Evangelize Your Library

As some of you know, I run a Yahoo Group for people who are interested in helping their local library to purchase Chesterton titles. It is so easy to do.

I noticed today that membership is up to 17! Who-hoo! Good for us. 17 libraries across America are being fed the information that WE Want More Chesterton!!!

Come join us today and help YOUR library purchase MORE CHESTERTON!

More Good News about Chesterton Academy

This was posted in the Catholic Spirit in the Twin Cities.

Sounds like they are off to a good start. Go Chesterton Academy!

St. Thomas More College Students Study in G.K. Chesterton's Own Library

Now don't you wish you were a St. Thomas More college student?

Chesterton, of course, loomed large in the course. Lectures were held mainly in the G.K. Chesterton Library where the College is the caretaker of a significant collection of books and memorabilia. The College is making Chesterton’s private library and belongings available for the first time to scholars and students who wish to conduct in-depth research into Chesterton’s life and writings. The library is maintained by the College’s Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford, England.

H/T: David Z.
Love the pun: "loomed large" combining a great bookstore thought with a huge writer thought.

I. Can't. Wait!

You have GOT to go see this, wow, I am so excited! The fifth season of Apostle of Common Sense, and plus all this other news of exciting programs being filmed right now at EWTN, cool! Using the modern means of tv, we evangelize the world!

GKC at the Crossroads

On almost the very first page of Orthodoxy you will find:

"To My Mother"

That's GKC's dedication. Motherhood echoes throughout Chesterton's works, though I can find few more splendid words on the topic than these:

You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:303]

He means, of course, the greatest of mothers and the greatest of sons. But today, here at the end of August, we ought to recall (as the Church does) the pair which might be number two on the list: Monica, the woman who prayed and wept for years, that her son be converted from his licentious and heretical life, and Augustine, the son who converted and became one of the greatest of stars in the constellation of the Doctors of the Church.

GKC didn't quote St. Augustine as much as some other books or saints, but he reveals at least some acquaintance with him:

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who really make protest on behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.
[Heretics CW1:88-9 (See PS for the Latin)]

The paradox of this is just hilarious, and I think St. Augustine (and his mom) are "ROTCL" (rolling on the clouds, laughing) at this moment. The AMBER hunt, exhilarating as it can be, yields only several dozen appearances of "Augustine", some of which are not this Augustine, such as that other one "called Augustine, who brought Christianity to our little island" as Father Brown recalls. ("The Scandal of Father Brown") (That Augustine was Augustine of Canterbury; today's is Augustine of Hippo.)

But, at the risk of delaying our investigation still longer today, I must quote another reference, because it suggests an important intellectual method, one which even GKC uses. It might be called "the Osmosis of Ideas" and I think will help you with your study of GKC. So when you are ready for an Augustinian treat, and the next phase of our studies, you know what to do:

Click here!

This quote, which is not from Orthodoxy, is from a very important essay, his ILN for June 24, 1911, found in CW29, which (as usual) it seems GKC has altered since I read it last. It is worth a lot of study, which I have no time for, as it is about techniques of argument and important insights into knowledge and ideas. First, you must hear a line which is the essence of the Chestertonian approach to all this - what really is the Scholastic approach, too:

I am much too anxious to argue with him ever to wish to quarrel with him.
[CW29:109]

Superlative. Please recall this when you are faced with intellectual foes! Now, GKC is debating with Mr. Greenwood about whether Bunyan had ever studied, or even knew the works of some author he would most likely be in disagreement with. And here is what GKC said:

...suppose I said, "Could Bunyan quote from an ancient Latin author living near Carthage?" Mr. Greenwood would instinctively say "No." But when he found I meant St. Augustine, he would cry, "Stop; that is another matter. Bunyan might use a phrase of Augustine's, for two reasons. First, although he had not read Augustine, he must have read scores of Puritan theologians who had. And second, he was so eager on the same problems of grace and predestination, that he may have naturally come to the same cross-roads of controversy." When we breathe the air of his age we shall feel that Bunyan would know nothing of the Popes, but might get much from the Fathers.
[CW29:110]

You see, even if someone has not read Augustine, he may naturally "come to the same cross-roads of controversy". And so have we!

Yes, for today, in the next paragraphs of Orthodoxy we arrive at the cross-roads, where you may for the first time come to see just what it is that Chesterton was seeing, and so get a clue about why he proceeded as he did. Again we find him reviewing what he has just said in the last few pages, a review which brings up another, very difficult topic - the topic of suicide.

I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen, an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say "fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes - for it makes even crimes impossible.
[CW1:275-6]

It would be hard to find a more penetrating (and yet still natural) argument against suicide than this. Note that the argument says nothing about soul or God or any of the usual issues of "moral theology" and yet it is strong, unanswerable, convincing. Perhaps even compelling. The astute reader will recall some echo of the policeman's words to Gabriel Syme on the nature of evil in The Man Who Was Thursday:

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become 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. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.
[TMWWT CW6:509]

Yes, GKC's fiction and his non-fiction carry the same themes. I know this is difficult territory. Have courage and let us continue. We are going to see something very startling now. You need to remember about seeing, and the other lessons we've learned on the previous parts of our journey:

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some freethinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the cross-roads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
[CW1:276-7]

Again, one might search very long to find a more penetrating and in many ways a "natural" argument for martyrdom. Obviously there must be something natural in the choice, for the choice is natural - that is, it is a matter of human nature. One cannot be not a martyr in a trance or a dream or upon divine or even diabolical control. Martyrdom is powered by supernature, perhaps driven by supernature, maybe catalyzed by supernature, and unthinkable without supernature - but it isn't supernatural in quite that way - that is, that choice has been factored out of the personal equation. GKC has told us! It is a matter of the will, of "caring so much for something outside" that one forgets his own personal life - even something as dull as Euclidean geometry: "If human history and human variety teach us anything at all, it is supremely probable that there are men who would be stabbed in battle or burnt at the stake rather than admit that three angles of a triangle could be together greater than two right angles." ["A Defence of Bores" in Lunacy and Letters 59]

But we are not going to talk about that now, even though I live on a sphere and I've had to face triangles that total 270 degrees! Ah, Euclid. Ahem.

Haven't you been asking all these many weeks where the "Christianity" comes in? Well, it came in. Here it is. Yes, we are at the cross-roads, as Chesterton now explains, staring at the contrast of martyr and suicide:

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?
[CW1:277]

Given the words like "degree" and "line" I think it's funny that we were just talking about geometry - but then I am easily amused. Recall also the famous epigram "Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere." [ILN May 5, 1928 CW 34:518] But we have something more important than art here. And it is this distinction which is so valuable to us here - this terrible sundering - the division as Christ Himself brought us, to the dismay of so many moderns, even in His time, simpering about "tolerance" and "unconditional love"! Or more pertinently, the distinction of ideas: what the Scholastics called the distinguo (I distinguish) in argument. And GKC recognized something about this, and knew - remember, all this argument we have been reading for all these pages is about his own studies and views, and not an attempt at explaining the existing "Christian" idea! But now, he recognized, as he said in the Introduction: "I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom." [CW1:214]

Wow.

Our surprises are only beginning. All these weeks I have been using the analogy of a hike or journey through a vast and mountainous country. And we now find that GKC will use the analogy too:

Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express - this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things? Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine. Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.
[CW1:277-8]

Stand! I hear that song by R.E.M. again. Think about direction. Ah, now, we see GKC reasoning by inference, going from an example to a larger view, dangerous sometimes, but useful if not excellent in all sciences. And as usual, he immediately tests his new tool:.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.
[CW1:278]

We shall see more of the "answer" next time.

--Dr. Thursday

PS: In the quote from Heretics GKC quotes St. Augustine's Confessions 10:27:

"Sero te amavi pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova!"

which means

"Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new!"

Another Conference: And we need YOU!

The Northeast MLA (Modern Language Association) conference in February in Boston is a great Chestertonian kind of opportunity. Unfortunately, as yet, I've not received any proposals for the Chesterton panel. The submission deadline is September 15. This link leads to the calls for papers for all the panels. Under the British/Anglophone section, you will find my session--G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who is Today:

G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who is Today This panel invites papers exploring any aspect of Chesterton's works, as well as those discussing his influential predecessors and/or his inspirational influence on his literary descendants. Please send abstracts to Jill.

From this link, all conference information can also be found.

Once again, perhaps you may reach some interested writers. They don't have to be students or professors, just those who write passionately and thoroughly about Chesterton. As is the case with MAPACA, I think having papers on a variety of Chestertonian topics can only help to introduce him and to build enthusiasm in these very vast arenas.

This again from Jill. If anyone is interested, please contact Jill immediately (you don't have to have the paper written now, just the ideas of what you WILL write about), and let's keep spreading the word about Chesterton!

Conference: Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture to have Chesterton Session

I succeeded in gathering papers and accepting four presenters for the GK Chesterton session at the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture conference October 30-Nov 2. I'm very excited about this. It will follow directly after a long-established session on Lewis/Tolkien, which, I believe, can only help promote the Chesterton talks.

This from Jill, one of our Chesterton speakers from a few years ago.

Congratulations Jill! And if anyone can attend, it should be very interesting. Jill promises a report on the conference in November.

Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations

This book sounds like a great book for teens. From the amazon.com info:

Product Description
A generation stands on the brink of a "rebelution."

A growing movement of young people is rebelling against the low expectations of today's culture by choosing to "do hard things" for the glory of God. And Alex and Brett Harris are leading the charge.

Do Hard Things is the Harris twins' revolutionary message in its purest and most compelling form, giving readers a tangible glimpse of what is possible for teens who actively resist cultural lies that limit their potential.

Combating the idea of adolescence as a vacation from responsibility, the authors weave together biblical insights, history, and modern examples to redefine the teen years as the launching pad of life. Then they map out five powerful ways teens can respond for personal and social change.

Written by teens for teens, Do Hard Things is packed with humorous personal anecdotes, practical examples, and stories of real-life rebelutionaries in action. This rallying cry from the heart of an already-happening teen revolution challenges a generation to lay claim to a brighter future, starting today.

Check it out here.

Poetry Contest

Cento Poetry contest. From the blog:

A cento is a poem made entirely of lines from other poems. The name comes from the Latin word meaning a cloak made out of patches. The cento differs from found poetry in that every line is taken from another poem, instead of just any borrowed material.

Sounds intriguing.

Cause a Stir: Need a New Sweatshirt this Autumn?

The American Chesterton Society needs your help. We need donations.

Right in the middle of a huge new interest in Chesterton, we are low on funds.

Please donate today, or buy some books, or buy a sweatshirt, you'll cause a stir.

India--NAP--oplis gets its very own Chesterton Society!!

Good news for Indianapolis! Your very own starter Chesterton group! Yeah for you! It is named Naptown Chestertonians, after the nickname (I presume?) for your city.

To join up, please visit the web site and email John M for questions or directions or finding out what will be discussed at the first meeting, or anything else.

GKC's Memorial to St. Pius X

We present G. K. Chesterton's column from The Illustrated London News, which he wrote as a memorial to Pope Pius X, who died August 20, 1914, and whose feast day is celebrated today.

Among the many true and touching expressions of respect for the tragedy of the Vatican, most have commented on the fact that the late Pope was by birth a peasant. Yet few or none, I think, traced that truth to its most interesting and even tremendous conclusion. For the truth is that the old Papacy is practically the only authority in modern Europe in which it could have happened. It is the oldest, immeasurably the oldest, throne in Europe; and it is the only one that a peasant could climb. In semi-Asiatic States there are doubtless raids and usurpations. But these are of brigands rather than peasants: I speak of the pure peasant advanced for pure merit. This is the only real elective monarchy left in the world; and any peasant can still be elected to it.

There is something awful and uncanny about the brilliant blindness of the enlightened. Telescopes have they and they see not: telephones have they and they hear not: some secret paralysis in the mind or the knot of the nerves prevents them from being conscious of anything that is palpable and present. I was told in a debating club that wars were now practically impossible and out of date, while the newsboys were crying the ultimatum of Austria to Servia. I dare say they are saying so still - in that debating club. And if I were to tell them that the modern scientific age has been, beyond and above all other ages, the Age of Militarism, they would call that plain fact a paradox. And as it has been with the old institution of arms, so it is to-day with the old institution of power in pedigree. It is much stronger today than it has ever been before. It is infinitely stronger than it ought to be. Modern heredity is ancient hereditary right. There used to be many elected despots in the world: to-day there are very few. Wherever the power is personal it is accidental. The modern world believes in the poetic and sporting chance of primogeniture. To prove this we need do no more than allude to the earthly or unearthly circumstances in which we stand at this moment. Whoever may be right or wrong, it is quite certain that the two central Empires now at war are made of many variegated bloods and histories. And it is quite certain that what holds each confederation together is not a public constitution, but simply a private family. The Austrian Emperor is trying to avenge his heir; and the German Emperor is trying to revive his grandfather. The feeling in both cases at least is not a constitutional sentiment: it is rather the sentiment that blood is thicker than ink. I think myself that the Hapsburgs have been wiser than the Hohenzollerns; understanding more of human nature and of the roots of such domestic despotism. For the House of Prussia points to its good luck; and if it once lost the luck, might lose all the loyalty. But the House of Austria rather points to its bad luck; and appeals, as did Maria Theresa, to men of many and alien races to rally round something simple, a babe, a woman, or an old man. I should not wonder if the calamities of the Austrian Empire have alone kept it together. In any case, we have a proof of the intense modernity of mere hereditary right. The tribes and clans that could not be kept together by any State are kept together by a surname. The family is larger than the nation.

But as compared with the case of the late Pope, the case of republican and "representative" rulers is just as strong. I do not remember that a real peasant has lately been President in France. I am quite positive that a real workman has not been Prime Minister in England. It must be confessed, I fear, that the longest and slowest of all such ladders of advance is the electioneering ladder. There is, of course, the very respectable and highly conservative person called a Labour Member. But how far he has travelled from the average workman! And how far he still is from the average Front Bench Man! In America, I suppose (at least I was told so in my youth) there was such a thing as "From Log Cabin to White House." As a boy I thought the change of residence a deplorable deterioration in the sense of the picturesque. But, for good or ill, is there any British record "From Cabinet-Maker to Cabinet Minister"? Does any modern politician, however republican, think it natural to imitate Cincinnatus? Does he, at any casual moment, cast aside the paludamentum and go back to the plough? Has he through life the speech and manhood and unmistakable make-up of the class from which he came? Even in high and heroic republics, like those of France and of Switzerland, can one say that the ruler is really the plain man in power?

Now all the evidence, from foes as much as friends, attests that this was really true of the great priest who lately gave back to God the most tremendous power in the world. Those who admired him most, admired the simplicity and sanity of a peasant. Those who murmured against him most, complained of the obstinacy and reluctance of a peasant. But for that very reason it was clear that the oldest representative institution of Europe is working: when all the new ones have broken down. It is still possible to get the strong, patient, humorous type that keeps cheerfulness and charity alive among millions, alive and supreme in an official institution. But I think it would puzzle the Parliamentarians, and the Suffragists, and the Proportional Representationists, and all the other correctors of our complex machine, to tell me where else it has been possible: except in that place now empty.

As has been pointed out, with subtle power and all proper delicacy, in numberless liberal and large-minded journals, the great and good priest now dead had all the prejudices of a peasant. He had a prejudice to the effect that the mystical word "Yes" should be distinguished from the equally unfathomable expression "No." Many travellers wandering in peasant countries have found traces of this belief. Mr. W. Yeats, in his most beautiful poem, exactly answers the peasant's instinct for exactitude: for the green arithmetic of ordered fields. "Nine bean rows will I have there." Many of the merely aristocratic poets, Shelley or Goethe, might have said nineteen bean-rows, or ninety: and Byron, when his blood was up, would have said nine hundred. But Mr. Yeats comes from a land of peasants: and he knows how many beans make nine. This obstinate belief that twice two is four, and three times three is nine, undoubtedly possessed the great peasant's intelligence when he argued with all the Intelligentsia of Europe. They were the finest intellects of the age. They said so; and they ought to know. The Pope never pretended to have an extraordinary intellect; but he professed to be right: and he was. All honest Atheists, all honest Calvinists, all honest men who mean anything, or believe or deny anything, will have reason to thank their stars (a heathen habit) for the peasant in that high place. He killed the huge heresy that two heads are better than one; when they grow on the same neck. He killed the Pragmatist idea of eating a cake and having it. He left people to agree with his creed or disagree with it; but not free to misrepresent it. It was exactly what any peasant taken from any of our hills and plains would have said. But there was something more in him that would not have been in the ordinary peasant. For all this time he had wept for our tears; and he broke his heart for our bloodshed.

[GKC ILN August 29, 1914 CW30:150-154]

Paradox: Physician and Physicist

Paradox: Physician and Physicist

Which ought to be subtitled, "Which came first: the irresistable force, or the immovable object?"

(Oh my. That's what you get when you combine an evolver with an ontologist! Hee hee. I guess you ought to know by now: you ought not be eating or drinking when you read my postings. You never know when the wit will seep out. Hee hee.)

And it is a good thing we are laughing. Today, perhaps more than before, I must shove the stationery... (great pun!) ...er, I mean push the envelope. Or at least Chesterton does, by bringing up the sensitive topic of women.

But before we proceed, I must welcome any Spanish-speaking readers to this blogg! If you assiduously read all the comments of our postings, you may have noted the Spanish comment on a recent posting, from a reader in Chile! ¡Que bueno! This of course is quite germane to our discussion, and the principle we noted recently, that the Cosmos is cosy - that is "it IS a small world after all".

This large/small paradox shows up in a very famous line, which may be quite provoking in some ways, and which helps introduce today's discussion:

...a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:119]

So if you are ready to join Uncle Gilbert in shoving the stationery, you may proceed into today's selection.

(( click here to proceed))


People tend to think very odd things of our Uncle Gilbert, and (in this particular case) point to "Part Three" in his 1910 book, What's Wrong With the World, called "Feminism, or the Mistake About Woman". Of course those who cite this rarely seem to cite anything more than the title, or they would be shocked. So, in paradoxical Chesterton fashion, I will instead cite something else, which I think will demonstrate GKC's real view of women:

I believe this way of talking about women and their higher culture is almost entirely a growth of the classes which (unlike the journalistic class to which I belong) have always a reasonable amount of money. One odd thing I specially notice. Those who write like this seem entirely to forget the existence of the working and wage-earning classes. They say eternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always a drudge. And what, in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man? These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister. They are always talking about man going forth to wield power, to carve his own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and to be obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are not drudges; but, then, neither are Duchesses. The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Smart Set are quite free for the higher culture, which consists chiefly of motoring and Bridge. But the ordinary man who typifies and constitutes the millions that make up our civilisation is no more free for the higher culture than his wife is.

Indeed, he is not so free. Of the two sexes the woman is in the more powerful position. For the average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman's world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture.
[GKC ILN Apr 7 1906 CW27:160-161]

Oh, you didn't like that? How about this, it's lots shorter:

Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry We will not be dictated to: and proceeded to become stenographers.
[recorded by Christopher Morley, quoted in M. Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton 205]

If this is not enough, I shall remind you that the book we are examining, Orthodoxy, was dedicated to his mother, and that he was happily married for seven years when it was released. Now that you have a better understanding of what GKC thinks, you will be ready to proceed.

One more thing. Recall, if you please, the line we ended with last week: "The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics." That gives the launch point for this next paragraph of our text, which we now examine:

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis' mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assume that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
[CW1:274]

I do not have familiarity with Thackeray (nor his books) and cannot cite the Pendennis reference at present - but I think the idea is clear anyway. Or, perhaps, as mystically shadowed as any other GKC phrase. You may find this deeply mystical: "Love is not blind... love is bound, and the more it is bound the less it is blind." But it is far more precise than any hundred rock songs, or even any dozen modern liturgical hymns. It gives us a piece of the mechanics of love, a datum as sound and as illuminating as any force diagram or equation of motion is for the student of mechanics.

But while we ponder this, we must not lose track of where we are! Remember: eye and foot, stand in the place where you live? This short consideration of Woman is just another example of GKC's studies, and he finds it consistent:

This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested in his views of it. "My son give me thy heart"; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective. It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer -

Enough we live: - and if a life,
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.

[CW1:274-5]

Now I beg pardon if you find this rather abrupt adjacency of words like "woman" and "birth" - but that's what appears in the text, and I think it is well. There's something more profound here in any case: that dramatic quote from the book of Proverbs "My son give me thy heart"; [Proverbs 23:26] which is the response for the Second Vespers of the Feast of the Sacred Heart. We might discuss here the most mystical of the anatomy and histology which is suggested here, but rather than anything either scientific or personal, I will just recall that the collection of Bil Keane's cartoons called The Heart of the Family Circus is about "Mommy". And even GKC said "the woman is the heart of the house". [ILN Apr 22 1911 CW29:76] Now that we have warmed ourselves with such thoughts, let us address that Dark bit at the end. Or rather see how GKC addresses it, and find even more strength:

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
[CW1:275]

You see? It is not a wandering piece of word-play, or an accidental example: rather, GKC is building, strong block upon strong block. The citing of woman (the heart of the house) and her role is because we are trying to find out our own role in "the place where we live" called the cosmos or world or universe. And there is this strange tension - this paradox.

You know, it needs to be stressed repeatedly (Remember "Do it again!" is our motto!) that Chesterton is hardly the author of all these paradoxes. All he does is write about them. They exist as part of our life, our world - and by now you ought to be expecting to see these things all the time, and maybe even seeing some for yourself. As you read more and more Chesterton, you will find it taking root, and begin to realize how amazing he found life, and start sharing in that experience - which will be healthy for you. It's not just by knowing where your heart is that the physician can assist you, but because he has a heart too... and not simply a blood-pump in his chest. "My son give my your heart." Not as a surgeon, but as a lover who chooses to be bound:

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.
[CW1:275]

Now we are getting into the very deepest part of the Chestertonian view: the idea that we can have extremes, opposite extremes, simultaneously! We are going to study this in detail next time, and see how this launches into some amazing insights.

I shall conclude with a quote from the amazing little book called Platitudes Undone, GKC's replies to Platitudes in the Making of Holbrook Jackson, who wrote:

X. Love is protective only when it is free.

GKC replied, in green pencil:

Love is never free.

--Dr. Thursday

PS I promised yesterday on my own blogg that I would give you a quote about St. Bernard that applies to our diuscussion. Here it is:

It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.
[GKC WWWTW CW4:96]

And I also found this, which might be GKC's tribute to home-schooling moms everywhere:

If education is the largest thing in the world, what is the sense of talking about a woman being liberated from the largest thing in the world? It is as if we were to rescue her from the cruel doom of being a poet like Shakespeare; or to pity the limitations of an all-round artist like Leonardo da Vinci. Nor can there be any doubt that there is truth in this claim for education. Only precisely the sort of which it is particularly true is the sort called domestic education. Private education really is universal. Public education can be comparatively narrow. It really would be an exaggeration to say that the school-master who takes his pupils in freehand drawing is training them in all the uses of freedom. It really would be fantastic to say that the harmless foreigner who instructs a class in French or German is talking with all the tongues of men and angels. But the mother dealing with her own daughters in her own home does literally have to deal with all forms of freedom, because she has to deal with all sides of a single human soul. She is obliged, if not to talk with the tongues of men and angels, at least to decide how much she shall talk about angels and how much about men.
[ILN Aug 5 1922 CW32:421]

Yes, even if you are not a woman, even if you are not a parent, as an adult you have a share in this teaching responsibility for the young people of your family...

Did you know that Dr. Thusday's been blogging again?

Our very own Dr. Thursday, who has his own blog, but who had been on hiatus for a time, is back (due to an employment situation which you can pray about if you are so inclined, thank you).

Check out his blog and leave him a comment or two.

Ralph McInery on Schall on Chesterton

Schall is inconceivable without Chesterton. In GKC Schall found a model for most of his writings. The bulk of those writings are journalistic, obiter dicta on this or that, essays, reviews, presentations, what-you-will. Hilaire Belloc provided a similar model. Chesterton and Belloc dashed off essays on a vast range of subjects, often triggered by something as evanescent as a newspaper story, and morphing into delightful insights. There was an “Essay on Everything,” another “On Nothing,” and, inevitably, eventually, an “Essay on ‘On.’” We should not miss the note of sheer fun in all this. We certainly cannot miss it in reading Schall. Fun, but not frivolity. Schall has written that “the short, often lightsome essay is one of the greatest of literary and philosophical tools.” You need only read his own essays to be convinced of this.

McInery is convinced that Schall is the Chesterton of our times. What do you think?

H/T: John

Michael Crighton reads Chesterton

A friend was doing some summer reading, and came across this surprise, and sent it to us:

I was doing some "junk"reading while on vacation, and I read the book-Next by Michael "Jurassic Park" Crichton. Anyway it's a book about genetics and in the back he lists all his sources. I was surprised to see two books by Chesterton listed. He also comments on how Chesterton was correct about the direction of science and how he was shouted down and ignored.

Looks like an interesting book, a sort of DaVinci Code for genetic scientists?

See Dale Live!

Well, sort of. He was on EWTN live last Wednesday night, and for a short while, you can view the show in the archives of the EWTN Live show listing.

Here's how you do it:

1. Click on the EWTN TV page.

2. Scroll down to where it says Archived Video.

3. Click on either the 100K or 300K download, depending on your connection, and there you will instantly be able to watch the show, even though you don't have EWTN on cable!

Pop some popcorn, and watch the show!

UPDATE: I've just tried watching 3-4 times, and can't get past the first 4 minutes, has anyone been able to view the whole thing? (It may be a browser/media player problem on my end, or maybe not!) Let me know if you can see it and what browser works. Thanks.

Christian Right splintered? GKChesterton and the election

As Benjamin Dueholm states in this news article from The National,

If America, as GK Chesterton famously proposed, is a nation with the soul of a church, its churches have often appeared to have the soul of a political party. Christian churches and other religious societies have played partisan roles in almost every major controversy in American history. Slavery and abolition, western expansion, prohibition of alcohol, expanding the franchise to women and non-whites and war and peace abroad have all been argued out in American pulpits and revival tents.

Then he discusses the latest developments between the Obama and McCain campaigns, all of which is pretty interesting reading.

More on Heckmondwike

From the same Leeds blog:

I have just found my copy of the original facsimile of G.K.Chesterton's observations of Heckmondwike in the form of a poem, probably penned on the train on his way to visit his friend Mgr. John O'Connor, who was under Fr. Hinsley in the early days of Bradford's St. Bede's Grammar School. As mentioned before Heckmondwike will be the subject of a future posting. Mgr. O'Connor was responsible for the building of the "Round church" of the First Martyrs in Heights Lane, Bradford. Fr. O'Connor was Chesterton's inspiration for the Father Brown stories.

and

Chesterton's poem about Heckmondwike will appear later today.

--written August 8th--after which it has not yet appeared.

We shall await the LMS blog on this. And it appears, Nick, as if you are right about the poem and a connection with Father (Brown) O'Connor.

Dale the Dignitary

This article refers to Mr. Ahlquist as a "dignitary". And also mentions something I wanted to let you all know: that the American Chesterton Society is currently recording its fifth season of the Apostle of Common Sense at EWTN studios.

Dignitaries attending the banquet included...Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society and star of EWTN's television show on G. K. Chesterton, now filming its fifth season.

American Agrarian Literature

I believe the distributists among us would enjoy this interesting post and listing of distributist/agrarian books to read.

The Mutex in the City of Polite Police

The Mutex in the City of Polite Police

Last week we concluded with the question, "Loyalty to Whom?" (We are, if you happen to have just joined us, in the middle of a slovenly study of GKC's Orthodoxy.) GKC had put us between the optimist and the pessimist, in argument over how we are to consider the place where we live and work. As I mentioned last time, this chapter argues about politics, as the previous chapter argued about science - that is, GKC is still talking about the strange and marvellous place called the universe, but now focussing on how we deal with each other, rather than how we happen to deal with the place itself... though of course these things are intertwined.

I used the word "politics" here. Please abandon, at least for the time while you read this, any concept which ties that word to other words like "voting" or "Demican" or "Republocrat" or "Tory" or "Whig" or whatever. Instead, get out your Greek lexicon - oh, no Greek lexicon? Too bad! (grunt, groan) Here's mine, the famous Liddell and Scott, which is always near the computer - along with the Lewis and Short Latin lexicon, a dictionary, the CRC handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and other important reference works. (ahem!) Politics comes from the Greek word polis which means "city". That word also gives us the word "police" - and though the word "polite" comes from a different root (the Latin participle meaning "polished"), even in Latin the two words come very close to each other, and GKC wrote, as a lengthy aside, a very important paragraph which is appended as a PS to this post. The point in bringing up word origins, as always in studying GKC, is that we need to grasp the far larger view that he has, and this is just one way of getting to that vantage point. The only concern that even GKC expresses is that we do not go far enough. We tend to exclude things from fitting together because we cannot make them fit into our scheme - all too often "pre-judged" to produce a certain conclusion. GKC works very hard to avoid that - so much so that his readers call it "verbal fireworks" when they do not see the grander connection he is portraying. Yes, we'll have some today.

Just as "Elfland" is a token for the magic of this Real World, the "Flag" is a token for the membership - I cannot use the word citizen just now, you'll see why soon - the membership we each have in the "club" of the universe. Remember that there is a trio of terms here - world, universe, cosmos - which are all interchangeable; though we often think of the "world" as our little globe, the idea of "world" includes the moon and the Andromeda Galaxy and lots of other things too. Speaking of references, I have a wonderful set of maps called The Nearby Galaxies Catalog which I use when I am trying to decide on where to go for vacations... ahem.

But for today we are considering things a little closer to home, and a bit more personal. Some people love to read science fiction, or see shows and movies about aliens and other planets - and this is all very nice, and quite traditional. The Greeks did this sort of thing: the whole Odyssey is a ten year mission to see all kinds of strange beings but get home eventually... And GKC links these ideas with our own work of today:

Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.
[GKC "A Defence of Nonsense" in The Defendant]

In the last chapter, GKC used "Elfland" and the idiom of fairy-tale to provide an allegory - a teaching analogy, or parallel - of the universe. In this chapter, he uses the idea of politics, of government - but in its primary, and most ancient form, enshrined in the mystic word "CITY" (polis in Greek, urbs in Latin).

((click here to read more))

And "City" comes from the Latin civis which means "citizen"... it comes from a root meaning "to summon" (a topic I must defer for today!) A citizen of the universe, then, can only be possible if we think of the universe as being organized - as a city is organized. What can that mean? Let us see.

When we talk about the deepest sense of city life - that is of politics - we are talking about how a man is to live with his fellow man. The ancients knew that even when one has one's own farm, and is more or less independent, living off the land, there were certain rules and certain disciplines which had to be enacted. I have no time to explore this in detail; another book, or perhaps a blogg might deal with it - but the one thing that jumps out of the memories of my reading was the strange mystic character the Romans assigned to a crossroads - typically, where three or four paths joined at the boundaries of farms. There were rituals and other actions which were performed there, and they became endowed with both a reverence and a certain kind of rustic fear. (Rustic is from Latin rus the country, which also gives us "rural".)

But, things change when one does not have many acres of fields, and one's house is next to another's. Additional laws and rules must be arranged. Indeed, as GKC points out, even that attitude about the cross-roads has not been lost in our modern technical age, where streets cross even in heavy urban downtowns like London:

The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death.
[GKC Heretics CW1:55]

Nor is it something simply pagan: no, it has all the drama of the Gospel, and all the shock of every crisis in literature:

The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross. For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:195]

But the cross-roads - or perhaps I ought use the term "street intersection" - does not feel rural. No, it feels urban. It is a trademark of the City. You may not know that term "signal box" though you have seen them. I will explain what these "coloured fires" are doing - it is quite high-tech, though you may not know it.

Where I used to work there was a time when I had to regulate the use of a single computer between two divisions of the department who made the schedules for the playing of certain TV commercials. I had to arrange something external to the computer which would keep these two divisions from trying to proceed into certain actions, both at the same time. When we do this in programming, we use a system device called a MUTEX - from the term "MUTual EXclusion" - but I was busy on another project and could not add a mutex to the programs at that time. So I took a scrap of paper and wrote "MUTEX" on it, and fastened it to the little stuffed "Abominable Snow Monster" doll that they kept in the department office, and told them: "If you want to use the computer, you must have take the MUTEX with you while you are using it. You cannot use the computer unless you are holding the MUTEX." Since only one person could hold our stuffed mutex at a time, only one person could use that computer.... and behold: the system worked, and they had some good laughs about it. (Eventually the program was revised to use the software kind of mutex, but the Abominable still kept its new name tag!)

Now, in the world you know, assuming you drive a car, there are also MUTEXes around - but they are Chesterton's "signal boxes" - which we call "traffic lights": the fires of green and red which keep other men from death, for only one may use a traffic intersection at a time!

This is what we mean by politics, not the parties. It is the system of rules we have made to organize our life with each other. But you came to hear GKC, not me, so please proceed:

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.
[CW1:271]

Wow, talk about binding diverse ideas together! Suddenly the great Ten Commandments are turned into something as bland as a traffic light? No - this is not a weakening of our view of the Decalogue, but a strengthening of our understanding of both the Ten and traffic lights. GKC now proceeds to link this sense of reverence for "the place where you live" back to his starting point of the odd couple of optimist and pessimist (see last week for more) and extends this into human relations:

If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back - his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.
[CW1:271-2]

The word "mother" seems to creep in unexpectedly here. You may recall that GKC dedicated this book Orthodoxy to his mother. But there is an important echo of another essay here, and one which may surprise anyone who has had to struggle with that odd little four-letter word "love":

On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word 'love' is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
["A Defence of Patriotism" in The Defendant]

And surely this term "love" was in GKC's thought as he goes on:

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises - he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, "My cosmos, right or wrong." He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained without it.
[CW1:272-3]

Remember we saw previously that "jingo" means "one who favours or supports a bellicose policy in foreign affairs" or "blustering patriot"... but also remember that I quoted Fr. Jaki's great title for GKC, "Champion of the Universe". Clearly there must be (as the scholastics would say) some distinction to be made. We must know how to deal with this apparent conflict. And GKC proceeds to examine that question:

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything) comes in ith the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason - because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.
[CW1:273-4]

There are a few things to define here - Hindoo (now spelled "Hindu") indicates India, which was then part of the British Empire - but the rest (e.g. of 1870, or the Norman vs. Saxon Conquest) I must defer. The idea comes across, even without a precise understanding of these historical events.... because he is getting to the mystery of love, and how it plays its role in the human system, our "life in the City"...

Here is another line for your notebooks, and a saying to be blazoned in your City Hall and e-mailed to those in government! Read it again, and think about it: "The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics." Bear in mind, too, our past discussion of the Theta and Pi of Boethius, and how true Philosophy binds the higher (theoretical) with the lower (practical).

Maybe more politicians ought to study the theory of the mutex...

--Dr. Thursday

PS GKC has a great discussion of "polite" and "police" - here it is:

A certain magistrate told somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always be polite to the police." I do not know whether the magistrate noticed the circumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the same origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness without thinking of a policeman; it's even possible that our eyes often alight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to the subject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only the link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the only serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a mere frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotism and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is because they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of the beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is not really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon: a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is politeness: a veiled image of politeness - sometimes impenetrably veiled. But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose all delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for something civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of a knight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of a knight-errant.
[GKC ILN Sept 29 1906 CW27:292-3]

GKC and Father O'Connor link talked about in England

From the blog:

For the Catholic boys of Bradford, Fr. Arthur Hinsley (later Archbishop and Cardinal) founded St. Bede's Grammar School (originally) near St. Patrick's church. His assistant was Father John O'Connor. Fr. O'Connor was a great friend of G.K. Chesterton who based his famous character, Father Brown, on this real priest.
St. Bede's daughter school was Cardinal Hinsley Grammar School for boys. As far as I am aware, this was always a school with lay staff and under the control of its only Headmaster, the late Walter Earnshaw. In the early 1980s Hinsley/Clitherow amalgamated to form Yorkshire Martyrs Collegiate School.
The link between G.K.Chesterton and Mgr. O'Connor and the much maligned Heckmondwike will be a future feature on this blog.

I'll keep an eye out for this "future feature".

How to Get Into Debt

From the book cover:

Debt - we all long for it, but sometimes it seems so unattainable. With the proper mindset and the step-by-step tools contained in this book, you'll be fighting off collection agencies and delaying payments to your bankruptcy attorney in no time. Whether your weakness is over-earning or under-spending, you'll learn to maximize the gap between your income and your outflow, all at the highest possible interest rates.

The so-called "Self-Hurt" series, a spoof on America's love for self-help, is a funny and instructive series to help to improve your life by doing, well, the opposite really, of what the book says.

So, for example, when the book says to overspend, use those credit card checks, shop at Whole Foods, and never pay the balance on the credit card statement, you know what to really do.

A humorous and Chestertonian take on our nation's #1 problem: being unable to save money.

Get Smart Chestertonian Moment

After the recent issue of the old "Get Smart" TV show on DVD, we've been watching for family "movie" night.

Last night's episode was particularly Chestertonian.

86 and 99 are fighting off the bad guys in the toy department of a store. After discovering that they are out of real ammunition, they begin to use the ping pong ball shooter, the toy guns, stuffed animals, and finally, a toy exploding dirigible to fight off the enemy successfully.

When 99 wonders how they did it, Smart says, "Well, we had every toy made for children at our command; they only had real guns and bullets."

I liked that line a lot, and it seemed as if you might like it, too.

National Post Defends Chesterton

From the National Post article:

T he New Yorker magazine recently got into all sorts of trouble for its satirical front cover cartoon depicting Barack Obama as an orthodox Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as a terrorist. Some people, it seems, simply can't take a joke. G. K. Chesterton could. Which is a good thing in that the British writer was the subject of a long and critical essay in the preceding issue of The New Yorker, in which the great man was accused of anti-Semitism and his Catholic religion painted with a strong, dull coat of condemnation.

It goes to Chesterton's reputation and influence that he's still being vilified even though he died in 1936. The dead only matter if they once spoke the truth.

Read the whole article, it's pretty good.
H/T: David Z.

The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Sale at Amazon

On sale for 98% off: normally priced $980, now $15.

The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (7 Volumes) (Paperback)
I: Aids to Reflection, The Statesmen's Manual
II: The Friend
III: Biographia Literaria
IV: Lectures Upon Shakespeare
V: The Literary Remains, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit
VI: Church and State, A Lay Sermon, Table Talk, more
VII: Poetry, Plays

H/T: John G.

Eyes and Feet: Standing in the Place Where We Live

Eyes and Feet: Standing in the Place Where We Live

Wow, I have just looked at where we are in Orthodoxy - and I am rather chagrined to note that we have five more chapters to cover - just about 100 pages - and only five months of Thursdays to do them in! Either we have to get someone to change the calendar, or you'll have to read faster. Ahem.

The next chapter, "The Flag of the World", stands in relation to politics, government, sociology and history the way the last chapter stood in relation to science and engineering. Of course it touches philosophy just as much as the last one did, and since philosophy underpins all disciplines, as much as the other "support" disciplines like mathematics and English - that is, your own natural language - you must always expect to see philosophy. What do I mean? I mean philosophy in the simple sense (yes, there's a paradox for you) - or maybe I ought to say the ancient sense - that is, the love of wisdom: the desire and the active effort to think and put into rational order the matters at hand, whether drawn from nature, from personal experience, or from deep interior contemplation. And it may be good to review some background information before we proceed.

Contemplation, you may recall, is the English word for the Latin contemplatio, which the Scholastics used as a translation for the great and exceedingly deep Greek Qewria = theoria, with a long o, the word which gives us "theory" and related words. This word has a Greek root meaning sight, vision - an idea we have encountered many times on our journey. Remember, too, this word is shorthanded by the great Theta emblazoned on the robes of Philosophy when she appeared in allegorical form to Boethius in his The Consolation of Philosophy (which I wrote about here). Linked "as if by stairs" to the Theta is the letter Pi, first letter of praxis; together these two letters stand for the theoretical (or contemplative) and the practical (or active) branches of philosophy.

Now, I have reviewed this because I want to paint a relation between this pair and another pair of pairs which GKC mentions. These odd couples will help reveal something important about our cosy universe, which is our home.

((click here to proceed))

The pair of ideas GKC starts with are perhaps even more opposite than theory vs. practice: he starts with optimism vs. pessimism, and proceeds to quote a child on the topic, kind of like Art "Kids Say the Darndest Things" Linkletter:

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, "An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet." I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.
[CW1:269]

Brilliant. Now this reduction from optomism/pessimism to eyes/feet by the unnamed little girl found a strange echo for me in a rock song. I never did know what "R.E.M." really meant by their song "Stand", perhaps some odd rebel thing, but of course since I follow a rebel (we'll see this in a few chapters, it's in CW1:343), and since I have learned how to hunt for truth even in the darkest corners (like Aquinas using Aristotle), I will take my own meaning from their curious and ill-fitting lyrics, which I quote from memory.

Stand in the place where you live, (now face north)
Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before.
Stand in the place where you work, (now face west)
Think about place where you live wonder why you haven't before.
Your feet are going to be on the ground,
your head is there to move you around.

Oh, it's probably some social commentary, and if an R.E.M. person reads this, why not read some Chesterton? Yes, indeed; you may be surprised! But even the paradox of the head (not the feet) being the means of movement is Chestertonian, if not exceedingly Scholastic, but we cannot discuss causes here. Ahem. Anyway, if you do think about this a little, you realize the Pauline drama of eyes (synecdoche for head) versus feet: St. Paul did not say "the foot is not the eye" but he could have. (cf. 1Cor12) But you, the complete you, are neither eye nor foot. Nor is reason found in optimism nor in pessimism, even though those color the place where we live.

I have commented elsewhere about choice of road (which can be found in Rush's "Free Will" or in Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven") but the thrust of GKC's idea here is the same as R.E.M.: that is, thinking about the place where we live and work, and looking around:

But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist. 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 midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.
[CW1:269-270]

What flag? The flag of the world. And let us not forget, "world" means more than "Planet Earth" as if it were just another stop on some intergalactic bus line. "World" translates the Greek kosmos = kosmos, usually spelled cosmos, and is "THE ALL", the ordered system of all created things - the place where we live. But what happened when GKC "took a look around", as he was growing up after his training in fairy tales?

In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales. The reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly comes next in the history of a boy. We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. 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. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.
[CW1:270]

What is a "penny dreadful"? Ah, cheap horror or mystery fiction which GKC loved (see his "A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" in The Defendant.) What's "jingo literature", you ask? Ah. The dictionary says "one who favours or supports a bellicose policy in foreign affairs" or "blustering patriot" - originally a supporter of Disraeli's policy in 1878 (GKC was four that year). GKC is not here recommending a particular national, or even international policy - he is recommending a certain view of our world, our "cosy cosmos" as he told us in the last chapter.

Now, this may seem a bit abstract, and maybe as intricately abstruse as rock lyrics. So, as a good teacher, GKC gives us an example:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing - say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
[CW1:270-271]

Now, before we proceed, there is a hilarious joke here, which is not easy for an American to get, unless he has been to London - or has a map.

Alas I have not yet been to London. But I have a map.

To disapprove of Pimlico and move to Chelsea - these places are merely districts of London, and are next to each other.

OK, now that you have finished laughing... I have to conclude today's studies here. You need to think about direction, and the place where you live.... remembering it's not simply Chelsea or Pimlico, but the Universe, the Cosmos... our cosy universe, as we have been told.

One of the most thrilling phrases associated with Gilbert Keith Chesterton - the most thrilling I have encountered - is the title of the fourth and last chapter of Fr. Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science. It is "The Champion of the Universe". This title might derive directly from this chapter, even though it is a most insightful glimpse of how GKC deals with Science - and the Universe. GKC puts it this way:

it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.
[CW1:270]

Yes: this begs the question: loyalty to whom? It's about time you asked that question. We'll start getting some real hints of that in our next expedition.

--Dr. Thursday

Appello ad rete

(that is, I appeal to the Net.)

A Chestertonian researcher has asked a favour, and I am unable to help, so I appeal to you, o Chestertonians for assistance. Here is the matter to be considered:

Needed: the text of a German poem, celebrating the eight beatitudes, a poem displayed about thirty years ago on a wall of the sanctuary of the Beatitudes near the Lake of Genesaret. Perhaps a Franciscan connection may help.

This is not the kind of thing that is in AMBER. Note: it is not BY Chesterton; we are simply assisting a Chestertonian.

Any suggestions?

--Dr Thursday

UPDATE: Nick from combox to be commended for finding it! This is the one. Thanks everyone for the great sleuthing!

Geir Hasnes: The Flag of the World/Loyalty to Life

Yesterday, I received a package in the mail which consisted of a mysterious CD and some loose papers which appeared to be a PowerPoint presentation. I was told:

...I am compelled to...send...the presentation by our favorite Norwegian bibliographer. I will post that CD to you...You'll understand after you've listened, and further explanation will only lessen its impact for you, so 'nuff said.

So, yesterday, I listened.

Luckily, I had had further warning to have tissue close by.

Now, since Geir told us in the talk that he watches the blogs to find out what people have to say about him, I shall have to say a few things about this talk.

1. Geir has a funny accent. I think it is because he is actually Norweigan. Like from that country, not just his nationality. But I could be wrong.

2. Geir is a cryer. He said it, I didn't.

3. Geir is funny. He has a Chestertonian way of interspersing humor into a very serious story, helping to lighten the load for those listening intently.

4. Geir made two cardinal joke-telling errors, in that he failed to give out the punch line of two jokes.

a. How many Chestertonians does it take to change a lightbulb? How will I ever know now?

b. What did the blonde tell the Chestertonian? I can't even imagine that one.

So, after this kind of build up, you are probably wondering, what in the world was Geir's talk about?

Geir had a chapter in Orthodoxy to talk about, the Flag of the World chapter. But, as he told us in his talk, he wasn't going to talk about that, because everyone in the room should either have already read that chapter, or they haven't, in which case they've already made up their mind not to read it and were just at the conference to party.

But, Hasnes did bring up some great points about the chapter: to talk about Chesterton, you must:

1. Understand what Chesterton said.

2. Think of some modern situations that compare to the situations that Chesterton talked about, and

3. Apply Chesterton's way of thinking to the newer problems; and

4. Be sure to use humor.

So, in that light, Hasnes wanted to apply the idea of abortion to Chesterton's thinking, using his own personal situation as an example.

And what ensued was a very personalized story about Hasnes' life, his mother's choice to bear a child even after being violated, and the result being a life worth living.

After thinking about the talk, I realized that Hasnes was really not talking about himself. He was talking about his mother. His mother is the one who was brave, noble, life-giving, self-sacrificing, courageous, scared, poor, etc. His mother is the hero of the story, but, like many heros, she was also a tragic hero, not realizing her own gift, her own huge sacrifice she gave to the world.

Like many of us, our choices seem so personal, so quiet, so unknown. We may believe that the sacrifice we make or made has no consequence to our lives, and maybe it doesn't: but maybe it makes a huge difference to the world. And maybe we'll never know that.

Geir is grateful for the life he was given, the life he's been able to live because of his mother's great love. His story was touching and moving, because he was there to tell it.

At the end, I'm sure he had the whole audience in tears as he recited Chesterton's famous poem, By the Babe Unborn:

"By the Babe Unborn"
by G.K. Chesterton
If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

In dark I lie; dreaming that there
Are great eyes cold or kind,
And twisted streets and silent doors,
And living men behind.

Let storm clouds come: better an hour,
And leave to weep and fight,
Than all the ages I have ruled
The empires of the night.

I think that if they gave me leave
Within the world to stand,
I would be good through all the day
I spent in fairyland.

They should not hear a word from me
Of selfishness or scorn,
If only I could find the door,
If only I were born.

The Curé D'Ars

The Curé D'Ars

This is GKC's preface to The Secret of the Curé d'Ars (translated by F. J. Sheed), by Henri Ghéon. Messrs. Sheed & Ward, 1929; the preface was collected in G.K.C. as M.C.

I thought it would be appropriate to read this today.

--Dr. Thursday

The Catholic Church is much too universal to be called international, for she is older than all the nations. She is not some sort of new bridge to be built between these separated islands; she is the very earth and ocean-bed on which they are built. Nevertheless, as she has always been able to work through variety as well as uniformity, she is now able to appeal to the nations as nations, but to appeal to them rather to learn from each other than to lie about each other. The Catholic nations are very national; but each has specialized in some spiritual truth, rather as each of the Catholic Guilds specialized in some technical trade. So the fullness and kindliness of the Faith has abounded in Flemish art and folk-lore; so the fire and chivalry of it in Polish history and tradition. The Spaniard has splendidly maintained in poverty that human dignity which he never wholly lost even under the load of wealth. The Irish have kept a clear space for that strange purity of the mind, in which even hatred has become something clean and translucent, compared with the loves of other lands. In the same fashion, French Catholicism gathers up and gives expression to the vital virtues of France, of which (needless to say) it was the creator in the dim and turbulent age when Gauls and Franks became a nation. And it is of the very nature of France that the French Catholic should emphasize the fact that the Church is a challenge.

In this case we feel at its worst the weakening of the word 'apologetics' for the defence of Christian dogma, and the verbal degeneration by which the defiant thing once called an apologia has dwindled to the feeble thing called an apology. In fact, of course, an apologia is almost the opposite of an apology. But it is true, and it may in some cases even be fortunate, that men of a somewhat milder type or tradition have often defended Christianity, and even Catholicism, in a tone that was deprecating and tactful, and might have seemed to some to be apologetic. There is nothing of this sort about the typical French Catholic. There is nothing of this sort about M. Henri Ghéon. There was nothing of this sort about the Curé d'Ars. The first fact that will strike anyone outside the Catholic Church, and even a good many people inside it, in the attitude both of the author and the subject of this book is that a Frenchman of this sort is essentially militant There is nothing apologetic about his apologetics. He is not only propagandist but provocative. It is a quality which can, of course, take bad as well as good forms; just as it can be put at the service of bad as well as good causes. But there has always been apparent on both sides of the French religious quarrel a certain insistent and irritant character. I have heard that a sceptical mayor of some French town was not content with taking the metal of certain church bells, but cast it into a statue of Zola. He did the most annoying thing he could possibly think of. I believe that a statue of a great French freethinker, honoured in foreign countries as a great scholar and man of letters, was set up to be a glory to his own village; and the villagers instantly battered it to pieces with stones. Try to imagine villagers in Surrey doing this to a statue of George Meredith, because he was an agnostic. To put this aspect of French Catholicism in a word, in France the defence is not merely defensive. It is, in the honourable and soldierly sense of the word, offensive. As Mr. Belloc has remarked somewhere, 'the French do not fight with reluctance.'

This book is the story of a humble and saintly parish priest, who lived a quiet life in a rustic corner. It is natural to think first of him as gentle and pacific; and in one sense, like all such men, he was very gentle and very pacific. But he was, above all things, challenging. If I might so express it, he was above all things exasperating. He was a walking contradiction; he cut across the whole trend of his time at right angles; quite content to know that the angle was right. Nearly all people of the other race or temper, like so many English and some German people, take their divergence in a sort of curve, feeling the forces round them as things that can be partially followed, if they are ultimately left behind. But M. Ghéon sees M. Vianney primarily as a protest and a denial; a denial of all the things which were at his moment most confidently affirmed. M. Vianney appeared in history at the supreme moment of the French Revolution, when it was proclaiming both tremendous truths and tremendous falsehoods as with the trumpets of the Apocalypse. And in the midst of all those thunders the Curé d'Ars stood calmly talking about something totally different. He was talking exactly as he would have talked if he had been a Celtic hermit of the Dark Ages talking to a savage tribe of Picts. At the very moment when the human world seemed to have been enlarged beyond all limits for all to see, he declared it to be quite small as compared with things that hardly anybody could see. At the moment when thousands thought they were reading a radiant and self-evident philosophy, proved quite clearly in black and white, he calmly called its black white and its white black. For us who live at the end of the rationalist and republican epoch, it is difficult to measure how hopeful was the beginning of it, and how hopeless seemed the contradiction of it. For already the curve of the world has begun to creep backwards a little nearer to the mysticism of such a saint; though, alas, the modern mind has more often changed negatively by disillusion than positively by enthusiasm. But in the atmosphere of his own age, he was like a man dug up out of some other aeon or flung from some other planet. And indeed the quarrel of the world about such a man must always be, in a deeper sense, on whether he has risen from the Stone Age or fallen from the stars.

M. Ghéon, the author of so many striking dramas, sees here chiefly the drama of such a defiance. Sometimes, I am tempted to fancy, he even exaggerates the contrast, not so much between the saint and the period as between the saint and the ordinary life. But I recognize in that the fighting French exaggeration; such as appears in Wilfrid Ward's life of his father, touching the parallel between the French and English reaction. While Newman was rationalizing against rationalism in The Grammar of Assent, Veuillot was hurling Holy Water in the faces of the French rationalists, as the thing that would exasperate them most. And there is in fact a vital value in emphasizing the contrast, as a part of the controversy that concerns everybody. The critics of the Church are notably unlucky in hitting on the charge that she belongs to a feudal world or particular periods of the past. They are driven to call so many modern things medieval, that it is at last apparent that she is no more medieval than she is modern. It was in the dull daylight of the manufacturing and materialistic nineteenth century that the unearthly light shone from the cavern of Lourdes. And it was in the full sunrise of the secular age of reason introduced by the eighteenth century that a nimbus not of that age or of this world could be seen round the head of the Curé d'Ars.