G.K.

Chesterton,
Theologian

Aidan Nichols

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS®

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 Copyright © 2009 Aidan Nichols

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nichols, Aidan.
G.K. Chesterton, theologian / Aidan Nichols.
p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-933184-50-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chesterton, G. K.

(Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936 — Criticism and interpretation. 2.
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936 — Religion. 3. Theology
in literature. I. Title.
PR4453.C4Z735 2009
823’.912 — dc22

2009005822
For John Osman
 Preface
This study has a straightforward form. The book falls, in effect, into two
halves. The first opens by offering an overview of Chesterton’s life, an
overview that already identifies some salient intellectual themes. Chapter 2,
on the Edwardian writers who were his earliest controversial opponents,
chiefly explores materials found in his first major work, Heretics. Chapter 3
centres on Orthodoxy, which Chesterton intended to be read with Heretics
in one’s other hand, though it also ranges more widely in detailing
Chesterton’s “discovery of metaphysical realism,” his version of Catholic
Christianity’s philosophia perennis. Chapter 4 investigates the most
distinctive of Chesterton’s imaginative and argumentative strategies, the
paradox.

Then in the second half of this enquiry, I consider five theological themes:
Chesterton’s argument for the existence of God, his theological
anthropology, his Christology, his moral theology, and his ecclesiology —
or, more widely, his overall sense of the Catholic Church and her faith.

Alison Milbank’s study of Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians reached

me too late for me to profit from it in the present study (as did also William
Oddie’s marvellously detailed study of Chesterton’s early years). I am
delighted to see, however, that she looks in this direction for light. I hope
that, in the wake of her more ambitious work, this modest book will help to
encourage theological interest in Chesterton, and indeed, the interest of
Chestertonians in theology.

Aidan Nichols,
O.P. Blackfriars, Cambridge
Ash Wednesday, 2008
 Introduction
It is not customary to consider G. K. Chesterton a theologian, although his
sympathy with theologians is unmistakable. In Christendom in Dublin he
registered his annoyance with the “tired and tiresome voice of the general
scepticism” which “talks with eternal reiteration about the quarrels of
theologians.”

One would suppose that nobody had ever quarrelled except theologians; or
that theologians had never done anything else. But if there be one thing
morally certain, it is that the world will quarrel much more without
theology than it ever did with theology.1

Chesterton considered this self-evident, since “people left without any

common theory, or attempt at a theory, will be able to quarrel about
absolutely anything whatever; including all the things on which men have
hitherto agreed.”2 Modern thinkers can and do take up ultimate positions
which all past theologians would have termed “anarchical and abnormal.” It
is hard to dislodge these positions precisely because they are ultimate:
“They are out of sight and hearing, for the purpose of anything so sociable
as a quarrel. Men do not agree enough to disagree.”3 How, for example, can
one reason with someone who denies the validity of reason? Or what is the
point of proving unjust someone who does not believe in justice? “It is idle
to offer ocular demonstration to the really consistent sceptic, who cannot
believe his eyes.”4

Once remove the old arena of theological quarrels, and you will throw open
the whole world to the most horrible, the most hopeless, the most endless,
the most truly interminable quarrels; the untheological quarrels.5

So winning a statement should not go without its theological reward.

Chesterton’s Theological Help

That is one reason for writing this book. Moreover, Chesterton has not only
praised theologians; he has helped them. In the face of an agnosticism that
has set its face against Christianity, he is attractive, indeed persuasive. As he
put it with characteristic winningness in his study of William Blake:

You cannot take the region called the unknown and calmly say that though
you know nothing about it, you know that all its gates are locked. That was
the whole fallacy of Herbert Spencer and Huxley when they talked about
the unknowable instead of about the unknown. An agnostic like Huxley
must concede the possibility of a gnostic like Blake.

We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.6

And since Chesterton was never afraid of risk-taking with his readership, he
would go further:

When Blake lived at Felpham angels appear to have been as native to the
Sussex trees as birds. His patriarchs walked on the Sussex Downs as easily
as if they were in the desert.

Should we simply say, then, asks Chesterton, that Blake was mad? He
replies: “Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and
shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of
history.”7

In “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” Father Brown is made to declare, “I

can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.” The Byronic young
American Paul T. Tarrant asks, “That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?”

“It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,” replied Father

Brown. “It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that
deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that
contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr
Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I
will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first
presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and
slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic
at all. That is not impossible, it’s only incredible.”8
Chesterton may not have considered himself a theologian. But he knew that
theology was thought applied to religion, and as Stratford Caldecott
remarks, “Very few have applied thought to religion as effectively as he.”9

Chesterton and the English

Contribution to Catholicity

Another reason, and a more autobiographical one, for writing this book, is
bound up with my own latest excuse for returning to Chesterton. In a recent
book, I selected him as one of half a dozen or so “sages” or “critics of the
culture” who might help to re-launch the mission of a Christian
intelligentsia in contemporary English society. In The Realm: An
Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England, I confessed my
admiration for Chesterton’s approach to apologetics: how Christianity
satisfies at one and the same time our deep conviction that we are at home
in the world — and yet do not really belong to it.10 I suggested that
Orthodoxy remains for the English the best introduction to Gospel religion.11

Chesterton also has much to offer the wider cause of reconstructing English
identity, since his prescription in the 1920s is as pertinent now as it was
then: “What is wanted for the cause of England today is an Englishman
with enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the
inside.”12 Chesterton disliked homogenisation. “Nations can love each other
as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but because
they are different.”13 He wanted a cultural-theological vindication of “the
spirit of England”: “to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as
a small nationality.”14 I am inclined to trust his judgements owing to his
sympathy with culture both low and high, and to the assurance and
congeniality with which he moved among the classics of the English
literary canon. Let us add, too, in the latter connection, his generosity of
spirit, as in this encomium on Thomas Hardy:

People talk of the pessimism of Hardy as ruthless, and in its artistic method
it was ruthless, often at the expense of reason and probability. But if he
changed spiritually, it was always towards feeling less of the ruthlessness
and more of the ruth. I should be very much surprised to learn that Hardy,
especially in later life, was really a pessimist at all. His theory, as a theory,
is not very clear or complete; but I am sure he did not become more clear or
more complete, in the sense of more convinced of a dogma of despair.15

If England can make any specific contribution to catholicity, it is probably

along the lines of the literary expression of humaneness. Such humaneness
of spirit has its foundation in the enduring good sense of a post-lapsarian
humanity that, in the formulations of Trent over against the Reformers, may
be wounded, but is not for that reason a “dead duck.” There is something
living here on which grace can build. Chesterton praised the “richness and
humanity of the unconscious tradition” of the age into which he was born,
despite the “cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae.”16 He saw
in that dull monarch George V, who occupied the throne for the last quarter-
century of Chesterton’s adult life, someone who represented the “protection
of the patient and unrecorded virtues of mankind.”17 Chesterton did not rule
out the possibility “in the incalculable time before us” that:

there may return to the mystical institution of the Crown something of

that immemorial legend which linked it with religion, and made one
baron, alone of all the barony, mysteriously responsible to God for the
people.18

In England today, among people of sensibility, the chief substitutes for

religion are “spirituality” and aestheticism. Chesterton had long since seen
through them. He isolated the religiose but fundamentally agnostic panacea
that now goes by the convenient name, at once vague and benign, of
“spirituality,” and which Matthew Arnold called “culture”: “the
disinterested play of the mind through the sifting of the best books and
authors.”19 To preserve a Church as a “vessel to contain the spiritual ideas of
the age, whatever those ideas may be,”20 could be considered the work of
the culture-vultures “trying to establish and endow Agnosticism.” But,
declares Chesterton:

[I]t is fairer and truer to say that unconsciously [Arnold] was

trying to restore Paganism: for this State Ritualism without theology, and
without much belief, actually was the practice of the ancient world.21
Regarding aestheticism, Chesterton also identified — in John Ruskin — the
habit of mind that decides to “accept Catholic art but not Catholic ethics.”22
The phenomenally well-attended National Gallery exhibition Seeing
Salvation did not, one supposes, find an ecclesial correlative in a greatly
increased rate of conversion to the Catholic Church, even though that
Church was the inspiration of the vast majority of the artworks involved.
Again, as Chesterton remarks:

In the matter of religion (which was the key of this age as of every other)
[Ruskin] did not, like Carlyle, set up the romance of the great Puritans as a
rival to the romance of the Catholic Church. Rather, he set up and
worshipped all the arts and trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the
Church itself.23

To link Chesterton so strongly to an analysis of the soul of England may not

be the best way to commend this book to non-English readers. Yet
Chesterton is a quintessentially English author, and, moreover, the
catholicity of the Church is incomplete until all the nations have made their
contribution to it. In that sense, it is Chesterton’s very Englishness that
makes him of greatest interest to Catholics in America and elsewhere. And
while we are still thinking of Chesterton from the viewpoint of the England
— or the wider Christian world — of the early twenty-first century, I do not
suppose many people will query the “prophetic” character of Chesterton’s
comment — made in 1911! — to the effect that Mohammed “created a very
big thing, which we have still to deal with.”24

No doubt we shall contend with this “very big thing” — if disproportionate

fears of terrorism do not prevent us — in a gentlemanly and sensible
fashion. As Chesterton put it in his Autobiography, “sleepy sanity” is a
typical English trait.25 Sometimes, however, we need a wake-up call — of
the kind given by the Victorian giants on whom he wrote so well: Ruskin,
Carlyle, Morris, Newman, and the rest. The remainder of this book seeks to
show that “Chesterton’s theology” is just that.
 Chapter 1

An Overview of Chesterton’s Life

G. K. Chesterton was born in 1874, in west central London, between
Holland Park and Kensington Palace Gardens, the elder son of an estate
agent whose family had long been established in that business. Like many
middle-class people, adequately supplied with servants, and funded by
family firms that more or less ran themselves, his father and mother had a
good deal of leisure time which they devoted to artistic or quasi-artistic
pastimes, including watercolour painting, toy theatres, photography,
collecting mediaeval illuminations and stained glass, and the study and
memorisation of English literature.26 They were Liberals with a capital L in
politics and a small l in religion, occasionally attending a Unitarian chapel
in the vicinity. Chesterton’s younger brother Cecil would sum up their creed
as “the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the non-eternity of
evil, the final salvation of souls”: all amounting to what he termed “a vague
but noble theo-philanthropy.”27 At least it was a creed of a sort. The
Chestertons’ household may have coincided with, but did not exemplify,
what Chesterton called “the precise moment when a middle-class man still
had children and servants to control but no longer had creeds or guilds or
kings or priests to control him”; such a man was thus “an anarchist to those
above him, but still an authoritarian to those below.”28

Through no fault of his educators, Chesterton’s schooling was erratic. But

as an adult he believed strongly in the prolongation of childhood, and he
never regretted that he had been a backward child. He attended St Paul’s
School at a time when it enjoyed undoubted academic excellence, yet he
was noted for inattention, slovenliness of personal appearance, and
incompetence at sport, although because he was taller than most other boys
as well as — at this juncture — still slim, he escaped bullying. The ongoing
informal education he received from his father, who took him to museums
and galleries, and explored with him the literary classics, counted for more
than his lessons. Where Chesterton came alive at school was as chairman of
the St Paul’s Junior Debating Club and contributor to its short-lived but
professionally produced magazine, The Debater, in whose pages his
originality of thought and expression, and gifts of versification — all
typified by remarkable energy and exuberance — became apparent for the
first time. The mediocrity of his form reports stood in sharp contrast to the
judgement given his mother by the High Master of the school in 1894: “Six
foot of genius. Cherish him, Mrs Chesterton, cherish him.”29

Chesterton’s gift for friendship, which would later metamorphose into the
capacity to capture the goodwill of a far wider range of people than is the
lot of most of us, had also emerged by this time, the best-known of his close
companions being Edmund Clerihew Bentley, inventor of the minor genre
known by his middle name. “The people of Spain think Cervantes/ Equal to
half-a-dozen Dantes,/ An opinion resented most bitterly/ By the people of
Italy.” Unlike his friends, however, Chesterton did not go up to Oxford or
Cambridge. He had shown minimal academic as distinct from intellectual
ability. Instead, following his own inclination and with parental
encouragement, he attended drawing classes and subsequently the Slade
School of Fine Art, at that period a department of University College,
London, where Chesterton also took some non-examined courses in English
and French and, for a short while, Latin. After a year, he was asked to leave,
since his teachers considered they had failed to teach him anything beyond
the skills of decorative and grotesque drawing skills he already possessed.

Crisis and Reaction

Chesterton’s experience of the Slade is nonetheless important for his

biography and also for the history of his opinions. Influenced by some of its
students and, one can speculate, depressed by the loss of his buddies who
were either still enrolled at school or, in due course, went up to the historic
universities, he began to feel, by his own account (see his “notebooks”30 and
Autobiography, for instance), a distinct attraction toward evil.31 He
gravitated towards nihilism as a general philosophy of life and began to
dabble in occultist spiritualism. Spiritualism was becoming fashionable,
especially among the metropolitan elite, but Chesterton’s taste of it, and
conversations with students whom he took, at any rate, to be diabolists, was
salutary.32 His agnosticism remained, but it acquired a pro-Christian
colouration. For instance, at some point in this period he jotted down about
Christmas Day, “Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;/ It is
a track of feet in the snow, It is a lantern showing a path, It is a door set
open.”33

At the Slade Chesterton also acquired an extremely hostile attitude to the

painterly mode called Impressionism, a hostility that not only later defined
much of his attitude to art at large but was formative for the development of
his realism in metaphysics. Consider his 1907 novel, The Man Who Was
Thursday. As Gabriel Syme, fleeing from the agents of Sunday, dives into a
patch of woodland, the play of light and shade on the leaves causes him to
muse:

Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of
dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen,
and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-
splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found
the thing the modern people called Impressionism, which is another name
for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.34

The identification of Impressionism as a symptom of cultural and,

especially, epistemological decadence also finds expression in, for example,
his 1910 study of William Blake. Seeking to express how for Blake lucidity
and decisiveness of outline were the chief desiderata in draftsmanship,
Chesterton risks the anachronism of writing that “the thing he hated most in
art was the thing which we now call Impressionism — the substitution of
atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere
colourist.” Incidentally, that same work ascribes the presence of occasional
bizarre phrases, sometimes obsessively repeated, in Blake’s poetry to his
commerce with spirits — not all of which were necessarily benign.
Chesterton’s Slade experience provides the likely context for such
assessments as the following:

It was exactly because [Blake] was unnaturally exposed to a hail of

forces that were more than natural that some breaches were made in
his mental continuity, some damage was done to his mind.35

More widely, Chesterton’s dip into the waters of fin-de-siècle aestheticism

gave him an aversion to any variant on “art for art’s sake,” an aesthetic, he
thought, that licensed a willful departure from the real — both in the sense
of showing a lack of respect for given natural forms and in the sense of
departure from moral norms themselves warranted by humanity’s good
sense. That is a motif of his first published work, Greybeards at Play, a
collection of comic verse subsidised by his father. W. H. Auden thought it
some of the best of its kind in English.

I had a rather funny dream,

Intense, that is, and mystic;
I dreamed that, with one leap and yell,
The world became artistic.
The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops —
And cooks recorded frames of mind In sad and subtle chops.
The stars were weary of routine:
The trees in the plantation
Were growing every fruit at once,
In search of a sensation.
The moon went for a moonlight stroll,
And tried to be a bard,
And gazed enraptured at itself:
I left it trying hard.
The sea had nothing but a mood
Of “vague ironic gloom,”
With which t’explain its presence in
My upstairs drawing room.
The sun had read a little book
That struck him with a notion:
He drowned himself and all his fires
Deep in the hissing ocean.
Then all was dark, lawless, and lost:
I heard great devilish wings:
I knew that Art had won, and snapt
The Covenant of Things.36
The slogan “art for art’s sake” retained its power to elicit from Chesterton
occasional expressions of impatience. Thus, in his survey book The
Victorian Age in Literature he remarks near the outset:

It is quite needless here to go into the old “art for art’s sake” business,
or explain at length why individual artists cannot be reviewed without
reference to their traditions or creeds. It is enough to say that with
other creeds they would have been, for literary purposes, other
individuals.37

Professional (and Confessional) Beginnings

Given his allergy to mediums and ouija boards, it was ironic that
Chesterton’s first job on leaving the Slade was for a small Bloomsbury
publisher specialising in spiritualism and the occult. He soon got through a
backlog of manuscripts submitted, sending them back to, as he put it,
“addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”38 After a few
months of this he was able to get a post with a mainstream publisher, T.
Fisher Unwin, later taken over by Ernest Benn. Chesterton’s courtship of
his future wife, Frances Bloggs, the first dogmatico-sacramental Christian
he appears to have met (she was an Anglo-Catholic), and the launching of
his career as a reviewer in London journals began now, in 1896. By the end
of 1900 he was selling articles to London papers on a regular basis.

At this stage — the closing years of the nineteenth century — Chesterton’s

mind had three comparatively settled components. The first, which he owed
in part to his reading of the American poet Walt Whitman, but far more to
the spontaneous experience of his own childhood, was piety towards the
cosmos. “I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the
sun. ‘Nature,’ as Walt Whitman says, ‘and her primal sanities.’ ”39 The
cosmic environment of human living would remain one of Chesterton’s
distinctive preoccupations. (It should be added that Whitman’s intoxication
with the physical universe of skies and grass also extended to human
comradeship, as did that of Chesterton.)

The second component was Socialism, which later yielded to Distributism,

notably under the influence of Hilaire Belloc, who was as opposed to
Socialism as he was to Capitalism. In his autobiography, Chesterton
explains that he became a Socialist only because it was intolerable not to
be, granted the chaotic consequences of over-industrialisation and the
increasing penury, with the agrarian depression lasting from the mid 1870s
to the mid 1890s, of the rural proletariat.

The third and last component was an increasing sympathy with Christian
theism. Such theism was as yet doctrinally unformulated. Its starting-point
was what Chesterton registered as a need to give thanks for membership in
the cosmos. As he would later put it in Orthodoxy, birth itself seemed a
birthday present. To whom could one give thanks if not a God? His theism
included admiration for the Jesus of the Gospels. It also sought to find a
strong affinity between the teaching of Jesus and contemporary Socialism,
notably through the role in each of compassion, an assault on covetousness,
and what St Paul had called “bearing one another’s burdens,” which
Chesterton interpreted in terms of political economy to mean “leveling,
silencing, and reducing one’s own chances, for the [sake of the] chance of
your weaker brethren.” These three elements of self-abnegation were, wrote
Chesterton, the “three fountains of collectivist passion,” common to
Socialists and the New Testament alike.40

Thaxted and Merry England

The Chestertons’ marriage would be solemnised by the most famous

Socialist Anglo-Catholic clergyman in England, Conrad Noel, the vicar of
Thaxted in north Essex. Noel’s 1906 Church Socialist League, a much more
radicalised version of two previous left-wing High Anglican bodies, the
1877 Guild of St Matthew and the 1889 Christian Social Union, advocated
a revolutionary overthrow of the existing political, social, and economic
order in England by bringing land, heavy industry, and transport into public
ownership by all available means, not excluding a general strike or armed
insurrection. Noel was a “little Englander” who despised the British Empire
as arrogant, parasitical, greedy, and cosmopolitan. Although he supported
the First World War as a righteous struggle against German militarism, he
also approved of the war-time Easter Rising in Ireland: in his church the
Sinn Fein tricolour and the Red Flag were displayed alongside the Cross of
St George. His Socialism acknowledged as its closest political neighbor the
Marxian “Social Democratic Federation,” whose most famous supporter
had been the Romantic poet and designer William Morris. Like Morris,
Noel wanted to combine Socialist revolution with a revival of native
English traditions in arts and crafts, and — especially stressed by Noel —
song and dance, which in Thaxted became para-liturgical: forms of festivity
following on the elaborate Sarum-rite Eucharists, Corpus Christi
processions, and other ceremonies celebrated in the parish church, whose
patron, the eccentric Frances Maynard, Countess of Warwick, kept at bay
the strongly disapproving bishops of Chelmsford. Although Chesterton
began early to have doubts about the interrelatedness of Socialism and
Christianity, Noel’s influence on him can hardly be overestimated.
Chesterton would follow Noel, albeit less “folkloristically,” in drawing
attention to what Noel’s biographer Reg Groves calls

fragmentary survivals of a past way of life and culture that had once
been rooted in popular life; regional and local in inspiration, and so [it
might be hoped] ultimately universal in its more profound
expressions.41

Both men — Noel and Chesterton — sought a unified cultural vision on

religious foundations. “My own work,” remarked Noel towards the end of
his life:

though poor in languages and scholarship, has been to synthesize and

develop the work of many original thinkers and make it more of a
unity . . . I believe we hold in the kind of Thaxted theology, philosophy
and politics, something that is a development and yet enshrines a huge
amount of the truth without which our age must perish.42

And he went on to say that the Church’s goal is

revolutionary and political (in a wide sense) but ever so much more. It
holds all values of redemption, and has its outlook on drama, on
amusements, on crafts and trades, on music, on dancing, on every kind
of human activity and expressions. Its task is therefore infinitely more
difficult and complex than that of cruder, narrower parties like the
Communists or the Labour folk . . . I think it holds in embryo in the
 Gospels, and in greater detail in its best thinking and most living
tradition the secret of life for men.43

Noel’s synthesis of Socialism and Anglo-Catholicism would be mirrored in

Chesterton’s synthesis of Distributism and Catholicism, first Anglo-and
later Roman. The common factors were, at first, the inspiration, both social
and aesthetic, of Morris, and later, the role of classical Christian doctrine
and morals. But even as Chesterton began to approach the latter, he started
to part from the former, as his notebooks bear witness.

Mr. William Morris . . . in his News from Nowhere gives a beautiful

picture of a land ruled by Love, and rightly grounds the give-and-take
camaraderie of his ideal state upon an assumed improvement in human
nature. But he does not tell us how such an improvement is to be
effected, and Christ did . . . When we compare the spiritual attitudes of
two thinkers, one of whom is considering whether social history has
been sufficiently a course of improvement to warrant him in believing
that it will culminate in universal altruism, while the other is
considering whether he loves people enough to walk down tomorrow
to the marketplace and distribute everything but his staff and his scrip,
it will not be denied that the latter is likely to undergo certain deep and
acute emotional experiences, which will be quite unknown to the
former.44

In an admiring yet also critical essay on Morris, Chesterton lauded him in

these words:

Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,

prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his fullblooded enthusiasm will be
remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant
colours and proved that this awful greenish grey of the aesthetic
twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not the
greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.45

That generous tribute was paid in 1902. But six years later Chesterton took
his definitive leave of Socialism in an article entitled “Why I Am Not a
Socialist,” published in the distinctly avant-garde journal The New Age. In
the summary offered by Chesterton’s biographer Michael Ffinch, with
citations from the original:

Just as imperialism had been foisted upon [the “mass of the common
people”] by the interests of commerce and international banking, so
socialism would be imposed on them by the interests of intellectuals,
“decorative artists and Oxford dons and journalists and Countesses on
the spree.”46

It is difficult not to think that by “decorative artists” Chester-ton has in

mind Morris, just as the “Countesses” necessarily conjure up Noel’s patron,
the wife of the Earl of Warwick. Not surprisingly, the second of the two
Russian revolutions of 1917 would complete the process of Chesterton’s
disenchantment, though without extinguishing his own brand of radicalism.
By 1922 he was writing the following: “Those who will not even admit the
Capitalist problem deserve to get the Bolshevist solution. All things
considered, I cannot say anything worse of them than that.”47 This reaction
was not uncommon. A lifelong Anglican Distributist, Maurice Reckitt,
commented wryly:

[T]he catastrophic achievements of a militant Marxism in eastern

Europe were suggesting that the word “revolutionary,” which Church
socialists had been accustomed to employ with a somewhat light-
hearted vagueness, would require in future to be used more
circumspectly.48

In the early Notebooks entry on Morris and Christ, Chester-ton added that
the “Galilaean programme” at least makes more provision than does
Socialism for what he calls the “real triad of Christian virtues”: humility,
activity, and cheerfulness. If upon hearing those words, dogmatic
theologians cannot help feel a sense of anti-climax, they need to recall that
this text comes from the period before Chesterton discovered doctrinal
Christianity.

The first clear evidence for Chesterton’s adherence to a dogmatic

confession was prompted by a manifesto of rationalism, God and My
Neighbour, in which its author, Robert Blatchford, editor of the journal The
Clarion, set out his reasons for not being a Christian. Chesterton’s response,
published a few months later as a contribution to a counterblast, The Doubts
of Democracy, anticipates the line of argument of his mature apologetics,
and notably the second, Christological, section of that two-part work, The
Everlasting Man, which dates from 1925.49

How, then, did that discovery of doctrinal Christianity come about? Like all
momentous shifts in outlook, it probably had its conditioning factors, of
which the influence and example of his fiancée, later wife, was surely chief
(he would dedicate The Ballad of the White Horse to the woman who
“brought the cross to me”), and that of Noel a good second — as the
Autobiography can testify.50 But at root his conversion was the dawning of
an intellectual conviction of which Chesterton gives a celebrated account at
the opening of his 1908 masterpiece, Orthodoxy. The world-view he was
developing in personal reaction to the contemporary intelligentsia turned
out to be, in key essentials, the same as the ancient faith of the Church. Or,
as he had already put it in the essay “The Doubts of Democracy”: “If I gave
each of my reasons for being a Christian, a vast number of them would be
Mr. Blatchford’s reasons for not being one.”51

In the course of writing in 1904 a study of contemporary intellectual trends,

under the title Heretics, where Blatchford continued to figure, Chesterton
found there were a number of Blatchfords of differing kinds. He judged that
the reasons for which Christianity was thus attacked from all sides were in
many respects contradictory. This was so, he thought, not only in the
negative sense of the objectors cancelling each other out but also in the
positive sense that their opposite objections pointed to something uniquely
balanced and fitting to the human condition in evangelical and catholic
orthodoxy — and what a later generation would call “orthopraxy”: right
practice.

Political Engagements

Chesterton’s conversion to a full-blooded Christianity coincided with the

journalistic enterprise which made his name in Britain, and that was his
campaign against the Second Boer War, a war which pitted the British
Empire for reasons commercial and strategic against the two small
Afrikaaaner republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, whose
white population later in the twentieth century (but not at its opening)
would become associated with the notorious system of social relations
called “apartheid.” Opposition to the Boer War was rife on the radical wing
of the Liberal Party, to which at this time Chesterton adhered, but it failed
to capture the party as a whole. Indeed, many of the party members — the
“Liberal Imperialists” — made common cause with the Conservatives in
supporting the war, while the Liberal leader in the Commons, Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, abstained at the crucial vote. Chesterton argued for
nations with coherent internal cultures over against cosmopolitan empires
which deracinated rulers and ruled. In What I Saw in America (1922) he
would write: “The objection to spreading anything all over the world is that,
among other things, you have to spread it very thin.”52 Moreover, he
suspected — not without reason — the invisible hand of high finance
pulling the strings of government behind the scenes. Yet uppermost in the
mind of Lord Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister, was the loss to
imperial prestige if British paramountcy in South Africa were successfully
defied.53

The Boer crisis brought Chesterton together with a pugnacious fellow-

writer, Hilaire Belloc, as classical a stylist as Chesterton was romantic, a
Catholic by birth, an historian (of a sort) by his Oxford training, and for a
while a Liberal member of Parliament. In the 1910 election, Belloc, angered
by what he saw as the Party’s turn to a “Welfare State” that was halfway to
a “Servile State,” stood as an Independent candidate and won. Later, under
the administration of David Lloyd George, notorious for what the later
twentieth century would call “sleaze,” Belloc would abandon with disgust
not only the Liberal Party but also modern Parliamentarianism as a whole
— and draw Chesterton with him. Though Shaw’s term for Belloc and
Chesterton jointly, “the Chesterbelloc,” hardly does justice to the
differences of form and content in their writing, it serves to draw attention
to a collaboration. (Their literal collaboration consisted in Chesterton’s
illustrations for a number of Belloc’s books.) Chesterton relied on Belloc
for, notably, historical knowledge. He was conscious of his lack of
background in the older Universities, though hardly apologetic for it; he
considered the education Oxford and Cambridge offered undergraduates to
be largely a lamentable collusion in the self-indulgent lifestyle of pampered
young men: “[I]t is not a working way of managing education to be entirely
content with the mere fact that you have given the luckiest boys the jolliest
time.”54

Chesterton was not a pacifist, as his broadsides against the Russian novelist
and popular philosopher Leo Tolstoy made plain.

Nothing is baser in our time than the idea that we can have
special enthusiasms for things, so long as they are secure,
without pledging ourselves to uphold them if they are ever in peril.55

He accepted the necessity of the First World War: the world had to be made
safe from Prussian militarism. He did not volunteer; by 1914 his girth was
already alarming. A lady on a London street who interrogated him with the
words, “Why are you not out at the Front?” was met by his celebrated
riposte: “Madame, if you go round to my side, you will see that I am.”

The War brought great grief to Chesterton nonetheless. The death of his
brother Cecil in a fever hospital in northern France (“trench fever” was a
frequent killer in the grim fighting conditions of the Western Front) robbed
him of his only surviving sibling. In due course, a curious exchange of gifts
took place. Gilbert took over Cecil’s journalistic enterprise as editor of what
would later become G. K.’s Weekly. Cecil passed on his (Roman) Catholic
faith. Not, however, quite yet.

Literary Output: the Anglican Phase

By the summer of 1922, when Chesterton was received into the Catholic
Church by the priest whom he would immortalise as the fictional detective
Father Brown, Chesterton was a major

— if controversial — literary figure in England. In addition to some

hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, many of which remain
uncollected, he had published studies of the artists William Blake and
George Frederick Watts; of the writers Robert Browning, George Bernard
Shaw, and Dickens; as well as a general survey of Victorian literature — all
books full of incisive, not to mention provocative, judgements. He had
written a short history of England, five fantastic novels,56 the first sets of
Father Brown stories, five books of poetry, and at least a dozen collections
of essays,57 as well as two works crucial for understanding his theological
outlook: Heretics and Orthodoxy, to whose examination I shall be devoting
the lion’s share of the next two chapters of this book. Chesterton’s studies
of other creative artists can be ransacked for their insights, including
theological, and are not treated as sober historical introductions to their
subjects. This is as Chesterton wished. Of his study, Robert Browning,he
wrote:

I will not say I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book on love,
liberty, poetry, my own views of God and religion (highly developed),
and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the
hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was
introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art,
or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity.58

The tone here is deliberately self-mocking (T. S. Eliot, for example, thought
Chesterton was without rival as a critic of Dickens). In fact, the Browning
book led to an invitation to become the first occupant of the Chair of
English Literature at the “redbrick” University of Birmingham. Had he
accepted, Chesterton would have met the young J.R.R. Tolkien. But perhaps
it was as well for academe that he declined: the boundary-lines defining
subject-matter were necessarily porous to one who thought that, as
Chesterton put it in his study of Watts:

There is no detail from buttons to kangaroos, that does not enter into
the gay confusion of philosophy. There is no fact of life, from the
death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to
dance and sing in, in the glorious Carnival of theology.59

One reviewer of the Browning book singled out for praise what I believe to
be the heart of Chesterton’s wider imaginative achievement, namely, his
success in giving the reader “the wild joy of looking upon the world once
more for the first time.”60 It is hard to think of much if anything from
Chesterton’s Anglican period which he needed to jettison on finding a
spiritual home elsewhere. All aspects of his copious literary production in
the years before 1922 are germane to his standing as a Christian thinker in
the Catholic tradition. In succeeding chapters, they are liberally drawn upon
in presenting the philosophical and theological themes Chesterton chose to
treat — and treat so well that one could imagine some future Pope declaring
him a Doctor of the Church.61

Conversion to Rome

Before looking into that imaginative achievement in the body of this book,
we need to complete this overview by a retrospect on the (Roman) Catholic
period of Chesterton’s life. Chesterton’s move from Anglo-Catholicism to
the Church of Rome was motivated by concern for legitimate authority.
After all, this had been the nub of the issue between Jesus and the Jewish
leaders of his time: where and how was divine authority to be accessed in
historical society? As early as 1909, when the third of Chesterton’s
novelistic fantasia, The Ball and the Cross, was published, with a Highland
Catholic as its quasi-hero, rumours had circulated that Chesterton was to
convert to the Church of Rome. Shortly after The Ball and the Cross
appeared, Chesterton discussed his spiritual concerns with two Catholic
priests who struck up a conversation with him at Coventry railway station,
saying, “It’s a matter that is giving me a great deal of agony of mind.”62 The
likely effects of such a move on his non-Catholic wife served as a strong
deterrent to Chesterton’s conversion.

In the last weeks of 1914 Chesterton had suffered a serious stress-induced

illness, provoked by his gruelling schedule of lecture engagements and
journalists’ deadlines, as well as by the court proceedings against his
brother Cecil for criminal libel in attacking senior government figures over
illicit share-dealing. (Cecil was the editor of The New Witness, a paper
founded to monitor evidence of corruption in public life.) It was an unhappy
period, characterised by some atypically acerbic journalism and a
sharpening of his remarks about the nefarious activities, real or imaginary,
of Jewish financiers based on the high-level skulduggery of the “Marconi
Affair” (1911-1913), of which a very full account is given in the biography
of Chesterton by Alzina Stone Dale.63 In this severe medical crisis (for a
while he was thought unlikely to recover) his wife Frances was reconciled
to summoning Father John O’Connor to receive Chesterton into the
Catholic Church by administration of the last sacraments in the event that
his condition worsened.64 In fact Chesterton recovered, and it took another
eight years before he steeled himself to make the move without his wife.

Various factors were in play in the temptation to “pope.” As Adam Schwartz

suggests, Chesterton’s visit to the Holy Land in 1919-1920 as a special
correspondent for the Daily Telegraph may have “heightened his sensibility
to Christianity’s historicity and the consequent importance of tradition.”65
Again, the Anglican Communion’s 1920 Lambeth Conference struck him as
flawed by a tendency to doctrinal minimalism, and thus by an openness to
accommodation with Modernism.66 By contrast, the constancy of the Roman
teaching office increasingly stood out. Here was a firm point of reference in
a changing world and Church. He would write in his study of Chaucer:

The Church is not a movement or a mood or a direction, but the

balance of many movements and moods, and membership of it consists
of accepting the ultimate arbitrament which strikes the balance
between them.67

But above all the sacramental authority of the Catholic Church to renew
baptismal rebirth by absolution from sins occupied the forefront of his
mind. It meant for him spiritual resurrection. As he put it in the sestet of the
sonnet he wrote on his reception into the Church:

The sages have a hundred maps to give

That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.68

Six months later he explained his decision in intellectually wider terms to

his fellow-convert, the writer Maurice Baring, who seems to have been, one
can note in passing, the original of Horne Fisher, the hero of a novel of high
politics Chesterton had just published, The Man Who Knew Too Much.69 As
Chesterton wrote to Baring:
 That there has always been [in the Church of England] a High Church
Party is true; that there has always been an Anglo-Catholic Party may
be true, but I am not so sure of it . . . But there is one matter arising
from that which I do think important. Even the High Church Party,
even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called
Protestantism upon particular points . . . If [High Anglicanism] is not
the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of anage. But
since I have been a Catholic, I am conscious of being in a much vaster
arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The
Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has
something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has
never had occasion to think about.70

He would take such thoughts further in The Catholic Church and

Conversion, published following his wife’s reception into the Faith in 1926.

Literary Output: the Catholic Phase

In the remaining years of his life (he died on 14 June 1936), Chesterton
himself had many things to say about some of those philosophies. He
remained much in demand as a public speaker, even if his capacity to turn
up at the right place at the right time was notoriously deficient — witness
the celebrated telegram to his wife: “Am in Market Harborough, where
ought I to be?” He made a speaking tour of the United States in 1930-1931,
repeating the success he had achieved in an earlier visit in 1920, where he
risked such remarks as these in Chicago: “I do not plan to go farther west
than Chicago, for having seen Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have
touched the extremes of civilization.”71 He also spent three months in Rome,
staying with his wife, Frances, and his secretary (later, literary executor)
Dorothy Collins, at the famous Hotel Hassler, at the top of the Spanish
Steps. The visit included meetings with Pope Pius XI and Mussolini. He
was more impressed with the latter than he expected, though he concluded
his account of modern Italy confessing that “by every instinct of my blood,
I . . . prefer English liberty to Latin discipline.”72

His literary output during this post-conversion period did not diminish.
From his Catholic period, we have studies of Chaucer, the Scots novelist
Robert Louis Stevenson and the early-nineteenthcentury social critic
William Cobbett; hagiography — his books on Francis of Assisi and
Thomas Aquinas; some twenty essay collections; an autobiography (to be
posthumously published), two plays, more poems and Father Brown stories,
and the principal theological work of his life, The Everlasting Man. Again,
there are hundreds of uncollected magazine articles, above all from his
relaunching of The New Witness as G. K.’s Weekly, in an effort to render
viable a paper which had languished since his brother’s death at the end of
the last Western Front campaign of the First World War. In the 1930s he
gained a new audience through BBC radio, his high-pitched but beautifully
modulated voice well-suited to this medium.73

Typical themes of Chesterton’s maturity were the imaginative and

argumentative defence of historic Christianity in its dogmas, practices, and
saints, Distributism (in 1926 G. K.’s Weekly became the official mouthpiece
of the Distributive League, and Chesterton the League’s President74), and,
most fundamental of all, the thesis that man was not merely an animal who
had evolved from a primitive life-form but a special creation, in the image
of God.

Though not all Chesterton’s biographers approve, his own Autobiography

ends, in fact, with the affirmation that his reception into the Catholic
Church was absolutely decisive for him: “[T]his overwhelming conviction
that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me my first
glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of
sensation . . .”75 Chesterton had sought to recapture this “glimpse” in
Orthodoxy and elsewhere, and he registers, in the book’s closing words, a
curious correspondence between a figure in his father’s toy-theatre and the
Peter whose vicar is the pope of Rome.

[T]here starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as
of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and who carries a key;
as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of
my father’s peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the
Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key;
and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a
poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.76
Still, other Christians, beyond the confines of the Catholic Church, can
appreciate what I am calling in this book Chesterton’s theology since, as
Dorothy L. Sayers, herself an Anglican, wrote of him in her preface to The
Surprise:

To the young people of my generation, G. K. C. was a kind of Christian

liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of
stained glass of a very bad period, and let in gusts of fresh air, in which the
dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our
Lady’s Tumbler.77

In his copy, given him by the author, of Sir Oliver Lodge’s The Substance of
Faith Allied with Science: A Catechism for Parents and Teachers, by the
side of the question, “What is the duty of man?” Chesterton pencilled in his
own answer: “To love God mystically and his neighbour as himself.”78 Let
that, then, be his epitaph.
 Chapter 2

Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis

Chesterton sought to affirm timeless truths, either about the human
condition or about Christian revelation: truths that would be, as we might
say nowadays, cross-cultural and intergenerational in span. But he himself
wrote from out of a very definite cultural conjuncture, into which he was
closely bound by his life as a journalist. I am taking a leaf out of a book by
Professor John Coates of the University of Hull which makes this very
point when I call this chapter “Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural
Crisis.”79

I find myself easily persuaded by Coates’s essential thesis, namely, that

there was in the Edwardian period a sharply increased intellectual and
moral instability among the educated class in England, and, moreover, that
Chesterton registered this crisis with particular acuteness, since he was
alarmed by its negative implications, though he also saw the positive
possibilities for a clarification of issues. I am doubtful, though, about
Coates’s further claim that when Chesterton wrote Heretics, the most
obvious book-length source for his view of the contemporary intellectual
life, the “crisis” was in a merely embryonic stage in which it consisted more
of confusion than of error. Only in the latter part of the quite short reign of
Edward VII, thinks Coates, and notably with the fuller English reception,
after 1906, of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, did Chesterton realise
that more than muddle was at stake.80 In 1906, as we shall see, Chesterton
was already hot on the trail of the Nietzschean Übermensch. That did not
have to await Orthodoxy, the sequel to Heretics, in 1908, or the publication
of Chesterton’s book on the Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, a
late convert to Nietzscheanism, in 1910.

Secular Heresies as Negative Indicators of the Truth

It is worth asking what Chesterton thought was wrong with his age because
his analysis of its ills will prove to be crucial for his presentation of the
Christian Gospel, in all three key respects of that Gospel’s central claims,
its background presuppositions, and its further implications. It was when
reviewers of Heretics challenged him to come clean about what he
considered the antithesis to “heresies” that he set out to write Orthodoxy
and in doing so made plain he had rediscovered the Christian religion. In
various ways, the different heresies he had described in Heretics
constituted, that is, negative indicators of the truth of revelation. He had
found in the positions of Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and other,
less well known, writers in favour with the Edwardian intelligentsia, certain
anthropological errors. When these errors were contradicted en bloc, the
truths asserted formed a pattern, so Chesterton found, and that pattern of
Orthodoxy turned out to be nothing other than the template the Church had
always offered to thought. As David Fagerberg has put it, at the time of
writing Heretics Chesterton was “learning Christianity by a sort of via
negative,”81 to which, we can add, Orthodoxy is the cataphatic completion,
on a via affirmativa all Chesterton’s own. Heretics is, then, a key book in
Chesterton’s oeuvre, and he intended Orthodoxy to be read in conjunction
with it: these are complementary volumes in a two-part work.

Woolly-mindedness: “A total levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy”

Chesterton’s “introductory remarks” in Heretics confirm that when he set

out to write this book, he was as much exercised by other people’s allergy
to reflection as he was anxious about any disastrous trains of thought ill-
conceived reflection might prompt. Thus far Coates is correct. In 1906
Chesterton was worried by what he called a “total levity on the subject of
cosmic philosophy.”82 People, he observed, are encouraged to discuss details
in art, politics, literature, to have an opinion about tram-cars or Botticelli. A
man, “may turn over and explore a million objects,” he lamented, “but he
must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a
religion, and be lost. Everything matters — except everything.”83

In an early example of his so-called love of paradox, Chesterton finds that

there was more real liberty in a regime of inquisitorial censorship in the
ages of faith than there is under modern liberalism. As he explains, “[t]he
old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss
religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it,”84 since
to do so offends against good taste. Chesterton begs to differ, citing his
conviction that “the most practical and important thing about a man is still
his view of the universe.”

What is objectionable in contemporary culture, according to Chesterton, is

the lack of any serious consideration of what he calls “general theories of
the relation of things.”85 Such theories have been excluded from literature by
the cry of “art for art’s sake.” The artist need not bother about the fate of
humanity, the aesthetician Clive Bell would declare in 1914, since
“aesthetic rapture is self-justifying.”86 Chesterton would reply some years
later: “I would rather have no art at all than one which occupies itself in
matching shades of peacock and turquoise for a decorative scheme of blue
devils.”87 General theories of the relation of things have likewise been
replaced in politics, so Chesterton complained, by concern with efficiency.
In the 1890s, “National Efficiency” became the slogan of the group of
lobbyists from Conservative, Liberal, and Socialist backgrounds who
jointly advocated a “willingness to use government power to organize and
legislate for an ‘Imperial race’ fit to meet the challenges of the world.”88
Chesterton had evidently registered the intellectually amorphous character
of such statements. Without a general view of the goal of politics in its
relation to all other human things, such concern for national efficiency
would be itself supremely inefficient.

Heretics on the Contemporary “Negative Spirit”

In the chapter that follows his introduction to Heretics, Chesterton inveighs

against what he terms the environing “negative spirit.” In The Victorian Age
in Literature he would describe it as “a curious cold air of emptiness and
real subconscious agnosticism such as is extremely unusual in the history of
mankind,”89 and he ascribes it to the mutual destruction of English
Christianity and philosophical liberalism in their mid-nineteenth-century
disputes. As he explains:

Liberalism (in Newman’s sense) really did strike Christianity through

headpiece and head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-
prepared English Christian. And Christianity did smite Liberalism
through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did succeed, through
 aims and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more or less to the
heart of the Utilitarian — and finding that he had none.90

The “years that followed on that double disillusionment,” Chesterton went

on:

were like one long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not
merely that everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also
that everybody believed that anything happening was even duller than
nothing happening.91

Chesterton is looking back at the last years of Victoria’s reign as well as

looking around at immediately contemporary writing when he remarks that
modern morality can point to numerous imperfections, while the very
concept of positive perfection is lacking. The great gap in modern ethics is
any substantive account of how a human being reaches his full flourishing.
Translated into the idiom of imaginative literature, there is an “absence of
vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph.”92 The typically
laternineteenth-century realism of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen,
extremely popular in Edwardian England, is symptomatic here. Chesterton
writes of such realism:

[W]hile the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things increases
in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what things
are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment, till it goes
almost blind with doubt.93

Ibsen is decisive against anything he identifies as a root of evil, but vague

about what constitutes either virtue or wisdom: what the Scholastics would
call the moral and the intellectual virtues respectively. We shall see in a
later chapter that Chesterton is a very early example of what became known
by the late twentieth century as “virtue ethics.” Chesterton points out how
Shaw, in his study The Quintessence of Ibsenism, sums up Ibsen’s message
approvingly in words Chesterton cited a number of times in order to pick
them apart in different contexts: “The golden rule is that there is no golden
rule.”94 This omission of any positive concept of human flourishing or
perfection, remarks Chesterton, leaves us “face to face with the problem of
a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no
definite image of good.” He continues:

To us, as to Milton’s devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is

visible. The human race, according to religion [Chesterton goes on],
fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we
have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to
us.95

The search for the “right life,” the “good man” — or the good for man —
has been abandoned.

Chesterton will find the novelist and early practitioner of science fiction H.
G. Wells a further example of the negative spirit. In Mankind in the Making
(1903), Wells identified parenthood as the single most important human
function. He would not be discussing, he explained, what made people great
saints or great heroes but only what made them good fathers and mothers.
That sounds sensible until one realises it is, in Chesterton’s words, “another
example of unconscious shirking.” He asks: “What is the good of begetting
a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man? You are
merely handing on to him a problem you dare not settle yourself.”96 On this
agnostic view, the most ethicists can do is put up a few notice-boards at
certain points to warn people of obvious dangers, such as: do not drink
yourself to death.

But the most egregious example of such minimalist agnosticism is found for
Chesterton in the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian cult of progress.
Chesterton complains that:

We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure

with the alternative ideal of progress — that is to say, we meet every
proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative
proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.97

For Chesterton, the language of progress, when used in counter-position to

definable moral ideals, is patently absurd. As he asserts, “Nobody has any
business to use the word ‘progress’ unless he has a definite creed and a cast-
iron code of morals.”98 Without some fixed standard, it is not possible to
make a judgment as to whether value is increasing or decreasing, whether
there is progress or regress in human affairs.

So far, then, into Heretics Chesterton confirms Coates’s claim that the
principal malaise of his age is indeed woolly-mindedness

— combined with “negative spirit.” But what happens to that claim when
Chesterton explores individual heresies?

Chesterton on Kipling and Rhodes

The first of these individual heresies comes labelled Rudyard Kipling.

Chesterton’s hostility to imperialism made it pretty inevitable that Kipling
would come high on his list for criticism, for the subtleties in Kipling’s
attitude to (above all) India and the British remained to be registered in the
critical consciousness.99 That Chesterton’s anti-imperialism was honed in his
commentary on the Boer War makes it similarly likely that he would add
the name of the adventurer-cum-empire-builder Cecil Rhodes as a pendant
to that of Kipling. Chesterton does not accuse Rhodes and Kipling of a
confusion of outlook on the universe. He accuses them, rather, of an
erroneous sense of what constitutes magnitude in Rhodes’s case, and of
what constitutes identity in Kipling’s. On magnitude, he calls Rhodes, who
added many thousands of square miles to the British empire in the countries
now called Zambia and Zimbabwe (but then named Rhodesia after him) “a
man with singularly small views.” As Chesterton writes, “There is nothing
large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children.”100 To
conquer ancient cultures and life-ways is not to have them; it is precisely to
lose them.

As for Kipling: Kipling admires England but for quite the wrong reason,
namely “because she is strong, not because she is English.”101 “Mr Kipling,”
writes Chesterton, here raising the flag for local identity,

knows England as an intelligent gentleman knows Venice. He has been

to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits.
But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof of it is this,
 that he thinks of England as a place. The more we are rooted in a
place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of
the universe.102

Imperialism à la Kipling encourages globe-trotting cosmopolitanism, a

“motor-car civilization” that sees all and yet sees nothing. Chesterton
predicts its exploratory expansionist spirit will lead it to “roar on” at last to
“the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars
suburban.”103

Chesterton on Shaw (plus Schopenhauer and Nietzsche)

Chesterton’s criticism of Shaw is more that of unpacking a definitely false

ideology, rather than simply drawing attention to an absence of ideology. In
Heretics Chesterton goes out of his way to praise Shaw for his clarity of
thought and expression. And yet in contrast with the 1910 book on Shaw,
which runs for 170 pages before the reader is introduced to Shaw’s late
acquired Nietzscheanism, one does not read six pages of the chapter in
Heretics before he begins to hear of Shaw’s “new master,” Nietzsche with
his theory of the Übermensch, the Overman or Superman. “He who had to
all appearances mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new
god in the unimaginable future.”104 On Chesterton’s analysis, Shaw’s
problem is that he cannot celebrate human beings as they are — not just
messy but often uproariously messy: he wants them to be rationalistic,
pacifist, teetotal, and vegetarian. The 1914 fantasy The Flying Inn can be
seen as Chesterton’s eventual novelistic response to Shavianism. As Coates
notes,

Nominally about a pub threatened with closure under National

prohibition, The Flying Inn deals with the threat to moral choice,
existing human nature and the pleasures, idiosyncracies and quiddity
of particular existence posed by a “higher” spirituality or by reformers
and idealists convinced they know better than the mass of mankind
how life should be lived. 105

In The Flying Inn, before the fanatical Lord Ivywood wins the
Parliamentary vote to introduce Prohibition, his cousin Dorian Wimpole
warns him:

[Y]ou are in deeper waters than you know. You will abolish ale! You
will make Kent forget hop-poles and Devonshire forget cider! . . .
Remember the sensible little High Church curate, who when asked for
a Temperance Sermon preached on the text “Suffer us not to be
overwhelmed in the waterfloods.”106

To Chesterton’s mind, the reason for Shaw’s impatience is that he

consistently compares the run of people unfavourably to something they are
not — whether in the past, where Shaw admires such exceptional figures as
the Stoics and Julius Caesar, or in the present, where he applauds the Fabian
Society’s “economic man,” or, so it now emerges, in the future, where
Nietzsche’s Superman will reign. There is a family resemblance between
Chesterton’s critique of the worship of size and strength among the
imperialists — Kipling and Rhodes — and his attack on Nietzsche’s
admiration for the “will to power.” According to Chesterton, “the greater
and stronger a man is, the more he would be inclined to prostrate before a
periwinkle,”107 a humble flowering weed of the hedgerow. The ground for
saying so is that the most potent appreciation of reality rests on a “certain
mystery of humility.” In Chesterton’s macarism, adding to the beatitudes
pronounced by Christ, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be
gloriously surprised.”108 Shaw, lacking humility, fails to appreciate common
humanity with its “warts and all.”

In the book-length study of Shaw which followed four years later,

Chesterton took the matter further. Chesterton praises Shaw for what he
takes to be his typically Irish qualities (his asceticism, though Chesterton
was not likely to follow Shaw in this, declaring “there is no natural limit to
this rush and riotous gallop of refinement”);109 his intellectual clarity which
leads him not to shirk any battle of ideas; and his assumption that political
debate is about principles rather than, as Chesterton writes (commenting on
the English party system before the Great War), “concerned with which of
two wealthy cousins in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring
in the same Parish Councils Bill.”110
At the same time, Chesterton identifies Shaw as a typical Puritan. Born in
Dublin in what Chesterton saw as the garrison world of Protestant
Unionism, Shaw was cut off from a wider human environment which could
have taught him things, simply because it was closer to the earth, to a
motherland, to the domestic. As Chesterton mused, “that he is not rooted in
the ancient sagacities of infancy has, I think, a great deal to do with his
position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland.”111 Chesterton records
that when Shaw was invited to Stratford-on-Avon for the tercentenary of the
birth of Shakespeare, he

wrote back with characteristic contempt: “I do not keep my own

birthday, and I cannot see why I should keep Shakespeare’s.” I think
that if Mr Shaw had always kept his own birthday he would be better
able to understand Shakespeare’s birthday — and Shakespeare’s
poetry.112

For Shaw had notoriously attacked Shakespeare as overrated. In short,

Chesterton ascribes to Shaw’s Protestant Irish background what he calls his
“inhumane humanism,” a characteristic he shares, so Chesterton feels, with
Shaw’s fellow-countryman Dean Swift.

Shaw’s Puritanism means, however, more than that. In Ulster one will find,
says Chesterton, “the cult of theological clarity combined with barbarous
external simplicity.”113 Such Puritanism, which for a period in the
seventeenth century enjoyed a cultural hegemony in England, has gradually
decayed, not, writes Chesterton:

because of the advance of modern thought (which means nothing), but

because of the slow revival of the mediaeval energy and character . . .
The English were always hearty and humane, and they have made up
their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of the Puritans.114

All that is left of Puritanism in England is a habit of vague but elevated

speech in public life; but in Shaw there remains far more: the Puritan scorn
for frivolity, the Puritan disdain for humour as distinct from wit, and the
Puritan unwillingness to take a holiday, however short, from responsibility.
Without necessarily mentioning Shaw, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy will need to
explain why Shaw is in these regards wrong-headed or wrong-hearted.

The Puritan Irishman is, finally, a Progressive. From the negative

animadversions Chesterton has made elsewhere on the cult of progress we
shall not expect this to be a compliment. He distinguishes sharply between
Progressivism on the one hand and concern with reform on the other. The
movement of reform in European (including British) civil life from the
French Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century was at its best
commendable and worthwhile inasmuch as it had sought measures that
were not only concrete but limited, since it is typical of the reformer to
identify specifiable ills. The Progressivist, by contrast, asks, What can I
alter? As Chesterton puts it:

The republican temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain
definite limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on
indefinitely knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were
windows.115

Shaw had made the mistake of being “on the insurgent side in everything,”
of “gnawing at the necessary pillars of all possible society.”116

There is in Shaw a massive displacement of appropriate attitudes, signalled

above all for Chesterton by Shaw’s attitude towards animals and also by his
Socialism, from which Chesterton was by now well distanced. Shaw wished
animals to be treated as well as human beings: “He would waste himself to
a white-haired shadow to save a shark in an aquarium from inconvenience
or to add any little comforts to the life of a carrion-crow.” Yet Chesterton
reports an inability to identify any occasion where Shaw has uttered “a
single word of tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast.”117 Likewise,
his Socialism is animated by a wonderful zeal for the salus populi, the
health and welfare of the people, which has led him to master piles of useful
statistics about boring but important matters. But Shaw has no feeling for
ordinary working people as such, as is evidenced in his own assertion: “I
have never had any feelings about the English working classes except a
desire to abolish them and replace them with sensible people.”118 To Chester-
ton, for whom working-class culture housed certain insights about features
of the human condition vital to a sane anthropology, this assessment was
wide of the mark. Later he would praise William Cobbett — in words
clearly condemning Shavian anthropology— for differing from “many
modern social reformers and from most modern philanthropists,” in his
concern “[n]ot merely . . . with what is called the welfare of the workers. He
was very much concerned for their dignity, their good name, their honour,
and even their glory.”119

So far as Shaw’s wider philosophy is concerned, Chesterton presents it as a

transition from a reworked Schopenhauer to a largely intact Nietzsche. This
is out of the frying pan into the fire. For Schopenhauer, author of The World
as Will and Representation, “[t]he intellect, if it could be impartial, would
tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct from thought,
drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt lottery.”120
In Shavian terms, life is a higher preoccupation than reason. But Chesterton
objects that Shaw’s “worship of life” is not itself “lively.”121 “To live” is for
Shaw a command of nature which is to be obeyed more than enjoyed. Shaw
follows the banner of life austerely, not with joy.

He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the
leap into the dark . . . It is awful to think that this world which so many
poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into
which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages
through which men have talked of having the courage to die. And then
remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the
courage to live.122

When Shaw replaced Schopenhauer with Nietzsche as his prime

philosophical mentor, he failed to take from Nietzsche the one healthful
doctrine the latter could have given him, which was, in Chesterton’s
estimation, the primacy of delight, valorously attained, over against a
merely utilitarian morality.

Christianity, too, believes, remarks Chesterton, somewhat vatically, in “an

ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of
the spirit, the wine of the blood of God.”123
What Chesterton means by that is deification, theosis: final human
fulfilment as gracious participation in the stupefying vision of God. But in
the 1903 play Man and Superman, together with its accompanying
collection of Nietzschean aphorisms, The Revolutionist’s Handbook, Shaw
made it crystal clear which of Nietzsche’s doctrines he had in fact taken —
and it was not that. The explanation of his selection of the teaching on the
Übermensch lies for Chesterton in the sudden breaking of one of the “legs
of the tripod” (as he puts it) on which Shaw — Irishman, Puritan,
Progressive — was sitting. It was the leg of progress that snapped. In
Chesterton’s explanation of the collapse, Shaw discovered that Plato was a
more advanced mind than Shakespeare. As a consequence, Shaw suddenly
ceased to believe in educational progress. The man of the future will not be
taught. He will be bred. Just as the ape produced homo sapiens,so homo
sapiens must now seek to produce something higher than man. The
development of this higher being is the purpose of history.

In his 1908 essay, “How I Found the Superman,” reprinted in the 1910
collection Alarms and Discursions, Chesterton parodies Shaw’s main
source for his knowledge of Nietzsche, the studies by

A. R. Orage which gave the English reading public a reasonably fair

account of Nietzsche’s thought for the first time.124 Orage had asked
rhetorically, “Will the Superman be a man?” and replied to his own
question: “Not man as we know him.” Chesterton continued in this vein:

Is the Superman good-looking? “On his own plane,” answers the proud
father. “Has he any hair?” “Well, not of course what we call hair . . .”
“Is it hair or feathers?” “Not feathers, as we understand feathers,”
answered Hagg in an awful voice.125

Moreover, Chesterton considered that “Nietzscheites,” as he described

them, had failed to answer the question, if the Superman is not simply an
exemplification of the highest human ethos as we know it, then why should
we desire him anyway?126

Chesterton on H. G. Wells
In 1905, H. G. Wells published a book entitled A Modern Utopia.
Chesterton’s positive response to Nietzsche on valour and delight is
pertinent to his essay in Heretics on Wells, for whom Utopia is to be created
by the natural sciences, not by the Superman (though Chesterton notes that
Wells’s 1904 fantasy The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth is
“Supermannish” in tendency). Leaving Shaw aside now, and taking up
Chesterton’s critique of Wells, one can see Chesterton suggesting that the
spirit of the old Christendom was one of “holding ourselves lightly and yet
ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs.”127 That spirit – which may also
be called Nietzsche’s at his infrequent best — did fuller justice to
humankind than could Wells’s hope for a scientific Utopia, because it
recognised at one and the same time the essentially flawed nature of human
psychology (thus, “holding ourselves lightly,” but Wells’s rejection of
Original Sin blinds him to this) and yet the possibility inherent in human
freedom of rising victorious over all that drags us down (thus, “yet ready
for an infinity of unmerited triumphs,” but Wells’s rejection of grace
disables him from making this assertion). Writes Chesterton: “The
weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man
and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the
overcoming of the smaller ones.”128 Given the nature of Chesterton’s
criticisms of Nietzsche and Shaw, his account of Wells in Heretics is
surprisingly mild. In the 1901 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical
and Scientific Progress upon Human Life, Wells had predicted that the
rightfully ascendant nation of the future will be, in his words, the one that
“most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its
People of the Abyss,” alias the “great useless masses of people.”129 Inspired
by the early-nineteenth-century theorist of population Thomas Malthus and
by Darwinism, the ethical system in Wells’s “New Republic” combines
eugenics with the disposal of people who have shown themselves unfit to
live through the administration of opiates. There is an oblique reference to
this view in Chesterton’s early novel The Ball and the Cross. Professor
Lucifer, alias the Devil, shows Turnbull, a humane rationalist, the outcome
of secular revolution in a dream sequence that includes the elimination of
the unemployable. Lucifer responds to Turnbull’s indignant outburst that
surely people have rights: “Yes, indeed. Life is sacred — but lives are not
sacred. We are improving Life by removing lives.”130 By 1903 in Mankind in
the Making, Wells had apparently abandoned this programme of enforced or
assisted suicide, and likewise decided that eugenics was as yet impractical
given the still imperfect character of the science of genetics.

His answer now to the problem of the masses was birth control: in a well-
ordered State, parenthood would be restricted to those with the money and
intelligence to be responsible rearers of children. Chesterton explains that
he is inclined to be merciful to Wells because at least Wells is willing to
change his mind. Indeed, Wells often changed his mind but not frequently
for the better. In A Modern Utopia (1905), on which Chesterton
concentrates in the Wells chapter in Heretics, Wells was proposing
compulsory sterilization for a second offence of child-bearing by the stupid
or improvident, and the isolation of social undesirables (including thieves,
the mentally handicapped, and the psychiatrically disturbed) on islands
policed in such a way as to keep the sexes apart so as to prevent
procreation. For the world population of 1500 million Wells envisages for
Utopia, the bureaucracy of the world-state will have on record, in a huge
system of buildings in Paris, a number for each individual, accompanied by
thumb-print and photograph. As Professor John Carey points out in his
incisive study The Intellectuals and the Masses, though Wells correctly
predicted a number of modern inventions, the computer technology which
would now make this data-tracking project more feasible was not among
them.131 Modestly, Chesterton restricts himself to one comment on the
breeding scheme: “medical supervision [may] produce strong and healthy
men . . . [but] if it did, the first act of the strong and healthy men would be
to smash the medical supervision.”132

In Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which appeared in the same

year as Heretics, Chesterton satirises the futuristic fantasies of Wells, in
which individuals are overshadowed by the technological achievements of
science and big government. Adam Wayne takes up his sword against
modernizing property developers and defends the dignity of Notting Hill —
and thus the liberty that is connected with owning one’s own house and
garden, however small. As the story unfolds, however, the novel becomes,
rather, a critique of the imperialism of Kipling and Rhodes. Notting Hill
made the mistake of seeking to impose its powers and way of life on all
London. After its defeat by the other boroughs in the battle of Kensington
Gardens, Wayne admits this was a merited punishment for corporate
egotism. “Notting Hill, having made itself a nation, succumbed to vanity by
becoming an empire.”133

More widely, Chesterton considered that Wells’s scientism lands him in a

hopeless relativism. Wells’s philosophy is a denial of the very possibility of
philosophy, since in his hostility to the Platonic concept of truth as timeless,
Wells holds there are no secure or reliable ideas on which the intellect can
come satisfactorily to rest. His own intellectual journey ended pretty sadly.
Ten years after Chesterton’s death, in Mind at the End of Its Tether, Wells
concluded it was hopeless to “trace a cosmic pattern of any sort,” and
impossible to resist the conclusion that “homo sapiens is in his present form
played out.”134

Chesterton on the Wider Evolutionism

The way in which Wells had earlier looked to science as the panacea for all
human ills was not, of course, a phenomenon restricted to himself. In a pre-
Dawkins universe, the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was
the approximate zenith of natural-scientific self-confidence. Even more
endemic at that period was belief in the inevitability of evolution towards a
higher condition, whether such evolution took, with science, a material or,
with Idealist philosophy, a spiritual form. Around 1900 a quite
extraordinary publishing success attended the English translation of the
German cosmologist Ernst Haeckel’s Welträtsel as The Riddle of the
Universe.135 A work to which Chesterton’s early writings make frequent
reference, it promised, in Coates’s words, “a vast, uniform, uninterrupted
and eternal process of development, linking organic and inorganic, matter
and spirit, life and art.”136 Haeckel was, as it were, Charles Darwin
transfigured by the German traditions of cultural Romanticism and
philosophical Idealism.

Coates’s claim that Chesterton was struggling with not only materialist but
idealist versions of evolutionism turns especially on the figures of Caird and
Green. The English Hegelian Edward Caird, Master of Balliol during
Belloc’s time there, belonged to a school which theoretically was in
reaction against philosophical materialism. But a Neo-Idealist Caird still
subscribed — so Coates points out — to an evolutionary myth, albeit one
whose key concept was not so much matter as the Absolute. For Caird, the
universe contained no antagonisms that could not be reconciled by finding
their place in a higher unity manifesting itself in a process of organic
development. There was neither truth simpliciter nor falsehood simpliciter,
though one could ask how much truth has been expressed with what
inadequacies or unexplained assumptions in the ongoing outworking of the
dialectic of spirit. In the highly influential writing of Caird’s colleague T. H.
Green, human knowledge is authenticated to the extent that, starting from
an animal condition, we become the vehicle of, or are identified with, an
eternally complete consciousness. In Coates’s judgment, the Late Victorian
commitment to evolutionism of such widely differing kinds shows how
Nietzscheanism could be so rapidly assimilated in the Edwardian epoch:
that wider phenomenon was likewise Chesterton’s broader object of attack.
For Chesterton, the idea of a predetermined movement onwards and
upwards was an ideologically simplistic substitute for religion, as well as an
empirically false supposition.

Revolt into Sanity

The last chapters of Heretics might be thought somewhat disappointing.

The book seems to peter out, by spreading its wings too widely to take in a
number of distinctly minor figures, or by tackling issues that are merely
sectorial rather than total world-views (ethnic identity, the family,
aristocracy, the artistic temperament, the meaning of the phrase “young
nations,” or how to write novels about the poor). But what Chesterton is
seeking to express is what Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday
calls “revolt against revolt.” As we read in that novel: “Being surrounded
with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt
into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity.”137

He was certainly provoked. As we hear:

His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for
simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was
wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe
and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his
mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence, the more did his
 father expand into a more than pagan latitude, and by the time the
former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had reached the
point of defending cannibalism.138

So Syme was vulnerable to the blandishments of a philosophical policeman

on the Embankment who tells him in the course of recruitment to the anti-
Anarchist division of the force:

We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless
modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are
essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the
essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect
property. They merely wish the property to be their property that they
may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as
property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.
Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly
ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers
despise marriage as marriage.

To which Syme responds enthusiastically, “The moderns say we must not

punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish
anybody else.”139

But there is a compensation. In the conclusion of Heretics Chesterton puts it

like this:

Truths turn into dogmas the instant they are disputed. Thus every man
who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time
does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them
their limits and their plain and defiant shape . . .

In context, that could and does refer to (political) Liberalism and patriotism
as well as Christianity. So it is when Chesterton spells out the implications
for the latter that Chesterton as theologian comes to the fore. He writes:

We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common

sense which inheres in that mystery until the Anti-Christian writers
pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on.
 Everything will become a creed . . . We shall be left defending not only
the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more
incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the
face.We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We
shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.
We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.140

That brings us conveniently to the topic of Chesterton’s discovery of

metaphysical realism. The sanities he sought to defend, over against
fashionable but ultimately lunatic intellectual trends, were all linked to this
discovery. The world is a world of things, with their intrinsic properties, and
these things and properties (a Scholastic might call them substantial forms)
enter the human mind in a commerce wholly native to that mind. Human
nature, being one of those things, retains its consistency through all changes
of epoch and culture, and its reasonable standards (again, the “perennial
philosophy” would term these “natural law”) are intrinsic to the flourishing
of our kind. Neither things nor standards are self-explanatory. They require
grounding, and the name of the ground is “God.” These convictions might
be counter-cultural for many who inhabited Chesterton’s intellectual milieu.
That did not make them the less foundational.
 Chapter 3

The Discovery of Metaphysical Realism

Chesterton was unashamedly a cultural populist, as opposed to a cultural
elitist. He was far from minded to agree with those of his intellectual
contemporaries who scorned the educational level reached, or even not
reached, by the early-twentieth-century “masses.” In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra Nietzsche had declared: “Many too many are born, and they
hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and
shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!”141 For
Nietzsche, all fountains are poisoned where the rabble drink.142 The State,
which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards took initiatives in
education previously left to private charity or the Church, was, he thought,
invented for the masses, or “the superfluous,” as his hero-prophet
Zarathustra terms them. In the State’s monstrous embrace “universal slow
suicide is called life.”143 In his The Will to Power Nietzsche called for a
“declaration of war on the masses by higher men,”144 for “everywhere the
mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master.”145 John Carey
has gone so far as to regard Nietzsche’s words as key to the attitude of the
European, including the English, intelligentsia in the years 1880 to 1939, or
roughly throughout Chesterton’s lifetime. Carey’s thesis is that:

modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the

unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth
century educational reforms. The purpose of modernist writing . . . was
to exclude these newly educated (or “semi-educated”) readers, and so
to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the “mass.”146

In sharp contrast, Chesterton’s adoption of a career as a journalist signalled

a willingness on his part to throw himself with gusto into the reading world
of the newly educated public. His trust in common humanity overbore all
other considerations.

This is not to suggest, however, that Chesterton regarded the print media of
his day with total indulgence. They at any rate were able to poison wells,
especially where people had become detached from traditional culture. At
the time of Christ’s Passion the Jerusalem populace had swung over to
support a baseless assertion — the moral superiority of Barabbas over
Jesus. In The Everlasting Man Chesterton compares this with the city
populations of his own day, over-influenced by “newspaper scares and
scoops.”147 Chesterton was especially worried by the way popularised
versions of sceptical or hyper-sophisticated philosophies were circulating.
That is relevant to the issue of metaphysical realism, a philosophy which,
over against all forms of reductionist empiricism and solipsistic Idealism,
he saw as native to the human mind and, moreover, a condition of that
mind’s sanity and flourishing. As he put it in his study of Cobbett, “This
great delusion of the prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to
experience and capable of contradicting it, is the main weakness of modern
urban society.”148 In this regard, the authority of print was not necessarily on
the side of the angels.

Chesterton’s discovery of metaphysical realism, a discovery later refined by

the — rather cavalier — reading which went into his Saint Thomas Aquinas
(his genius meant he had little need to burn the midnight oil), was meant to
be a vindication of the experience of the common man. But metaphysical
realism is not merely the upshot of a commonsense epistemology. As
practised within the Christian tradition (and the Jewish and Islamic
traditions likewise, for that matter) metaphysical realism is also a fruit of
the doctrine of creation, which declares things to be intelligibly planned by
the divine mind who called them “good.”

The primordial things — existence, energy, fruition — are good so far

as they go . . . The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is
a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is a good universe,
even if it gets worse.149

So the metaphysical realism Chesterton discovered combines these two:

commonsense epistemology and the doctrine of creation.

We have already investigated Chesterton’s attitude towards the secular

“heresies” of Shaw, Wells, Kipling, and Rhodes, as well as his reaction to
the wider group of monistic evolutionists — both materialist and Idealist —
of Chesterton’s youth and early manhood. We now turn our attention to
Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s response to the secular “heresies” of the
Edwardian era, in which he takes on what he calls the “mad doctors” who
“occupy half the chairs of science and seats of learning.”150

Intellectual Lunacy

In selecting the word “mad” to describe the professors and scientists of his
day, Chesterton is not simply choosing any insulting term that comes to
hand. As Orthodoxy opens, he is found arguing that it is characteristic of
maniacs that their minds move in a perfect but narrow circle. Within their
own limited terms of reference, lunatics are often cogently rational. As he
writes, “The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does
not explain them in a large way.”151 Chesterton takes the mark of madness to
be the “combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual
contraction.”152 Madmen are “in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea . .
.”153 The situation is likewise with contemporary intellectuals: these thinkers
exhibit “the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a
contracted common sense.”154 Thus, in the materialism of Ernst Haeckel
(several of whose books had been translated by Joseph McCabe, one of the
minor rationalists to whom Chesterton devoted a chapter of Heretics),
cosmic order is to be explained by a matter-based determinism. Chesterton
sums up the world-view of Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe in these
words: “all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on
an utterly unconscious tree.”155 The explanation, comments Chesterton, does
explain, but at the price of leaving us with the feeling that, if this is the real
cosmos, it is not much of one. On this account: “the whole of life is
something much more grey, narrow and trivial than many separate aspects
of it” (Chesterton has already named, for instance, fighting peoples, proud
mothers, first love, fear on the seas, and he will go on to add kindness,
hope, courage, poetry, initiative, and, in a portmanteau phrase, everything
distinctively human). And so, “The parts seem greater than the whole.”156

By contrast, metaphysical realism, as an account of cosmic order hospitable

to the Christian doctrine of creation, can improve on the materialist
account: whereas Christians are free to believe that there are large areas of
“settled order and inevitable development” in the universe, materialists,
Chesterton points out, cannot allow the slightest incursion of spirit or
miracle.157 Chesterton returns to the topic of Haeckel’s materialist monism
on numerous occasions, right up until the end of his life, rightly discerning
that this kind of thinking would be a major contender for the allegiance of
intellectuals for a long time to come. In The Well and the Shadows,
published the year before his death, he speaks of Haeckel’s materialism
lying on science “like a dead hand,” mentioning how the prospect of
conceivably forwarding Haeckelianism almost deterred Darwin from
publishing The Descent of Man, according to Darwin’s own account in the
introduction to that work.158 Chesterton saw Haeckelianism as a monstrously
inflated version of Darwinism, for Haeckel had turned evolution into what
the historian of science Stanley Jaki has termed a “mimicry of the Creed,”
with its own trinity of divinities which Jaki defines as: the inchoateness of
the universe; the spontaneous origin of life, and the automatic rise of human
consciousness.159

After materialism, a second philosophical error is solipsism, a kind of

“logical completeness” married to “spiritual contraction.” In general,
Chesterton saw solipsism more existentially than theoretically. He
considered it chiefly a pathological state of mind, indeed, “the real and ever
threatening alternative to normal existence.”160 In this perspective, Kantian
philosophy and post-Kantian philosophies of the transcendental ego,
according to which our grasp of the sensuous forms of reality depends on
the origination of forms of thought from the “I,” are dangerous sirens,
luring the unwary onto the solipsistic rocks. In his Autobiography he noted:
“At a very early age I had thought my way back to thought itself. It was a
very dreadful thing to do; for it may lead to thinking that there is nothing
but thought.”161 Chesterton’s principal literary exploration of solipsism
would take the form of his 1929 novel of ideas, The Poet and the Lunatics.
There the hero, Gabriel Gale, is both populist and sane, whereas the elitists
are egoists who go mad by making themselves the centre of their world.
Being a poet is the correct profession for Gale, since, so Chesterton writes,
the artist’s role is to be “centric . . . [Genius] . . . ought to be in the core of
the cosmos, not on the revolving edges.”162 Already in Orthodoxy Chesterton
understands solipsism as what he terms “panegoism.” The moral as well as
ontological connotations of the word “egoism” enable Chesterton to make
the term “solipsism” stretch so as to include writers who, as Chesterton puts
it, try to “impress their own personalities” rather than, by their use of the
literary imagination, create life for the world. Into the same category fall
those Nietzscheans seeking the Superman who are always “looking for him
in the looking-glass.”163 In each case there is an inability to believe one lives
outside an all-consuming dream of self.

More widely, the two great errors — materialism, solipsism — have

something in common. As Chesterton puts it in Orthodoxy:

The man who cannot believe his senses [the solipsist] and the man
who cannot believe anything else [the materialist] are both insane, but
their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the
manifest mistake of their whole lives.164

Locked up in twin boxes, they cannot get out into health and happiness,
whether that be, as in the case of the materialist, the wider realm of heaven,
or, as in that of the solipsist, the wider realm of earth.165 Chesterton admits
that in this critique he is bringing to bear a pragmatic criterion, but he
accompanies it with a theoretical one. What these two errors have in
common is they use reason “in a void,” without awareness of the “proper
first principles” by reference to which the exercise of reason should
proceed.166

Just as in Heretics, then, Chesterton recovered the faith of the Church about
man by a process of contestation of contemporary ideologies, so in
Orthodoxy Chesterton wants us to infer what those “proper first principles”
are by means of the challenge he issues to improper first principles, as
found in various false philosophical, and especially epistemological,
starting-points.

We recall how in Heretics Chesterton was sometimes worried by particular

erroneous principles which individual thinkers had espoused, but sometimes
also by a refusal to declare a cosmic philosophy at all. This second
phenomenon, the withdrawal from intellectual commitment — which
occurs most notably in the opening sections of the book, and which Coates
thinks reflects the early years of Edward VII’s reign — still preoccupies
him in Orthodoxy. It is not now, however, as in Heretics, an essay on
culture, simply a false if fashionable humility about making wide-ranging
truth-claims. It is in Orthodoxy,an essay on epistemology and metaphysics,
something more worrying: an outright scepticism about the value of “the
instrument”

— namely, the human mind. Why should not good logic be as misleading as
bad logic, if both are “movements in the brain of a bewildered ape”?167 In
the wrong hands, Darwinian thought can secrete this ruinous corrosive. As
Chesterton writes: “Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of
how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it
is an attack on thought itself.”168

The preceding discussion does not exhaust Chesterton’s inventory of

varieties of intellectual madness. His range as a philosophical interlocutor
of his own contemporaries is demonstrated in taking further the criticisms
he had offered of them in Heretics. Other examples of epistemological
errors spotted by Chesterton include: Wells’s nominalism, for which all
separate things are unique and there are no classes of object, to which
Chesterton replies, “Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they
cannot be connected,”169 and the relativistic version of the doctrine of
progress, for which standards are constantly changing. As Chesterton asks,
“If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a
standard?”170 Chesterton had already noted that particular weakness in
Heretics.

Chesterton agrees that there is an imperative need to accept the “things that
are necessary to the human mind,” 171 and he is willing to use a pragmatist
argument as what he calls a “preliminary guide to truth.” Yet he recognizes
that a systematic pragmatism would be self-defeating as a form of reason.
As Chesterton puts it, “One of those necessities [of the human mind] is a
belief in objective truth.”172

Chesterton has a clear overall response to these mistaken intellectual

gambits. If things can be questioned wildly — that is, without respect for
metaphysical realism, or an account of things as interrelated in a cosmic
ordering, with homo sapiens, cognitively equipped to grasp the
intelligibility of things, specially placed among them — then the rational
life will not long survive. At the present time, writes Chesterton, “we can
hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same
moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.”173 There must be on
our part a fiduciary consent to the claim that human thinking is reality-
related, that human knowing really grasps the intelligibility of the real and
can proceed to express it in words. Otherwise, reason will not be able to
sustain — indeed, even to begin — its work. This is what Chesterton means
by saying, “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.
Reason is itself a matter of faith.”174 Naturally, by “faith” here Chesterton
doesn’t mean specifically Christian faith. He is speaking of a philosophical
faith grounding confidence in the fundamental reliability of the human
mind and its most refined instrument, which is language. Here Chesterton
may be placed in a long line of English public moralists going back to
Newman and Coleridge.175

The Limits of Necessitarianism

Before looking at what Chesterton made of one particularly profound and

venerable version of a rationally functioning metaphysical realism, namely,
that of Aquinas, we should notice the distinctive spin he puts on such
realism in Orthodoxy. Chesterton distinguishes sharply between, on the one
hand, what he calls “the science of mental relations” in which, as he
remarks, “there really are laws” (necessary entailments as in mathematical
and logical reasoning), and, on the other hand, the “science of physical
facts” in which, he writes, “there are no laws but only weird repetitions.”176
Chesterton is rightly suspicious of the concept of laws of nature, if the word
“law” is to be construed as necessitating in a strict sense. As Stanley Jaki
has put it: “Chesterton’s stunning insistence... that science as such gives
only logical identities and relations but no realities, should make him
appear an interpreter of science to be ranked with a Duhem and a
Meyerson....”177 The latter two figures mentioned were earlytwentieth-
century practising scientists who were also notable philosophers of science.
Jaki explains that Pierre Duhem (18611916) “asserted the primacy of
objective reality, to which common sense and not the exertions of logic,
science or not, gave the only access,”178 while Emile Meyerson (1859-1933)
spelt out, if in a “muted and at times roundabout way” the “inference that if
only the identity relations of mathematical physics existed, nothing in
reality would ever happen.”179 Whereas Darwin’s disciple and philosophical
populariser Thomas Huxley considered that counting ordinary sequences of
events furnished a sufficient argument for positing unalterable cosmic law,
for Chesterton no such conclusiveness attached to the act of inference
involved. Where the repetition of cosmic sequence is concerned, we do not
so much count on it as bet on it.

When we are considering the actual existence of things, the

inappropriateness of necessitarianism is only matched for Chesterton by the
appropriateness of an enduring attitude of wonder or surprise. As
Chesterton puts it in expounding the “ethics of elfland.” “The repetition in
nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”180
Owing to their abounding vitality, children can go on doing the same thing,
or wanting an adult to do it, times beyond number. By analogy, the Author
of nature, who must be boundlessly more vital than they, may “exult in
monotony,” so that repetition may continue for millennia by mere choice
and then suddenly stop. To account for real existence, will is a far more
useful concept than law. In their non-necessity, facts are miracles in a broad
sense of the word by the way they arouse or should arouse wonder:
marvelling. Here is where Chesterton locates the strictly rational need for
imagination. In his first book of essays, the 1901 collection The Defendant,
he had described the function of imagination as “not so much to make
strange things settled as to make settled things strange, not so much to make
wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”181 Chesterton asks in this context
whether by being ultimately “wilful” facts may not also be called miracles
in the strict sense as well.

The Model of the Artwork in Cosmic Philosophy

In so asking, he raises the further question: Is there purpose, and therefore

personality, behind the world? Chesterton compares the limited order which
characterises the world to that of a work of art, whose existence one would
hardly register without positing in some way that of the artist. As he would
write in Saint Thomas Aquinas, the question of a transcendental creative
matrix for the world is unavoidable.
 For those who really think, there is always something really
unthinkable about the evolutionary cosmos, as they [integral
Evolutionists à la Haeckel] conceive it; because it is something coming
out of nothing; an ever-increasing flood of water pouring out of an
empty jug. In a word, the world does not explain itself, and cannot do
so merely by continuing to expand itself.182

According to Chesterton, the root concept of Christian theism was that

“God was a creator, as an artist is a creator.”183

A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a

little thing he has “thrown off.” Even in giving it forth he has flung it
away. The principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking-off
is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary
principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman loses a child
even in having a child. All creation is separation.184

And Chesterton calls it the “prime philosophical principle of Christianity”

that this “divorce in the divine act of making” is the “true description of the
act whereby the divine energy made the world.”185

He considers two main objections. According to the first, the sheer scale of
the cosmos makes the comparison with an artwork limp. Chesterton
disputes the claim that the cosmos is “large” in scale, on the ground that,
since there is only one of them, comparison is senseless. If someone wishes
to say, “I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of
varied creatures,” he may do so, but he cannot dispute the right of another
to say, “I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as
neat a provision of livestock as I wish to see.”186 And indeed, Chesterton
considers that the “dim dogmas of vitality” expressed in the notion of a
personally purposive artefact are better served by calling the world small
rather than large. He reports a

fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the
peril of life . . . I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a
schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.187
Chesterton would surely have been struck by more recent astrophysical
investigation of the early phases of the history of the universe, where, as
one traces time backwards, it shrinks to the dimension of a star, a planet,
and from there in microseconds to the size of a pinhead. As Jaki (again)
writes, it seems a demand of reason to accept that such a cosmos is
“radically contingent on a supracosmic choice for its existence.”188

At this same foundational level of response to the world, Chesterton waves

away a second objection — the problem of evil which, since late antiquity,
has been a major difficulty in the idea of the issue of the world from a non-
maleficent Creator. Chesterton replies that moral reactions along the
spectrum, “cosmos good, cosmos bad,” are irrelevant here. As he remarks:

The assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as if he were

house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of
apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full
possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of
mid-summer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just a
man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone
against the absence of a sea-view. But no man is in this position . . .
My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like
patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.189

Pessimism or Optimism?

After his Slade School experiences, Chesterton was never tempted again by
pessimism. That life is a gift immensely valuable and immensely valued
may be proved, he wrote in The Thing,bythe simple device of “putting a
pistol to the head of a pessimist.”190 In his novel Man Alive, a Cambridge
undergraduate, Innocent Smith, gives a Schopenhauerian (and therefore a
pessimist), the Warden of Brakespeare College, whom he has driven out of
his rooms onto an adjacent Gothic buttress, the options of either having his
brains blown out or repeating after him the lines: “I thank the goodness and
the grace/ That on my birth have smiled/ And perched me on this curious
place,/ A happy English child,” which in these particular circumstances Dr
Eames is only too glad to do.191
In sharp contrast to his denial in Orthodoxy of any imputation of optimism,
in his study of the artist George Frederick Watts Chesterton had accepted
the self-description “optimist” in a cosmic context. It would, however, be
incorrect to suppose he had changed his mind, for in the Watts book he had
given the word a sense all his own. He writes:

One optimism [the variety he repudiates] says that this is the best of all
possible worlds. The other says that it is certainly not the best of all
possible worlds, but it is the best of all possible things that a world
should be possible.192

For the cosmic patriot, such as Chesterton considered himself to be:

The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave

because it is miserable.It is the fortress of our family, with the flag
flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should
leave it.193

What is wrong with the pessimist is not that he “chastises gods and men”
but that he “does not love what he chastises.”194 He fails in primary loyalty
to things. Should he put this failure right, the problem of evil would take on
its correct proportions, which are not those of a theoretical difficulty about
divine origination but those of a practical challenge to human ameliorative
effort.

Here Chesterton’s cameo portrait of Lord Byron in his 1902 study Twelve
Types is instructive. Byron, writes Chesterton, was to all appearances an
uncompromising conscious pessimist. But a moral challenge, the “cold,
hard political necessity” to help the Greeks in their bid for freedom from
their Turkish oppressors, revealed an unconscious optimist beneath — even
though Byron’s participation in the Greek War of Independence was
medically disastrous for him and brought him to his death.

In Greece [Byron] heard the cry of reality, and all the time that he was
dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of that buried and
subconscious happiness which is in all of us, and which may emerge
 suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow, or the spears of the
enemy.195

The Significance of Freedom

The reference to human freedom here is important. As Chesterton explains

in Orthodoxy, in making the world, God precisely set it free. Christian
doctrine can help out philosophy here by reference to the idea of theological
dramatics. Chesterton anticipates the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s notion of “theo-drama”: the interaction of freedoms, human and
divine. As he writes:

God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had
planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors
and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.196

That raises the question of how Chesterton saw ethics in a theological

perspective, an issue which I shall be considering in chapter 8; meanwhile
we can note that the defence of free will is central to Chesterton’s
metaphysical realism inasmuch as the latter includes the recognition of
human will as genuine albeit conditioned choice. Part of metaphysical
realism is to accept the testimony not only of the senses in relation to the
shared external world but also of common human self-report with regard to
the internal world constantly exposed externally in moral action. If
Chesterton disliked an inflated evolutionism for abolishing forms in favour
of flux, his strongest opposition was reserved for its attempt to elide that
deepest sort of ontological form which is the immortal human soul (the
“form of the body”), with its native capacity for freedom. Mechanistic
ontologies pre-empt that freedom, whereas metaphysical realism warrants
it, not least by generating an account of reality as issuing from divine will.
A world brought into existence by free divine will is a place congruent with
the exercise of free human will.197 In the 1912 novel Manalive the “wind”
which blows Innocent Smith over the garden-wall of a suburban boarding-
house so as to rejuvenate the attitudes of the young people staying there is
clearly meant to be the Holy Spirit, who, in the teaching of Jesus, “lists
where he will” (John 3:8). As the narrator explains, this is the “good wind
that blows nobody harm.”198
 Chesterton’s Discovery of Thomism

Chesterton’s decision to compose an account of Thomas and Thomism as a

complement to his study of Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism obliged
him to take further the discovery of metaphysical realism. In an
introductory note, Chesterton explains he has taken the view that a
biography of Thomas will be an introduction to his philosophy, just as
Thomas’s philosophy is an introduction to his theology. Chesterton
confesses that he can only take the reader “just beyond the first stage of the
story”: in other words, to broach the theology but not cover it. Aquinas
appealed to him as a resource for resolving the crisis in the philosophical
order which affected Chesterton’s intellectual environment as he had come
to view it in Heretics if not before. Actually, Chesterton was convinced of
metaphysical realism well before the religious development of his thought
took off on its distinctive trajectory. Some years prior to his adoption of a
doctrinally based Christianity he concluded that “where there is anything
there is God,” and sensed an organic link between the real and its source in
divine creativity.199 For a Thomist the explanation of both affirmations
would be divine presence in all things by way of creative causality. It was
the complete congruence of Thomas’s philosophical-theological outlook
with Chesterton’s pre-existing commitment to a theistically ordered realism,
amplified in its dogmatically reworked articulation in Orthodoxy, that
explains Chesterton’s attraction to Thomism. To this may be added as a
subsidiary factor, after his conversion to Catholicism in the pontificate of
Pius XI and hence wider exposure to Aquinas (this was the high point of the
Thomist revival and official magisterial approval for Thomism in the
Church of Rome), his conviction that, as he put it:

It is a paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint

who contradicts it most, and as St Francis appealed to the prosaic
nineteenth century, so St Thomas has a special message for our own
irrational generation . . .

— the generation, namely, by this juncture, of the 1930s. Adam Schwartz

calls Chesterton’s Aquinas book “a non-fictional allegory of Chesterton’s
own era, as he felt that Thomas’s mediaeval foes had re-emerged in
modernity.”200

What points does Chesterton highlight from Thomas’s corpus? They are
underlinings of Chestertonian insights already achieved, and so will not
surprise us. Here we can mention five in particular, of which the initial two
may be indicated quite briefly.

In the first place, Thomas is manifestly committed to the notion that body
and mind belong equally to the human person so that, as Chesterton writes,
claiming for further justification D. H. Lawrence as well as Walt Whitman,
“[The human being] can only be a balance and union” of the two.201
Secondly, Chesterton insists on Thomas’s presentation of freedom, which
Aquinas had linked, via St John Damascene, to the biblical doctrine of
man’s imagehood of God.

Thirdly, and this is the first of three points that require slightly more
explanation, Chesterton correctly reports that (owing, in fact, to Aquinas’s
account of secondary causality), Thomas “stands for . . . subordinate
sovereignties or autonomies.” He was “always defending the independence
of dependent things.”202 He notes Thomas’s inhospitality to monism: for
Aquinas, he observes, pigs are pigs, not epiphenomena of an underlying
One. In Christendom in Dublin, written in 1932, the year before Saint
Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton stated his belief that such an anti-monistic
pluralism is a precondition of poetry.

Pantheism has been attributed to the poets, but in truth Pantheism is

the very opposite of poetry. Poetry is that separation of the soul from
some object, whereby we can regard it with wonder, whereas
Pantheism turns all things into one thing, which cannot wonder at
itself.203

Chesterton sees that while such a doctrine of natural kinds is common

sense, it is not, for Thomas, mere common sense, but is connected with the
dogma of creation, or as Chesterton writes: “a Creator who created pigs, as
distinct from a Cosmos that merely evolved them.”204 That will be connected
to the fifth and final of my “underlinings.” Meanwhile we can note how
Chesterton confessed in the Autobiography that “all my life I have loved
edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another.
All my life I have loved frames and limits.”205

In the fourth place, Chesterton stresses that, for Thomas, these points of
anthropology and cosmology belong with a distinctive overall scheme
whose cardinal teaching is a theological, rather than naturalistic,
materialism with its climax in Christology. This is not entirely a novum for
Chesterton, except in the clarity and force with which it is now expressed.
He says: “As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most
obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or
sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.”206
Whereas the Crusaders wanted to recover the places where Christ’s body
had been, because they held them to be, consequently, Christian places, the
“holy places”: “St Thomas wanted to recover what was in essence the body
of Christ itself; the sanctified body of the Son of Man which had become a
miraculous medium between heaven and earth.”207 In rather more technical
terms, the crucified and glorified embodied humanity of the Word incarnate
continues to be the instrumental cause of humankind’s salvation.

Fifthly and lastly, Thomism for Chesterton combines commonsense

evaluation of reality with the doctrine of creation. So on the one hand, we
can find Chesterton writing as follows: “The motto of the Mystics has
always been, ‘Taste and see.’ Now St Thomas also began by saying, ‘Taste
and see,’ but he said it of the first rudimentary impressions of the human
animal.”208 That is common sense, or in the often-repeated Thomist maxim,
“Everything that is in the intellect has been in the senses.”209 But on the
other hand, Chesterton does not simply make Thomas into a second Dr
Johnson, who proves the existence of a stone by kicking it. Instead,
Chesterton follows the movement of Thomas’s own thought as it finds in
the finite being presented through the senses a way to the fontal being
which pours itself out in all that is. He thus highlights the doctrine of
creation too. Chesterton speaks of the “positive position of [Thomas’s]
mind, which is filled and soaked as with sunshine, with the warmth of the
wonder of created things,” in such a way that just as Carmelite nuns take
“titles of devotion” such as “of the Holy Ghost” or “of the Cross,” Aquinas
could be given, so Chesterton thought, the title “of the Creator.”210 This was
a proposal cited by Pope Benedict XVI when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he
preached a homily in honour of St Thomas on 28 January 1987 at the
Pontifical University of St Thomas (the Angelicum) in Rome.211 Chesterton
does not omit the corollary, which is that the capacity of the mind to
apprehend the creature/Creator relation is an index of its aptitude for a
knowledge of God as the First Truth. Returning to his contrast between
Thomas’s realist epistemology and mystical knowledge, we find Chesterton
remarking:

It might be said that the Thomist begins with something like the taste
of an apple, and afterwards deduces a divine life for the intellect; while
the Mystic exhausts intellect first, and says finally that the sense of
God is something like the taste of an apple.212

By which he means I suppose (not being a mystic myself), sweet, crisp, and
refreshing. For Thomas God’s grace can be, up to a point, perceived, since
“he who receives it knows by an experience of sweetness which is not
experienced by him who does not receive it.”213

“Nothing but Yourself”

As is fairly well known, Thomas’s thought follows two paths: a “way of

ascent,” through analogy, from finite things to God, using the tools of
metaphysics; and a “way of descent,” reproducing the divine self-disclosure
in finite materials, using the resources supplied by revelation. The normal
presentation of the “way of descent” in Thomas’s corpus is via the
disciplined exploration of Holy Scripture for which the primordially given
divine Name is “I AM WHO AM” (Exodus 3:14), a ratification by divine
authority of the naming of God as subsistent Being itself in the way of
ascent in metaphysics.

Chesterton has warned us, however, that he will not be going beyond the
philosophy into the theology. Nevertheless, he signals his awareness that
Thomas’s theology is not only “anabatic,” upward-travelling, but is also
“catabatic,” downward-travelling, in his interpretation of a celebrated
episode in Thomas’s biography. That was when in the last year of his life, in
December 1273, the saint had a striking visionary — or more strictly,
auditory — experience in the priory church of the Dominicans in Naples.
According to the biographers, he heard a voice speaking from the great
crucifix in that church, San Domenico Maggiore. The voice told him he had
spoken well of the Lord, and might name his recompense, to which Thomas
replied, Nihil nisi Te: “Nothing but Yourself.” Chesterton’s interpretation of
the contemporary accounts stresses how the sheer avidity of Thomas’s
metaphysically realist thirst for things heightens strikingly the significance
of this reply. Thomas, says Chesterton:

might have asked for any one of a thousand things that would really
have satisfied his broad and virile appetite for the very vastness and
variety of the universe. The point is that for him, when the voice spoke
from beneath the outstretched arms of the Crucified, those arms were
truly opened wide, and opening most gloriously the gates of all the
worlds; they were arms pointing to the east and to the west, to the ends
of the earth and the very extremes of existence. They were truly spread
out with a gesture of omnipotent generosity; the Creator himself
offering Creation itself; with all its millionfold mystery of separate
beings, and the triumphal chorus of the creatures. That is the blazing
background of multitudinous Being that gives the particular strength,
and even a sort of surprise, to the answer of St Thomas . . . “I will have
Thyself.”214

We can notice that Chesterton gives a beautiful little account, in no way

misleading, of Thomas on that “act of recognition”: ibid., 148-149. The
mind is neither merely receptive nor merely creative: “the essence of the
Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work: reality and the
recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage.”

Excursus on the Visionary Dimension of Chesterton’s Metaphysics

It would be a mistake to think that the elevated common sense of Thomist

ontology constituted the whole of Chesterton’s metaphysical outlook. True,
the Thomist ontology had a depth and beauty not apparent in either its
Platonist or its Aristotelean forerunners, and that owing to its distinctive
foundation in a creation metaphysic indebted to Holy Scripture. But even
so, taken by itself, it does not suffice to account for Chesterton’s entire
vision of the world. His is not only the metaphysical realism of a
mainstream twentieth-century Thomist philosopher such as Étienne Gilson.
It is also a visionary metaphysics which, like that of one of Thomas’s
ancient sources, the Pseudo-Denys, acknowledges in symbol an equally far-
reaching way of displaying what is involved in the real.

We can see this at once from his early studies of two visual artists, G. F.
Watts and William Blake, where Chesterton considers in one case the
natural symbolic value of a painting, in the other a poet-illustrator’s
prolongation of a supernatural symbol from the Scriptures. Chesterton’s
book on Watts came out in the year of the artist’s death, 1904, when Watts,
whose mature work consisted in part of portraits, in part of ambitious
allegorical paintings, was already falling from favour. Chesterton is chiefly
interested in the allegories, and in his account of them presents Watts as a
great preacher who sought to speak universally by eschewing any use of
signs that are, as Chesterton explains, “local or temporary or topical, even if
the locality be a whole continent, the time a stretch of centuries, or the topic
a vast civilisation or an undying church . . .”215 In Watts’s symbolic
repertoire, we read: “There is nothing here but the eternal things, clay and
fire and the sea, and motherhood and the dead.”216

Though Chesterton appears to be in two minds about the wisdom of this

proceeding, an actual encounter with the canvas of Watts’s Mammon
convinces him of the metaphysical reach of painting inspired by this
aesthetic. Watts had portrayed Mammon, or the spirit of commerce, as an
impressively enthroned man whose face seems, however, blind and
somewhat bestial: his ears in particular look asinine. His heavy hand and
feet have fallen, “as if [writes Chesterton] by a mere pulverizing accident,”
on the godlike figures of a young man and young woman beneath him. The
background is smoky, as though, to cite Chesterton again, “from some
invisible and horrible sacrifice.”217 The common objection by critics is that
the painting is a mere literary allegory. Watts could have saved his time by
simply putting into words his dislike of commercial exploitation.
Chesterton responds:

It is not true that this is a picture of Commerce; but that Commerce

and Watts’ picture spring from the same source. There does exist a
 certain dark and driving force in the world; one of its products is this
picture, another is Commerce.218

The common positions of allegory and reality, explains Chester-ton, are

here reversed.

The fact is not that here we have an effective presentation under a

certain symbol of red robes and smoke and a throne, of what the
financial world is, but rather that here we have something of the truth
that is hidden behind the symbol of white waistcoats and hats on the
back of the head, of financial papers and sporting prophets, of butter
closing quiet and Pendragon being meant to win. This is not a symbol
of commerce: commerce is a symbol of this.219

So Watts “is not a man copying literature or philosophy, but rather a man
copying the great spiritual and central realities which literature and
philosophy also set out to copy.”220 At the time of writing G. F. Watts,
Chesterton was content to explain the correspondence between art and
moral truth or moral beauty in purely psychological terms. There is —
claims Chesterton in what he calls a “not very extravagant hypothesis” — a
“kinship between pictorial and moral harmonies in the psychology of
men.”221 Watts’s use of colour and line serves such harmony. Chesterton’s
description of his own aesthetic in this book as a “not very extravagant
hypothesis” alerts us to the possibility that he may in the future expand this
hypothesis from a thesis about human psychological reality to something
more comprehensive: a thesis about reality as a wider whole.

This is what we find in Chesterton’s Blake. By the time of writing Blake

Chesterton’s rallying to metaphysical realism was that much more
advanced, or at any rate, more articulate. Speaking of mediaeval
illuminations, for instance, he writes that “the Christian decorators, being
true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality of objects.”222

As we saw in chapter 1 of this study, Chesterton used his Blake book to

attack Impressionism, which in a comparison with Gothic art he now
identifies as scepticism: “It means believing one’s immediate impressions at
the expense of one’s more permanent and positive generalisations.”223
Here Blake is definitely on the side of the mediaevals: he believed in
essential realities, that is, in realities whose ontic outlines were as clear as
his own draughtsmanship. Chesterton then surprises us by offering as an
example, taken evidently from Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” the
following instance: “an eternal tiger who rages and rejoices for ever in the
sight of God.”224 Ido not know whether the Oxford Inkling Charles Williams
read and was struck by this comment, but his Christian-Platonist fantasy
The Place of the Lion also posits archetypal realities in the divine creative
mind which have their finite counterparts in the creaturely world.225
Certainly Williams had read a lot of Chesterton, lamenting of him in 1936,
“The last of my Lords is dead.”226 Chesterton’s Blake and Williams seem as
closely associated here as are lions and tigers.

By 1910, when writing Blake, Chesterton had himself accepted a form of

Christian orthodoxy, and consequently a doctrine of biblical inspiration,
which as an Anglo-Catholic theologian of the generation after Chesterton’s,
Austin Farrer, had argued was in important part a revelation of images.227 A
key image in the last book of the biblical canon, the Johannine Apocalypse,
is the Lamb of God, an image of Christ in his divine as well as human
reality. Chesterton, insisting that Blake’s symbols are not allegories, writes
that for Blake: “There really is behind the universe an eternal image called
the Lamb, of which all living lambs are merely the copies or the
approximation.”228 Whereas in Chesterton’s discussion of Watts’s Mammon a
naturally occurring reality made manifest in the allegorical painting is
symbolised in the paraphernalia and processes of commerce, here a divine
reality is manifested in naturally occurring realities, with the connexion
between the two disclosed in the biblical symbol.

Commenting on the Johannine notion of the “wrath of the Lamb,”

Chesterton adds:

If there is an immortal Lamb, a being whose simplicity and freshness

are for ever renewed, then it is truly and really a more creepy idea to
horrify that being into hostility than to defy the flaming dragon or
challenge darkness or the seas . . .229
All of these — dragons, darkness, the seas — are biblical tropes for
dangerous cosmic powers that can serve as instruments of divine justice.
For Blake, the meekness that is no mere willingness to make oneself a
doormat for the feet of others was itself a shadow of the everlasting Lamb.

This brings Chesterton to a marked contrast between Blake and Watts. The
atmosphere of Watts’s work was, Chesterton tells us, “the belief that
abstract verities remained the chief affairs of men when theology left
them.”230 In that atmosphere of “sceptical idealism,” the use of personal
language for divine reality must be construed as only figurative. What such
language figures is the impersonal, as in the concepts of beauty, truth,
goodness. This is far from being the case with Blake or Chesterton himself.
Writing in his own name, Chesterton claims that in such language “the
impersonal is a clumsy term for something more personal than common
personality. God is not a symbol of goodness. Goodness is a symbol of
God.”231

Standing back now from the studies of Watts and Blake, we can seek to
square our findings with Chesterton’s philosophy of created things by
saying that he sought to practice metaphysics through a synthesis of
philosophy and mythopoetic thought. It will be a key claim of the closing
Christological sections of The Everlasting Man that the Incarnation of the
Word makes possible precisely such a union of a philosophy and
mythopoeisis: a universal philosophy that abstracts from concrete things in
the search for general and underlying structures, on the one hand, and on
the other, a mythopoetic imagination that discerns divine presence and
action as the matrix of the most important concrete things.

Conclusion

For Chesterton, created nature in the cosmos both reveals God and conceals
him. God plays a game of hide-and-seek with us in nature, in the world he
has made. That is part of the meaning of the elusive, larger-than-life figure
of Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday. The key to that novel is that the
men who represent cosmic order in society are pursued, harried, by those
who suppose them to be really anarchists. In this way, the representatives of
order who police the world for its health and safety are able to bear witness
that they too have suffered, and this gives them a moral cachet in the eyes
of all who consider themselves the victims of order. When Syme asks
Sunday whether he has ever suffered, Sunday’s face “grew larger and larger,
filling the whole sky, then everything went black.” The novel continues:
“Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to
hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard
somewhere, ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’ ”232
 Chapter 4

The Role of Paradox

If in a word-association exercise, someone well versed in English literature
were asked to continue a sequence beginning “Chesterton” and “theology,”
it would be a fair guess that they would offer as answer: “paradox.”
Chesterton has suffered from this commonplace. The word “paradox” is
often taken to mean sheer self-contradiction. More philosophically, it may
be taken to be a synonym for “antinomy,” meaning: an unavoidable self-
contradiction, which is even worse. To say that sheer self-contradiction is
intellectually unavoidable is a recipe for philosophical anarchy. The law of
non-contradiction is a foundational principle of rational thought. Famously,
Hegel queried it, but it needs to be remembered that when Hegel treats of
logic he is really dealing with ontology, so in this context what concerns
him is clashing tendencies in natural or cultural development. Hegel was
not an irrationalist, nor — it should be said without further ado — was
Chesterton. Readers of the Father Brown stories may recall that in “The
Blue Cross” one of the ways in which Brown is able to unmask the arch-
criminal Flambeau, who has disguised himself as a priest, is that Flambeau
questions the universality of reason in all possible planetary systems
circling the myriads of stars. As Flambeau remarks:

[T]hese modern infidels appeal to their reason, but who can look at
those millions of worlds and not feel that there may be wonderful
universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?233

After the capture, Brown explains, “He attacked reason . . . It’s bad
theology.”234 So Chesterton was certainly not against the use of reason. He
only wanted to know how reason was being used. As he remarked in his
study of the early-nineteenth-century English social critic William Cobbett:
“There is nothing very much the matter with the age of reason; except, alas,
that it comes before the age of discretion.”235 Hilaire Belloc considered
critics had done Chesterton a disservice by naming him a “Master of
Paradox,” where the word “paradox” is meant to imply a sheer
contradiction which baffles reason. Rather, remarked Belloc, at Chesterton’s
hands paradox was “illumination through an unexpected juxtaposition.”236
That is an important part of the picture, but it is not by any means, as we
shall see, all that can be said on this topic.

Paradox is certainly a ubiquitous feature of Chesterton’s oeuvre. In Saint

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, Chesterton offers his readers prime examples
in succeeding chapters. In chapter I, he tells us, referring to the
incarnationalism of both Francis of Assisi and Aquinas, that “these two
saints saved us from Spirituality: a dreadful doom.”237 In chapter II,
comparing Thomas with his family, who thought his talents would be
wasted as a penniless friar, he affirms the “much more practical pertinacity
of the man who is called theoretical.”238 In chapter III, comparing the
Aristotle who “took things as he found them” with the Aquinas who
“accepted things as God created them,” Chesterton infers that Thomas
“saved the human element in Christian theology . . . Only, as has already
been urged, the human element is also the Christian one.”239 Congruently
with this trio of paradoxes he concludes, in chapter IV, which deals with
Manicheism, that “the work of heaven alone was material; the making of a
material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.”240

A Short History of Attitudes Toward Chestertonian Paradox

Chesterton was early castigated for over-egging the pudding. One reviewer
of Heretics remarked:

Paradox ought to be used like onions to season the salad. Mr

Chesterton’s salad is all onions. Paradox has been defined as “truth
standing on her head to attract attention.” Mr Chesterton makes truth
cut her throat to attract attention.241

Probably those critics are correct who suggest that Chesterton learned the
habit of paradox from Oscar Wilde, who used it with a like flamboyance.
Association with the decadents of The Yellow Book — hierophants of a
shimmering wit divorced from truth by the simple declaration “art for art’s
sake” — did nothing to assist Chesterton’s reputation as a serious
philosopher, much less as a theologian. That George Bernard Shaw also
used the paradox form in the dialogue of his plays may, up to a point, have
sweetened that particular pill.

Some help was at hand, however, a decade or so after his death. Chesterton
seems always to have been popular in Canada, so perhaps it is not
surprising that this aid took the form of the Canadian Hugh Kenner’s study,
Paradox in Chesterton. Published in 1948, Kenner’s book argues that for
Chesterton paradox is a particularly striking way of bringing home to
people the implications of the Thomist doctrine of analogy. According to
that doctrine, likeness with difference is the all-pervasive feature of relations
between creatures as well as between creation (creatures as a whole) and
God.

Paradox in Chesterton boasted an introduction by Kenner’s fellow-

countryman Herbert Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan would become a cult
figure of the 1960s, when his maxim, “The medium is the message,” more
repeated, perhaps, than analysed, was held to sum up the cultural revolution
of the period. Oddly, McLuhan’s introduction sought to reverse rather than
reinforce the message of Kenner’s book. While agreeing with Kenner that
Chesterton was a major thinker, McLuhan wanted to prize apart the moral
metaphysics of Chesterton’s doctrine from their literary form, to which
paradox is central. For the McLuhan of the 1940s, at any rate, the
Chestertonian medium was definitely not the Chestertonian message.
McLuhan considered that a deficient, indeed tiresome, literary medium got
in the way of a worthwhile moral message in Chesterton’s writing.

If McLuhan somewhat shot Kenner in the foot, things looked different

thirty years later with the publication in 1978 of a much fuller study in
French, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, by Yves Denis. Unlike
Kenner’s, Denis’s book is more theological than philosophical. It locates
Chesterton somewhere between the Gospels and such theological giants of
la nouvelle théologie as the Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar and
his French Jesuit mentor Henri de Lubac. As Denis points out, the Jesus of
the Gospels himself speaks in paradoxes in key sayings on those who would
save their life losing it and those who lose it on his account saving it, on the
meek who will possess the earth, on the first being last, or those who want
to be greatest of all needing to become the least of all. As to de Lubac,
anyone wishing to attempt a reconstruction of his thought would have to
take into account two sets of reflections entitled Paradoxes and Nouveaux
Paradoxes.242 That Balthasar, who regarded de Lubac as his master, had
learned from him in this regard becomes apparent when we consider so
central a sentence for his theological aesthetics as this one from the opening
volume of The Glory of the Lord: “All the paradoxes of the being of man
and of the world resolve themselves around a centre . . . [which is none
other than] the divine obscurity making itself manifest in Jesus Christ.”243
After this demonstration that the paradoxical has its place both in the
teaching of the Founder of Christianity and in that of some of the most
theologically able among his later-twentieth-century followers, Denis seeks
to display the wide ramifications of Chesterton’s uses of paradox:
pedagogically, doctrinally, mystically, aesthetically. Along with Kenner’s,
his study remains foundational for later attempts to understand Chesterton’s
modus operandi in this regard.

The Rhetorical Paradox

What, then, did Chesterton intend by multiplying his paradoxes? In part,

Chesterton made a selection from a variety of possible rhetorical tools, and
among them found paradox especially to his liking. His love of word-play,
manifested in enthusiasm for puns and jokes in general, sufficiently
explains this. The purpose in his purely rhetorical paradoxes is the
maximisation of impact, the securing of effect. As Kenner writes:

The special rhetorical purpose of Chesterton is to overcome the mental

inertia of human beings, which mental inertia is constantly landing
them in the strange predicament of both seeing a thing and not seeing
it . . . Now a man’s acquaintance with truth is likely to be renewed by
the violent shock of being told a thundering and obvious lie.244

And Kenner cites as an example this passage from Chesterton’s William

Blake:

Blasphemy is not wild; blasphemy is in its nature prosaic. It consists in

regarding in a commonplace manner something which other and
 happier people regard in a rapturous and imaginative manner.245

There is, of course, an obvious sense in which the first proposition in this
statement is false: considered as a denial of the divine Goodness,
blasphemy is wild, wildly off target. But when at any rate conventional
blasphemy is considered in its contrast to the tropes of Scripture,
hymnography, and mystical theology, its imaginative deficiencies, as
Chesterton points out, soon become plain.

Paradox flung out in flat contradiction of the reader may be, as here, a
rhetorical device. But it may also be a quite straightforward statement of a
contrary case, as Denis explains by reference to Chesterton’s study George
Bernard Shaw.246 In one sense, declares Chesterton, wherever Shaw counters
a commonly received opinion — in Greek, doxa — he utters what people
insist on calling paradox. To attack head-on an idea in possession which
itself appears to be normative, to enjoy the force of intellectual law, may be
to seem paradoxical. In one of his Daily News articles for 1911, Chesterton
issued the following advice to any reader in this situation:

When next you hear some attack called an “idle paradox,” ask after the
“dox”; ask how long the “dox” has been in the world; how many
nations or centuries have believed in the “dox”; how often the “dox”
has proved itself right in practice; how often thoughtful men have
returned to the “dox” in theory. Pursue the “dox.” Persecute the “dox”;
in short, ask the “dox” whether it is orthodox.247

But secondly, Shaw can also utter judgments whose terms are in collision,
and yet any contradiction between them only exists for a superficial mind
that contents itself with some current acceptation of terms, ignoring the
richness of meaning human language can yield. The role of paradox here is
to open thought to a subjacent truth. Chesterton’s paradox about blasphemy
from his Blake book can illustrate that as well as any Shavian epigram.248

What is distinctive vis-à-vis Shaw in Chesterton’s deployment of the

rhetorical paradox is twofold. First, it aims at what Platonists term
anamnêsis, the awakening of unregistered acquaintance, or what Father
Brown in “The Three Tools of Death” calls “that strange light of surprise in
which we see for the first time things we have known all along.”249 And
secondly, such deployment of the rhetorical paradox often serves as, in
Denis’s term, “a pedagogy for man on his way to the new vision of faith.”250
But while paradox at the hands of Shaw may be comparable to the
rhetorical paradox as employed by Chesterton, Shaw does not reach — does
not seek to reach — the level of another sort of paradox in Chesterton’s
writing, a sort with which any consideration of Chesterton as theologian
will chiefly be concerned.

What Kenner terms “rhetorical” paradox is what Denis calls “pedagogical”

paradox, and these two critics are in agreement that this is the less
interesting aspect of the role of paradox in Chesterton’s writing, though
they also admit it is not always easy to disentangle it from the aspect they
rate more highly. This more exalted form of paradox Kenner dubs the
“metaphysical” paradox, while Denis gives it the sobriquet the “doctrinal
paradox.”

Such metaphysical or doctrinal paradoxes are the more important because,

at Chesterton’s hands, they claim to identify elements in objective reality,
rather than constituting simply a choice of stylistic means to bring about a
certain effect in reading. These are the paradoxes which in Orthodoxy
Chesterton terms the primary truths of his theology, what he calls
combinations of “two almost insane positions which yet somehow
amounted to sanity.”251 He wants to show how two seemingly incompatible
realities, which are supposed to be rebarbative in each other’s regard— here
opposite poles do not attract but repel — can come together not in some
weak compromise but, as he puts it, at the “top of their energy.”252 Judging
by the evidence of Orthodoxy, what alerted Chesterton to the crucial
importance of the metaphysical or doctrinal paradox was his growing
realisation that the only humanly fitting way to live in the world is to be at
one and the same time passionately optimistic about it (which he interprets
to mean passionately loyal) and passionately pessimistic (which he
interprets to mean passionately concerned to heal and transform it), and that
Christianity alone, by its complex doctrine of creation, fall, and redemption
licenses this combination: what he terms “love and wrath both burning.”253
Such doctrinal paradoxes belong to one or another of two orders. The first
such order (and it is the order with which Kenner’s book is more
concerned) is the order of metaphysical realism. The second relevant order
(and here is the focus of Denis’s study) is the order of the religious
foundation for metaphysical realism. There are, then, two possibilities here.
Either doctrinal paradox may concern the world of things and especially of
man, as in metaphysical realism, or it may concern God, the realm of the
divine, and so the religious foundation for metaphysical realism. Taken
broadly, this is, then, a distinction between what would generally be
regarded as philosophical and theological subject-matters, but it is relevant
to note that a philosophical subject-matter can be approached from either a
philosophical or a theological perspective.

A foundational doctrinal paradox in the order of metaphysical realism for

Chesterton concerns the interrelation of being and nothingness. In his Saint
Francis of Assisi, Chesterton presents Francis as one who “not only
appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made.”254 As
he writes:

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly

mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet [i.e.,
a mystical saint like Francis] does really praise creation, in the sense of
the act of creation . . . The mystic who passes through the moment
when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the
beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else.255

Somewhat later in the same chapter of that book, denying that Francis was a
nature-lover, someone for whom the natural world was a pleasing
background environment, Chesterton declares that if Francis’s mind had a
background, it was, rather, “[t]hat divine darkness out of which the divine
love had called up every coloured creature, one by one.”256 The explanation
of the philosophical paradox that “everything is made of nothing” is
properly theological: plenary divine being has made out of nothing all that
is, and only the constant influx of donated being from the giver prevents all
things from returning to that nothing from which they were made.
In Orthodoxy the foundational ontological paradox is sharpened by the new
ontic condition which, alas, is ours, owing to the Fall. In Chesterton’s
summary, “Whatever I am, I am not myself.”257 Created humanity was
always suspended between being and nothing, but now, in the post-
lapsarian condition, even that genuine being it really receives it holds
abnormally. The abnormal is now the norm. Something we have never
known in the full sense of that word is not only better than us but is more
natural to us than we are to ourselves.258 And this is why, as he remarks in
Heretics,if we suppress the supernatural, what we are left with is the
counter-natural — an affirmation he will renew in Orthodoxy, where it
takes the form of saying that only the supernatural can now guard the
natural. For Orthodoxy this is perhaps the primary paradox offered by the
covenant of grace.

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations

and professional priests. But inside that inhuman guard you will find
the old human life dancing like children, and drinking wine like men;
for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom.259

The same point was made in poetic form in The Ballad of the White Horse,
in the song which Alfred sings in the camp of Guthrum, the leader of the
pagan Danes:

Therefore your end is on you,

Is on you and all your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely Fen,
Not that your Gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.
For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God’s death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow.260
Still in the philosophical order of metaphysical realism, another doctrinal
paradox highlighted in Orthodoxy concerns the terms on which human
nature can flourish. For high-minded paganism in the ancient world, reports
Chesterton, that flourishing was held to consist in some sort of balancing of
elements. Here he appears to have chiefly in mind one interpretation of the
Aristotelean doctrine of the virtuous mean. But, Chesterton maintains,
enquiry in depth into the virtues suggests that, to the contrary, flourishing
involves the collision of seemingly opposed passions. Courage, for
instance, one of the four cardinal virtues shared by antiquity and the
Church, consists in a vigorous desire to live taking the form of a disposition
to die.261 Charity, the primary theological virtue, consists of either
“pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.”262

Once again, the explanation in each case requires us to move onto the
supernatural level: the courage Chesterton has chiefly in mind is that of the
martyrs, who exercise the virtue of courage in what the mediaeval
Scholastics would call an infused form, a form where the human disposition
concerned has already been affected by grace, while charity, the organising
virtue of theological ethics in Thomism, is, along with faith and hope, an
example of an infused virtue that as such has no “acquired,” purely natural,
counterpart, in the way that courage does. It is in no way surprising to see
Chesterton thinking theologically about the paradoxes presented by forms
of human action, anymore than with the paradoxes presented by the
interrelation of being and nothingness, since, as Denis rightly sees, the
order of metaphysical realism, studied in the first place by philosophy, has
for Chesterton its foundation in the realm of the divine, which only
theology can study in its own right. Metaphysical realism has a religious
foundation.

When we move onto that further order, we find that paradoxes remain
pertinent. In classical Christianity, there is a paradoxical interrelation of
divine transcendence and divine immanence. Divine transcendence makes
possible divine immanence, since it is only inasmuch as God differs from
the world that he can be present to it and in it without transgression of the
world’s inherent character as creation. Transposing that ontological
statement into terms of the human knowledge of God, the distance between
the divine realm and human understanding which transcendence entails can
co-exist, then, with an area of contact between the Creator and created spirit
based on the immanence that transcendence makes possible. As Denis puts
it, with reference to the book of Deuteronomy: “Like Moses on the
threshold of the promised Land the mind glimpses without being able to
touch.”263

By accepting a classical theism for which this is the proper adjudication of

the relationship between transcendence and immanence, Chesterton places
the chief Christological mysteries — the Incarnation and the Atonement —
in a mould of paradox which reflects its character. We can take the
Incarnation first. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton takes the midpoint of
Christological orthodoxy to be the paradoxical combination of the idea of a
baby with that of, as he writes, the “unknown strength that sustains the
stars.”264 Even in the 1908 Orthodoxy Chesterton’s Christology, though not
so foregrounded, is resolutely Chalcedonian: Jesus Christ is “not a being
apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half
not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very
man and very God.”265

In William Blake he affirmed that in Jesus coincide the “form filling the
heavens” and “the appearance of a man.”266

The paradoxical character of the Incarnation yields further paradoxes in the

Atonement. In the temptation scene in the Garden of Olives God tempted
God. The cry from the Cross — “Why hast thou forsaken me?” —
“confessed that God was forsaken of God.”267 “There is only one religion,”
remarks Chesterton, “in which God seemed for an instant to be an
atheist.”268 Such statements anticipate the most daring theological
speculations of Balthasar’s theodramatic passiology about the self-
estrangement of the divine Trinity on the Cross. And the theopaschite
formula of the sixth-century Eastern churches seeking to satisfy the element
of truth in Monophysitism, “One of the Holy Trinity was crucified for us,”
receives an even sharper formulation in Chesterton’s confession about the
death of the Word incarnate in his 1930 independently printed poem “The
Grave of Arthur”: “Dead is the King who was never born.”
And behind these paradoxes of the Incarnation and Atonement lie not only
the classical theistic paradoxes of divine transcendence combined with
divine immanence, but also the unique paradox at the heart of Nicene
orthodoxy which makes possible the dramatic re-expression of inner divine
relationships in history: God is a Trinity, or, in Chesterton’s words in
Orthodoxy: “For us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence) God
Himself is a society.”269

The Difference Between the Rhetorical and Metaphysical Paradoxes

The difference between the pedagogical paradoxes and the doctrinal

paradoxes is not itself stylistic. As we have seen, Chesterton’s aim is
sometimes, like Shaw’s, simply pedagogical: to jolt minds out of
complacency either by briskly denying reigning errors or by conjoining
seemingly contradictory terms in order to open thought to a subjacent truth
which could be in principle stated in some other way. On other occasions,
like those we have just visited, his aim is doctrinal in the strongest sense —
namely, to bring people to encounter metaphysical and even more
foundationally religious truths in a form which is isomorphic with the
realities involved. But in both instances the literary techniques employed
are similar: a build-up of argumentation or persuasive discourse is suddenly
concentrated in a phrase that shocks. Chesterton introduces what Denis calls
“metaphors that initiate,” and these set our imagination moving in a certain
direction that prepares the reader, subconsciously at any rate, for what is to
come: contesting a received opinion and unsettling the reader’s mind, often
by a humour which arouses tolerance thanks to the pleasurableness of
hearing the unaccustomed. But only the crystallisation of the paradox itself,
in a sharp formulation of its own, makes the logical impact, bringing
together two seemingly contradictory concepts at the heart of their meaning,
thus causing the reader to re-evaluate his or her attitude to truth in some
respect as a consequence of a new illumination. Finally, in the characteristic
pattern which typifies both pedagogical and doctrinal paradox in
Chesterton’s prose, imagistic echoes follow, offering some ongoing
reminders that return the mind to the focal paradox.

The substance of the distinction between the pedagogical paradox and the
doctrinal paradox is not to be found, then, in their literary mechanisms but
at another level of analysis.

The Relevance of the “Analogy of Being”

For Hugh Kenner, whose interest lies in Chesterton’s use of paradoxes in

the order of metaphysical realism, the decisive difference between
pedagogical and doctrinal is the tacit presence (or otherwise) of an appeal to
the analogy of being, the key doctrine of metaphysical realism in its
Thomistic version. For Kenner, this is what enables Chesterton’s use of
paradox to be not merely rhetorical but fully metaphysical. Kenner states
the distinction as follows:

The object of verbal [i.e., rhetorical] paradox . . . is persuasion, and its

principle is the inadequacy of words to thoughts, unless they be very
carefully chosen words. But the principle of metaphysical paradox is
something inherently intractable in being itself; in the Thing.270

And Kenner goes on to say that Chesterton’s ultimate object in drawing

attention to such metaphysical paradox is eliciting from us “praise,
awakened by wonder.”271

The idea of analogy is that of likeness at the heart of difference. This is why
analogy thinking is crucial to metaphysics. It is also why it is immediately
pertinent to Chesterton’s paradoxes in the order of metaphysical realism. In
Heretics Chesterton invited his readers to realise the “first and simplest of
the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth,” namely, to “see that the fact
of two things being different implies that they are similar.” As he writes:

The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but
they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be
swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say
that the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when
we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without need of other words,
that there are things that do not move.

And even in the act of saying that things change, we say that there is
something unchangeable.272
Analogical thinking explains what in the metaphysical order paradox
identifies or describes. The common content of analogy and paradox is the
intrinsically analogical character of reality: paradox is rooted in being
which, by that fact, discloses itself to the metaphysical imagination as
wonderful. As Kenner seeks to unfold this point, he writes:

Everything that is is wrapped in the mystery of its own

incommunicable individuality, and hence all things are wonderfully
different; but everything that is exercises the act of existence in
common with everything else, and in that sense all things are alike.
Both the wonder of differentiation and the wonderful fact of existence
are explained and illuminated by the Thomistic ascription of difference
to the individual essences of things, in proportion to which they
exercise the act of existence. The grass exists grassily, the cloud
cloudily; they both are, and they are both different, according to the
way in which they are.273

That Chesterton understood the main lines of Thomist metaphysics when he

wrote his Saint Thomas Aquinas is obvious; but Kenner’s claim is that years
before looking into Thomas, Chesterton’s reiterated reports that anything
could stimulate him to rapture and elicit the instinct to praise — or
example, in one essay, a lamppost274 — showed that from early manhood on
he had always possessed an analogical imagination: that is, an habitually
analogical mode of perception. His gratitude was not only that, amid so
many potentialities, this particular thing might not have been; it was also
that, in its limited being, it participated in the being which has its fount in
God.

In the Autobiography Chesterton describes his younger self

all groping and groaning and travailing with an inchoate and half-
baked philosophy of my own, which was very nearly the reverse of the
remark that where there is nothing there is God. The truth presented
itself to me, rather, in the form that where there is anything there is
God. Neither statement is adequate in philosophy: but I should have
been amazed to know how near in some ways was my Anything to the
Ens of St Thomas Aquinas.275
Chesterton eschewed the language of analogy because, as he explains in
Saint Thomas Aquinas, he sought to avoid the formal metaphysical
language of the Middle Ages for fear of putting readers off. But he was
aware that what made paradox possible was what allowed the Scholastics to
develop their doctrine of analogy: namely, the non-univocity of key words.
Here the Schoolmen would have singled out most notably the words “one,”
“good,” “true,” “beautiful,” as well as “being” itself. Owing to his decision,
a technical vocabulary was lost to him, but what he added was humour. The
importance of humour in paradox is that it excludes all explicative
commentary that would result in the attenuation of surprise (and even
scandal) in the ontological disclosures that paradox, like analogy, can
provide.

For Kenner, Chesterton’s Christological incarnationalism capped or

crowned the intuition into the paradoxical character of reality, a reality
whose philosophical explanation he grasped at first tacitly and later
explicitly as the analogy of being. Any perfection which man could achieve
would be, on the principle of analogy, infinitely less than God’s. Man’s
littleness, moreover, was intensified by the Fall, by his sins. Yet on the other
hand, man was created in the divine image, and in the Incarnation God saw
fit to assume that image so as to underline man’s greatness, despite the Fall.
Paradoxically, then, man is both very little and extremely great.276 In The
Poet and the Lunatics Chesterton ventures the fancy that, as St Peter was
being crucified upside down, he “saw the landscape as it really is; with the
stars like flowers, and the clouds like hills, and all men hanging on the
mercy of God.”277 Certainly this passage supports Kenner’s claim,
combining a way of looking at the natural cosmos with a view of the
existential situation of man in a perspective of sin and grace.

Paradox, Christology, and the Church

Denis’s investigation of doctrinal paradox in the wider religious realm

which founds the order of metaphysical realism identifies two principal
“paradoxes of [Chestertonian] Catholicism.” He calls the first “The God-
man and the greatness of the little” (a concept that has evident links with
Kenner’s notion of the Incarnation as the seal of cosmic paradox), and
identifies the second as “the Church and the paradoxical universe” (a
formulation that has no obvious anticipation in Kenner’s study). These two
substantive themes will be germane in chapters 7 and 9 respectively, where
I deal first with Chesterton’s Christology in its own right and finally with
Chesterton’s account of Catholicism. This latter topic will touch upon the
two ways in which, for Denis, Chesterton links paradox with the Catholic
style: the “internal balance” and the “festal” character which paradox and
Catholicism alike share.
 Chapter 5

The God of Joy

We come now to the quartet of particular theological themes this book will
survey: God, man, Christ, and the Church.

A New Argument for the Existence of God?

Chesterton’s writings contain what appears to be a novel argument for the

existence of God.278 This argument may be termed the “argument from joy.”
According to Chesterton, joy as a response to being is the principal signal
of transcendence that human experience offers, the most persistent and
eloquent of what the sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, has called
“rumours of angels.”279

Joy as Experience

In The Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton suggests that the theme of joy,
pervasive in his writings, indicates a kind of aperture in experience: via this
aperture we are open to the transcendent realm that is God. Chesterton
speaks of it as a kind of rupture in the chain of cause and effect that governs
the finite universe. The passage in question consists of some lines placed in
the mouth of the Mother of Jesus and spoken to King Alfred at the darkest
point of his struggle with the Danes.

I tell you naught for your comfort.

Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,

And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope.280
The phrase “joy without a cause” is the phrase that I should like to explore
further in this chapter.

It may be said at once that by calling joy uncaused, Chesterton did not mean
that it was a random or chance occurrence, onto-logically rootless. On the
contrary, precisely because, for him, joy is neither empirically bounded nor
ethically relevant, its foundation must be sought at a deeper level, where the
finite opens onto the infinite. Were joy a reaction to empirically specific
states or situations, it could be regarded as determined by those states and
situations. Were it ethical in content, it could be seen as a reflection of a
self-constituted human meaning. But since, as Chester-ton indicates, it is
neither of these things, its raison d’être must be sought at a point which
may be called metaphysical: on the finite-infinite frontier. Joy, he argued,
lies deeper than happiness or unhappiness, pleasure or pain. All of these are
reactions to particular conditions or events within existence, whereas joy is
the reaction to the fact that there should be such a thing as existence at all.
Intimately related to wonder before the fact of being, joy is an implicit
affirmation of the doctrine of creation and hence of the truth of theism.

Sheer wondering joy before the face of existence is claimed by Chesterton

in the Autobiography as a characteristic feature of childhood. The child, he
held, sees the world in the light of an eternal morning that “had a sort of
wonder in it as if the world were as new as myself.”281 Childhood figures
prominently in Chesterton’s writings for reasons almost directly opposed to
those that operate in the tradition of autobiographical writing at large.
Chesterton is virtually uninterested in childhood as the foundational stage
of the individual’s psychological development. His study of Stevenson is an
exception to this statement — probably because, on Chesterton’s account,
Stevenson’s experience (toy theatres and all) was so like his own. Despite
sickliness, the grey cityscape of Edinburgh, and the grim Calvinist or post-
Calvinist culture of Scotland, he could still, at the moment of writing
Treasure Island, greet existence with at least a “Yo ho ho.”282 For Chesterton
childhood is not significant so much for its contribution to the making of an
individual as for its role in disclosing a shared cosmos. In this sense, he saw
it retrospectively as “real life; the real beginnings of what should have been
a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living.”283 Far from
continuously happy himself as a child, he maintained that nevertheless,
whatever unhappiness and pain there might have been were “of a different
texture or held on a different tenure.”

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a

wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous
world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I recall; not the
things I should think most worth recalling.284

Yet Chesterton does not regard childhood as a lost fairyland from which
adult life is merely an ever-accelerating descent into reality. On the
contrary, reality itself in its own utterly non-necessary yet glorious being
has the qualities that we normally ascribe to the realm of faëry. For this
reason, childhood remains the proper criterion for adult sensibility. The
child’s response to existence as sheer gift, through wondering joy, is the key
to ontology, and, by a supreme irony, far from being a piece of knowledge
acquired through the ratiocination of the mature man or woman, it is a gift
received with the dawn of consciousness itself. The role of philosophising is
to unpack this gift, what elsewhere Chesterton calls this “birthday present”
of birth itself,285 and so to uncover its further implications which lead, in
fact, to the postulation of a divine Source for the world. As he wrote in the
Autobiography, even in a difficult adolescence, “I hung on to the remains of
religion by one thread of thanks,” being unable to shake off a “sort of
mystical minimum of gratitude.”286

A Philosophy for Joy

Philosophical reflection is also needed to sustain the gift of joy since, as the
young Chesterton observed, the experience of living in a flawed human
environment quickly obscures the sense of joy. Autobiographically, as we
noted in chapter 1, Chesterton identified the causes of this abatement of joy
as, first, an extreme scepticism, partly brought on by his immersion in the
currently fashionable Impressionism, a painterly equivalent (in his view) of
epiphenomenalism, and second, a growing sense of the perverse
attractiveness of evil, which he associated with his dabblings in
spiritualism. He seems to have realised at this juncture that the gift of joy is
only of enduring value if, by means of it, the mind can get a sustained hold
on the truth of things, natura rerum. The rest of his life, in this perspective,
is the attempt to work out a philosophy of joy.

Although, at its most conventionally expressed, Chesterton could find this

philosophy in the concept of pulchrum, the beautiful, a “transcendental”
term in Thomism, this was no more than a confirmatory check from the
history of Christian philosophy of something that he had been working out
more personally in a wide variety of writings. As Marshall McLuhan
pointed out, Chesterton did not seek out ideas in the philosophical tradition.
Without the apparatus of formal philosophising, he “seems never to have
reached any position by dialectic or doctrine, but to have enjoyed a kind of
connaturality with every kind of reasonableness.”287 This connatural
philosophising, insofar as it touches the subject of joy, can be seen in three
of Chesterton’s widely separated works.

In his study of Dickens, Chesterton introduces the topic of the gratuitously

joy-provoking character of existence by describing Dickens as a man who,
if he had learned to whitewash the universe, had done so in a blacking
factory.

Charles Dickens, who was most miserable at the receptive age when
most people are most happy, is afterwards happy when all men weep.
Circumstances break men’s bones; it has never been shown that they
break men’s optimism . . . When those who starve or suffer speak for a
moment, they do not profess merely an optimism; they are too poor to
afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely
logical defence of life; that would be to delay the enjoyment of it.
These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of
the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to
criticise or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of
a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with
least cause.288

Again, in his masterpiece, Orthodoxy, Chesterton speaks of the Christian

belief in a God who creates by the communication of his own goodness as
the crucial factor in showing the consonance of Christianity with an
experientially based ontology:
 The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but
sad about the big ones. Nevertheless . . . it is not native to man to be
so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the
fundamental thing in him and grief the superficial. Melancholy should
be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise
should be the permanent pulsion of the soul.289

And yet, Chesterton continues:

According to the apparent estate of man, as seen by the pagan or the

agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy
ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be concentrated, it
must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a
concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an
unthinkable eternity . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly
man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it
supremely in this: that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic
and sadness becomes something special and small.290

Finally, in his life of Francis of Assisi, Chesterton refers to joy in the face of
existence — ontologically significant joy — as a sign of our relation to the
divine creative act. It brings about a kind of contemporaneity with the
original creation from nothing.

In a fashion [Francis] endures and answers even the earthquake irony

of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of
the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons
of God shouting for joy.291

Chesterton was well aware that not every reader would be likely
immediately to echo this allegedly universal element in the tissue of living.
From his earliest writings, Chesterton considered human beings to be in
need of a kind of therapy of perception. As he put it in The Defendant, “his
eyes have changed.” P. N. Furbank was right to identify Chesterton’s
“central belief” in these words:

At the back of our brains . . . there was a forgotten blaze or burst of

astonishment at our own existence. The object ofthe artistic and
 spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.292

What Chesterton admires in an artist or writer is, often enough, the ability
to cleanse the inner eye from the filming effects of excessive familiarity or
of cultural distortion, so that our perceptual limits may approximate more
fully to those of integral nature. This is essentially the basis for his
veneration of Blake. Admitting that the sentimental classicism of Blake’s
rival, Thomas Stothard, was sometimes more finely executed in strict
painterly terms than Blake’s own work, Chesterton adds that this argument
reflects “the duel between the artist who wishes only to be an artist and the
artist who has the higher and harder ambition to be a man — that is, an
archangel.”293 (No doubt Blake’s Songs of Innocence played a part in
confirming Chesterton’s view of the significance of joy.294) Chesterton
belongs to the tradition of philosophy, stretching from Plato to Kierkegaard,
which regards rhetoric as a necessary concomitant of argument, precisely
because rhetoric can begin to shift certain mental blocks to insight by
enlisting the imagination’s power to unsettle and reshape consciousness. If
all were left to ratiocination alone, such a shift might never occur.

If the poet or artist, sage or saint can elicit this primordial response to being
which is joy, then the philosopher can analyse its content. Insofar as
Chesterton came in later life to understand and accept Thomism, he seems
to have been happy with the Thomist account of beauty as a “transcendental
determination of being.”295 Found more systematically in some later
Thomists than in Aquinas himself, this concept proposes that a feature of all
existent things is their power to arouse our sense of beauty. Finite being in
its manifold diversity is, in the words of Yves Denis, “apt for satisfying our
entire register for enjoyment.”296 We encounter this deliciousness or radiance
in such a variety of beings that the concept that covers it, pulchrum, the
beautiful, may be termed “transcendental” in the sense of belonging to
participation in being at large rather than to a limited set of kinds of being.
But because all finite being is received or participated being — because it is
not self-explanatory or self-sufficient — the concept of the pulchrum
becomes one of the ways whereby we may speak of the infinite Source
from which the finite realm of being comes forth.297
More characteristically Chestertonian, however, is the suggestion that joy
may be explained by reference to its correlative concept of gift. The
conceptual link is formed by the notion of surprise. Joy is not delight in a
settled possession (as in “The Marquis of Lothian enjoys possession of
twenty thousand acres”), but delight in what was in itself wholly
unexpected — namely, that there should be something at all rather than
nothing. It is, therefore, intimately associated with the concept of gift, as a
passage in Chesterton’s novel The Poet and the Lunatics well illustrates.

Man is a creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as

the Great Voice commanded us, in being a child.All his fun is in
having a gift or present; which the child,with profound understanding,
values because it is a “surprise.” But surprise implies that a thing
comes from outside of ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from
someone other than ourselves. It is thrust through the letter-box; it is
thrown in at the window; it is thrown over the wall. Those limits are
the lines of the very plan of human pleasure.298

It is in this way that Chesterton’s argumentum e gaudio proceeds from a

certain recurrent feature of human experience, rendered intelligible by
reflection about the existence of God. God is the true but hidden centre to
which Chesterton alluded when he sought to explain Dickens’s
“incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the
infinite eccentricity of existence.”299 He continues: “We feel that all there is
is eccentric, though we do not know what is the centre.”300 The divine centre
is off-side. Yet for all that, it makes its presence felt.

No doubt such an argument needs conceptualisation in a setting where other

types of theistically suggestive experience are also included and
appraised.301 Nevertheless, it seems as worthy of attention by philosophers
as, for instance, the argument from desire found in Gregory of Nyssa, or the
argument from hope in Gabriel Marcel, or even the argument e contingentia
mundi in Aquinas to which, indeed, it might usefully be related.

If an argument for God’s existence can be based on the phenomenon of joy,

then we are in the presence of one of Chesterton’s celebrated paradoxes. It
would certainly be paradoxical if a problem that has aroused the conceptual
and argumentative intricacies of, say, the argument from a First Mover, or
the argument from design, were in some sense soluble by reference to what
is, on Chesterton’s own showing, essentially an infantile emotion. Tiresome
as Chesterton’s exploitation of paradox may sometimes be, it is justified for
him, as our explorations in the last chapter indicated, by considerations
based on ontology rather than style. In Orthodoxy Chesterton declares a
hatred for pure paradox and a love for truth which has, he argues, an
objectively extravagant aspect.302 As Denis writes, “for him paradox is not a
mask; it is a disclosure.”303 That the point of insertion of God into the human
continuum should be something as simple as joy is a serious suggestion,
though made in a playful way. Here as elsewhere, Chesterton’s imagination
is formidably intellectual. The paradox is not a game; rather, the sense of
play is a pleasure arising simultaneously with the paradox from the
perceived truth: “The humour is inseparable from the argument. It is . . . the
‘bloom’ on dialectic itself.”304

In this connection it is worth returning by way of conclusion to Peter

Berger’s A Rumour of Angels, an essay that Chesterton would undoubtedly
have found highly sympathetic. Berger points out that “ludic,” playful,
elements can be found in virtually every sector of human culture, to such a
degree that, so it may be argued, culture as such is impossible without play.
Here reference is made to the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens
where these ludic elements can be connected to the theme of joy.305 Berger
writes:

Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is actually realised, in

joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very
specific quality — namely, it becomes eternity . . . Even as one
remains conscious of the poignant reality of that other “serious” time
in which one is moving towards death, one apprehends joy as being, in
some barely conceivable way, a joy forever.306

And from an astonishing concentration of the insights of Chesterton’s

writings, Berger infers that it is the human being’s ludic constitution that
enables us to regain and realise the deathless joy of our childhood. Thus
play becomes the anthropological key to joy, and joy the anthropological
key to truth. Can one echo the words of Denis and agree that Chesterton has
found “the gateway to the land of marvels”?307
 Chapter 6

Man in the Image of God

The theme of man in the image of God is likely to crop up almost anywhere
in Chesterton’s writing, sometimes in unlikely places. But that is not really
surprising. Chesterton was a wonderfully generous-spirited human being
who was worried, with reason, about the present and future condition of his
fellowmen; he also accepted the truth of Christianity. The doctrine of the
imagehood of God in man is the foundational doctrine of Christian
anthropology, and therefore the most important element in Christian truth to
have to hand if what is needed is a re-orientation in the sense of the
humanum: what it is to be human at all, what are the conditions of
flourishing of the human, and what is the expected destiny of the human.

Starting from Dickens

Chesterton’s most systematic statement of his anthropology is surely the

account to be found in the first half of The Everlasting Man. I begin,
nevertheless, with a statement not from that theological masterwork of his
maturity but from his early study of Charles Dickens. I do so partly because
it serves to link the last of our fundamental topics — paradox — to this key
topic among particular doctrines — namely, theological anthropology.
Chesterton has been dealing with the complaint that, in his handling of his
characters, and general attitude to the human race, Dickens was, as some
critic or another had opined, a “vulgar optimist.” Chesterton accords this
accusation a measure of truth. As he writes:

Let us admit that Dickens’ mind was far too much filled with pictures
of satisfaction and cosiness and repose. Let us admit that he thought
principally of the pleasures of the oppressed classes; let us admit that it
hardly cost him any artistic pang to make out human beings as much
happier than they are.308

A curious fact remains. Dickens succeeded in eliminating some of the social

wrongs he detested: he brought about some of the reforms in English social
institutions that he wanted to see. The explanation, continues Chesterton, is
that, like “every real and desirable thing,” Dickensian social reform entails
a “mystical contradiction.”309 Explaining what particular paradox he has in
mind, Chesterton draws near to the doctrine of man as the image of God.

Chesterton’s argument runs as follows:

If we are to save the oppressed, we must have two apparently

antagonistic emotions in us at the same time. We must think the
oppressed man intensely miserable, and at the same time intensively
attractive and important. We must insist with violence upon his
degradation; we must insist with the same violence upon his dignity.
For if we relax by one inch the one assertion, men will say he does not
need saving. And if we relax by one inch the other assertion, men will
say he is not worth saving. The optimists will say that reform is
needless. The pessimists will say that reform is hopeless. We must
apply both simultaneously to the same oppressed man; we must say
that he is a worm and a god; and must thus lay ourselves open to the
accusation (or the compliment) of transcendentalism.310

Only if man has been clothed at his creation with divine dignity is it safe to
affirm the deplorable condition, physical, moral, and in every other way,
sometimes in extreme forms, that can be his on earth. We could not bear to
face the facts about human depravity in their stark grimness if human
dignity were essentially an earthly dignity, that is, a property of the human
animal as such. As Chesterton puts it: “If [human dignity] is a heavenly
dignity we can admit the earthly degradation with all the candour of
Zola,”311 a reference to the ultra-realist novelist of French industrial society
who sought to shock the bourgeoisie by his tell-all descriptions of the
physical and moral squalor of the proletariat, allied in his writing with a
deterministic biology of the human taken from his reading of Darwin.

Clearly, it is not simply a question of an inhibition about naming human

depravity. It is also a question of the well-foundedness or otherwise of the
hope of getting people to cooperate in doing something about it. Chesterton
does not name the doctrine of the divine imagehood of man in so many
words, but that is what he evidently has in mind when he calls this need to
identify the conditions of reform the “strongest argument for the religious
conception of life.”312 Every man is the bearer of the royal image; he or she
is stamped with the seal of the divine King. Human rights, which are the
explication, the unfolding, of that intrinsic human dignity, are not so much
natural rights as they are supernatural rights — as Chesterton does state in
so many words, appealing to Thomas Jefferson for confirmation, in What I
Saw in America.313

The American Example

In the context of our present theme, that book, which dates from the year of
his conversion to Catholicism, 1922, deserves some mention. In his
retrospect on his tour of the United States, which had occupied the early
months of 1921, he declared roundly, “There is no basis for democracy
except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”314 Chesterton was correct
in observing that the growth of such scientific — or perhaps pseudo-
scientific — disciplines as craniology, which sought to correlate
intelligence with the structure of the skull and both with racial inheritance,
had added to the problems of Abolitionists in the ante-bellum epoch in
America. He believed that not only would Abolitionism have had the
utmost difficulty in establishing itself without the Civil War, itself fought
for other reasons, but that, had slavery continued until the end of the
century — into the era of what he termed “evolutionary imperialism” — the
anthropological basis for its legal removal would no longer have been
available. It was against the trend of the nineteenth century that Lincoln
reiterated the principal Jeffersonian tenets stated in the founding documents
of the American Republic, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.” Lincoln
did so, as Chesterton puts it:

to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like
this: “We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that
all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by
heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal
wrongs,” and so on.315
Chesterton expresses his doubts as to whether such a creed could ever
“have overthrown a slave state.”316

But what about the creed of Catholic Christianity? Could it do any better?
Chesterton does not propose to argue that Christian orthodoxy renders
inevitable political democracy and the recognition of universal human
rights. A regime issuing from evangelical and Catholic inspiration is, he
agrees, “not . . . necessarily at any moment more democratic” than some
other. The important point lies elsewhere and consists in the fact that “its
indestructible minimum of democracy really is indestructible.”317 And, he
goes on:

[B]y the nature of things that mystical democracy was destined to

survive, when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy itself.
And whenever democracy destroying itself is suddenly moved to save
itself, it always grasps at rag or tag of that old tradition that alone is
sure of itself.318

For Chesterton, Enlightenment humanism is really dependent on a

perception deriving ultimately from the biblical account of the creation of
the universal proto-parents in the divine image.

Chesterton’s conviction that acceptance of a divinely originated dignity for

each member of the human species is not only a religious but a moral
necessity was from the beginning on a collision course with later-
nineteenth-century biological materialism. “Thinking people,” he briskly
declares in “The Evolution of Slaves,” an essay in the collection Fancies
Versus Fads, know that “the constant flux of adaptation” posited by
evolutionary anthropology does not exist.

So far from saying that the evolution of man has not finished, they will
point out that (as far as we know) it has not begun. In all the five
thousand years of recorded history, and in all the prehistoric
indications before it, there is not a shadow or suspicion of movement
or change in the human biological type.319
Chesterton’s suspicion is that the claim that evolution is ongoing for the
human phylum is only too convenient for ideological interventionists who
wish to aim the path of the human species in a given direction, of which he
offers various examples, the most anodyne of which is vegetarianism.
“Having risen from a monkey who eats nuts to a man who eats mutton,
[man] may rise yet higher by eating nuts again.”320 The denial that man is
properly thought of as a higher animal will be the true starting point of The
Everlasting Man, to which I now turn.

The Genesis of The Everlasting Man

Chesterton’s Everlasting Man was written as a response to An Outline of

History, a one-man history of the world by his old sparring partner H. G.
Wells. What endeared the Wells of Edward VII’s reign in Chesterton’s eyes
was Wells’s willingness to admit his mistakes, philosophical and otherwise.
This trait survived into the reign of George V. The First World War derailed
the juggernaut of Wellsian progress and punctured the confidence Wells had
fluctuatingly shown in the inevitably ameliorative effects of science.
Chesterton would not live long enough to witness the sorry spectacle of the
Wells of the years immediately following the Second World War, the War of
Holocaust and Hiroshima, and so missed the despairing reaction of Wells’s
study Mind at the End of Its Tether.

What Chesterton noted about An Outline of History were two things. First,
Wells took it for granted that the human being was simply the product of
mammalian development along a particular evolutionary track. Secondly,
Wells gave minimal space to Christ and the Gospel: his section on Jesus of
Nazareth occupied only a quarter the length of his account of the struggles
of the ancient Greeks with the Persian empire, and, like Christianity itself,
Christ became invisible in Wells’s scenario as soon as Wells left the
mediaeval period behind, something he did very expeditiously.321

The central thesis of The Everlasting Man is that the two chief axes of
history are missing in Wells’s account. What one ought to note about human
history is, in the first place, the rupture in the natural continuum produced
by the emergence of homo sapiens, and, in the second place, the unique
transformation of human possibilities that was displayed by the Incarnation.
When cut along its most significant internal boundary-lines, history breaks
down, accordingly, into two phases. It is anthropophany, followed by
Christophany. What an outline of history should offer above all is, first, an
account of the creative explosion with which man arrives on the animal
scene, followed by, secondly, an account of the figure who represents a
unique qualitative leap in human experience. Neither of these
manifestations can be explained naturalistically; both of them submit only
to theological explication.

The Divine Origin of Man

When we consider the reality of man in the image of God, we are concerned
with the first of these two claims. Chesterton addresses this claim in his
essay “The Secret Society of Mankind” (also included in Fancies Versus
Fads):

The truth involved here has had many names; that man is the image of
God; that he is the microcosm; that he is the measure of all things. He
is the microcosm in the sense that he is the mirror, the only crystal we
know in which the fantasy and fear in things are, in the double and real
sense, things of reflection.322

Incidentally, Chesterton reiterates the democratic implications of that

statement when he rounds it off by remarking:

In the presence of this mysterious monopoly the differences of men are

like dust. That is what the equality of men means to me, and that is the
only intelligible thing it ever meant to anybody.323

The Everlasting Man, then, in its two diptychs, anthropological and

Christological, opens by explaining the method Chesterton will follow. That
method is to look at his two subject-matters, the human and the Christian,
by the strongest imaginative effort that can be made to see both as if from
the outside. So far as the human being goes, it is, specifically, by seeing
man as a strange animal that we shall realise “how strange an animal he
is.”324 It is, in Chesterton’s words, “exactly when we do regard man as an
animal that we know he is not an animal.”325 Compared with animal nature,
so Chesterton hopes to show, “man has distanced everything else with a
distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still
thunderbolt of the light.”326 Chesterton had no objection to the theory of
evolution insofar as it postulated the gradual character of the formation of
non-human species by natural selection. Yet he was keenly aware of the
problem created for Darwinism by the surprising paucity of the transitional
forms that the theory seemed to require, and thus treated it as an hypothesis.
Questions of the length of evolutionary time he dismissed as “a merely
relative question of the same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through,
as can be done with any story at a cinema by turning a handle.”327 Nor did he
object to the application of Darwinian concepts to the development of the
human body. His chief objection was to the notion that Darwinism could
explain the human soul — the distinctively human configuration of
consciousness and activity. The distance between man and the other animals
is simply too great for this to be plausible.

A subsidiary but still important ancillary objection is to the notion that the
prehistory of human evolution has any predictive power for the future of
mankind. Were we to take one statement from The Descent of Man which
encapsulated what Chesterton disliked about evolutionary biology, it would
be when Darwin writes by way of conclusion:

Man may be excused at feeling some pride at having risen, though not
through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and
the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally
placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant
future.328

The denial of aboriginal placement; the flagging up of the possibility of an

evolutionist eschatology: these are the errors, and they are no bagatelle
because they concern, literally, the alpha and the omega of the human
creature: its first beginning and its last end.

Man Is a Revolution

As Chesterton notes, these fundamental issues of human origin will not be

decided aright unless we bring to the fore the fact that “man is not merely
an evolution but rather a revolution.”329 For Chesterton, the first telltale sign
of this revolution is that man is an animal who paints. Hence the beginning
of his account in a cave, that is, one of the caves in southwestern France and
northern Spain in which the best preserved Palaeolithic artworks can be
viewed (by select professionals, at any rate) owing to the fragility of the
micro-climates that sustain the pigmentation. The Altamira caves were
opened up in 1878, those of Font de Gaume, which confirmed the
authenticity of the Altamira paintings, in 1903, and in 1940, four years after
Chesterton’s death, the best-known of all, the caves of Lascaux, in the
Dordogne. One curiosity of Chesterton’s 1925 account is that he waxes
lyrical on the circumstance of the discovery of cave-art by “a priest and a
boy.” This description does not tally with either Altamira or Font de
Gaume; but of the first four people to enter the caves of Lascaux, so Stanley
Jaki reports, two were boys and one was a priest.330 Make of that what one
will, what seems clear is that for latertwentieth-century students of
Palaeolithic art, its emergence remains, as in Chesterton’s account,
explosively sudden: one enquiry into the origins of art from the 1980s is
entitled The Creative Explosion.331

Chesterton imagines a visit to inspect this artwork by “one of the professors

who simplified the relation of men and beasts to a mere evolutionary
variation.”332 The professor:

had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the
picture of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he
found a place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.

Chesterton calls this a “tremendous truth.” The professor might

descend to depths unthinkable, he might . . . see in those cold chasms

or colossal terraces of stone, traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the
fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of biological life . . . He would find
the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our
common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching
life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle;
growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the
finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one
 significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun
to scratch the faint suggestion of a form.333

Defining art as “the notion of reproducing things in shadow or

representative shape,” Chesterton asks us to note that the evidence carries
no hint of a development of artistic skills from the rudimentary in animals
to the more evolved in ourselves.

Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them. Pithecanthropus
did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo sapiens draw it well. The
higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not
paint better in his best period than in his early bad period as a jackal;
the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race horse a
PostImpressionist.334

If man was “an ordinary product of biological growth,” then he was not like
any other.

Indeed, remarks Chesterton, he “seems rather more supernatural as a natural

product than as a supernatural one.”335 The right conclusion to be drawn is
that:

somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of

nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly
a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other
shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is a
mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may
resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may
excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a
room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard larger than a
mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man
is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of
God.336

If we look at man in the company of the animals, we have to say he is a

“very strange being,” almost a “stranger on the earth.”337 He wraps himself
in “artificial bandages called clothes”; he props himself on “artificial
crutches called furniture.” He hides his own organs of generation “as in the
presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame.”
And alone among the animals, he is “shaken with the beautiful madness
called laughter.”338

That was a point Chesterton had already made in criticism of the Irish
agnostic man of letters George Moore. Moore had proposed that comedy
and tragedy, the inherent possibilities of humour as well as the ever-present
shadow of mortality, belong equally with all that lives: in Moore’s words,
“whether it be leviathan or butterfly, oak or violet, worm or eagle.”
Chesterton drew to his attention what he called the “prodigious fact” that
man is the only creature that actually laughs, besides which, he remarked,
“the fact that men laugh in different degrees, and at different things, shrivels
not merely into insignificance but into invisibility.339 In his essay on Moore,
“The Secret Society of Mankind,” Chesterton writes:

It is true that I have often felt the physical universe as something like a
firework display: the most practical of all practical jokes. But if the
cosmos is meant for a joke, men seem to be the only cosmic
conspirators who have been let into the joke.340

Citing Moore’s own catalogue of creatures:

We may come upon him in some quiet dell rolling about in uproarious
mirth at the sight of a violet. But we shall not find the violet in a state
of uproarious mirth at Mr Moore. He may laugh at the worm; but the
worm will not turn and laugh at him. For that comfort he must come to
his fellow sinners . . .

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton does not include among the differentia
of the human our consciousness of mortality, but this played its part in the
controversy with Moore, which concerned not only the uniqueness of man
in nature but also the spiritual equality, despite other inequalities, of the
members of the human species: what Chesterton calls the “solidarity and
sameness of mankind.”341 Whereas all living things die, only man knows that
he will. Asks Chesterton:
 Can Mr Moore draw forth leviathan with a hook, and extract his hopes
and fears about the heavenly harpooner? Can he worm its philosophy
out of a worm, or get the caterpillar to talk about the faint possibility of
a butterfly? The caterpillar on the leaf may repeat to Blake his
mother’s grief; but it does not repeat to anybody its own grief about its
own mother.342

And he goes on:

We do not know what a whale thinks of death; still less of what the
other whales think of his being killed and eaten. He may be a
pessimistic whale, and be perpetually wishing that this too, too solid
blubber would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. He may be a
fanatical whale, and feel frantically certain of passing instantly into a
polar paradise of whales, ruled by the sacred whale who swallowed
Jonah. But we can elicit no sign or gesture from him suggestive of
such reflections; and the working common sense of the thing is that no
creatures outside man seem to have any sense of death at all.343

Only a human death can be a tragedy, from which flow “all the forms and
tests” whereby we further characterise it as murder or execution, martyrdom
or suicide: all these depend “on an echo or vibration, not only in the soul of
man, but in all the souls of all men,”344 precisely because all know the
shadow of death falls on them.

Biological Archaeology or Meta-history?

For Chesterton there may be a “broken trail of stones and bones faintly
suggesting the development of the human body,” but there is “nothing even
faintly suggesting such a development of the human mind.”345 As he writes:
“Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside
time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense.”346
The original human ensoulment is a meta-historical event which renders
human history possible: taking the word “history” to stand for both the
sequence of events in the human past and the study of those events by
historians. The historian must take something like it for granted; he cannot
investigate it, any more than can the biologist.
 The Fall and Original Sin

Chesterton took the same view of Original Sin, when welcoming Aldous
Huxley’s departure from the view of such late Victorian and Edwardian
rationalists as his father, Thomas Huxley, that acceptance of the doctrine of
Original Sin was an unnecessarily cramping limitation to one’s estimate of
the human species. Unfortunately, for Chesterton, the younger Huxley then
rather spoiled things by adding that “the scientific view of man necessitates
a sort of original sin, if it be only the residuum of his animal ancestry.”347
“Sin, whatever else it is,” declared Chesterton in his essay “On Original
Sin,” reprinted in the collection Come to Think of It, “is not merely the
dregs of a bestial existence.” Rather, it is “something more subtle and
spiritual.” Indeed, it is “in some way connected with the very supremacy of
the human spirit.” As he wrote:

It is not merely a matter of letting the ape and tiger die, for apes are not
Pharisees, nor are tigers prigs. The elephant does not turn up his long
nose at everything with any superior intention, and the totally unjust
charge of hypocrisy might well be resented by any really sensitive and
thin-skinned crocodile. The giraffe might be called a highbrow, but he
is not really supercilious about the powers of Uplift.348

And he complained that, in the moralising literature of bestiaries and fables:

Man has scattered his own vices as well as virtues very arbitrarily
among the animals, and there may be no more reason to accuse the
peacock of pride than to accuse the pelican of charity. The worst things
in man are only possible to man.349

He insists:

That poison is his own recipe; it is not merely decaying animal matter.
That poison is most poisonous where there are fine scientific intellects
or artistic imaginations to mix it. It is just as likely to be at its best —
that is, at its worst — at the end of a civilization as at the beginning.
Of this sort are all the hideous corruptions of culture; the pride, the
perversions, the intellectual cruelties, the horrors of emotional
exhaustion. You cannot explain that monstrous fruit by saying that our
 ancestors were arboreal; save, indeed, as an allegory of the [Genesis]
Tree of Knowledge.350

So he concludes:

The poison . . . is as old as any memory of man. Wherefore, we have to

posit of it that it also was of the human source and fountainhead, that it
was in the beginning, or, as the old theology affirms, original.351

Actually, both Chesterton’s discovery of metaphysical realism and his

distinctive argument for the existence of God predisposed him to an
acceptance of the dogma of the Fall. As Adam Schwartz explains,
Chesterton’s conviction that the grateful acceptance of the gift of existence
in joyful humility is what leads to happiness received confirmation in “the
Christian dogma that it was precisely proud ingratitude and the arrogant
ambition of creatures to be like God that precipitated the human race’s
aboriginal calamity.”352 We shall not perhaps expect so genial a man as
Chesterton to write compendiously about vices, but neither shall we be
surprised that for him “the true vanity of vanities” is the sin of pride. Pride’s
subtlety is such that “[a]ll other sins attack men when they are weak and
weary; but this attacks when men are happy and valuable and nearer to all
the values.”353 Just like Adam, in fact.

At the same time, that doctrine also liberates humankind by its implicit
claim that there is nothing fixed about endemic moral defect. To
Chesterton’s mind, rejection of the dogma of Original Sin entails
acceptance of the “persistently flawed state of human nature as normative.”
That road leads to despair (compare Wells). But if man has fallen from a
higher dignity, he may be restored thereto by cooperating with God’s
grace.354

The Defence of Free Will

According to Chesterton, we are free to mix the poisons our spiritual

ancestry makes available to us in the way we like, just as we are also free to
abstain. He was hardly likely to fall into a theological necessitarianism
about personal sin, when he had fought so long and valiantly against
philosophical, biological, and psycho-analytic necessitarianisms of various
kinds. In an essay “On Psycho-analysis” he absolved the dramatists and
poets of the Greco-Roman civilization of any such error.

Insofar as old tragedy was a struggle between Fate and Free Will, it
represented the defeat of Free Will and not the denial of Free Will. The
struggle of man against the gods might be a hopeless struggle, but it
was a struggle. It is the whole point of modern Determinism that there
can be no struggle at all.355

Chesterton’s blazing affirmations of freedom made him impatient with legal

reformers who sought to replace retributory rationales for judicial
punishment by alternatives which justified imprisonment, for instance, in
terms of protecting society. While it is true that we are not infallible when
we think we are punishing criminals, it is also true that we are not infallible
when we think we are protecting society. When the “Potteries” novelist
Arnold Bennett lent his weight to the view that crime is the result of
conditioning, so only the rationale of social protection will serve,
Chesterton responded vigorously in his ironically entitled essay, “The
Mercy of Mr Arnold Bennett.”

Mr. Bennett’s solution is not the more merciful, but the less merciful of
the two. To say that we may punish people, but not blame them, is to
say that we have a right to be cruel to them, but not a right to be kind
to them. For after all, blame is itself a compliment. It is a compliment
because it is an appeal; and an appeal to a man as a creative artist
making his soul . . . [W]hen we call a man a coward, we are in so
doing asking him how he can be a coward when he could be a hero.
When we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the
powers of a saint.356

Punishing someone for the protection of society, thought Chester-ton,

“involves no regard for him at all.” Especially, it involves no “limit of
proportion” in punishment.

There are some limits to what ordinary men are likely to say that an
ordinary man deserves. But there are no limits to what the danger of
 the community may be supposed to demand.357

The State trials of the Soviet Union would shortly confirm the pertinence of
Chesterton’s comment. Bennett’s intervention was an example of what
Chesterton called elsewhere the way in which “the progressive, generation
after generation, does elaborately tie himself up in new knots”: above all
with respect to his picture of man.358

In “The Revolt of the Spoilt Child,” Chesterton took issue with the newly
fashionable philosophy of education and counselling which had as its aim
“drawing out the true personality of the child, or allowing a human being to
find his real self.”359 The only meaning that can be assigned to “finding
one’s true self,” thought Chesterton, is a matter of mystical theology, and
concerns divine purpose in creating. Otherwise, “it is so unmeaning that it
cannot be called mystery but only mystification.”

Humanly considered, a human personality is only the thing that does in

fact emerge out of a combination of the forces inside the child and the
forces outside . . . Anybody might amuse himself by trying to subtract
the experiences and find the self; anybody who wanted to waste his
time.360

In the “case of the finest and most distinguished personalities,” Chesterton

noted, it would be hard to “disentangle them from the trials they have
suffered, as well as from the truths they have found.”361 Chesterton
continues:

God alone knows what the child is really like, or is meant to be really
like. All we can do is to fill [the child] with those truths which we
believe to be equally true whatever he is like.362

So, we must “believe in a religion or philosophy firmly enough to take the

responsibility of acting on it.”363

We have already looked at Chesterton’s philosophy. In the next chapter we

must consider his Christologically defined religion.
 Chapter 7

Chesterton’s Christology
For Chesterton, “the double nature of Christ” is “the essential paradox of
the Incarnation.”364 Those words from Christendom in Dublin show us how
strongly Chalcedonian Chesterton’s Christology is. Perhaps an even better
term than “Chalcedonian” would be “Leonine,” for Chesterton’s mature
theology of the Incarnation is extraordinarily Western in character. Like the
fifth-century Pope, Chesterton emphasises a symmetry or equality of the
natures in their constitution of the incarnate Word. Chesterton’s Christology
remains, as we shall see, genuinely Chalcedonian — it never develops
Nestorian tendencies — but it looks for the subsequent unfolding of the
teaching of the Fourth Ecumenical Council to the iconography and
hymnography, devotion and sensibility, of the mediaeval and post-
mediaeval West. In matters of Christological orthodoxy, Chesterton has
little sympathy with the Byzantine version. Unlike the present writer, he
prefers Raphael to the art of the icon.

Chesterton’s attitude toward Monophysitism is key here, because

Monophysitism is the pressing of the orthodox doctrine of Cyril of
Alexandria, as dogmatised at the Third Ecumenical Council, Ephesus, in
431, in the direction of an anti-Leonine interpretation of Chalcedon. As
important historical background — not given by Chesterton and perhaps
unknown to him — we can mention how the desire of the Byzantine
emperors to exclude any version of Chalcedon that might give succour to
Nestorianism dominated their Church policy in the sixth and seventh
centuries. That desire both reflected and engendered some sympathy with
the Monophysites, until in the figure of St. Maximus the Confessor the
controversy over Monothelitism — the claim that there is in the incarnate
Word only one will — gave the emperors pause. With the Sixth Ecumenical
Council, in 681, Constantinople III, the pendulum took another swing, this
time to re-emphasise the reality of the Saviour’s human faculties.

Chesterton understood Monophysitism in terms of the antithesis it presents

— and this is true enough — to our contemporary theological liberalism.
Ancient Monophysitism was, he wrote, the “very opposite” of early-
twentieth-century Modernism: “Whereas the most recent heretics are
humanitarians, and would simplify the God-man by saying He was only
Man, the most ancient heretics simplified Him by saying He was only
God.”365 Chesterton is right if he understands by “saying He was only God”
the denial that, after the union of natures at the Incarnation, the humanity of
the Lord retains its own consistency, its own capacity to function according
to those principles which the “man assumed” shared with the rest of the
human species. Contrary to Monophysite claims, Christ was not only
consubstantial with the Father; he was and is consubstantial with ourselves
also. The popular Monophysite picture of Christ (we are not thinking here
of such subtle and responsible theologians as the great Severus of Antioch)
has been described as “God looking out through the eyes of a man.” But
Chesterton goes further and imagines the incarnate God of Monophysite
devotion as looking out through the eyes, rather, of a ghost. Is this
Monophysitism? Or is it really Docetism that Chesterton is speaking of?
The question is unavoidable when we read such a passage as the following:

[T]hese mystics had in their hearts the same horror as the Moslems:
the horror of God abasing himself by becoming human. They were, so
to speak, the anti-humanitarians. They were willing to believe that a
god had somehow shown himself to the world like a ghost; but not that
he had been made out of the mere mud of the world like a man.366

Chesterton has been arguing that Palestine-Israel, the “scene of the

Incarnation,” became in the aftermath of the Resurrection, “almost sealed
and consecrated to the denial of the Incarnation.”367 Chesterton speaks fairly
enough of the Jews of the Land whose “high monotheism eventually
hardened and narrowed into a violent refusal of the Incarnation.”368 There is
also truth in his claim that, under the eventual Islamic dominion, the Land
was ruled by a people who “also interpreted monotheism mainly as the
denial of the Incarnation; even after the Incarnation.”369

But he does not stop there, since he wishes to argue that Monophysite
Christianity exemplifies what he calls “mystical developments, tending in
the same direction and thriving especially in the same neighbourhood.”370
Nor does he regard the mainstream Byzantine tradition (which never ceased
to be Chalcedonian) as entirely exempt from this condition. The East
Roman rule which separates, chronologically, Jewish and pagan Roman
dominance in Judaea from Islamic, is tarred — up to a point — with the
same brush. Those who lived closest to the natural surroundings of Jesus
were least able to grasp how far God had stooped down to become co-
natural with them. As Chesterton writes:

And above all, for this is the point of the paradox, the Catholic Church
proclaimed that original humanity more and more loudly, as it passed
away from its original human habitation. As the Church marched
westward she bore with her, with ever-increasing exultation and
certitude, the human corporeal thing that had been made flesh in
Bethlehem; and left behind a ghost for the Gnostics and a god like a
gilded idol for the Greek heretics, and for the Moslems only the fading
shadow of a prophet.371

I said that Chesterton tarred the Byzantines with that same brush with
which he was painting black the Monophysites “up to a point” because he is
careful not to describe Eastern Orthodoxy as actually heterodox in matters
Christological: he distinguishes between “the truth itself” — meaning the
truth of the reality of the humanity assumed — and “the emphasis on this
truth,” the way Orientals presented the truth of the reality. It was the
“emphasis on this truth, if not the truth itself” that “actually grew stronger
as the Church marched westward, from Antioch to Rome and from Rome to
the ends of the earth.”372 Or in an alternative formulation, likewise intended
to save the Christological orthodoxy of the Chalcedonian East while
simultaneously indicating there was something slightly half-hearted about
it: Byzantine theologians “defended rather than described the Humanity.” It
was Western Christendom that “made the first portraits, if not the first
pictures of Christ.”373

The Higher Critics took a frigid pleasure in referring to their human

Christ only as Jesus of Nazareth; but they could not find Him in
Nazareth. They could find little or nothing in Nazareth or twenty other
holy places of the East, but the flattened faces of the Greek icons or the
faceless ornament of the Moslem script. Insofar as He was
remembered, or at least insofar as He was imagined, as a human
 personality and a Man moving among men, He was seen as moving as
in a hundred pictures, under Italian skies or against Flemish
landscapes, a new Incarnation in colour and clay and pigments; which
did not take place till He reached the coloured regions of the sunset . .
.374

by which Chesterton means the Western Europe of Florence or Bruges.

There are even [writes Chesterton] some dark and fearful Christs, in
the more sinister phases of Byzantine art, which really look
Monophysite to the point of monstrosity; and we almost look to see a
wheel of six arms, holding hammers and thunderbolts . . . There was
something symbolic, like a mysterious repetition of the Flight into
Egypt, in the way in which the Mother, carrying the Divine Humanity
in her arms, took refuge in the Roman world of the West; and seemed
still to be fulfilling some destiny even in moving continually
westward. It was as if, in some fairy tale about sunset and the islands
of the blest, there was to be discovered somewhere a softer air or a
more quiet light, in which the God could most freely show Himself as
a Man; taking on an intimate and domestic character forgotten in the
heat and the hard abstract feuds of the fiery places of his birth.375

It was, then, so Chesterton maintains, “Western art, Western legends,

Western customs of Christmas or Easter” that “gradually unfolded the
fullness of the Manhood, with which dwelt the fullness of the Godhead
bodily.”376

A Theology of the Atonement

The incorporation of that phrase from the letter to the Colossians about the
divine pleroma subsisting bodily in Jesus informs us that Chesterton is not
setting out to displace emphasis on the Godhead of Jesus by this encomium
on Western devotion to the sacred humanity. As we shall see when we turn
now to the topic of the Atonement, he is capable, when he thinks it
rhetorically necessary, of doctrinal statements that are highly asymmetric in
their stress on the divinity of Christ — even to the point of suggesting that
same Monophysitism he so excoriated in Christendom in Dublin.
Did, then, Chesterton have a theology of the Atonement? Certainly, but for
much of the time it has to be assembled from allusions and asides. Its
character can already be discerned from Chesterton’s William Blake. Blake,
whose Christianity was jumbled up with Gnosticism, considered it a
mistake on the part of the Redeemer that he so weakly accepted death. If
Jesus attained in his growth to maturity the divine life, he should likewise
have attained immortal life, not surrendered life on the Cross. So thought
Blake, but not, however, Chesterton, who comments:

The spectacle of a God dying is much more grandiose than the

spectacle of a man living for ever. The former suggests that awful
changes have really entered the alchemy of the universe; the latter is
only vaguely reminiscent of hygienic octogenarians and Eno’s Fruit
Salts.377

“The spectacle of a God dying” is a striking phrase. How should we assess

it? It is, of course, true that for the emerging Christology of the great
Councils of the first seven centuries, the patristic era, “one of the Holy
Trinity was crucified for us.” That statement, originally devised in the hope
of capturing Monophysite sympathies, is no capitulation to those
sympathies. Rather, it captures the full implications for the death of Jesus of
the clarification issued by the Fifth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople II,
in 552, when it sought to tighten the formulation offered at its processor, the
Fourth Council, Chalcedon, in 451. The “person” in Christ is the uncreated
Word: this is he who died on the Cross.

Chalcedonianism accepts, nonetheless, that the Word existed in his two

natures, including full humanity, which licenses us in speaking also,
therefore, of the man who died — and indeed God could only die as man, in
his human embodiment.

The highly Alexandrian, or at any rate Byzantine, statement of the

Atonement Chesterton makes in William Blake needed to be complemented,
therefore, by an account which does fuller justice to the humanity of the one
who suffered.

This we can find in, for example, Four Faultless Felons, a novel from
Chesterton’s late period. In one episode, the son of an exploitative
industrialist takes on the role of a criminal, breaking into people’s houses or
putting his hand in their pockets, in order to leave jewels and money there
to compensate for his father’s reduction of others to poverty.

Don’t you understand [asks this character, Alan Nadoway], how

shallow all these moderns are, when they tell you there is no such
thing as Atonement or Expiation, when that is the one thing for which
the whole heart is sick before the sins of the world? The whole
universe was wrong, while the lie of my father flourished like the
green bay-tree. It was not respectability that could redeem it. It was
religion, expiation, sacrificial suffering. Somebody must be terribly
good, to balance what was so bad. Somebody must be needlessly good,
to weigh down the scales of that judgment.378

Here Nadoway stands in the shadow, not darkening but illuminating, of the
Man on the Cross. Chesterton is providing his own answer to St. Anselm’s
question, Cur Deus homo?: Why did God become man?

It was to expiate human evil by an act so utterly superfluous in the

unnecessarily superabundant character of its overfulfilment of the demands
of justice that the mercy it expressed redeemed the world, righted the
balance. So spendthrift was God in his investment in human nature.

A Christocentric Theology of History

Chesterton’s fullest response to the Anselmian query is furnished, however,

by the Christocentric theology of history he offers in The Everlasting Man.
Indeed, this theology of history can be called the principal locus for his
Christological contribution. We saw in the last chapter, on the image of God
in man, how strongly Chesterton insists on the revolutionary — rather than
merely evolutionary — character of the emergence of man from the animal
realm. Chesterton orients his succeeding story towards the Incarnation by
an unusual route: the significance, as he sees it, of the structure of the
family.

In the first place, the human family reinforces the sense of the difference
which separates man from other living creatures. As Chesterton puts it:
“Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from
ants and bees.”379 Throughout the history of human culture, so Chesterton
claims, the family retains its place and role. As he remarks elsewhere, in an
essay on “The Drift from Domesticity” included in The Thing:

The existing and general system of society, subject in our own age and
individual culture to very great 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 the 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.380

That “triangle,” as The Everlasting Man has it, is “repeated everywhere in

the pattern of the world.”381 And so we should not be surprised if the event
of the Incarnation, termed by Chesterton “the highest event in history, to
which all history looks forward and leads up,” turns out to be what he calls
“something that is at once the reversal and the renewal of that triangle.”382 A
new triangle — the Holy Family: child, mother, and father — so imposed
on the old triangle — father, mother, and child — as to intersect it. The
effect is at once preservation and inversion: “It is in no way altered except
in being entirely reversed; just as the world which was transformed was not
in the least different, except in being turned upside down.”383

In dealing with the passage of time between the moment of the emergence
of humankind and the moment of the Incarnation, Chesterton is chiefly
concerned to subvert the notion that this passage of time is principally a
passage from barbarism to civilization. That is partly because he found
some especially ancient civilizations especially impressive and so saw no
reason why civil elements could not have attached to earliest man. But
mainly it is because he seeks to eradicate the habit of mind for which “at
every stage” barbarism is something to which we “look back,” civilization
something to which we “look forward.”384 That version of historical
determinism would discourage us, even if it did not entirely disable us,
from considering certain episodes in the Roman Palestine of the first
decades of the Common Era to be the real climax of history. But, as we
know, they were.

The key to the Incarnation as the climax of history is, for Chesterton, the
realization that, in his words, “Man could do no more.”385 On Chesterton’s
interpretation of the movement of human history — in, not exclusively but
mainly, what was for him its central theatre, the Mediterranean basin — the
two chief impulses which lead human beings to conceive the overall
purpose of the world — the mythopoeic impulse which generates
mythology and the rational impulse which produces philosophy — had
exhausted their resources for doing just that in any fully coherent and
satisfying way. In this crucial test-case, human capacities had been shown
to have run up against their limit.

Chesterton’s argument is complex but cumulative. While recognising the

heterogeneity of religions, he treats the use of the mythopoeic mode as the
essence of paganism. “The power even in the myths of savages is like the
power in the metaphors of poets . . . it is an attempt to reach the divine
reality through the imagination alone.”386 In pagan culture (he means outside
the Abrahamic faiths) the religious imagination works both negatively and
positively.

Negatively, by various indicators — ranging from references to a high God

who has withdrawn to the vague etherialising of the divine represented by
the Chinese term “Heaven” — the religious imagination signals its sense of
the “presence of the absence of God.”387 This absence, whether in
polytheism or in agnosticism, was serious stuff.

[T]he world would have been lost if it had been unable to return to that
great original simplicity of a single authority in all things . . . that we
live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally
over all the peoples of the earth . . .388

It was, for Chesterton, the unique vocation of Israel — she who is by

definition outside the nations, the goyim — to keep that conviction alive, if
only, for the time being, on a “tribal” foundation.
Positively, however, through paganism in the mythopoeic mode there runs
the “love of locality and personality.” There was, feels Chesterton, “a truth
in it that could not be left out, though it were a lighter and less essential
truth.”389 “[H]e who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with
men.”390 Pagan religion in that mode satisfied the need for “the twin ideas of
festivity and formality.”391 By its sacrificial cultus it also partly satisfied the
human need to “surrender . . . something as the portion of the unknown
powers.”392 Most importantly, however, it expressed the “indestructible
instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely
wrong in localising his God.”393 But since the “laws and triumphs” of
imagination are not necessarily reality-related, the way of mythology could
only be

a search: it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a

recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking
for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all
the places found.394

The gods have a “great deal of nonsense about them”: often it is “good
nonsense,” though sometimes (Chesterton has especially the religions of
tropical America in mind, as well as ancient Carthage395) it may be
demonic.396

Chesterton draws a very sharp contrast between mythopoeic religion and

philosophical rationality: “It is vital to the view of all history that reason is
something separate from religion even in the most rational of these
civilisations.”397 Merely by an “afterthought” do a “few Neo-Platonists or a
few Brahmins” try to rationalise the gods — generally by allegorisation.398
“But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do
not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.”399Ambitiously, Chester-
ton runs through the philosophers of ancient Greece and what he terms the
“royal philosophers” — whether princes or the advisers to princes — of
China (Confucius), Egypt (the pharaoh Akhenaton), and India (Gautama,
the Buddha), as well as the “sages” of Persia (Manes, Zoroaster). His
criticism of them all is false simplification: “They all think that existence
can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing, and the rude
drawings of the childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited
protest against that view.”400 But in late antiquity, mythology, which, since it
was “never thought” could not be revived and thus sustained,401 became
increasingly trivial, while the philosophers, who had never succeeded in
generating consensus, tended to degenerate into “hired rhetoricians.”402

In this situation, when “Man could do no more,” the preaching of the gospel
was “as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference
of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they
had struck a rock.”403 In the cave of Bethlehem, it was a “hole in the rocks”
which “marked the position of one outcast and homeless . . . [T]he God who
had been only a circumference was seen as a centre, and a centre is
infinitely small.404 In the “riddle of Bethlehem,” “heaven was under the
earth.” It is easy to see where Chesterton is heading. The philosophical
affirmation of pure deity in its almighty relationship with everything that is
not divine is here combined with the mythopoeic celebration of a little
child: “The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been
wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity
need not disdain the limits of time and space.”405 Since that hour of Christ’s
birth, writes Chesterton, doubtless somewhat sweepingly, “no mythologies
have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.”406 What, then, of
philosophy? At the manger-cave its terms are changed, as the visit of the
Magi, the representatives of philosophical wisdom, should tell us.

Philosophy also, like mythology, had very much the air of a search. It
is the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and
mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is
broader than philosophy, and that this is the broadest of religions,
contained within this narrow space.407

Under the heading “the riddles of the Gospel,” Chesterton will go on to

evoke the enigmatic mode of teaching of the adult Jesus which

if anyone says it is what might be expected of a man walking about in

that place at that period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much
more like what might be the mysterious utterance of a being beyond
man, if he walked alive among men.408
He will also resume for us the “strangest story in the world”: “a romance of
the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice,” such that

from the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the
moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole
story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending
with an act beyond words.409

On Good Friday, all three of Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens were present and
where the “best things in the world” were “at their worst” we are shown
“the world at its worst.”410 But where men could do no more, God acted
supremely. At Easter, the disciples “in varying ways realised the new
wonder” — but “even they did not realise that the world had died in the
night.” What they were looking at was “the first day of a new creation.”411

Yet I do not think we find any more sublime, or for that matter
quintessentially Chestertonian, statement than his comment on the cave of
Bethlehem:

[I]t is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions
about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch
with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even
of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who
was a child.412

The closing words of that citation, let it be said, breathe the atmosphere of
Chesterton’s tender devotion to Mary the Mother of God, of which so many
of his poems — most notably those contained in The Queen of Seven
Swords — are filled.413

Conclusion

In The Everlasting Man Chesterton pursues the fundamental idea of a

Christological reconciliation of mythology and philosophy very consistently
to the end. I find it impossible not to insert a reference here to the
theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, in which the gap between
the mythopoeic and the philosophical is unbridgeable without the
Incarnation. Myth and philosophy are like

a bridge which is being thrown out from two piers on opposite shores
and which seems all the time to be approaching the point where both
constructions meet, yet always remains intrinsically incapable of being
completed.414

For Chesterton, the faith which sprang from the event of Jesus Christ is “the
reconciliation” — in Balthasar’s term, the “bridge”— precisely because it is
the “realization both of mythology and philosophy.”415

It is a story, and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true

story. It is a philosophy, and in that sense one of a hundred
philosophies; only it is like life. But above all it is a reconciliation that
can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative
instinct which produced all the fairy tales was neglected by all the
philosophies — except one. The Faith is the justification of that
popular instinct; the finding of the philosophy for it or the analysis of
the philosophy in it.416

And Chesterton looks back for a moment (this, at any rate, is my surmise)
to the world of Heretics which he had left behind, and that of Orthodoxy
which he still inhabited, when he concludes of non-Christian philosophies:

Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does

something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by
fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and the destiny that is the death of
adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of
drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into
atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral
consequences; or by a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests
monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical texts
insecure.417

In this human story that is also a divine story the mythological search for
romance and the philosophical search for truth were alike fulfilled, in a
figure who was both historical and ideal.

The more deeply we think of the matter, the more we shall conclude
that, if indeed there be a God, his creation could hardly have reached
any other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the
world.418

Otherwise, the human creature would have remained ineluctably

schizophrenic, one lobe of the brain “dreaming impossible dreams” and the
other “repeating invariable calculations.” It was “this abyss that nothing but
an incarnation could cover.”419 The “true story of the world” could be given
only by revelation from above, since a story is always told by one to
another, and who could this “one” be but God if the “other” were the world?
But once it was told, the story could restore the sanity of the world and offer
the soul salvation.
 Chapter 8

Chesterton as Theological Ethicist

In Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis John Coates singles out
with peculiar emphasis Chesterton’s identification of a “latent
irrationalism” among his contemporaries, owing to their lack of any
pondered theory of the good.420 Chesterton was well aware of the importance
of the cultural domain. He wrote in Fancies Versus Fads: “Man, as Aristotle
saw long ago, is an abnormal animal whose nature it is to be civilized.
Insofar as he ever becomes uncivilized he becomes unnatural, and even
artificial.”421 Chesterton realised, however, that culture cannot flourish
unless it is underpinned by the virtues. In their interrelated functioning, the
virtues are constitutive of the human good. Authentic culture has a moral
structure, the character of which can be thought through, in the first place,
by reference to human nature itself. The moral structure of culture, in other
words, is not without its own preconditions in ontology — in the discovery
of what reality, and notably our reality, is like. Orage, the editor of the
progressive Edwardian journal The New Age, appears to have been
converted from his Nietzschean view of man-in-constant-evolution-
towards-Superman by acceptance of Chesterton’s thesis that much of the
crisis of modernity stems from an unwillingness to recognise the
definiteness of the human species, and consequently the definiteness
likewise of our nature’s native good. As Orage put it, in words that might
have been written by Chesterton himself:

Starting from a false conception of the nature of man, the mind

continually sees everything in a false light. Its whole object is to
become something that it really is not, and can never be . . . with
human nature undefined, nothing else is definable.422

The criterion for determining what human dispositions really are moral
virtues, or habits vitally necessary to the flourishing of man in culture, is,
then, human nature. But that does not necessarily mean human nature
humanistically conceived.
 Ethics and the Supernatural

There are two reasons for adding that important qualification. In the first
place, our grasp of the first principles of reasoning about human nature, and
the virtues which belong to its perfection, may be, naturally speaking,
uncertain. We are living, after all, in a post-lapsarian age, after the Fall of
Adam. Our grasp on the relevant principles may need steadying, then,
supernaturally— that is, by divine revelation. In Orthodoxy Chesterton was
evidently aware of this problem: people can be really quite lunatic in their
attempts at rational judgment of the good for man. As he wrote:

The chief mark and element of insanity is reason used without root,
reason in the void. The man who begins to think without the proper
first principles goes mad, the man who begins to think at the wrong
end.423

So revelation may be needed in order to confirm which principles really are

the primary principles of reason in evaluating human nature and its moral
needs. Orthodoxy belongs, of course, to Chesterton’s Anglo-Catholic
period, but it would not be difficult to show that it reflects — no doubt
unwittingly — this insistence of the [Roman] Catholic magisterial tradition,
notably articulated at the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870. Strictly
speaking, so that council explained, human reason is able by its own natural
power and light to attain a true and certain knowledge of the natural law
written by the Creator in human hearts. But de facto the human mind is
hampered in the attaining of such truths, not least by the disorder in our
appetites which follows on Original Sin. In moral matters, people easily
persuade themselves that what it does not suit them to hold as true is
actually false or at best doubtful. So divine revelation has a key part to play
in facilitating humanity’s grasp of the natural moral order.424

The second reason for saying that the criterion of the moral good is human
nature but not human nature “humanistically conceived” turns on a very
different question, and that is the supernatural — the more-than-natural —
“finality” (goal, orientation, direction), which, according to Scripture, God
wills for our human nature in his plan to transfigure and consummate it in
his beloved Son. In the concrete divine economy of creation and salvation,
our human nature is ordered towards a superhuman goal. As Chesterton
wrote in The Thing:

For Catholics it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human

beings, without any exception whatever, are specially made, were
specially shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting
the mark of Beatitude . . .425

the super-fulfilment of which is sharing in the life of the divine Trinity by

seeing the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. That supernatural
finality does not mean, however, that human nature ceases to exist as a
natural reality when it enters the order of grace. It means, rather, that the
good of that nature can now be achieved only by way of the supernatural.
Some features of the good for man can, therefore, be identified — in
principle, not merely in practice — only by means of divine revelation, in a
superhuman, more-than-human, way. There are, accordingly, moral virtues
key to human flourishing in the context of grace that were unknown, or at
best barely surmised, outside the sphere of revelation — for instance,
charity, the virtue that bids us love our neighbour for God’s sake that he
may be in God: what Jesus himself called, in his Last Supper discourse, the
“new commandment.”

On both grounds — the practical difficulty of persuading people of the

basic truth of natural ethics without the supplementary confirmation of
revelation, and the theoretical impossibility, or near-impossibility, of
establishing the higher norms of supernatural ethics without the historic
revelation which comes to its climax in Jesus Christ — appeal to the Gospel
as a fount of doctrine on not only faith but also morals is required. And
therefore appeal to the Church is required, since the Church is responsible
for Gospel transmission. As Chesterton put it in The Thing (again):

[H]ere humanism cannot substitute for super-Humanism. The modern

world, with its modern movement, is living on 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 crystallised in Christendom.426
 The Pattern of the Virtues

Many twentieth-century Christian writers would no doubt have said the

same thing. What is distinctive about Chesterton is the emphasis he lays on
the holistic pattern of the virtues in their interrelations, the total picture
which they represent. There are not only particular virtues, natural or
supernatural, which we need. There is also an overall configuration of the
virtues which we need. En route to its beatitude our determinate human
nature cannot flourish without doing so in and through a definite
constellation of good dispositions. The virtues do not just sit next to each
other in a catalogue. They belong with each other in a pattern, an ordered
totality. They make up a significant form, and it is this form which
disintegrates outside of faith and which humanism, try as it will, is
powerless to re-integrate. It cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again.
Citing one last time from The Thing:

Humanism may try to pick up the pieces; but can it stick them
together? . . . 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 age
with its gigantic arches and carrying everywhere the high river of
baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.427

While something along those lines might have come from Chesterton’s pen
in the period opened by the writing of Orthodoxy, in fact The Thing dates
from 1929, when Chesterton has left Anglo-Catholicism behind and
discovered with Petrine communion the thought of St Thomas Aquinas. In
Thomas’s ethics the idea of the unity of the virtues plays an important part.
It is a notion which has made a remarkable comeback in some more recent,
latetwentieth-century, ethics, in a way which would have gladdened
Chesterton’s heart. In After Virtue, written in 1981, Alasdair Mac-Intyre had
repudiated the notion that, in his words, “there exists a cosmic order which
dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human
life,” such that moral truth consists in moral judgment conforming to this
scheme. But so varied and heterogeneous are human goods that “their
pursuit cannot be reconciled in any single moral order.” To attempt that is to
risk enfolding the human condition in a “totalitarian straitjacket.” That goes
for “heterogeneity of the virtues” as well as goods in general.428 Seven years
later, he changed his mind completely. 429 In a successor volume, Whose
Justice, Which Rationality?,hedeclared, “The unity of the virtues is
exhibited in what is required to perfect each of them.”430

It would not be misleading to say that throughout his life Chesterton was
seeking how best that mutual perfecting of the virtues could take place, and,
correspondingly, what was the best way to express the moral structure
needed for culture — though no doubt he would have spurned the word
“structure” as excessively geometric, not to say jejune. In Orthodoxy he
calls what I have termed a “structure” “an exact and perilous balance, like
that of a desperate romance.” In another formulation he speaks of it as no

mere victory of some one thing swallowing up everything else, love, or

pride or peace or adventure; [instead] it must be a definite picture
composed of those elements in their best proportion and relation.431

Perhaps the most striking statement of this Chestertonian project of pointing

up the human good as a structured whole comes in Chesterton’s discussion
of the mediaeval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. In his Chaucer: A Study
he takes up the idea of a harmonious equilibrium and works it into a more
mobile and flowing simile, the simile of the “dance” of the virtues. What
Chesterton adds here to his account in Orthodoxy is above all an explicitly
Christological dimension. The dance of the virtues has for its centre a
unique still point in the turning world, and this is the disclosure of the
ultimately Christological character of the human good, with Christ as the
true midpoint, then, of culture. To convey this vision Chesterton makes use
of the well-known English nursery rhyme, “Here We Go Round the
Mulberry Bush.” He writes:

Medieval morality was full of the idea that one thing must balance
another, that each stood on one side or the other of something that was
in the middle, and something remained in the middle.There might be
any amount of movement, but it was movement round this central
 thing; perpetually altering the attitudes, but preserving the balance.
The virtues were like children going round the Mulberry Bush, only
the Mulberry Bush was that Burning Bush which they made
symbolical of the Incarnation; that flamboyant bush in which the
Virgin and Child appear in the picture . . .

In mediaeval iconography the Burning Bush is normally an emblem of the

Incarnation, not a full pictorial representation, and so Chesterton signals to
us he has a definite painting in mind. It is in fact Nicolas Froment’s late-
fifteenth-century triptych The Burning Bush in the cathedral of Saint-
Sauveur at Aix-en-Provence. There indeed, to revert to the text of Chaucer:

the Virgin and Child appear in the picture, with René of Provence and
his beloved wife kneeling at their side. Now [Chesterton goes on]
since that break in history, whatever we call it or whatever we think of
it [the ending, he means, of the mediaeval world], the Dance has
turned into a Race. That is, the dancers lose their balance and only
recover it by running towards some object, or alleged object; not an
object within their circle or their possession, but an object which they
do not yet possess. It is a flying object, a disappearing object.

Chesterton insists he is not at the moment concerned with “condemning or

commending the religion of the Race or the religion of the Dance.” He
insists:

I am only pointing out that this is the fundamental difference between

them. One is rhythmic and recurrent movement, because there is a
known centre; while the other is precipitate or progressive movement,
because there is an unknown goal . . .

In contrast with the accelerated pace of modern life, “Canterbury pilgrims

do not seem to be in a very great hurry to get to Canterbury.”432 The
“religion of the Race” is, of course, the ideology of progress, which
Chesterton, whatever his self-restraint in this passage, thought to be absurd
because of its lack of either clear goal or fixed standard of value.

Among twentieth-century critics of liberal secularism and its effects in

culture, then, Chesterton is distinctive in the emphasis he lays on the
holistic pattern of the virtues necessary for human flourishing or human
perfection. But where he seems to be more than merely distinctive — to be
in fact unique — is in his account of the argument that when the pattern
disintegrates, the individual virtues may do as much damage as the vices.
He writes in Orthodoxy:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far
too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious
scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered by the Reformation),
it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let
loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose
also; and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is
full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad
because they have been isolated from one another and are wandering
alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless.
Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry
to say) is often untruthful.433

A Pseudo-virtue: Innovativeness

But it is time to look at what the particular virtues are that Chesterton
assembles in the ring o’roses around the Supreme Good in his own
incarnate form. We can notice by way of preamble how briskly Chesterton
disposes of what may be the most praised virtue in our own culture, namely,
innovativeness, especially of a technical or economic kind. Chesterton did
not believe that the imperative, Be technically or economically innovative,
of itself specified a range of actions belonging to a virtue. For such
innovations must always be judged in terms of their congruence with
human nature, with the human good. Thus, in The Victorian Age in
Literature he observes that innovations in transport and communications are
of secondary significance compared with the question, Is what is being
transported or communicated worthwhile?

The Victorians . . . could not or would not see that humanity repels or
welcomes the railway train, simply according to what people come by
 it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the telephone,
according to what words one hears in it.434

The innovativeness admired by an entrepreneurial culture of an advanced

technological kind can only be regarded as a pre-moral trait until we know
what good, if any, it serves in the human scheme as a whole. The
unwillingness to raise such fundamental questions stemmed for Chesterton
from the exaggerated empiricism of an intellectual culture that had
narrowed its own base without warrant. In the course of the nineteenth
century

[t]he duty of dragging out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner
one can possibly get hold of [i.e., empirical enquiry], a perfectly sound
duty in itself, had somehow come into collision with the older and
larger duty of knowing something about the organism and ends of a
creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of
it.435

There can be no wisdom without the willingness to put the “why” question,
to seek to know the causes of things — both in terms of final causality, by
understanding the purpose of human living, and in terms of formal
causality, by understanding the kind of things human beings are.

Archaiophilia

If we now leave a pseudo-virtue for the real thing, we find Chesterton

commending a wonderful range of virtues in the course of his work. I begin
with one of the more controversial of his circle of virtues, not because it is
in any way pre-eminent there, but simply on the grounds that he considered
its practice a necessary condition for gaining the large view of the human
creature without which all informational knowledge will fail to add up to
wisdom. I call this first virtue (which has no ancient or mediaeval name, a
fact that rather underlines the peculiar juncture humanity reached in the
modern era) “archaiophilia” — literally “love of the past.” By archaiophilia
we love the past not because it is past— that would be mere historical
nostalgia — but because it furnishes contemporary culture (this anyway
was Chesterton’s conviction) with myriad illuminating exemplars of the
human good. The word archaios means in Greek not only that which is
ancient but also that which is connected with abiding principles. In What’s
Wrong with the World Chesterton opined:

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name
as large as he likes; the past [he added ironically] I find already
covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare,
Michelangelo, Napoleon.436

Nor is this a question simply of learning from outstanding individuals.

Where modern education eliminates historical retrospection as a guide to
life, it cuts off from our gaze the equally instructive life-ways of the silent
masses of mankind who lived before us. In Orthodoxy Chesterton defined
tradition as “democracy extended through time.”

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our
ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit
to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be
walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the
accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the
accident of death.437

Fraternity (and Justice)

Archaiophilia readily introduces us, then, to the practice of another virtue,

fraternity. An excessive sensitivity to human difference — to the differences
between individuals and groups — is endemic in our contemporary cultural
radicalism. Chesterton discussed the same phenomenon in the context of the
psychological novel and the class distinctions in the capitalist society of his
day. Overemphasis on difference, he thought, militates against the human
essence and undermines fraternity, the bonds which we should create or
sustain because we belong with each other in the same species. Too much
celebration of diversity works against the unity of the human race, which,
seen theologically, is not only a truth found in revelation, from Genesis
onward, but also a presupposition of the universal mission of the Church. In
The Victorian Age in Literature Chesterton reminds his readers of the gamut
of Chaucerian characters that made their way to the shrine of the “holy
blissful martyr,” Thomas à Becket, and he enquires whether a similar
selection of modern figures from the nineteenth-century novel could even
be imagined on some similar common journey. Having assembled a
collection of characters from Thackeray, strongly contrasting in their social
categories and individual temperaments, Chesterton asks rhetorically, “To
what sort of distant saint would [this collection] travel, laughing and telling
tales together?”

The answer, of course, is that there is none, and he draws the conclusion,
“We have gained in sympathy, but we have lost in brotherhood.”438 As the
invocation of Becket’s shrine may suggest, Chesterton thought the virtue of
fraternity could only fully be exercised in the context of what he called
“positive religion.”

Man is merely man only when he is seen against the sky. If he is seen
against any landscape, he is only a man of that land. If he is seen
against any house, he is only a householder. Only where death and
eternity are intensely present can human beings feel their fellowship.439

It was because the working classes, rural and urban, had retained certain
features of that fundamental fellowship — Chesterton singled out their
charity to neighbours, their humour, and their reverence for the dead — that
he made what we can call, in the language of liberation theology, his
“option for the poor.” This was an option for the recovery of qualities
belonging to the human patrimony as such, qualities identified by
observation of the characteristic virtues of the poor — though he was not so
starry-eyed as to think that all the poor exhibit these virtues at all times.
From his earliest Socialist phase Chesterton had never ceased to be
preoccupied by the wider condition of society, what his early Victorian
predecessors would have called the “condition of England question.” He
considered that what he termed “oppression by oblivion” was a typical
feature of English capitalism. The worker, in his combination of economic
dependence and, after the third of the Parliamentary Reform acts, political
independence, was easily forgotten because, unlike a slave, he was not
under the eye of a master, but hired and sacked according to need. The
larger part of a nation could thus be neglected through absence of mind.
This was an assault on a third virtue closely connected to the virtue of
fraternity, and that is the virtue of justice, by which we tend to give every
man his due. As Chesterton put it in his study of William Cobbett:

[T]his negative and indirect injustice was native both to what is good
and what is bad in the English temper. It is the paradox of the English
that they are always being cruel through an aversion to cruelty. They
dislike quite sincerely the sight of pain, and therefore shut their eyes to
it; and it was not unnatural that they should prefer a system in which
men were starved in slums but not scourged in slavecompounds.440

Domesticity

From humanity itself, Chesterton turns his attention to the smallest of

human units — the family — when proposing a fourth key virtue, the virtue
of domesticity. This is a virtue which is requisite for the smallest possible
polity, the home. In The Superstition of Divorce Chesterton called the
family “the small state founded on the sexes [which] is at once the most
voluntary and the most natural of all self-governing states.”

Chesterton then draws on W. S. Gilbert’s comic song from the Savoy opera
H.M.S. Pinafore where the chorus reflect that the Captain of the Pinafore
who “himself has said it/ And it’s greatly to his credit,/ That he is an
Englishman”: might in other circumstances “have been a Roosian,/ A
French, or Turk, or Proosian”: “It is not true of Mr Brown that he might
have been a Russian, but it may be true of Mrs Brown that she might have
been a Robinson.”441 The vow that is, then, perfectly freely made in order to
establish this polity — the marriage vow — must be equally firmly kept for
the reason that uniquely weighty consequences are attached to it in the form
of children. Owing to its link with procreation, the marriage covenant that
brings into existence this miniature yet irreplaceable polis is unlike any
mere contract. “There is no contract that can bring cherubs (or goblins) to
inhabit a small modern villa.”442 In his essay on marriage in Come to Think
of It Chesterton observed that the same arguments as those used in favour of
divorce could also be invoked in favour of murder.

If it is true that we may sometimes solve a social problem by breaking

a vow, it is equally true that we might often solve it by cutting a throat.
 If the immediate relaxation of an individual strain justifies everything,
then Aunt Susan is indeed in danger, and the life of Cousin James
trembles in the balance.443

Idiaphilia

So as to create the optimal conditions for the exercise of the virtue of

domesticity, Chesterton believed another virtue had to be engaged. Like
archaiophilia, already discussed, it has no name. So once again I shall
invent one on Chesterton’s behalf, and call it “idiaphilia,” the appropriate
love for personal property, from the Greek ta idia meaning “one’s own
things.” (Chesterton would probably have harrumphed, and declared this
virtue to be, quite simply, the virtue of justice. But he saw justice in a very
distinctive way.)

Idiaphilia was key to the programme of the Distributist League, originally

entitled as it was “The League for the Preservation of Liberty by the
Restoration of Property.” The primary objects of the League, whose
chairman Chesterton became, were: first, the preservation of property, so as
to safeguard the liberty of the individual and family, and secondly, as a way
to preserve property, the better distribution of capital through wide personal
ownership of the means of production.444

The League supported, to cite its own propaganda:

Small Shops and Shopkeepers against multiple shops and trusts.

Individual Craftsmanship and Cooperation in industrial enterprise.
(Every worker should own a share in the Assets and Control of the
business in which he works.) The Small Holder and Yeoman Farmer
against monopolists of large inadequately farmed estates.445

Such a programme was essentially intended to support the exercise of

domesticity. In Chesterton’s words in The Superstition of Divorce: “Too
much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,
and so aristocracy sins, not in planting a family tree but in not planting a
family forest.”446 Historically, there have been many intermediate groups
between the individual and the State but, writes Chesterton, “there is only
one type among them which all human beings have a spontaneous and
omnipresent inspiration to build for themselves; and this type is the
family.”447 The family is the “only check” on the State that is “bound to
renew itself as eternally as the State, and more naturally than the State.”448

If we ask how can this be called an aspect of theological ethics,

Chesterton’s address to the first meeting of the League throws light. In G.
K.’s Weekly, the League’s journalistic mouthpiece, he and his colleagues, so
he told a political meeting:

believed in the very simple social idea that a man felt happier, more
dignified, and more like the image of God, when the hat he is wearing
is his own hat, and not only his hat, but his house, the ground he trod
on, and various other things. There might be people who preferred to
have their hats leased out to them every other week, or wear their
neighbours’ hats in rotation to express the idea of comradeship, or
possibly to crowd under one very large hat to represent an even larger
cosmic conception; but most of them felt that something was added to
the dignity of men when they put on their own hats.449

Other Virtues That Circle Love

Other virtues which loom large in Chesterton’s writing are magnanimity,

chivalry, and courage, and the more especially evangelical trio of simplicity,
innocence, and humility.450 Chesterton had an extraordinary vivid sense of
such virtues. As he put it in Tremendous Trifles:

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers;

virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or
punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one
has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from
sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word,
God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had
almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.451
Certainly white is the liturgical colour for virgins. But Chester-ton never
painted so gorgeously, I think, as when he did so in scarlet.

In his study of Chaucer he ends by lauding the virtue of charity as what

gives form to all the assembled virtues. Charity provides the mould which
gives them, whether they be natural or supernatural, their true vindication
and proper role. In an extraordinary visionary passage of the book
Chesterton sees Chaucer, standing between the two other principal English
mediaeval poets, and apparelled in this way in Jesus Christ.

Between the black robes of Gower and the grey gown of Langland he
stands clothed in scarlet like all the household of love; and emblazoned
with the Sacred Heart.452

The all-embracing, form-giving virtue of charity, so Chesterton held,

saturated the sensibility of Chaucer. Were we to ask Chester-ton what is the
evidence for that, he would reply, I think, in terms he used elsewhere when
he wrote of the early-nineteenth-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac:

The morality of a great writer is not the morality he teaches but the
morality he takes for granted. The Catholic type of Christian ethics
runs through Balzac’s books, exactly as the Puritan type of ethics runs
through Bunyan’s books. What his professed opinions were I do not
know, any more than I know Shakespeare’s; but I know that both those
great creators of a multitudinous world [Balzac’s great series of novels
had the general title La Comédie humaine] made it, as compared with
other and later writers, on the same fundamental moral plan as the
universe of Dante.453

Chaucer, Chesterton explained:

had the one thing needful; he had the frame of mind that is the ultimate
result of right reason and a universal philosophy; the temper that is the
flower and fruit of all the tillage and the toil of moralists and
theologians. He had Charity; that is the heart and not merely the mind
of our ancient Christendom.454

In this all the virtues come together, not least the natural ones, for this was:
 the shout that showed that normality had been found. For a great voice
was given by God, and a great volume of singing, not to his saints who
deserved it much better . . . but only suddenly, and for a season, to the
most human of human beings.455

Conclusion

In Heretics Chesterton had complained that the contemporary intelligentsia

lacked the positive concept of perfection. Neither designating saints nor
determining who was the “most human of human beings” (Geoffrey
Chaucer can hardly be the only candidate) figured in their ethical scheme. A
conversation between Father Brown and an academic who professes the
Human Sciences points up the contrast. In “The Man with Two Beards,”
Professor Crake asks Brown, “Don’t you believe that criminology is a
science?” “I’m not sure,” replied Father Brown. “Do you believe that
hagiology is a science? . . .” And he adds: “You see, the Dark Ages tried to
make a science about good people. But our own humane and enlightened
age is only interested in a science about bad ones.”456 For Chesterton, as for
many people from Voltaire onward, the contrast between the Dark Ages —
an ironic reference to the medieval period — and the modern
Enlightenment has to do with the hegemony or the marginalisation,
respectively, of the Catholic Church, though Chesterton’s evaluation of that
contrast was rather different from Voltaire’s. How Chesterton saw the
Church, first as an Anglo-Catholic, then as [Roman] Catholic, must be our
next topic.
 Chapter 9

Chesterton and the Church

Chesterton was, of course, concerned with the Church long before he
entered peace and communion with the See of Rome. In his Anglo-Catholic
period his Churchmanship was, however, not terribly engaged, except in
controversy. Surprisingly, he seems to have participated very little in the
rich liturgical life of the Anglo-Catholic parishes to which his wife’s
faithfulness of practice and his own reputation as an Anglo-Catholic Sir
Galahad would surely have given him ready access. This should not prevent
us from taking seriously the ecclesiological elements in his earlier works,
and above all in Orthodoxy’s sixth chapter, “The Paradoxes of Christianity,”
which, while it hardly touches on the structure of the Church — as organic
community, hierarchical society, or whatever — has plenty to say about the
Church’s moral, ascetical, devotional, and credal life.

Ecclesial Paradox in Orthodoxy

In Orthodoxy Chesterton recounts how struck he was by the contrariety of

the objections brought against the Church for being both deplorably X and
lamentably non-X at one and the same time. This is where the application of
paradox to ecclesiology, flagged by Denis, comes into its own. If, pondered
Chesterton, re-creating the mindset of his still uncommitted days:

this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and blood-

thirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering
preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their
foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil
existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and
unique . . . Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the
Supernatural . . . An historic institution, which never went right, is
really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go
wrong.457
Chesterton’s first reaction was: Perhaps Christ — and therefore the Church
of Christ — is the Antichrist. His second reaction was, if a man is criticised
for being the wrong shape by critics who flatly contradict each other in their
attempts to say just what is wrong about him, quite possibly he is quite the
right shape after all. In Chesterton’s example:

[I]t was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at
once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also
odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily
luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man
thought Becket’s robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the
modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate
such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes.458

Thinking constructively on the point, Chesterton divined that the Church

had maintained the Aristotelean insight that virtue lies in a mean, a middle
way, in Greek meson. But she had understood this in an altogether
distinctive fashion. She had understood it to mean a “moderation made
from the still crash of two impetuous emotions.”459 The key lies, he thought,
in the overall gospel message about Creation, Fall, and Redemption, which
furnishes us with two contrasting, yet not for that reason mutually
exclusive, truths. Chesterton writes:

In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in
another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before.
Insofar as I am Man, I am the chief of creatures. Insofar as I am a man,
I am the chief of sinners . . . Christianity thus held a thought of the
dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the
sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a
thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed
in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St Dominic
and the white snows of St Bernard.460

Francis of Assisi in his praise of good could be a more blatant optimist than
Whitman; Jerome of Bethlehem, in his denunciation of evil, could be a
blacker pessimist than Schopenhauer. And the explanation is that “both
passions were free because both were kept in their place.”461
The “historic church” has emphasised both celibacy and the family. It has
told some men to fight and others not to fight. It has sanctioned both
asceticism and celebration — and each in relation to the other.

Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers

could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because
fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider
in the orchards of England.462

Care in the Formulation of Doctrine

“Mental and emotional liberty,” observed Chesterton, “are not so simple as

they look.”463 The Church “had to be careful,” not least so that the “world
might be careless.”464 Hence the great care that had to be invested in the
formulation of doctrine. The Church “went in specifically for dangerous
ideas; she was a lion-tamer.”465

The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being,
of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas
which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something
blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the
artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism
burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the North.466

The Church taught Chesterton that the “thrilling romance of Orthodoxy” is

also a remarkable sanity. But as he adds, “to be sane is more dramatic than
to be mad”: it is the “equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses.”467
And it was in that spirit that he “accepted Christendom” as his “mother.”468
A “living teacher,” it (or she) “not only certainly taught me yesterday, but
will almost certainly teach me tomorrow.”469 Evidently, he expected further
truths from the treasury of the deposit of faith to strike home before he died.

The Atmosphere of a Fresh Conversion

What Chesterton did not know in 1908, though the play he makes between
the words “romance” and “Rome” perhaps indicates some surmise, was that
Christendom would teach him the wider circle of truths into which he
entered in 1922 with his move from the Church of England to the Catholic
Church. One cannot imagine Chesterton at any time of his life glued to
church newspapers or perusing pastoral letters. Like Evelyn Waugh, he
probably regarded a detailed interest in ecclesiastical affairs on the part of
laymen as a telltale sign of incipient lunacy. As he put it, more gently, in
The Catholic Church and Conversion: “[I]n most communions the
ecclesiastical layman is more ecclesiastical than is good for his health, and
certainly much more ecclesiastical than the ecclesiastics.”470 Even so, it is
not surprising that his conversion to Catholicism triggered a new phase of
writing of a more focussed ecclesiological kind. This was a momentous
shift of allegiance to a form of Christianity which, in England, had been,
ever since the seventeenth century, deeply unpopular or, at any rate, suspect.
After the failure of the second Jacobite uprising in 1745, the spread of
Enlightenment tolerance combined with the discretion of the recusant
minority to improve matters. But the situation was soon re-inflamed with
the nineteenth-century mass immigration of Irish paupers and the fears of
crypto-Romanism in the Church of England that the Tractarian and Ritualist
movements enkindled. Dislike of Catholicism has been called, no doubt too
cynically, the default religion of the English. Its last dramatic public
manifestation (so far) was in the year when Chesterton published
Orthodoxy, 1908. An international Eucharistic Congress was held in
London. The Metropolitan Police announced they would be unable to
guarantee public order if the monstrance containing the eucharistic host
were carried through the streets of the capital.

Would such ill will have worried Chesterton? Did it worry him? Did he, as
some think, fear a diminution of Englishness? Well, the problem was
scarcely confined to England. He noted later “the sincere and savage hatred
felt by many Europeans for the religion of their own European past.”471 And
in any case, like John Henry Newman when writing the Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine, he was inclined to think that the
penchant of the Catholic Church for attracting hostility was a sign of its
identity with the Church of early Christian times. The story of the Church
is, he thought:

the story of . . . something which is always coming out of the

Catacombs and going back again, something that is never entirely
 acceptable when it appears, and never entirely forgotten when it
disappears.472

His Apologia

Chesterton’s principal apologia was, as its title suggests, his 1926 The
Catholic Church and Conversion.473 Among other things, The Catholic
Church and Conversion sought to deconstruct the English, British, or
Anglo-Saxon tradition of popular anti-Catholicism: a necessary step if
Chesterton were to capture the good will of his readership.474 That tradition
had certain recurrent features, from the lasciviousness of nuns to the
shiftiness of Jesuits. Newman, who had much the same aims as Chesterton
in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, parodies
anti-Catholicism with almost Dickensian grotesquerie,475 whereas
Chesterton shows a lighter touch. For example, on the topic of Jesuit
equivocation, Chesterton considers it absurd to

pillory half a dozen Popish priests for a crime committed daily by half
a million Protestant laymen . . . Every gentleman was expected to say
he would be delighted to dine with a bore; every lady said that
somebody else’s baby was beautiful if she thought it as ugly as sin . .
.476

If Chesterton’s apologia seems at times a little half-hearted, that may be

because, as he admits, he personally had never felt the force of the anti-
Catholic tradition, owing to the liberal atmosphere created by his parents.
While showing no sympathy with Catholics, they wanted nevertheless to be
just to them. “I was always sufficiently enlightened to be out of the reach of
Maria Monk,”477 a reference to the Victorian penny dreadful which summed
up the popular “black legend.”

The only aspect of anti-Popery he really bothers to take seriously is the

claim that a Catholic cannot be a patriot. For Catholicism, he argues,
patriotism is simply one aspect of being human: “we must love all men; but
what do all men love? They love their lands, their lawful boundaries, the
memories of their fathers.”478 Patriotism is not a superordinate consideration
that trumps all others, whereas when the Englishman beats the Protestant
drum, it often seems to be just that. The trouble is that “the normal British
subject begins by being so very British.”479 The Catholic Church, on the
other hand, began in “a vast cosmopolitan cosmos that had never heard the
name of England,” namely, the Roman empire.480 So that Church can only
“love nations as she loves men; because they are her children.”481

There are also arguments, as distinct from prejudices, which inhibit access
to Catholicism. In many cases, these arguments by their diametrical
opposition to each other tend to cancel each other out, since, for example,
the universalist curses Rome for “having too much predestination,” the
Calvinist curses her for “having too little”; one “No Popery man” finds her
doctrine of Purgatory “too tender-hearted,” another finds her doctrine of
Hell “too harsh.”482 This state of affairs is exactly analogous to the situation
Chesterton found to be the case with objections to “Christendom” in
Orthodoxy, where he concluded that someone found so inconsistently to be
always wrong might actually be right.

What holds more people back is, he thinks, the sense of moral demand
found in a Church that uses auricular confession in its administration of
Penance, and, more widely, wields pastoral authority in the service of a
clear moral code. The expectation of realistic sincerity in the confessional
frightens people. And the reason is that “most modern realists only like
[realism] because they are careful to be realistic about other people.”483 And
more widely the convert will have to be more responsible:

He will have somebody to be responsible to and he will know what he

is responsible for; two uncomfortable conditions which his more
fortunate fellow creatures have nowadays entirely escaped.484

Once these obstacles are overcome — if they are overcome — the person is
free to discover the Church, a process Chesterton describes as easier than
joining it and much easier than trying to live its life. He compares the
discovery to finding “a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic
animals, which is at once wild and hospitable.”485
There now intervenes, so Chesterton claims in what we can call his
phenomenology of the conversion process, an “interval of intense
nervousness” before someone takes the plunge, rather as with the shaky
bridegroom at the wedding or the army recruit who takes the king’s shilling
and gets drunk partly to celebrate but partly to forget. Its content is anxiety
that what previously seemed so bad as to be intolerable now seems too good
to be true. But if nonetheless someone actually joins the Catholic Church,
Chesterton predicts the chief effect will be one of stepping into a larger
room.

At the last moment of all, the convert often feels as if he were looking
through a leper’s window. He is looking through a little crack or
crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an
opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the
Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is
outside. He has left behind him the lop-sidedness of lepers’ windows
and even in a sense the narrowness of Gothic doors; and he is under
vast domes as open as the Renaissance and as universal as the
Republic of the world.486

Entering a Wider Realm

The experience of entering this wider space is discussed by Chesterton

under the heading “The world inside out.” The basic idea here is that
revelation as transmitted in the Catholic Church is the greatest possible
truth that can be conceived. All other truths, whatever their provenance, can
fit into this truth but it cannot fit into them. In The Thing, Chesterton
applies this to Calvinists who “took the Catholic idea of the absolute
knowledge and power of God,” and to Evangelicals who “seized on the
very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin,”487 but also to those
outside Christianity in any form, such as the atheistic poets Shelley and
Whitman and the “revolutionary optimists” (presumably, from the Great
Revolution of the West, 1789-1815) who had “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.”488 That
was the nugget of gold which Chesterton, following Belloc’s example, took
from the French revolutionaries’ “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen.” Many elements of Catholic truth, then, are found outside
Catholicism altogether. As Chesterton puts it in The Catholic Church and
Conversion:

[The convert] is not worried by being told that there is something in

Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is
something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact
that he finds everything in something.489

If that is somewhat oracular, Chesterton spells it out when he writes:

The outsiders stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering
with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is
fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they
really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not
know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the
broad daylight. It is he who is, in the broad and beautiful sense of the
word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because
he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large
number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labelled as being
very large; but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of
them.Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos or scheme of all
things . . . Each of them is supposed to be domed with the sky or
painted inside with all the stars. But each of these cosmic systems or
machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than the
broad and balanced universe in which he lives.490

That is, clearly, the Chesterton of Orthodoxy speaking and it justifies, up to

a point, the claim of the Canadian Chesterton scholar Ian Boyd that
Chesterton’s conversion “was the result of a personal decision that had
more to do with a question of fact than a change in his religious
convictions.”491

But what fact? Chesterton tells us himself in The Catholic Church and
Conversion when he writes:

There are High Churchmen as much as Low Churchmen who are

concerned first and last to save the Church of England. Some of them
 think it can be saved by calling it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or
believing that it is Catholic; but that is what they want to save. But I
did not start out with the idea of saving the English Church, but of
finding the Catholic Church. If the two were one, so much the better;
but I had never conceived of Catholicism as a sort of showy attribute
or attraction to be tacked on to my own national body, but as the
inmost soul of the true body, wherever it might be. It might be said
[concluded Chester-ton] that Anglo-Catholicism was simply my own
uncompleted conversion to Catholicism.492

A Last Look Back

That was in 1926, though. How did things look ten years later at the end of
his life? The best guide is The Well and the Shallows published the year
before he died. Chesterton looks back on the intervening decade to discuss
what he calls his “post-conversion conversion,” by which he means, as he
explains, things that have happened since his reception into the Church of
Rome, things which “would in any case have rendered impossible any
intellectual position outside the Church, and especially the position in
which I originally found myself.”493 The six trends or episodes he names
under this rubric are very various. But at least they show what Chesterton
considered momentous, what was preoccupying him most, in the last years
of his life.

The first is the fossilisation of Protestantism as evidenced by the growth of

Anglican Modernism on the one hand and, across the North Sea, the
emergence of the Nazi-sponsored so-called “German Christianity” on the
other. “Fossilisation” seems an odd term for vigorous if misguided religious
movements, but Chester-ton explains its use here well enough when he
writes:

A fossil is not a dead animal, or a decayed organism, or in essence

even an antiquated object. The whole point of a fossil is that it is the
form of an animal or organism, from which all its own animal or
organic substance has entirely disappeared; but which has kept its
shape, because it has been filled up by some totally different substance
by some process of distillation or secretion, so that we might almost
 say, as in the mediaeval metaphysics, that its substance has vanished
and only its accidents remain.494

The substance of Christianity is evaporating, Chesterton was claiming, from

the historic churches of the Reformation.

His second reflection on “post-conversion conversion” concerned the rise of

the Fascist dictators, a political seismic shift which reversed the Victorian
consensus about the “way the world was going” — towards, that is, greater
freedom and fraternity in a context of representative democracy. The lesson
of the “age of the dictators” for Chesterton was:

put not your trust in manhood suffrage or in any child of man. There is
one little defect about Man, the image of God, the wonder of the world
and the paragon of animals; that he is not to be trusted. If you identify
him with some ideal, which you choose to think is his inmost nature or
his only goal, the day will come when he will suddenly seem to you a
traitor.495

That might not seem to have any particular relevance to Catholicism as

such, but the moral Chesterton draws from it is in keeping with his earlier
claims that humanism may be the pool, but Christendom is the fountain —
namely, modernity is exhausting Catholic capital. He writes, and it is no
more than a free assertion which may therefore be as freely denied:

[I]n the centre of the civilisation called Catholic, there and in no

movement and in no future, is found that crystallisation of
commonsense and true traditions and rational reforms, for which the
modern man mistakenly looked to the trend of the modern age.496

Chesterton’s third crisis concerns what he calls “the surrender upon sex,”
his name for two worrying developments: the decision of the 1930 Lambeth
Conference to accept the use of artificial birth control within marriage, and
a series of indications that Anglicans were preparing to accept likewise the
Church remarriage of the divorced. “Modern Churchmen” argued for this
departure from traditional Christian sexual discipline as progressive. This
was not a way to Chesterton’s heart. Continuous change, he conceded,
could be called progress, just as “a snow-man, slowly turning into a puddle”
could be said to be “purifying itself of its accretions.”497 In sexual matters,
whether in external codes or in “deeper matters,” the “modern will,” he
thought, has been amazingly “weak and wavering.”498 It was proposed to
allow birth-prevention or divorce in special circumstances. Chesterton
countered: “The Catholic Church, standing almost alone, declared that [this]
would in fact lead to an anarchical position; and the Catholic Church was
right.”499

Chesterton’s fourth converting issue was the controversy in the Church of

England over the 1928 revision of the Prayer Book, which Parliament
notoriously rejected against the wishes of the Church Assembly and the
Anglican bishops of the day. The members of the House of Commons,
wrote Chesterton:

whether they claimed to be Protestants or clamorously bragged of

being atheists . . . all seemed to have this fixed idea; that they owned
the Church of England; and could turn it into a Mormon temple if they
liked.500

And he adds, “I could not, in any case, have gone on being owned in that
way.”501

The fifth issue in his catalogue was very different, and hardly seems to have
much in the way of obvious implications for the Anglican/Catholic
distinction. Chesterton entitled it “collapse of materialism.” In his
interpretation of the theoretical physics of the 1920s and ’30s, such figures
as, in Germany, Albert Einstein or, in Britain, Sir Arthur Eddington, were
saying that science no longer had any conclusive answers to the question
“What ultimately is real?” The only specifically Catholic “take” Chesterton
can offer on this is that the Church “throws down the unanswered challenge
of Lourdes,”502 a reference to the investigations of inexplicable cures by the
Medical Bureau at that town of the 1858 Marian apparitions, though he also
mentions that the “youngest school of Catholic apologists,” with figures
like Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, and Christopher Hollis, were, in his
opinion, bringing a new rigour to bear on their arguments about such
Gospel miracles as the Resurrection of Christ.503
Chesterton’s last “post-conversion conversion” moment he calls “the case
of Spain.” The Spanish Civil War broke out just as Chesterton died, but the
conflagration was, of course, already brewing. After his death, the
Distributists — and indeed other Chestertonians — disagreed violently over
what might have been his reaction to the War had he lived. Chesterton had
no quarrel with the declaration of a Republic in Spain, but he most
definitely quarrelled with the support English Liberals gave to Spanish
Socialists who in his view threatened the forcible disruption of civil
government unless the Cortes accepted a radical anti-clericalism which had
failed to triumph in the popular vote. The rallying of English Liberalism to
Socialist anti-clericalism in Spain completed the political disillusion begun
by his observation of financial corruption in the Liberal government before
the First World War. And his conclusion, which we might think somewhat
premature, was:

[T]here are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals;

there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and
irritating institution in the world; and there are its enemies.504

These six affairs or tendencies aside, we could sum up the temper of

Chesterton’s Catholicism in his last year with the words that allude to the
title of the book from which these extracts are taken: “We have come out of
the shallows and the dry places to the one deep well; and the Truth is at the
bottom of it.”505 Looking back, doubtless on his own career as well as that of
others, Chesterton noted:

We have done far less than we should have done, to explain all that
balance of subtlety and sanity which is meant by a Christian
civilisation . . . We did not ourselves think that the mere denial of our
dogmas could end in such dehumanised and demented anarchy . . . We
did not believe that rationalists were so utterly mad until they made it
quite clear to us . . . We have done very little against them; non nobis,
Domine; the glory of their final overthrow is all their own.506

In the struggle against what he called the “recent riot and vulgarity of the
merely ‘modern’ world,”507 Chesterton would have liked to say that his
mature adulthood had witnessed a “popular revolt” of “ordinary, old-
fashioned, obstinate people” against the “perversions and pedantries of
vice.”508 In this wish, we can see how his populism endured to the end. But
he had been, he had to confess, not only disappointed but surprised. There
was a revolt, but it was led by T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley.

God moves in a mysterious way [concluded Chesterton] and does not

disdain the strangest or the humblest instruments; and we must not be
ashamed of finding ourselves, if necessary, on the side of the cultivated
and the clever.509
 Conclusion
It seems an appropriately Chestertonian pun that an inventory of his
theological contribution should end with eschatology, thus concluding with
the Conclusion of the world. The ending of his study of Dickens provides us
with an entrée. Chesterton is asking after the ultimate direction toward
which Dickens’s characteristically English achievement points. What the
dickens did Dickens mean? Chesterton’s answer introduces the topic of the
character of eternity, understood as the life of man in God. He responds:

[T]his at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious

joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are
interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for
ever. The inn [the reference must be to The Pickwick Papers] does not
point to the road; the road points to the inn.510

And Chesterton draws a wider conclusion which forms his own version of
the classical eschatological themes of the Communion of Saints and the
messianic banquet: “And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we
shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall
be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.”511 This is a
passage which some have flagged as an example of Chesterton’s hearty,
Merrie-England-ish, pseudo-mediaeval jollity, though as a matter of fact it
raises a question not much addressed, so far as I am aware, by theologians:
namely, what is the status of characters from fiction — sub-created literary
beings — in the divine mind?

In the context of Chesterton’s work, these citations from Charles Dickens

suggest, if not an answer to the theological question I just raised, then at
least a response to the literary question Chesterton himself raised when
writing another of his scintillating studies of the novelists, Robert Louis
Stevenson. “There is,” wrote Chesterton in that work:

at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of

architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is
imagery. It is a thing like the landscapes of his dreams; the sort of
 world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander;
the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing
he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or
structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied, and
because he can in this sense create a world, he is in this sense a
creator; the image of God.512

In Chesterton’s case — this, at least, is my proposal — the “pattern” in

question could be described as a wonderful adventure of discovery, ending
in the greatest discovery of all, coming home, coming to the Patria. An inn
is not quite a home, though inns were, I suppose, homes from home for
Chesterton. Still, the parallel with the ending of Charles Dickens is near
enough.

In any case, the point of a pattern or a “type of architecture” in literary

creation is its formation, as Chesterton writes, of an overall atmosphere or
ethos. It does not have to be adverted to very often in order to be felt. The
consummation of all things in the Age to Come when the world goes home
is not as such a frequently invoked motif in Chesterton. But it is signalled
explicitly from time to time. In The Ball and the Cross MacIan is found
explaining how “an apocalypse is the opposite of a dream”: “A dream is
falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the
world it ends . . . Everything is coming to a point.”513

Chesterton’s aim of reviving the romance of Christianity, and its confident

hope for homecoming in God, by a wide re-diffusion of its ethos — what he
termed “Christendom” — was not realised in the second half of the
twentieth century in either Britain in particular or Western Europe in
general. Rather. the opposite was the case. But as one social historian has
observed: “The most decisive secularization may cause dissatisfactions that
prepare the way for ultimate revival.”514 That thought is a cause for hope,
even if it also implies that tears will be shed on the way. Chesterton’s regret
for his own contemporaries, in an era dominated by scientism and the
Nietzschean will to power, was that those who sought to preserve human
values held to them less firmly than might have been the case had they
possessed an appropriate metaphysic, and a groundwork of morals to
match. Writing shortly after Chesterton’s death, T. S. Eliot testified that,
even if his ideas appeared to be totally without effect, “they were the ideas
for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more, I
think, than any man of his time . . . to maintain the existence of the
important minority in the modern world.”515

After all, the final dénouement which, by the faith of the Church, he
expected to be marvellous, was also not to be attained without human
struggle or divine drama: “When evil things become evil, good things, in a
blazing apocalypse, become good.”516
 Bibliography
Primary Bibliography The project of publishing in a uniform series the
Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton was begun by Ignatius Press of San
Francisco in 1986. A listing of individual works and contributions,
according to their original place and date of publication is found in:

Sullivan, J. G. K. Chesterton: A Bibliography, with an Essay on Books by

G. K. Chesterton and an Epitaph by Walter de la Mare. London, 1958.

———. Chesterton Continued: A Bibliographical Supplement. London,

1968.

The reader keen to do research will find useful:

Sprug, J. W. (ed.). An Index to G. K. Chesterton. Washington, 1966.

Secondary Bibliography

Barker, D. G. K. Chesterton: A Biography. London, 1958.

Boyd, I., [C.S.B.]. The Novels of G. K. Chesterton. London, 1975.

Canovan, M. G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York, 1977).

Coates, J. D. Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis. Hull, 1984.

———. G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and

Critic. Lewiston, NY, 2002.

Clipper, L. J. G. K. Chesterton. New York, 1974.

Conlon, D. J., ed. G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments. Antwerp,

1976.

———, ed. G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views. Oxford, 1987.

Coren, M. Gilbert: The Man who was G. K. Chesterton. London, 1989.

Crowther, I. G. K.Chesterton. London, 1991.

Dale, A. S. The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G. K. Chesterton.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982.

Denis, Y. G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme. Paris, 1978.

Jaki, S. L. Chesterton, a Seer of Science. Urbana, Illinois, and Chicago,

1986.

Ker, I. The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845-1961): Newman,

Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. Notre

Dame, Indiana, 2003.

Kenner, H. Paradox in Chesterton. London, 1948.

Milbank, A. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the

Real. London, 2007.

Nichols, A., O.P., ed. Chesterton and the Modernist Crisis. Saskatoon,
1990.

Oddie, W. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy. The Making of GKC

1874-1908. Oxford, 2008.

Pearce, J. Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton. San

Francisco, 1997.

Reckitt, M. G. K. Chesterton: A Christian Prophet for England Today.

London, 1950.

Schwartz, A. The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene,

Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. Washington 2005.

Sullivan, J., ed. G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal. New York, 1974.

Ward, M. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. London, 1944.

———. Return to Chesterton. London, 1952.

Wills, G. Chesterton: Man and Mask. New York, 1961.

 Biographical Note

Aidan Nichols, O.P.

Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., of Blackfriars, Cambridge, is a member of the
Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University and possibly the most prolific
writer of theology in the English language. He has published on countless
topics, especially in systematic, sacramental, and ecumenical theology, and
was awarded the title Sacrae Theologiae Magister by the Dominican order
in 2003. His books include important studies of St Thomas Aquinas;
modern thinkers, including Hans Urs von Balthasar; and the theology of
Pope Benedict XVI. He has written on the liturgical “reform of the reform”
and on “re-energising the Church in Culture,” as well as on the arts and
iconography. The present book is based on a series of lectures given as the
John Paul II Memorial Lecturer at the University of Oxford — the first
Catholic Lectureship created in the university since the Reformation.
 An Invitation
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Footnotes
1
Christendom in Dublin (London, 1932), 41-42.
2
Ibid., 42.
3
Christendom in Dublin, 43.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
William Blake (London, 1910), 74.
7
Ibid., 73.
8
The Complete Father Brown Stories (London, 1992, 2006), 431.
9
S. Caldecott, “Was Chesterton a Theologian?” The Chesterton Review
XXIV.4 (1998): 465.
10
A. Nichols, O.P., The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion
of England (Oxford, 2008), 110-118.
11
Orthodoxy, of course, abounds in paradoxes, and Chesterton himself has
left an essay, reprinted in the posthumous collection The Glass Walking-
stick, where he roundly declares that “the English people have a peculiar
appetite for paradox.”
12
What I saw in America (London, 1922), 284.
13
Ibid., 285.
14
Ibid.
15
Come to Think of It (London, 1930), 129.
16
The Victorian Age in Literature (London, 1911), 31.
17
Come to Think of It, 242.
18
Ibid.
19
The Victorian Age in Literature, 73.
20
Ibid., 76.
21
The Victorian Age in Literature, 77.
22
Ibid., 69.
23
Ibid., 62-63.
24
The Victorian Age in Literature, 44.
25
Autobiography (London, 1936), 35-36.
26
Toy theatres figured large in Chesterton’s childhood: it is instructive that
in his study of Stevenson he ascribes to the Scots novelist’s own childhood
love for them the origin of the “special style or spirit” of his work in its
clarity of form and characterisation. “In that little pasteboard play, there
might be something of the pantomime, but there was nothing of the
dissolving view,” Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1927), 50.
27
Cited in M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton (London, 1986), 13.
28
Autobiography, 21.
29
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London, 1945), 42.
30
A miscellaneous collection of documents now in the G. K. Chesterton
Archives in the Manuscripts Department of the British Library.
31
See W. Oddie, “Chesterton at the Fin de siècle: Orthodoxy and the
Perception of Evil,” The Chesterton Review XXV.3 (1999), 329-343.
32
In his 1913 play Magic he “plainly stated that calling up powers, thrones,
and dominations was an ancient and perilous sin,” A. S. Dale, The Outline
of Sanity: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982), 35.
33
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 62.
34
The Man Who Was Thursday (London, 1907, 1944), 131. For an analysis
of Chesterton’s attitude to Impressionism, see J. D.Coates, Chesterton and
the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, 1984), 191-209.
35
William Blake, 94.
36
“On the Disastrous Spread of Aestheticism in All Classes,” in J. Sullivan,
ed., G. K. Chesterton, Greybeards at Play, and other Comic Verse (London,
1974), 42-47.
37
The Victorian Age in Literature, 8-9.
38
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 67.
39
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 110.
40
Ibid., 71-72.
41
R. Groves, Conrad Noel and the Thaxted Movement: An Adventure in
Christian Socialism (London, 1967), 120.
42
Ibid., 321.
43
Ibid, 322.
44
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 74.
45
“William Morris,” in Twelve Types: A Book of Essays (London, 1902), 30.
46
M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton, 157, with an internal citation from “Why I
Am Not a Socialist,” published in The New Age for 4 January 1908.
47
What I Saw in America, 127.
48
M. Reckitt, Maurice to Temple: A Century of the Social Movement in the
Church of England (London, 1946), 167.
49
Crucial sections of the essay are anthologised in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith
Chesterton, 172-176.
50
Autobiography, 159-163.
51
M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 172.
52
What I Saw in America, 244-245.
53
A. Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999, 2000), 714-740.
54
All Things Considered (London, 1908), 97.
55
The Glass Walking-stick and Other Essays, ed. D. Collins (London, 1955),
71.
56
The classic study is I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in
Art and Propaganda (London, 1975).
57
For an account of the variety of Chesterton’s approach to essay writing,
against the background of a history of the essay form and with some subtly
analysed examples of how Chesterton gained his effects, see J. D. Coates,
G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic
(Lewiston, New York, 2002), 117-155.
58
Autobiography, 95.
59
G. F. Watts (London, 1904; 1975), p. 75.
60
Cited in M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton, 111.
61
That assumes Chesterton could be acknowledged as an example of
Christian holiness of life, something not obviously impossible. The genres
of his writing are, of course, atypical of the great Doctors — but much the
same could be said of, for example, Thérèse of Lisieux, declared doctor
ecclesiae by Pope John Paul II in 1997.
62
Cited in M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton, 183.
63
A. S. Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 168-183.
64
M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 330.
65
A. Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene,
Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (Washington 2005), 78. The
Jerusalem stay bore fruit in The New Jerusalem (London, 1920).
66
See I. Boyd, C.S.B., “Chesterton’s Anglican Reaction to Modernism,” in
A. Nichols, O.P., ed., Chesterton and the Modernist Crisis (Saskatoon,
1990), 5-36.
67
Chaucer: A Study (London, 1932), 341.
68
Collected Poems (London, 1933), 387.
69
The Man Who Knew Too Much (London, 1922). For the plausible
identification of Horne Fisher with Baring, see I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K.
Chesterton, 79-83.
70
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 390.
71
Cited A. S. Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 225.
72
The Resurrection of Rome (London, 1930), 283.
73
A. S. Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 288.
74
Some major articles of Chesterton on Distributism from G. K.’s Weekly
were published in 1926 as The Outline of Sanity — which should not be
confused, of course, with the biography of the same title by A. S. Dale in
the previous footnote.
75
Autobiography, 355.
76
Ibid.
77
D. L. Sayers, Preface, The Surprise (London, 1952).
78
O. Lodge, The Substance of Faith Allied with Science: A Catechism for
Parents and Teachers (London, 1907), 129. I thank Mr Stratford Caldecott
of the Chesterton Library in Oxford for showing me this item in the
collection of Chesterton’s own holdings.
79
J. D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, passim.
Many of the themes are taken further in idem., G. K. Chesterton as
Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic.
80
“Confusion” may have been more the ethos of the 1890s. It is dangerous
to build too much on one citation but one notes how, asked about the aims
of the Yellow Book project, its editors, Aubrey Beardsley and Henry
Harland, replied it would contain “clever stuff”and be distinctively
“modern,” though neither was able to say what “modern” meant. Thus, J. G.
Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1971), 299.
81
D. Fagerberg, The Size of Chesterton’s Catholicism (Notre Dame, Indiana,
1998), 8.
82
Heretics (London, 1906, 2006), 2.
83
Ibid.
84
Heretics, 2.
85
Ibid., 4.
86
C. Bell, Art (London, 1914), 241.
87
A Gleaming Cohort (London, 1926), 184. He wrote decisively four years
later: “All art is religious . . . Religion is the sense of ultimate reality, of
whatever meaning a man finds in his own existence, or the existence of
anything else”: Come to Think of It (London, 1930), 64.
88
C. Harvie and H.C.G. Matthew, Nineteenth Century Britain: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford, 2000), 128.
89
The Victorian Age in Literature, 215.
90
Ibid., 214.
91
The Victorian Age in Literature, 217.
92
Heretics, 12.
93
Ibid., 13.
94
Ibid., 14.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid., 16.
97
Heretics, 16.
98
Ibid., 17.
99
By the mid-1920s, Chesterton was more nuanced on this point, though not
fully convinced: thus The Victorian Age in Literature, 249.
100
Heretics, 28.
101
Ibid., 25.
102
Ibid., 26. This was also the view of Chesterton’s younger contemporary,
the novelist E. M. Forster: “The imperialist is not what he thinks or seems.
He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism and though his
ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be gray”:
Howard’s End ([1910] Harmondsworth, 1983), 315.
103
Heretics, 29.
104
Ibid., 34.
105
J. D. Coates, G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Novelist, Essayist, and
Critic, 77-78.
106
The Flying Inn (London, 1914), 200-201.
107
Heretics, 35.
108
Heretics, 36.
109
George Bernard Shaw (London, 1910), 25.
110
Ibid., 32. It might be more accurate to say “before 1912” (rather than
1914), since the introduction of a Liberal bill for Home Rule for Ireland —
the price that had to be paid for support by Irish Nationalist MPs for the
1910 reform bill of the House of Lords — brought to the leadership of the
Conservatives a politician, Andrew Bonar Law, who vowed the destruction
of the Liberal Party. See G. Dangerfield, The Damnable Question (London
and Boston, 1976). The creation of Lloyd George’s Liberal-Conservative
coalition government at the Armistice in one sense vindicated Chesterton’s
perception of the pre-1912 system, a claim reflected in the 1922 novel The
Man Who Knew Too Much. But it also destroyed the Liberals as a governing
Party.
111
George Bernard Shaw, 37.
112
Ibid., 38.
113
George Bernard Shaw, 45.
114
George Bernard Shaw, 44.
115
Ibid., 62.
116
Ibid., 73.
117
Ibid., 78.
118
Cited in George Bernard Shaw, 86. This was not an attitude confined to
Shaw. In George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism, Hubert
Eldon expresses the authorial view when he describes English Socialism as
irredeemably vulgar, “like everything originating with the English lower
classes,” Demos, vol. III (London, 1886), 13, cited in J. Carey, The
Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary
Intelligentsia 18801939 (London, 1992), 112.
119
William Cobbett (London, 1925), 45. This attitude lies behind the
opposition of Cecil Chesterton’s The Eye-Witness (the earlier title of The
New Witness) to Lloyd George’s National Insurance Bill. By making it
mandatory for all workers between the ages of 16 and 70 to contribute to
such insurance, supervised by State commissioners, the legislation would
produce a servile working class. Belloc proposed instead voluntary
contributions to a programme paid for by a tax chargeable to employers:
thus J. P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against
Modernity (Athens, Ohio; and London, 1981), 49-50.
120
George Bernard Shaw, 193.
121
Ibid., 194.
122
Ibid., 195-196.
123
Ibid., 205.
124
A. R. Orage, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age
(London, 1906); idem., Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (London, 1907).
125
Cited in J. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 40.
126
George Bernard Shaw, 207.
127
Heretics, 39.
128
Ibid., 45.
129
H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific
Progress upon Human Life (London, 1901), 211-212.
130
The Ball and the Cross, 320-321.
131
J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses , 127-128.
132
Heretics, 43.
133
J. P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against
Modernity, 4.
134
H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London, 1946), 17, 18; cf. M.
R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians
(New York, 1967).
135
E. Haeckel, Welträtsel (1900); English translation: Riddle of the Universe:
At the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1900, 1902). A
supplementary volume was published as Wonder of Life: A Popular Study of
Biological Philosophy (London, 1904). Other translations appeared as
History of Creation (London, 1892), The Last Link: Our Present
Knowledge of the Descent of Man (London, 1898), Evolution of Man
(London, 1905), and Last Words on Evolution (London, 1906). For his life
see Biographie in Briefen. Ernst Haeckel (Gütersloh, 1984). Especially
pertinent to Chesterton’s critique of Haeckel is the latter’s Monism as
Connecting Religion and Science: The Confession of Faith of a Man of
Science (London, 1894). The most recent study is R. J. Richards, The
Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary
Thought(Chicago, 2008).
136
J. D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 34.
137
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908, 1944), 39.
138
Ibid., 38-39.
139
Ibid., 44.
140
Heretics, 190-191.
141
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (English translation,
Harmondsworth, 1961), 75-77. I owe this and the following citations from
Nietzsche’s writings to J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
142
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 98.
143
Ibid., 120.
144
F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (English translation, London, 1968), 77.
145
Ibid., 382.
146
J. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, vii.
147
The Everlasting Man ([1925] San Francisco, 1993), 211.
148
William Cobbett, 145.
149
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, and Other Essays, ed. D. Collins
(London, 1975), 164, 165.
150
Orthodoxy (London, 1908, 1996), 22.
151
Ibid., 18.
152
Ibid.
153
Ibid., 21.
154
Ibid., 22.
155
Ibid., 23-24.
156
Ibid., 24.
157
Ibid., 25.
158
The Well and the Shadows (London, 1935), 56.
159
S. L. Jaki, Chesterton: A Seer of Science (Urbana, Illinois, 1986), 63.
160
Ibid., 87.
161
Autobiography, 92.
162
The Poet and the Lunatics, 24-25.
163
Orthodoxy, 28.
164
Ibid., 29.
165
See on this A. D. Nuttal, The Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary
Imagination (Berkeley, California, 1974).
166
Orthodoxy, 30.
167
Ibid., 39.
168
Ibid., 41.
169
Ibid., 42.
170
Ibid., 43.
171
Ibid., 44.
172
Ibid., 44-45.
173
Orthodoxy, 40.
174
Ibid., 39.
175
See, for example, J. Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition
(Oxford, 1970).
176
Orthodoxy, 67-68.
177
S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A Seer of Science, 26.
178
Ibid., p. 23. Duhem’s Théorie physique (Paris, 1906) is further explored in
Jaki’s study, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem
(Dordrecht, 1984); Meyerson’s treatise Identité et réalité is dated to the
following year, 1907.
179
S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A Seer of Science, op. cit., 26.
180
Orthodoxy, 82.
181
The Defendant (London, 1901), 84.
182
Saint Thomas Aquinas (London, 1933), 215-216.
183
Orthodoxy, 10.
184
Ibid., 111.
185
Ibid.
186
Orthodoxy, 86.
187
Ibid., 87.
188
S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A Seer of Science, 112.
189
Orthodoxy, 92, 93.
190
The Thing (London, 1929), 62.
191
Manalive (London, 1912, 1921), 165.
192
G. F. Watts, 66-67.
193
Orthodoxy, 93.
194
Ibid., 97.
195
Twelve Types, 44.
196
Orthodoxy, 111. That is the theme of Chesterton’s last play, The Surprise.
197
Cf. S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A Seer of Science, 20.
198
Manalive, 10.
199
See “A Crazy Tale,” cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 19, and
Autobiography, 150-151.
200
A. Schwartz, The Third Spring, 101.
201
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 27.
202
Ibid., 29.
203
Christendom in Dublin, 33-34. Or, as he wrote the following year: “That
strangeness of things which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is
really connected with their otherness, or what is called their objectivity,”
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 147. This was Chesterton’s long-standing
conviction. In his Blake book he had written of mediaeval illuminations:
“The Christian decorators, being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to
maintain the reality of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to
affirm the material,” William Blake, 135.
204
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 30.
205
Autobiography, 25.
206
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 31.
207
Ibid.
208
Ibid., 57.
209
Cited in Saint Thomas Aquinas, 129.
210
Ibid., 95.
211
J. Ratzinger, “ ‘Consecrate them in the truth’: a homily for St Thomas’
Day,” New Blackfriars 68.803 (1987): 112-115.
212
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 57-58.
213
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia. IIae., Q. 112, art. 5.
214
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 108. Chesterton’s conviction that Thomism is “the
philosophy of common sense,” and so, as he puts it, “nearer than most
philosophies to the mind of the man in the street” (ibid., 116, 117) does not,
then, exhaust his account of Aquinas. Still, the philosophy of common sense
matters to him. One can see why the doyen of historians of mediaeval
philosophy Étienne Gilson so strongly approved of Chesterton’s short and,
after all, amateur work, when we find Chesterton anticipating Gilson’s own
quarrel with Jacques Maritain over the admissibility or otherwise of
qualifying the term “critical” in Thomas’s case (Gilson thought definitely
not). Chesterton notes that it may seem surprising that Thomas “does not
deal with what many now think the main metaphysical question: whether
we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The
answer is that St Thomas recognised instantly what so many modern
sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously, that a man must either
answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question;
never ask any question; never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask”
(ibid., 119).
215
G. F. Watts, 34.
216
Ibid., 33.
217
Ibid., 51.
218
Ibid., 53.
219
G. F. Watts, 53.
220
Ibid., 54.
221
Ibid., 61.
222
William Blake, 135.
223
Ibid., 138.
224
Ibid., 137.
225
C. Williams, The Place of the Lion (London, 1931). Williams was drawing
on the later Platonist tradition, subsequently Christianised as a doctrine of
the divine Ideas. But then so also was Blake.
226
Cited in A. S. Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 253.
227
A. Farrer, The Glass of Vision (London, 1948).
228
William Blake, 141.
229
Ibid., 142.
230
G. F. Watts, 18.
231
William Blake, 142.
232
The Man Who Was Thursday, 191. It is only fair to record, against my
interpretation, that Chesterton himself, writing a quarter of a century later,
described Sunday as “not so much God . . . as Nature as it appears to the
pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism”
(Autobiography, 98). The crux, to my mind, lies in whether one interprets
the novel from its prehistory, where its “nightmare” quality (“A Nightmare”
was the original subtitle) derives from Chesterton’s own struggle out of
Slade School madness to incipient faith, or, alternatively, from its time of
publication (1908), when Chesterton had made the transition to doctrinal
Christianity, as the exactly contemporaneous Orthodoxy shows.
233
The Complete Father Brown Stories, 28.
234
Ibid., 32.
235
William Cobbett, 115.
236
H. Belloc, On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters (London,
1940), 21.
237
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 21.
238
Ibid., 48.
239
Ibid., 66.
240
Ibid., 85. I owe this chain of references to Y. Denis, G. K.Chesterton:
Paradoxe et Catholicisme (Paris, 1978), 17.
241
Cited in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 155.
242
H. de Lubac, Paradoxes (Paris, 1946); idem., Nouveaux Paradoxes (Paris,
1955).
243
H. U. von Balthasar, La Gloire et la croix. Aspects esthétiques de la
Révélation I. Apparition (Paris, 1965), 409, cited in Y. Denis, G. K.
Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 19.
244
H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 43.
245
William Blake, 178.
246
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 96-98, by way of
examination of George Bernard Shaw, 76-77.
247
Cited in M. Ffinch, G. K. Chesterton, 87.
248
Their “talents were strikingly similar but [their] beliefs were so
diametrically different”: W. B. Furlong, Shaw and Chesterton. The
Metaphysical Jesters (University Park, Pennsylvania; and London,1970),
188.
249
The Complete Father Brown Stories, 176.
250
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 155.
251
Orthodoxy, 132.
252
Ibid., 133.
253
Ibid.
254
Saint Francis of Assisi, 87.
255
Ibid.
256
Ibid., 98.
257
Orthodoxy, 236.
258
Ibid.
259
Ibid., 235.
260
The Ballad of the White Horse (London, 1911), 66.
261
Orthodoxy, 134-135.
262
Ibid., 137.
263
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 89.
264
The Everlasting Man, 170.
265
Orthodoxy, 133.
266
William Blake, 210.
267
Orthodoxy, 205.
268
Ibid., 206.
269
Ibid., 201.
270
H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 17.
271
Ibid.
272
Heretics, 46-47.
273
H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 30.
274
The Uses of Diversity (London, 1920), 7.
275
Autobiography, 150.
276
H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 93.
277
The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (London,
1929), 27.
278
I make use here of some material originally published as Chapter 11 of my
book A Grammar of Consent: The Existence of God in Christian Tradition
(Notre Dame, Indiana, 1991).
279
P. Berger, A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the
Supernatural (London, 1970; Harmondsworth, 1971).
280
The Ballad of the White Horse, 1.
281
Autobiography, 48.
282
Robert Louis Stevenson, 111.
283
Cited from the Notebooks in M. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 14.
284
Autobiography, 38.
285
Orthodoxy, 73.
286
Autobiography, 94.
287
H. M. McLuhan, “Introduction,” in H. Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton,
xix.
288
Charles Dickens, 41-42.
289
Orthodoxy, 238.
290
Ibid., 238-239.
291
Saint Francis of Assisi (London, 1923), 87.
292
P. N. Furbank, “Chesterton the Edwardian,” in J. Sullivan, ed., G. K.
Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London, 1974), 21-22, citing from
Autobiography, 90-91.
293
William Blake, 56.
294
K. Raine, William Blake (London, 1970), 50.
295
Saint Thomas Aquinas, 175-195.
296
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 37.
297
Compare J. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York,
1954), 160-167.
298
The Poet and the Lunatics, 129.
299
Charles Dickens, 286.
300
Ibid.
301
I attempted this in the original setting of this chapter: A Grammar of
Assent.
302
Orthodoxy, 4-5.
303
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 17.
304
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London, 1935, 1939), 143.
305
J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture
(Boston, 1955).
306
P. Berger, A Rumour of Angels, 76-77.
307
Y. Denis, G. K. Chesterton: Paradoxe et Catholicisme, 38.
308
Charles Dickens (London, 1907, fifth edition), 268.
309
Ibid., 269.
310
Ibid., 270.
311
Ibid.
312
Charles Dickens, 270.
313
What I Saw in America, 153.
314
Ibid., 305.
315
Ibid., 301-302.
316
Ibid., 300. “The view that . . . rights are the universal property of men as
such was virtually unknown in classical antiquity. Frequently when it is
presented even now, there is little comprehension of the philosophical
difficulties it entails. It is in many respects an ethical survival whose first
espousal depended on a now-abandoned theological belief that man was
formed in the image of God”: thus J. M. Rist, Human Value: A Study in
Ancient Philosophical Ethics (Leiden, 1982), 1.
317
What I Saw in America, 303.
318
What I Saw in America, 303.
319
Fancies Versus Fads (London, 1923), 183.
320
Ibid.
321
I follow here the account of the book’s origins in S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A
Seer of Science, 61.
322
Fancies Versus Fads, 122-123.
323
Ibid., 123.
324
The Everlasting Man, 16.
325
Ibid., 17.
326
Ibid., 19.
327
Ibid., 26.
328
C. Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, 1882, second edition), 619.
329
The Everlasting Man, 26.
330
S. L. Jaki, Chesterton, A Seer of Science, note 23, 142.
331
J. E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosition: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art
and Religion (New York, 1982).
332
The Everlasting Man, 32.
333
The Everlasting Man, 33.
334
Ibid., 34-35.
335
Ibid., 35.
336
Ibid.
337
The Everlasting Man, 36.
338
Ibid.
339
Fancies Versus Fads, 122.
340
Ibid.
341
Ibid., 121.
342
Ibid., 120.
343
Fancies Versus Fads, 121.
344
Fancies Versus Fads, 121.
345
Ibid., 38.
346
Ibid.
347
Cited in “On Original Sin,” in Come to Think of It, 156.
348
Ibid.
349
Ibid.
350
Cited in “On Original Sin,” in Come to Think of It, 157.
351
Ibid.
352
A. Schwartz, The Third Spring, 66.
353
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, and Other Essays, D. Collins, ed., 13.
354
A. Schwartz, The Third Spring, 67.
355
Come to Think of It, 55.
356
Fancies Versus Fads, 88, 89.
357
Ibid., 89.
358
“The Revolt of the Spoilt Child,” in Fancies Versus Fads, 138.
359
Ibid., 139.
360
Fancies Versus Fads, 139, 140.
361
Ibid.
362
Ibid., 140.
363
Fancies Versus Fads, 141.
364
Christendom in Dublin, 86-87.
365
Christendom in Dublin, 87.
366
Ibid.
367
Ibid., 86.
368
Ibid.
369
Ibid.
370
Christendom in Dublin, 86.
371
Ibid., 89.
372
Ibid.
373
Ibid., 91.
374
Ibid., 90.
375
Christendom in Dublin, 92-93.
376
Ibid., 93.
377
William Blake, 179.
378
Four Faultless Felons (London, [1930] 1936), 229.
379
The Everlasting Man, 54.
380
The Thing, 40.
381
The Everlasting Man, 55.
382
Ibid.
383
Ibid.
384
Ibid., 71.
385
The Everlasting Man, 210.
386
Ibid., 105, 110.
387
Ibid., 93.
388
The Everlasting Man, 97-98.
389
Ibid., 99.
390
Ibid., 109.
391
Ibid.
392
Ibid., 111.
393
Ibid., 113.
394
Ibid.
395
The key to Chesterton’s exaltation of the Roman Republic and Empire is
that, in her final unexpected victory over Carthage with its dreadful
religion, “all men knew in their hearts that she had been representative of
mankind, even when she was rejected of men” (ibid., 150).
396
Ibid., 118.
397
Ibid., 110-111.
398
Ibid., 111.
399
Ibid.
400
The Everlasting Man, 136.
401
Ibid., 160.
402
Ibid., 161.
403
Ibid., 164.
404
Ibid., 173, 172. The title “the divine Outcast” for Jesus Christ had been
much favoured in Noel’s Thaxted.
405
Ibid., 174.
406
Ibid., 175.
407
Ibid., 179.
408
Ibid., 196.
409
The Everlasting Man, 207.
410
The Everlasting Man, 210.
411
Ibid., 213.
412
Ibid.
413
The Queen of Seven Swords (London, 1926).
414
H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. IV.
The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (Edinburgh, 1989), 216.
415
The Everlasting Man, 246.
416
Ibid. We can note that Chesterton does not make the mistake of supposing
that a “narrative theology” can stand alone, without some philosophical
integument, accompaniment, or exploration. See F. A. Murphy, God Is Not
a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford, 2007).
417
The Everlasting Man, 246.
418
Ibid., 248.
419
Ibid.
420
I make use in this chapter of some material previously published under the
title “G. K. Chesterton as Moralist of Culture” in A. Nichols, O.P., Beyond
the Blue Glass: Catholic Essays on Faith and Culture (London, 2002), 65-
80.
421
Fancies Versus Fads, 182.
422
Cited in W. Martin, The “New Age” Under Orage (London, 1967), 215.
423
Orthodoxy, 30.
424
Cf. Dei Filius (the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council on
faith and reason), 2.
425
The Thing, 26.
426
Ibid., 22.
427
The Thing, 34.
428
A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1985,
second edition), 142, 143.
429
Idem., Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (London, 1988), x.
430
Ibid., p. 198. For his change of position, see C. S. Lutz, Tradition in the
Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism and Philosophy
(Lanham, Maryland, 2004), 101-104.
431
Orthodoxy, 166.
432
Chaucer: A Study (London, 1932), 158-159.
433
Orthodoxy, 34-35.
434
The Victorian Age in Literature, 211.
435
Ibid.
436
What’s Wrong with the World (London, 1913), 27.
437
Orthodoxy, 63.
438
The Victorian Age in Literature, 98.
439
Ibid.
440
William Cobbett, 222.
441
The Superstition of Divorce (London, 1920), 23.
442
Ibid.
443
Come to Think of It, 9.
444
J. P. Corrin, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc:The Battle Against
Modernity, 108-109.
445
Cited in ibid., 109.
446
The Superstition of Divorce, 41.
447
The Superstition of Divorce, 42.
448
Ibid., 67.
449
Cited in W. R. Titterton, G. K. Chesterton: A Portrait (London, 1936),
172.
450
For a detection of the “family resemblance” joining Chesterton with Hans
Urs von Balthasar in his account of those evangelical virtues, see J. Saward,
The Way of the Lamb: The Spirit of Childhood and the End of the Age
(Edinburgh, 1999), 123-149.
451
Tremendous Trifles (London, 1909), 5-6.
452
Chaucer, 75.
453
The Superstition of Divorce, 35.
454
Chaucer: A Study , 293. Chesterton’s medievalism has been pilloried, but
as John Coates has written, its subtlety has not been understood: “The
unjustly neglected late novel The Return of Don Quixote (1927) contains a
full and amusing satire on the sentimental preoccupation with the externals
of medieval life which neglects those essential values which alone gave it
meaning” (J. D. Coates, Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist,
and Critic, 184).
455
Chaucer: A Study, 293.
456
The Complete Father Brown Stories, 516.
457
Orthodoxy, 129.
458
Ibid., 130-131.
459
Ibid., 135.
460
Ibid., 136-137.
461
Ibid., 139.
462
Orthodoxy, 144.
463
Ibid., 138.
464
Ibid., 146.
465
Ibid., 145.
466
Ibid.
467
Ibid., 146.
468
Ibid., 232.
469
Ibid., 230.
470
The Catholic Church and Conversion (London, 1926), 40.
471
The Glass Walking-stick, and Other Essays, 60.
472
Ibid., p. 63.
473
Two of Chesterton’s essay collections also throw further light on his
thinking: The Thing, published in 1929, and The Well and The Shallows,
published in 1935, the year before his death.
474
See P. Jenkins, “Chesterton and the Anti-Catholic Tradition,” The
Chesterton Review XVIII, 3 (1992): 345-370.
475
I. Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845-1961): Newman,
Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2003),
22.
476
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 22.
477
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 16.
478
Ibid., 29.
479
Ibid., 30. In his Autobiography he suggested that imperialism, or, at any
rate, patriotism, had become a substitute religion for many British people.
“Men believed in the British Empire precisely because they had no thing
else to believe in” (145).
480
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 30.
481
Ibid., 31.
482
Ibid., 36.
483
Ibid., 38.
484
Ibid., 39.
485
Ibid., 45.
486
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 49.
487
The Thing, 29.
488
Ibid., 30.
489
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 67.
490
The Catholic Church and Conversion, 68.
491
I. Boyd, The Novels of G. K. Chesterton, xii.
492
Ibid., 19.
493
The Well and the Shallows, 23.
494
The Well and the Shallows, 25.
495
Ibid., 34.
496
Ibid., 35.
497
Ibid., 38.
498
Ibid., 40.
499
Ibid., 42.
500
Ibid., 45.
501
Ibid.
502
Ibid., 55.
503
Ibid., 56.
504
Ibid., 64.
505
The Well and the Shallows, 72.
506
The Well and the Shallows, 79.
507
Ibid., 91.
508
Ibid., 92.
509
Ibid., 92-03.
510
Charles Dickens, 297.
511
Charles Dickens, 297.
512
Robert Louis Stevenson, 40.
513
The Ball and the Cross, 377.
514
H. McLeod, “Secular Cities? Berlin, London, and New York in the Later
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in S. Bruce, ed., Religion and
Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization
Thesis (Oxford, 1992), 86.
515
Cited in D. J. Conlon, ed., G. K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments
(Antwerp, 1976), 531-532.
516
Charles Dickens, 284.
 Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. An Overview of Chesterton’s Life
2. Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis
3. The Discovery of Metaphysical Realism
4. The Role of Paradox
5. The God of Joy
6. Man in the Image of God
7. Chesterton’s Christology
8. Chesterton as Theological Ethicist
9. Chesterton and the Church
Conclusion
Bibliography
Biographical Note: Aidan Nichols, O.P.
An Invitation