about muslim integration. But she gave a very interesting talk. (I'm told all the talks will appear on the website soon).

Fr Ian Ker, author of many books including his latest one of 700 pages on GK Chesterton, which Dr Oddie described as being a book that no fan of Chesterton could afford to be without. But at £30 I'm not sure it is one I can afford to be with! Father gave a great talk about GKC, Jesus and all that, it was quite amazing. It was also a very English talk as Father muddled his papers and was very embarrassed. At one bit he talked about GKC making us look at Jesus, we have become distracted since Vatican II with Justice & Peace, Just War, etc. and we think of Jesus as a kindly uncle who does not mind what we do, and forgives us. But Chesterton makes us look the Jesus of the Gospels.

After Mass, Celebrated by Fr Hean the Treasurer, now a Priest of the Ordinariate, and lunch, Dale Ahlquist spoke; "Thank you for showing up for your afternoon nap", with glass of wine in hand, "I will be joining you shortly". He did go on to say much of interest, with over one hundred quotes from GKC! "Have you noticed how, many people in the suburbs have pets but no children. Wherever you have animal worship you have human sacrifice."

All in all a very good day, and what I have said does not do it justice. Do keep an eye on The GK Chesterton Society's website to read the talks in full. And as the quotes above are from memory (and as Conor will tell you, I don't have one) handle with care! Another odd thing that day was as I walked towards the Conference, the people walking in front of me. One of the girls had purple, pink & lighter pink hair, I thought to myself, this generation, this Country, this culture, what hope for GKC? I stopped to buy myself a mocha, to help keep me awake. I sat at the back of the Conference room and the same group of youngsters sat in front of me! (see photos)
For GK Chesterton Prayer cards

4th July; As I Said Last Year!