newspaper essays: Tremendous Trifles, What's Wrong With the World, Heretics, ..... Objectivist reason gone mad is the perfect description of modernity, while the.
Chesterton’s Century: Orthodoxy at One Hundred Ralph C. Wood University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University Mary Ann Remick Visiting Fellow, Center for Ethics & Culture, University of Notre Dame
G. K. Chesterton’s most renowned book is a hundred years old. Orthodoxy was first published in London by John Lane Press in 1908, and it has never gone out of print. Since it’s long been in the public domain, there are more than two dozen printings still available. How to account for such perduring interest? Graham Greene described Orthodoxy as “among the great books of the age.” Etienne Gilson declared that Chesterton had a philosophical mind of the first rank. Hugh Kenner said that the only other twentieth century author with whom Chesterton should be compared, in sheer originality of style and vision, is James Joyce. And Dorothy Day was inspired to reclaim her natal Christianity mainly by reading Orthodoxy. I contend that the last century belongs to Chesterton in a strange sense: because he so remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and post-modernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure. Born in 1874 to Anglican parents who were functional Unitarians, Chesterton soon saw that their acculturated kind of Christianity would not suffice as an answer to the ills of the modern world. Largely under the influence of Frances Blogg, a high church Anglican who would eventually become his wife, Chesterton gradually came to identify himself as a Christian. Indeed, he began to use the word “Catholic” as a virtual synonym for Christianity. Partly in deference to Frances, however, Chesterton was not received into the Roman Catholic Church until 1922, when he was 48. He would die fourteen years later at age 62, in 1936. Chesterton rightly regarded his conversion as a progressive and not a reactionary decision. It was not a nostalgic, backward-gazing act. The central argument of Orthodoxy is that Christianity finally answered his pressing questions. It challenged him to push ahead toward the consummation of all things: “the only corner where [people] in any sense look forward is the little continent where Christ has His Church.” 1
Though sometimes a crank and often a curmudgeon, Chesterton never turned in revulsion against the disorders of his age. On the contrary, he sought to redress them by means of a feisty and witty, a punning and alliterating kind of journalism. In a torrent of essays published in the Illustrated London News and many other newspapers—they would eventually number more than 1400— Chesterton thundered against all manner of evil, mainly the maladies that afflicted the poor: the wage slavery that wedded workers to their jobs, the abolitionism that would have robbed the destitute of convivial relief from drudgery, the nanny state that wanted to manage even the cleanliness of the needy, the eugenics programs that would have kept the mentally “deficient” from marrying. Together with Hilaire Belloc and Father Vincent McNabb, Chesterton also devised an alternative to both capitalism and socialism called Distributism, a scheme for reallocating land rather than wealth. Many of Chesterton’s most memorable books are collections of these newspaper essays: Tremendous Trifles, What’s Wrong With the World, Heretics, The Defendant, Alarms and Discursions, Fancies versus Fads, All Things Considered, etc. He also wrote remarkable short studies of such 19th century figures as Dickens and Browning and Blake, as well as fine biographical accounts of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. In addition, he authored a clutch of still estimable novels: The Man Who Was Thursday, The Club of Queer Trades, Manalive, The Flying Inn, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and especially The Ball and the Cross. The Father Brown detective stories are also perennially popular. Yet except for The Everlasting Man (1925) and a couple of late works such as The Well and the Shallows (1935), Chesterton rarely devoted himself to straightforward theological writing. He sought to come at things indirectly, slyly suggesting or else thunderously pronouncing about matters whose religious import was often more implicit than overt. Orthodoxy is a notable exception to the pattern. It is not an anthology but a carefully argued and deceptively complex work whose title indicates that its moral concerns are also 2
theological. It is a subtle account, in fact, of his own conversion, as he moved gradually from the claims of reason to those of faith. Even after a century, the book holds up astonishingly well. It does so because Chesterton once again treats the most serious things in the lightest manner, probing depths when he appears to be skating on surfaces. One could never accuse Chesterton of prancing, however, since he was well over six feet tall and weighed more than three hundred pounds, his largeness increased by his customary cape. Yet rotundity did not deter him from buoyancy. He jauntily declares, for instance, that “solemnity flows out of men naturally,” like the seepage of a fetid pool; “but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.” Chesterton was impatient with Christian apologists of his time because they were so solemn and thus wrong-headed: “it is plainly not now possible (with any hope of universal appeal) to start, as our fathers did, with the fact of sin.” For Chesterton, the conviction of sin depends on an assumed metaphysical order, a transcendent hierarchy of goods over against which one can both identify vices and promote virtues. The collapse of this venerable Great Chain of Being, as it was once called, is precisely the condition and thus the curse of our age. What tack, then, does Chesterton take to deal with such an enormous collapse in the courts of heaven? In an exceedingly shrewd ploy, Chesterton argues that our age is insane. Perhaps sensing the new vogue of psychology that would dominate the 20th century, he declares us to be both mentally and morally unhinged. In so characterizing our age, he becomes the uncanny prophet of both modernism and post-modernism. I. Chesterton attends first to our insane rationalism. Yet his attack on rationalism is not an attack on reason. Quite to the contrary: “Reason itself is a matter of faith,” Chesterton observes. “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any 3
relation to reality at all.” We assume the rationality of the world as the fundamental postulate and axiom of our very existence. That the world is rational rather than irrational is the basis of everyday life: we could not engage in the most elementary communications and relations if our words and concepts—our reason— did not have a truthful relation to reality. Alas, since the time of Descartes, we have come to believe that there is nothing but reason—reason of a largely reductive and calculating kind. Real things are said to be those that can be demonstrated either by empirical science or mathematical logic. For Chesterton, such modernist rationalism is madness. The rationalist who ignores the limits of reason is always on the verge of becoming a maniac. The maniac is not the person who has lost his mind, Chesterton wisely observes. “The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason…. He [dwells] in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” The mental jail cell of modernity is, for Chesterton, the monomaniacal notion that the universe consists of nothing but matter and energy. Though Chesterton identifies such madness as “materialism,” it is perhaps more appropriate to call it physicalism. As believers in the triune God who has enfleshed himself, who has become matter for our sake, Christians are unabashed materialists who repudiate the gnostic error of belittling or despising the world. What Chesterton rightly rejects is the deadly physicalism that attributes everything to mechanical and efficient causes alone, failing to ask about material and formal and final causes—namely, what brings things into being, what enables them to achieve their particular form, what end-cause drives them, what purposes are they meant to serve? In refusing to ask such questions, physicalism attributes everything to outward forces. Its curious effect is to turn us in upon ourselves, convincing us that we could not be radically other than our genetics and environment have decreed us to be. Insane rationalists are profound pessimists.
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Chesterton rightly links modernist rationalism to ancient Stoicism. The Stoics were also pessimists who believed in a self-enclosed, self-repeating cosmos. Absent any belief in the transcendent God, their only recourse was to worship the god within that would later be called the Inner Light. For Chesterton, this is the worst form of lighting. It would give rise, in fact, to the New Age religion of our own time. Thus did Chesterton foresee both our sickness and our cure: That Jones shall worship the god within turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man [has] not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian [is] that a man [is] not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely [recognizes] an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. The madness of modernist rationalism was also at work in the Natural Religion of the Enlightenment. Yet the worship of nature always turns out to be unnatural, says Chesterton, because Pan is the god of the cloven hoof. The physical world is dark and cruel no less than innocent and amiable. There are good reasons for being responsible stewards of the environment, but they cannot be derived from the environment itself. Chesterton insists, in fact, that no real ethics can be deduced from the physical world. It cancels what it seems to affirm. While democracy declares all men to be worthy, for example, and aristocracy designates some men as worthier, “nature makes no remark on the subject.” Supernatural revelation is required, therefore, to take a sane view of nature: The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity [is] this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity…. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth and Emerson. But nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. 5
To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. Chesterton does not deny the partial validity of physicalism. We are shaped by our cultural and bodily conditions; we are indeed members of the animal species. In fact, Chesterton was not opposed to Darwin’s evolutionary discoveries as such. “A personal God,” he writes, might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.” Chesterton would become the enemy of Darwinism largely because Herbert Spencer and the early capitalists had so badly abused it. They argued, viciously, for the survival of the mentally talented and the economically fit. They ignored our immense dignity as the distinctive and unique animal. “Man is the ape upside down,” Chesterton declares. As the superprimate who is also the sub-angel, man does not look down at the ground like the other beasts. We are anthropoi, the upward-looking creatures who seek transcendent beauty and truth and goodness. Not only radically dependent, we are also uniquely free: Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have an explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals, following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type; man alone is ever undomestic, either a profligate or a monk. For Chesterton, the symbol of insane rationalism is the circle and its sane counter-symbol is the Cross. The circle is a self-enclosed thing, whereas the Cross breaks all confines. Chesterton often links the circle with the religions of the East, especially Buddhism. He is also alarmed by the crescent moon as the central symbol of Islam, fearing that it would become the partial circle that threatens to enclose everything else. The Flying Inn is his novel-length exploration of that fear. The very form of the Cross, by contrast, indicates its power to set us free from all thralldoms: As we have taken the circle as the symbol of [physicalist] reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery 6
and health. [….] For the circle is perfect and infinite in nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.” II. If hyper-rationalism is one symptom of our cultural madness, hyper-emotionalism is the other. The former is filled with false pride, the latter with false humility. It’s a false humility because, unlike lunatic rationalists who believe they know everything, mad emotivists deny that they know anything. Modesty has settled on the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has exactly been reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part that he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason. We once had misgivings about our efforts, Chesterton adds, and were thus spurred to greater diligence. Our new emotivists, by contrast, are loath to make ethical claims of any kind. Having no high purpose, they are tempted to cease working altogether, sinking into moral lassitude or else frenetic hedonism. Such antirational passivity, Chesterton accurately prophesies, will produce a people too intellectually meek “even to claim their inheritance.” We have become so suspicious of large truth-claims that we are suspicious of even the smallest. “Madness may be defined,” according to Chesterton, “as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness.” “We are on the road,” he wittily but alarmingly concludes, “to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.” Chesterton rightly discerned that Nietzsche would be the ultimate exemplar of the turn to the subject that began with Kant—indeed, that he would be the philosophical father of the post-modern and irrationalist century to come. Though in 1908 Nietzsche had just recently been translated into English, Chesterton saw 7
immediately that he would inaugurate the triumph of will over reason. With remarkable acuity, Chesterton goes to the heart of the matter: “Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it…. They say choice itself is the divine thing” (emphases added). Whereas the real was once the rational, it is now the chosen and the felt. Chesterton shrewdly notes Nietzsche’s retreat from comparative to spatial metaphors taken “from acrobats or alpine climbers.” To avoid the challenge of ethical judgment, Nietzsche transports us “beyond good and evil,” rather than having the courage to declare how our moral path should be determined by whether it is “more good” or “more evil.” In similar recourse to a metaphor of extension rather than comparison, Nietzsche exalts the “over-man” as his hero, refusing to describe “the purer man” or “the happier man” or “the sadder man.” “Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker,” Chesterton concludes about the philosopher whose brave motto was “Be hard.” “The stone must go downward,” Chesterton counters, “because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force, there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air…. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” With stunning foresight, Chesterton saw it all coming already in 1908. Objectivist reason gone mad is the perfect description of modernity, while the subjectivist denial of reason is an apt account of post-modernity. François Lyotard famously defined post-modernism as the suspicion of all metanarratives: of all totalizing and exhaustive explanations, whether in the Copernican and Newtonian science of the Enlightenment, or in the Christian creeds that narrate the story of the entire cosmos. Post-modernists seek to dismantle all such metanarratives, replacing them with aesthetic preferences and allegedly autonomous choices. In such an emotivist and subjectivist world, the only putative good is diversity. The central post-modernist premise is that multiple viewpoints and multiple interests 8
enlarge our comprehension of the finally incomprehensible universe, whereas a singular and definitive perspective denies this irreducible multiplicity of viewpoints. As with rationalist modernism, so with irrationalist post-modernism: there is much truth in it. All our seeing is indeed subjective and culture-bound. We behold the world through the lenses of our own conceptions and assumptions. All truth is filtered and sieved, all understanding rooted in time and place and community. There is no view from nowhere, no godlike perch from which we can view the world neutrally—as if that were God’s own view. But from the valid premise that there is no such thing as naked knowledge, postmodern relativists and emotivists reach invalid conclusions. They hold that we can make no comparative moral judgments, engage in no time-transcending religious arguments, allow no privileging of certain cultures—for example, cultures that dignify women over cultures that demean them, or even governments that enhance democratic freedoms over those that destroy them. In the face of such emotivist madness, Chesterton does not call for the reestablishment of the ancien regime. On the contrary, he was a lifelong defender of the French Revolution. Despite its many horrors, including the ravages of the Jacobins, Chesterton believed that these eighteenth-century revolutionaries erred in the right direction—namely, toward the dignity and equality of every human being in before God. Such radical equality is backward no less than forward looking. It may be located, paradoxically, in tradition, which Chesterton famously defines it as “an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Chesterton believed that this vital democratic tradition had been kept literarily alive by the Romantic poets as well as Blake and Browning. The Romantics, especially Coleridge, taught him that nature is not a dead realm. It does not lie inert, awaiting our total mastery, whether by calculation or imagination. As 9
an intuitive (and later a confessed) Thomist, Chesterton insists that our knowledge of the truth is rooted in sensate perception and discovery of what is already there. Yet the “there” also requires our creative involvement, both morally and theologically. Without embarrassment, Chesterton embraces the dialectical character of the mind-world, grace-nature relation. God is not a solo performer but a symphonic conductor. He creates and redeems his cosmos only with the free involvement of his creatures: The only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision…. [T]he essence of the doctrine [of real progress] is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create. This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model, a vision. III. Where can we find this subject, model, and vision that would answer our twin insanities of hyper-rationalism and hyper-emotivism? Chesterton believes that they are ready to hand, indeed that we acquire our most basic convictions from the fantasy books of our childhood. They reveal “the original instinct of man for adventure and romance.” Fairy stories embody the same “irregular equilibrium” that operates in the physical world. We have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two hands, two feet—but only one heart, and it slightly to the left of center. “The Ethics of Elfland,” as Chesterton calls the moral world of fairy tales, also constitute a surprising analogue of the Gospel’s own asymmetrical kind of sanity: they let grace abound without canceling justice. As in the Gospel, so do fairy stories administer two indispensable tests, says Chesterton. The first elfin trial concerns the imagination: whether we are willing to see the world as it is, and therefore not as consisting of two separate realms—the visible and the invisible, the literal and the figurative, the necessary and the free,
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not even the natural and the supernatural. The cosmos invites us, instead, to discern these spheres as mysteriously, even miraculously, overlapping and intersecting. Adam and Eve failed the test of imagination because they clung to a univocal understanding of the world, as if eating the forbidden fruit had but a single and uncomplicated consequence. They were the first fundamentalists and hyperrationalists. Modern scientists may have been the second. They operate, says Chesterton, “as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically.” Physicalists thus speak of “laws” and “necessity,” even of “fatalism” and “mechanism.” Yet such a cosmos would permit no novelty, whether natural or human. Anticipating Einstein and quantum theory, Chesterton found their recent discoveries at work in immemorial fairy tales. Fairy tales extol the freedom and even the weirdness of nature’s repetitions, apprehending them imaginatively rather than reductively: 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.… When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or [why] fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked why her mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must understand that it is magic. It is not a “law” because we do not know its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet…. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” The express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. For Chesterton, magic is a synonym for wonder and surprise and miracle: the mysterious and complex transformation of one thing into another, especially sinners into saints. The physical and spiritual realms converge and overlap because neither works according to strict necessity. Only when we immerse ourselves imaginatively 11
in life’s complex alloy of “the familiar and the unfamiliar” can we learn to engage the world analogically and paradoxically. Paradox is truth standing on its head, Chesterton said, waving its legs to get our attention. Such strange semaphoric signaling is required for comprehending a universe as thoroughly interstitial as ours. As the chaos theorists remind us, a butterfly fluttering its wings in India can cause a tornado in Texas. Unpredictability is not a cause for distress, however, because probability is at work even in chance events. Analogical imagination enables us to discern the pattern, to name the likenesses nestled in unlikenesses, and thus to see that the world’s contraries may be more apparent than real. Only Christians have doctrines sufficiently subtle and intricate to encompass the world’s repetitions and transformations, whether they occur in nature or history. Far from being a threat to faith, science virtually requires it: “The complication of our modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith.” Christian tradition constitutes a careful elaboration of dogmas that treat the local and the particular no less than the cosmic whole. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium…. [I]f some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all of the best statues in Europe. A slip in definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrine had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. If the analogical imagination is Chesterton’s remedy to our century’s insane rationalism, the “Doctrine of Conditional Joy” is his cure for our insane emotivism. This doctrine deals with the drastic if on which everything hangs, the singular decision that determines everything else. In a radically contingent universe, choice is everything, as the weight of the world hangs on it. God himself makes choices, though not in our strictly contingent fashion. Chesterton would have embraced 12
Peter Geach’s analogical claim that God is the Grand Master of the cosmic checkerboard: “[He] sees and controls the whole board and many limited players also make moves. Each of the human players sees only a little of the board and has limited powers of moving…. the Grand Master … can take into account all possible moves of the other players; he cannot be thwarted or surprised or forced to improvise.” The world’s lasting myths and fairy tales reveal, says Chesterton, that our resistance to the Grand Master’s plans can be hugely destructive: “A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. A flower is plucked and human lives are lost. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.” The ultimately free decision, Chesterton declares, is “the liberty to bind myself.” Discipline and fidelity, oaths and obligations, are the means of joy. The making and keeping of promises, especially in marriage, provide the keys to happiness. “Love is not blind,” Chesterton keenly observes. “Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” In gladly embraced limits, not in the will-topower, lies the only liberty: Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…. Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses…. Anarchism [another name for insane emotivism] adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame…. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel…. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. In his splendid chapter on “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Chesterton demonstrates that the Gospel sanely balances these seeming contraries of gift and
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requirement, grace and ethics. Their delicate equilibrium serves to differentiate the suicide from the martyr. The suicide is one who has given up on life and thus desires death; the martyr is one whose strong desire to live takes “the form of a readiness to die.” Not martyrs alone but all other Christians live within these drastic opposites: meekness and daring, love and wrath. Christians are happy pessimists, says Chesterton, those who do what is unthinkable to the pagan: they choose to love the unlovable and to pardon the unpardonable. The soldier of the Cross, he argues, “must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” The past century belongs to Chesterton because he was one of its most astute analysts, though he died when it was barely a third finished. Orthodoxy remains his most prophetic book because he foresaw both the insane modernist rationalism and the lunatic post-modern emotivism that would engulf us. Yet Chesterton remained a happy pessimist because he was a Christian humanist. And his influence is alive and well after a century because he discerned one thing above all else: that humanity is a monstrosity, a wild and not a tame species. Sartre was oddly if unwittingly right. We have broken out of the closed circle of our animality. We do not fit seamlessly into the world; we stick out like a spike. But rather than constituting a futile and “sorry project,” as Sartre famously said, we are monsters in the glorious sense of the Old French word mostre: a horror, a wonder, a marvel, a thing of God’s own making and remaking.
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