Conference Issue of Gilbert Magazine

A few days ago, I received my copy of Gilbert Magazine, and I am still enjoying it.

I loved reading all about the conference, as I couldn't be there this year. I didn't even know (this is how outsider of an insider I am) that Gilbert had an intern this summer, but we did! Thanks Ann Colwell for the great write up of the conference, and the interesting interview with William Oddie. Keep up the good work.

I guess I am one of Chris Chan's two faithful readers, because I was ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing) over his latest ploy to change the world: the new organization called P.A.T.H.O.S.

The two Gilbert Scholarship winners were included in this issue, and two fine essays by Maria McDonald and Andrew Horne. Congratulations winners! We hope to hear more from you.

The new/old essay of Chesterton's titled "The Ethics of Elfland" was intriguing to read. It wasn't the chapter from Orthodoxy, but written years before that. I find it fascinating to sort of trace Gilbert's thoughts on this subject, and to find this clear thinking over and over again is so refreshing.

Kyro Lantsberger, David Fagerberg, David Beresford, and Robert Moore-Jumonville's columns were fun (especially that one about driving hundreds of miles to get a good dish of bbq ribs).

After the current insanity of the election, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to hang out and read Gilbert, and temporarily forget that we are in the midst of the most important election ever. ;-)

The Saints, or a Bar of Platinum

Which might have as subtitle, "Unrolling or Walking - or a Form?"

Saturday, as you may know, is the feast of All Saints, and until the canonisation of Frances and Gilbert is achieved, must serve as our "feast day" to commemorate them as well as all the others who have attained heaven. Note: In no way do I imply any anticipation of the judgements of the Church; I fully submit to her authority on the matter of their sanctity. But I do have an opinion on the topic. GKC and FBC are most remarkable models, and most unexpected by so many notions of "saints" and "sanctity". You see, we tend to expect that a saint has a certain appearance - but that's silly. Just look at the chunky sedentary megawriter named Aquinas and the gaunt bouncy nah-I'm-too-busy-to-read John Bernardone... Who's that, you ask? It's a trick; we know him under his nickname. Here's a hint: he's the only other saint GKC wrote a book about. Of course he did write poems - the great Canticle of the Creatures is just about as Thomistic a piece of tech stuff as you'll find! And Aquinas, for all his bulk, walked across Europe at least twice or so - from Italy to Cologne to Paris to Rome, and perhaps to England - not necessarily in that order.

So what is a saint? A saint is a human who has attained heaven, by spending his time on earth striving to somehow approach a certain form - the form of the Master. In Genesis, we are told we are "made in the image and likeness of God"; in the gospels we are told we must turn, or convert, and - what? And become like little children. [Mt 18:3] We need to "get in shape" - a mystical shape, given the two examples I have suggested - but one which they both attained, and one which we also called to work for.

This sense of an exemplar - a role model - a mentor - a teacher - a master - all these terms point towards something which is (1) not ourselves, (2) fixed in its character (3) and a measure to which we are held. Some years ago, there was a lot of debate about measurement. The committees eventually decided on a bunch of new units of measure, centered about the unit of length called the "meter" - supposedly one ten-millionth of earth's meridian quadrant at sea level. This "metric" system (from the Greek metron = "measure, quantity") was finally epitomised in a bar made of hard, heavy and precious metal, which measured the ideal or "standard" meter, and kept in Sèvres, France; they were made in 1793, and served for some years as the great exemplar for the whole world. It was kept in a safe place, in a vacuum, so it would not change. Nowadays we do it differently; if you wish to know more you can visit the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. But as an idea, this old "standard meter" is still a standard, as it tells us something about saints - and about this week's portion of Orthodoxy.

((click here to read more))

It is very interesting to note some of the parallels of the saints to the famous bar-of-platinum "meter". For one thing, the ISO can in some ways be considered the Vatican of science. You may laugh, but it is true: it is not simply international, but supernational - hee hee - no, I did not say supernatural! Its work is intended to benefit - indeeed, to serve - all the world. For another, the standard meter bar was made of rare and precious metals, (platinum, according to one source, or possibly a mixture of the platinides) - this was not to make it impossible to reproduce, but because the material chosen had the desired property of being stable. It would not rust, or deteriorate, or get attacked by bacteria, or fade in sunlight, or be changed by any earthly agent. The place where it was kept was held at a constant temperature so that it would not vary as the weather grew warmer or colder - and it was kept in a "protected" place - not to forbid access, for that was the point of having such a thing - but to keep it beyond the reach of any who might wish to meddle with it (though platinum is so hard it would be foolish to attempt filing it or anything like that.)

What's the point of this discussion? To stimulate interest in science, or drum up new members for the ISO? Well, there aren't lots of Chestertonian scientists, so I do hope some of our Chestertonian lit'ry friends will be inspired to learn a little about my field - after all, I busy myself in their world, as you see! But no. It is because the next few paragraphs of Orthodoxy delve into how this sense of measurement and standardisation link in to GKC's thought and his struggles to understand the world, and Christianity. Recall that last time we heard about the mess that some of GKC's intellectual opponents - people like Darwin or Nietzsche - have made: the mess that centers on certain words, almost the precise opposite of measure and standard:

We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress: personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form. It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image; to make it something that we see already in our minds. Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road - very likely the wrong road. But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape. And we know what shape.
[CW1:310]

OK, words! (That sounds like King Azaz in The Phantom Tollbooth.) Here we go: "evolution" is from the Latin ex+volvo = "I roll out, unroll". Progress is ultimately from the Latin gradior = "I step, walk". It would be perhaps a bit contentious to deal with the term "Reformation" just now - perhaps we can consider that in another posting someday. But if you wish to have a hint of how GKC really thought about this here you go:

Modern critics have congratulated Chaucer, or congratulated themselves, on the fact that he was so enlightened a reformer as to satirize the Monk and the Friar. Curiously enough, they have neglected to notice what he satirized them for. Rather simple things of this sort do often get overlooked. And the simple truth is that Chaucer satirizes the Monk for not being sufficiently Monastic. He may have been right or wrong; but it is certain that if he was right, the Reformers of the Reformation were wrong; and only on the assumption that they were wrong can we pretend that he was in any sense right. The point is rather practical; because nearly all studies of this period are full of the suggestion that Chaucer, like his contemporary Wycliffe, was a sort of morning star of the Reformation. We can only answer that in that case he was an eccentric star who wanted the sun to move backwards instead of forwards. In the whole of his satirical sketch of the Monk, the point is, not that the Monk is sunk in monkish superstitions, but simply that the Monk is not monkish enough. Protestantism, as it ultimately developed, professed to free monks and nuns from the prison of the cloister. It welcomed runaway monks and nuns to the freedom of the secular world; even when their conduct was rather alarmingly free and somewhat startlingly secular. But all Chaucer's denunciation is directed, not so much at a monk, as at a runaway monk; and that not because he is a monk but because he is a runaway.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:343]

Very much to the point, as we shall see.

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
[CW1:310]

What is "the New Jerusalem"? It is one of GKC's travel books which he wrote after his trip tot he Holy Land. (You can find it in CW20.) But GKC is referring to this:

And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
[Apocalypse/Revelation 21:1 et seq]

To put it another way, it's hard to get anywhere if you keep changing the destination as you travel. But as usual, GKC gives us an example for our amusement, and links it in:

Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, he started to paint everything red or yellow, his work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of his early bad manner. This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker. It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example. But it is literally the fact of recent history. The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belonged to the black and white epoch when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not unfrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be Conservative. But in the existing atmosphere there is not enough time and tradition in Radicalism to pull anything down. There is a great deal of truth in Lord Hugh Cecil's suggestion (made in a fine speech) that the era of change is over, and that ours is an era of conservation and repose. But probably it would pain Lord Hugh Cecil if he realized (what is certainly the case) that ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age of complete unbelief. Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy - the plain fruit of all of them is that the Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
[CW1:311-2]

Well - why Canterbury? it's not very ISO of Chesterton to say this - that is, it does not sound very Catholic. However, Canterbury was the origin point of Christianity in England, and the first English bishop was sent there by Pope St. Gregory the Great - St. Augustine (No, not Monica's son, the bishop of Hippo, who died in 430; this is the other St. Augustine, who died about 605!) Remember, also - in 1908 GKC was still about 14 years away from his home-coming, and he had been brought into Anglican practice by his dear wife Frances (she also became Catholic later). But this clash of Anglican vs. Roman ought not distract us here. Recall these critical words from his preface to The Everlasting Man, just as true for our present text: "this study is not specially concerned with the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant" [CW2:141] No, indeed; it is hilarious to imagine these arch-heretics holding up any episcopal throne (no pun intended). GKC goes on to demonstrate his point:

We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all the safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day - the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office - he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day. The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with sceptical literature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.
[CW1:312-3]

Who is Gradgrind? He's a character in Dickens' Hard Times;I do not know this story, but it is easy enough to get the sense from the context. If you'd like a bit more, here you go:

The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first, that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he attacked it without knowing he was doing it - certainly without knowing that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we will call Mr. Gradgrind.
[GKC The Victorian Age in Literature CW15:456]

[Dickens] seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth, that the backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to enter the house of Gradgrind. ... He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth century...
[GKC Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens CW15:292,362]

Now, I must touch on what might be a sensitive matter: please be careful not to read something into the term "negro slave" here - if you do, you ought to read it again, and see just what GKC has said, and compare this to the Gradgrind matter - and then to the larger thrust of the argument.

I am out of time for today, and must break off here, though the argument continues into the following paragraphs. I shall give you just the first line, since it gives the key thought for you to have today:

This, therefore, is our first requirement about the ideal towards which progress is directed; it must be fixed.
[CW1:313]

You must also have the companion argument, which is GKC's version of the whole point of the ISO meter-bar, and a wonderful conclusion for you to consider until next time:

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[GKC Heretics CW1:117]

People Going Nuts Over This Election

People are really losing perspective over this election. I've gotten urgent emails almost every hour letting me know, under no uncertain terms, that THIS is the most important election ever, that THIS is the critical election of all elections, the THIS election is more important than any other election, yada, yada, yada.

Sometimes I wonder if these folks have ever lived through an election before.

Every election, of course, is critical. Everyone should always vote, that's our American right. Of course, we have the freedom not to vote, too.

Maybe it's because I'm old enough to go back a few years, and remember a few past elections that I don't think this one is any more or less critical than any other election. I mean, it's not as if--if one candidate gets in we get heaven, and if the other gets in we get hell. I mean, with the economic mess, either one is going to be preoccupied for a long time on that.

I wish I could let those fear-mongers in on a little secret I've learned: neither one is going to keep their campaign promises. Neither one really can. Neither one can be a dictator, neither one can act alone. They do seem to believe that on the campaign trail, but we all know our country doesn't work that way.

I decided long ago who to vote for, and I'll bet you did too. So, we have one week to wait, and then, I hope, all these emails will stop, and we can get on with arguments about something other than how critical this election is. Wouldn't that be fun?

From Jill K.:

A week from now begins the Midwest Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conference. Below is the session description from the conference program:

S3.6. Chippawa – Ground Floor 11:30-12:45 Saturday
Special Session: G.K. Chesterton: Speaking To and About the World, Yesterday & Today
Area Chair: Jill Kriegel, Florida Atlantic University
***G.K. Chesterton and the Philosophy of Surprise
Robert MacArthur, Center for the American Idea
***A Tale of Emptied Hells: The Philosophical Journey of G. K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday
Jon Coutts, Briercrest Seminary
***Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek
Aron Dunlap, Temple University
***Tourist Imaginaries: Chesterton and Bauman on Engaging and Understanding the Other
Jessey Gilley, University of Kansas

The whole program can be found at this link.

Looks exciting. Good luck Jill, Rob, Jon, Aron and Jessey.

The World will never want for wonders...

Funny Youtube video of a Chestertonian perspective on the lack of wonder in today's world.

H/T: Rob D.

Debate: Chesterton vs. Obama

Here they debate economics. Quite interesting!

Fans of ACS on EWTN Unite!

From reader Carol:

I tuned in to EWTN, only to see a commercial first for a special presentation of "Into Great Silence" which will air on SUNDAY NIGHT AT NINE!

I think that just S-T-I-N-K-S. Don't misunderstand; I am actually very interested in seeing "Into Great Silence"... but not at the expense of Chesterton! It will be the second Sunday evening in a row that "Apostle of Common Sense" has been pre-empted for something else, and the third Sunday night in two months.

I have complained via e-mail to EWTN twice in recent months about it and asked Dale if he felt the third time would be overkill. He said to encourage others to complain.

So, if you are so inclined, would you email EWTN, too?

Gargoyles! Or, Turtles All the Way Down...

Which ought to be subtitled, "Yes, Professor ___, GKC really is a Philosopher" where you can supply the professor or author's name of your choice. At first I was going to call today's posting "GKC: Too 'Practical' To Be A Philosopher" or "Evolution Is Nonsense When It's Not Science" but I liked the gargoyle imagery better. Halloween is next week, after all, and you may wish to modify your plans once you read what I have to say today. Hee hee.

You know what a gargoyle is, don't you? It's a nasty-looking demon head, usually found on medieval cathedrals, with a BIG gaping mouth. The mouth is connected to a rainspout, so when there's a storm, it looks like the demon is puking. Yes, slowly but surely we are nearing that greatest, and most-misquoted of all GKC's words, the "toucan" quote about angels taking themselves lightly. [CW1:325] The associated line, which comes on the next page, is the relevant one for our consideration: "...solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity." [CW1:326] The one thing it is said the devil cannot stand is to be made fun of, and what better way to joke at the Universal Failure than to make him into a drain! Ha HA! You think this is NOT Chestertonian. It is, and I can show an even better example. GKC is considering an old puppet-play which was the original tale of Faust, a doctor (possibly a philosopher?) who summons demons:

The learned doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of the earth to find a certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which he can control the infernal deities. At last he procures the one precious volume, opens it at the proper page, and leaves it on the table while he seeks some other part of his magic equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour defying and dominating hell.
["A Drama of Dolls" in Alarms and Discursions 42-43]

I would heartily like to find this script - it is not in the Faust I obtained from Dover - and as yet no one has been able to locate this particular version. But, perhaps because I am a computer scientist and have some experience in - er - giving instructions, let us say - I think this one of the funniest bits of comedy: the subjection of the powers of Hell to act as nothing more than an overworked piece of machinery. Hilarious! The servant had the right idea: like gargoyles, the demons really ought to be put to use somehow. Some modern Dante might put them into his updated cosmology as the black holes at the center of the galaxies - the demons wanted the whole world to revolve around them - and now it does. It's that practicality, which is the grand ally of humility - remember St. Francis unites these two words in his praise of Sister Water, who is humble and useful and precious? Yes, (gollum) indeed. And it is that usefulness we are seeing as we read GKC, especially his Orthodoxy.

The reason why some gargoyles, I mean some philosophers, refuse to consider Chesterton as a Philosopher - indeed, one of the first rank - is because they are not really philosophers at all! I don't know where the infection came in; I am not enough of a historian to know, and at present I have no time to trace the issue to the point of failure. But every so-called "philosopher" who refuses to be practical with his philosophy is by that very action cast out of the Order of the Lovers of Wisdom. I am not bitter about this; I am too practical to be bitter. I merely point to Boethius, a great philosopher of the past, who described the robe of Philosophy as having been torn by violence - the robe, which she had made herself, bore the Greek letters Pi and Theta - symbolising the Practical and Theoretical, linked together. If that is too esoteric a citation, I can put it more plainly: if you are too theoretical, you shall never publish any books - or even journal articles! (You might get ink on your fingers. Remember GKC and the Cyclostyle ink?) And if you do write such things, you are most likely being hypocritical. There are plenty of very solemn people, claiming to be "traditional" who argue against technology - on bloggs! Amazing. There are even some that have web sites; I've heard them whine about technology, especially the internet. It's funny. All this was recognized decades ago by A. N. Whitehead, in a quote I learned from one of Fr. Jaki's books:

Those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.
[A. N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason 12 quoted in S. L. Jaki, The Purpose of it All 57]

We shall hear more of such wonderful ridicule of the evolutionists as we get into today's study - it's hilarious, and so badly needed at the present time. (Note: an evolutionist is quite a bit different from a scientist, though sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart. We'll explore that topic eventually, but if you are anxious to learn, start with Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science.)

So I hope you are feeling a bit exhilarated by a sense of action, and perhaps even of debate - since we are going to get into some stern matters today. Yes, for today we begin the chapter called "The Eternal Revolution", the seventh of GKC's great book Orthodoxy.

(( read more))

You may recall that this book Orthodoxy is usually considered to be a book about Christianity, though so far we have not heard all that much about Christ. So you will be thrilled to read this opening paragraph, a smashingly good review, in which GKC drags Christ in, in an almost unbelievable manner:

The following propositions have been urged: First, that some faith in our life is required even to improve it; second, that some dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order to be satisfied; third, that to have this necessary content and necessary discontent it is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the Stoic. For mere resignation has neither the gigantic levity of pleasure nor the superb intolerance of pain. There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it. The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin. Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do - because they are Christian. And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful. Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, "If these were silent, the very stones would cry out." [Lk 19:40] Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus the façades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.
[CW1:307]

I think you may have noted my quoting lyrics from various rock-and-roll songs as relevant comparisons sprung to mind. Here, we see one of the more famous cross-links from GKC to rock:

I remember a debate in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in the name of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stones would cry out." With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed. With those words He founded Gothic architecture.
["The Tower" in Tremendous Trifles]

That "a natural noisiness at a great moment" always makes me think of the almost unnoticed directions on the first album by "Rush": "For best results play at maximum volume." But there is another extension to another form of art, very fitting for us to consider with Halloween in the near future: the very curious medieval "let's all laugh at the devil" art called the Gargoyle. This is another very interesting demonstration of GKC's powerful scholastic style, where he examines even such an odd branch of art as this sculpture for the adorning of rainspouts. Elsewhere you will find this:

A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.
[The Everlasting Man CW2:252]

But we are not doing that here! We are making rain spouts, and of course the best way of making such a dull and practical thing is to make it into a joke. So the great builders of the Middle Ages made the prosaic rainspout look like the devil is puking, so we can laugh every time it rains. They understood how to use even ugliness - to laugh at what ought to be laughed at. For more details on this curious art, see "On Gargoyles" in Alarms and Discursions; it will surprise you. Of course there is lots more to Gothic architecture than gargoyles: remember last week when we heard: "In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress." [CW1:303] Jesus tells us that Hell is the town dump of the universe, and He constantly reminded His followers of the reality of the rotting stink and fires they could see just outside Jerusalem. It's easy enough to overlook such a practical matter - but neither He nor the Gothic designers did!

Next, GKC proceeds to a kind of review in a very Scholastic manner, by a consideration of the opponents:

If these things be conceded, though only for argument, we may take up where we left it the thread of the thought of the natural man, called by the Scotch (with regrettable familiarity), "The Old Man." We can ask the next question so obviously in front of us. Some satisfaction is needed even to make things better. But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle - that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism. Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant.
[CW1:307]

We have seen all this about the circle in "The Maniac" [CW1:222, 231], and GKC carries the argument into fiction in the opening chapter of his The Ball and the Cross. But we have another image here, which may sound like just GKC's usual animal humour, but is really an excellent cross-link to the whole cosmological error of the ancients - what Fr. Jaki calls the "stillbirth of science" [see chapters 1-6 of his Science and Creation] brought on by the fixation on the circle, the belief that all things would eternally repeat: Jaki recounts a tongue-in-cheek view of this, which will give you the necessary detail:

Turtles entered cosmology several thousand years ago. According to ancient Hindu lore, the world is resting on the back of a tiger that stands on an elephant, which in turn is supported by a turtle. In one way or another, the turtle is imagined to be self-supporting. This story must have been in the mind of that little old lady who went to hear a prominent cosmologist lecture on the stellar universe. She became legendary because her story, apparently true, has been retold many times and in the process has taken on some graphic details, such as that she wore shabby tennis shoes, perhaps a symbol of her resilience. What the cosmologist said is not recorded, but he obviously must have spoken of immense spaces, intangible nets of world-lines and the like that can easily create the impression that the universe hangs in mid-air. Something like this must have been in the mind of our legendary little lady, and she was not pleased at all. When the scientist took some questions after the lecture, she walked up to him, wagged her finger and said with a shrill voice: "Excuse me, sir, but you’ve got it all wrong. The truth is that the universe is sitting on the back of a huge turtle." "Oh really?" the cosmologist asked. "Well, tell me, what is the turtle standing on?" The little lady was ready with the reply: "Oh, it’s standing on another turtle." The cosmologist asked again: "And what is that turtle standing on?" Her reply came promptly: "Another turtle." The cosmologist began to repeat his former question, but she stopped him in mid-sentence: "Save your breath, sonny," she said. "It’s turtles all the way down." [Jaki, God and the Cosmologists 111, quoting R. Wright’s report, “Did the Universe just Happen?” on the ideas of E. Fredkin, a champion of artificial intelligence, in Atlantic Monthly, April 1988, p. 41]

I find this elegantly funny, since there is a formal proof in computer science that an infinite series of nested IFs is equivalent to a WHILE - but you may find the Hindu infinite turtles or GKC's turtle/elephant image much easier to grasp, and perhaps even funnier. Ahem. But let us not lose sight of the fatal blow GKC deals to evolution here! This is every bit as effective as Whitehead's "purpose in proving there is no purpose" - and perhaps there is a formal proof that they are equivalent. You may begin to glimpse the boredom I find in that topic, because the matter voiced by the evolutionist is clearly not about science! Yes - for science is not about "good" - remember the quote about boiling a man to see if he emits "the green fumes of depravity"? [ILN Sept 28 1907 CW27:559] Hee hee. But all that is really only said in passing, and a serious study of this is deferred. Here you need to know that he discards evolution (perhaps you ought to read "evolutionISM" here) as error, and this is why:

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature, and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God. We must have our own vision. But the attempts of most moderns to express it are highly vague.
[CW1:307-8]

Ah, now you begin to see the common point! Now, you understand the brilliance of GKC-the-philosopher!

You don't? Read it again. And don't confuse the sick philosophy of evolutionism with the very simple process of measuring a creature and comparing those measures with those made of its offspring - which is the real science of evolution. You have been misled by Darwin and a lot of other philosophers in lab coats. (I have a lab coat too. So there.) For more see Jaki's short chapter on GKC as "Critic of Evolutionism". But the point GKC is making is not strictly a critique of any science - it is a critique of really bogus philosophy. Darwin should have stuck to his finches.

Next, GKC proceeds to the next wrong alternative, though it may sound quite similar to the evolutionary one:

Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human morality is never up to date. How can anything be up to date? - a date has no character. How can one say that Christmas celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month? What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind his favourite minority - or in front of it. Other vague modern people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.
[CW1:308-9]

And thus GKC provides "kryptonite" to destroy Nietzsche's "superman"! Granted, such dark writing as Nietzsche or Darwin is not advised, but we ought to know what their errors were, and we ought to know the remedies.

You may find that argument confusing. It's an idea, after all, and (let us say it together): "Ideas are alarming!" Wow. Perhaps you'd like it better in another style of presentation? Here is the parallel from GKC's fiction:

[Syme, our hero asks Gregory the anarchist:] "First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:490]

Of course we know that was Darwin's plan because he actually wote it in a letter, and gave away the show, as Jaki tells us: "Sin is too blatantly a spiritual entity to have place in the radical materialism which Darwin, throughout his scientific career, meant to promote by his evolutionary theory. All doubt on that score has been made unscholarly by the full publication in the early 1970s of Darwin's notebooks from 1837-39." Jaki goes on to give us this grand insight into the error of Darwin the philosopher, which very interestingly links his thought to our "superman" by quoting "the precept laid down by Darwin himself": "Never say higher or lower." [This is from S. L. Jaki's The Only Chaos 147; his footnote reads: Darwin's handwritten note fastened with a clip in his copy of Chalmers' Vestiges of Creation. See More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of His Work in Hitherto Unpublished Letters, F. Darwin and A. C. Seward, eds. (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), vol. 1, p. 114.]

I think we have quite disposed of that matter, and can now proceed to hear GKC completing his review:

Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. Nature is going to do something someday; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.

Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people. This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution, to work for what you want, and to call that evolution. The only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men, is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere method and preparation for something that we have to create. This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. We must be clear about what we want to paint. This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles. We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.
[CW1:309-10]

Perhaps you are feeling a bit uncomfortable at this last paragraph. It seems to be a conclusion, but it also seems to be a transition, which is fairly typical in GKC's work. I have debated omitting it, but have decided I shall include it again next week. The argument is rather dense here, but I need to make a division somewhere, if just for the practical reason of my postings - if this were a book, it would not be as awkward. I think it may be helpful for you to review, as GKC did, this handful of nonsensical views, if only to begin to have a sense that they are wrong. As you read and think and study, you will be about to understand why they are wrong, and argue the issues for yourself. But they are very common, even 100 years afterwards - people are still harping on the same philosophy that gave us the Nazis and the Communists, pretending that there may be something good in it after all. It's time for you to throw it on the trash heap... or perhaps make a gargoyle.

A Chestertonian Wedding

A little birdie has told me that two Chestertonian young people, who have attended ChesterCons in the past, are engaged!

Congratulations Sheila and John!!!!

I'm already planning the Chestertonian wedding. Bun throwing and tossing contests, clerihew contests, poetry reading toasts, etc.

Chesterton on the Current Election

H/T: Peter F. Thanks.

ILN October 27, 1928
"The Innocent Conservatism of Youth"]

One of the old sayings repeated eternally by everybody, and rather especially by those who pride themselves on novelty and originality, is the statement that old people tend to be conservative, and that it is only the young who can really believe in change.

And yet this saying seems to me to be rather less than a half-truth - so much less as to be very nearly two-thirds of a lie. My own experience is this: that I was really much more conservative when I was a boy, though I admit that I was too conservative to be even conscious of how conservative I was. Click here for the rest.

I mean that I was conservative in this sense - that I did not really believe that the fashion of this world could pass away. I had certain ideals of reforming it, and to a great extent I have the same ideals still. In so far as they have changed, it is not in the direction of being any more content with the corruption and oppression of the world.

I was once what I called a Socialist; I am now what I call a Distributist. But the ideal of simplicity and small property is rather more unlike the existing condition than the ideal of Communism. It would change the world more to turn it into what I want than to turn it into what Mr. Philip Snowden [Philip Snowden (1864-1937) was an
English socialist statesman and advocate of free trade.] wants. There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

They are much nearer to each other than either is to my own ideal - of breaking up the big businesses into a multitude of small businesses. That would be really a change; but I am still ready for that change, and I see no reason to doubt that, when I am tottering on crutches at the age of ninety, I shall still be ready for that change.

What I was not ready for, in my youth, was something quite real and entirely different. I did not know that the world itself changes, long before we can change it.

Take a commonplace example for convenience. I sympathised then, and I sympathise still, with various claims of Labour which arose especially in connection with the coal-mines and with the railways. I do not think I have weakened in this: if anything, I think I was more doubtful and groping when I was young. But there was one thing that
I never really doubted when I was young. And that was that coal would continue to support England and enrich the capitalists of England.

I thought of this unique wealth as one of the conditions of the case, which might be attacked in various ways, moderate, greedy, revolutionary, and so on. But I vaguely assumed that the coal would be there, as I assumed that the sea would be there. Yet these things also can change; and even the sea is not quite so significantly and
satisfactorily there since the alteration of the relations of ships and aeroplanes.

I was accustomed to the two sides of the old argument about whether coal-owners were too rich; I never really looked forward to the new argument that coal-owners are too poor. I was accustomed to the talk of heaping up riches or dividing riches or justly distributing riches; but I had forgotten the old Scriptural figure that the riches themselves take to themselves wings and fly.

In a word, I could not imagine change, the real fundamental changes of this earthly life, because I was too conservative, being a boy.

In the same way, I knew all about the grumbling of railway passengers against railway porters, and in the same way about the grumbling of railway porters against railway directors. I sympathised more with the latter than with the former, and I do still.

But when I was a boy, which was just before the motorcar burst upon the world, I never dreamed of doubting that the railway-train dominated the whole future of the world. It was the latest great locomotive that man had invented. And that conservative spirit of childhood always makes the child think of the latest as the last.

To talk, as some people are now talking, of whether railways will become obsolete, of whether steam can be superseded, of whether railway stock will always be as safe as it was - all this would have been to me a prophecy as unintelligible as some of those Old Testament visions that seem a
medley of wheels and wings and clouds. Railways had been firmly established before I was born; I never dreamed of doubting that they would remain exactly the same after I died.

They seemed to me simply the iron framework of England, and almost of existence: as if
the embankments were built before the everlasting hills or the trains of "Bradshaw" followed their appointed circuit like the stars.

If there is any old gentleman still alive who remembers the time when there were no railways, he probably feels quite differently: he feels as I feel about motoring. I do not feel in this cosmic and conservative way about motoring, but I think it probable that the young who are younger than motoring really do. If you talk to them of a future without motoring, of a coming time when petrol will be scarcer than coal and men will walk about on their feet for want of wheels to carry them, it will seem like an unthinkable nightmare of negation. It will
seem what the amputation of all legs would seem to a population of pedestrians. But they also will learn in due course what they cannot conceive now, just as I have learnt in due course what I could not have conceived then: that it is the world that alters, even more than we who alter it.

Of course, it is a comparatively slow alteration, which to some muddle-headed evolutionists seems to make it more consoling, but in fact makes it much more dangerous. It may or may not be true that petrol will replace coal or cars replace railways. But nobody supposes that Waterloo Station fell in a heap of ruins when the first taxicab went across Waterloo Bridge, or that bats and owls nested in Clapham
Junction when the first petrol-pump was set up on the road to Clapham Common.

The point is not whether the changes are as rapid and revolutionary as the young are supposed generally to expect. The point is that they are not the changes they were
expecting. Above all, the point is that they are changes in the very material they propose to treat - not changes in the manner of treating it.

It is not a question of a younger generation wishing to carve the Phrygian cap or the Tree of Liberty [In Roman times, a Phrygian cap of red felt was given to a slave who had been freed; during the French Revolution, it became a powerful symbol for the revolutionaries. The Tree of Liberty was a similar symbol for the Americans.] on a stone that has been marked out for decoration with the Crown or the Cross.

It is a question of the stone crumbling away before it can be carved with anything, because they have forgotten the air they breathe, and the sky and the weather of the world.

We are always being told nowadays to allow for the natural impulses and instincts of youth. Let us be careful to allow for this most profound instinct of youth, its innocent conservatism. Let us always remember that to the very young the world they see really seems to be eternal; and that, however much they may talk a current cant about novelty and mutability, they do not really expect the externals of their world to be profoundly altered by time.

Notice, for instance, what is the very phrase used in defence of any novelty. Observe what is really said in praise of the electric toothpick or the petrol pea-shooter. We are always assured that the discovery "has come to stay." We, who have lived long enough to understand the real value of life, know perfectly well that nothing of that sort has ever come to stay. It may do all sorts of other things; but there is one thing that it cannot do, and that is to stay. We shall show no irritation, please God, on being repeatedly introduced to the Hat of the Future and the Umbrella of the New Age and the Goloshes of the Good Time Coming.

But the only thing we really have learnt from life is that the good time will be going as well as coming, and that, in the book of fashions, the Hat of the Future will be recorded as the Hat of the Past. It is now the custom to condemn youth as too frivolous. But youth is always too serious; and just now it is too serious about frivolity. The conservatism of youth is a good thing; and it is not even necessary to conserve it.

Info on G.K. Chesterton Theater Company in Santa Monica, CA

Read all about it.

Apostle of Common Sense Season 4 Now on DVD!

Buy an early Christmas gift for yourself or someone who needs Chesterton today.

An E-mail from a Concerned Reader to Dale

Dale recently received this email in his box:

Dear Mr. Ahlquist:

On your recommendation I read Orthodoxy. I can not say that I learned much new; however had I read it forty years ago I would have been saved the trouble of earning two doctorates.

Sincerely
Larry V.

This is a real letter.

The "Perilous and Exciting" Bit of Difference

Today with five rousingly glorious paragraphs, we complete our study of "The Paradoxes of Christianity", chapter six of GKC's centennial Orthodoxy. There's too much to say, so I will forgo the preface and jump right in - should you wish for peril and excitement...

((click here to continue))

Recall that last week we examined what I called GKC's "The Of And" - the strange idea of having both your ice cream and your cake. There's a lot more to say, and this point is really the whole thrust, the ultimate paradox. In a sense, it is the essence of paradox, for it is the nearest one can come to the impossibility of having two opposites simultaneous. No wonder it's perilous and exciting!

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It is true that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to run it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is - Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.
[CW1:302-3]

First, we have a few terms to handle.

Tolstoyans - these were a kind of super-Quaker, a follower of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the Russian novelist and philosopher: "Tolstoy is not content with pitying humanity for its pains: such as poverty and prisons. He also pities humanity for its pleasures, such as music and patriotism. He weeps at the thought of hatred; but in "The Kreutzer Sonata" he weeps almost as much at the thought of love. He and all the humanitarians pity the joys of men." [GKC ILN Oct 3 1908 CW28:190]

Supermen - this is not Kal-El of Krypton, but the mythical nonsense invented by Nietzsche on Darwinian foundations and brought to its height in Nazi Germany. Again I must point out that my own sharp barbs are nothing compared to GKC's - and I shall quote something on it, something which again points out GKC's Scholastic fairness and wisdom:

Now when that pathetic and poisoned Puritan whose name was Nietzsche started his idea of a Superman, it was quite consistent with his idea of the universe. His notion was insane, but it was not unreasonable. His notion was this: that, just as a brutal and bewildering anarchy of animals had somehow brought man forth - a superior to the ape - so a brutal and bewildering anarchy of men might bring forth some inconceivable being who should be better still. An Anarchist like Nietzsche has a right to talk of "the Superman" without knowing what it means, just as I have a right to talk about the Winner of next year's Derby without knowing what horse will win it. In a chaotic struggle, the Superman simply means whatever creature finds itself on top of man. The creature may have five legs. He may have nine heads or none. You may, if you like, imagine some unthinkable huge hybrid evolved out of biological chaos; and you can call such a creature by a grand, unmeaning name. This, I suppose, is what Nietzsche did. He said: "Throw all creatures, nice and nasty, eye of newt and toe of frog, hand of ape and wing of angel, into the cauldron of anarchy; and whatever monster comes to the top like scum, I will call the Superman." This is a contemptible position, but not an incomprehensible one.
[GKC ILN Dec 19 1908 CW28:236]

I spend so much space on this because it is important to grasp, not what GKC means when he talks about Superman, but what GKC means when he talks, and how it is possible to fight an idea without fighting the person who voiced that idea.

Sir James Douglas (1286-1330) who assisted Robert the Bruce of Scotland and carried his embalmed heart to the Holy Land for burial, but was slain in battle with the Moors.
Joan the Maid - also called the Maid of Orleans - St. Joan of Arc (1412-1431) who fought in battle to lift the siege of Orleans, defeat the English at Patay and escort the dauphin to Rheims where he was crowned Charles VII of France.
St. Louis IX (1214-1270) was king of France; he led the seventh Crusade.

And then that bit about the lion and the lamb - oh boy, talk about complications! The lion and the lamb. Everybody knows this is from the Bible... sure. But, like so many Chesterton quotes, even some appearing in books about (though not by) Chesterton, it's not in the Bible at all. It is in fact an almost exact parallel of the error found in the famous words credited to GKC about "if a man stops believing in God, he'll believe in anything." (For the details see here; please bear in mind that the Quotemeister's conclusion is backed up by the power of AMBER!) Or, perhaps, the easily misquoted one about angels flying. For the "lion and lamb" is derived from this:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.

which is Isaias 11:6. Even so, "everyone" knows it's from the Bible. Yes. But do not miss the point GKC is making: the point about uniting extremes, about "The Of And" which we heard a lot about last week! But there's still more to come:

This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life. This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe - that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy - that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can grovel" - that was an emancipation.
[CW1:303]

Yes, we heard that last week. It is truly the mystery of distinguo = "I distinguish, tell apart": no, not for some sheer delight in curiosity, but for the simple practicality of life: "Does this act matter? Is it good or bad? How can I know?" This is indeed a masterpiece of psychology, well worth pondering, and you ought to record this in your notes:

"Here you can swagger and there you can grovel" - that was an emancipation.

Yes, indeed; it is another instance of "The Of And". It permits the blackest glooms of Good Friday, and most brilliant glory of Easter Sunday. Speaking of those colour extremes, there was a famous quote I wanted to mention last time which I learned when I was poking among the Greek roots in the New Testament:

Having more things to write unto you, I would not by paper and ink: for I hope that I shall be with you and speak face to face, that your joy may be full.
[1 John 1:12, emphasis added]

In Greek, the word for "ink" is melanos which also means "black" - it is the root for the biological term "melanine" which is the skin-colour compound. The analogy fails rather short since you are most likely reading this on a CRT or LCD screen, but you've seen enough books in your life to understand the point. Incidentally, print is also quite correct in heraldry: if like St. John you print with paper and ink this simple plus-sign:

+

you can also blazon it as "argent a cross sable". You see it is black and white.

Chesterton returns to this great gift of "The Of And" over and over again throughout his writing, and it is so powerful it answers the silly whines we are still hearing about the conflict of science and religion:

Those who complain that theologians draw fine distinctions could hardly find a better example of their own folly. In fact, a fine distinction can be a flat contradiction. It was notably so in this case. St. Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence in the reality of his religion; and though some may linger to dispute it, it has been justified. The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the Faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century. Even the materialists have fled from materialism; and those who lectured us about determinism in psychology are already talking about indeterminism in matter. But whether his confidence was right or wrong, it was specially and supremely a confidence that there is one truth which cannot contradict itself.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:474-5]

Or this:

...the dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.
[GKC The Thing CW3:303]

You may well ask: do such distinctions make a bit of difference? And Chesterton said, yes it does, almost as if he knew that to change smallest part of a letter (which in computers is one eighth, or a "bit") might change everything. We shall hear more on that shortly. But first, he wants to give us some more examples of how this combination of extremes can work:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."
[CW1:303-4]

There is a curious term used here, which makes me wonder what he had been reading: "in Christendom apparent accidents balanced." Does he mean "accident" as the Scholastics - a property such as size or colour? Very curious. No, I don't think he is suggesting some architectural novelty in saying "every buttress is a flying buttress" - a buttress is simply a supporting member of a building, and a flying buttress is a tricky arrangement (it looks like a little bridge way up in the air) to support the weight of the roof of a large building. I am no building architect to give a fair comment about this, but I am an architect of software and also (in a minor way) of fiction, and GKC speaks truly about those matters - "all different, and all necessary". It would be curious to know how GKC's view of Europe has played out with coming of the European Union, but I must also let the political topic for others to address. Rather I would focus on GKC's point of the other European union - the one brought into being by St. Paul's dream when the man cried "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" [Acts 16:9] Remember too that one of the greatest of all Europeans was born in what we now call Italy but "...travelled a great deal; he was not only well known in Paris and the German universities, but he almost certainly visited England; probably he went to Oxford and London; and it has been said that we may be treading in the footsteps of him and his Dominican companions, whenever we go down by the river to the railway-station that still bears the name of Black-friars." [GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:444] Yes - and he died in France, too. It is something to delight in - and sets the simple ancient phrase "Roman Catholic" against the odd neo-pagan "unity in diversity" which is of course right out of the pagan empire.

Now we come to a paragraph which one of our loyal readers sought information on, and which our esteemed bloggmistress replied to some weeks ago. It gets into an issue which bothers some people, and which I happen to laugh at every time I hear that psalm which starts "The Lord is my shepherd" - that is, the issue of war. So let us hear GKC about it:

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.
[CW1:304-5]

Here we see GKC shatter the false calm, peaceful mood induced by the pastoral scene of Psalm 22(23) about the Good Shepherd. You see, this is one of the more militant psalms, but people almost always overlook that the Shepherd is ARMED:

For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. [Ps 22(23):4, emphasis added]

No real shepherd (and David was one) expects to care for his sheep without weapons! There are wolves, you know. But GKC says this better, and gets into a far more complex issue: "It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world." You may have to recall the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Mt 13:24-30) to better grasp the larger picture.

Our reader wondered if GKC could be supporting war, and how it might be that the Church would resort to death and destruction for the sake of Easter eggs or Christmas trees. You can read Nancy's answer here; another answer is given by GKC in the first paragraph we have seen today in his comments about submission and slaughter. Here is another view of this important matter - but not what you might expect. GKC is seeing what one finds when an honest man actually examines the Gospels:

For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He would find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to treat a robber not with passive resistance, but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement, [Lk 6:29] if the terms be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had stolen goods. But he would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ's attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. [Mt 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10]
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:323]

My annotated edition (not yet available in stores) here notes the cross-link to the Summa on War, which is in II-II Q40 A1. But as important as war is, it is not the real issue. It is the idea that some things really are worth fighting over, and one of them is the truth. And so, it is most important for us to understand the whole sense of distinctions. GKC does not wish for "war for war's sake", but he points out that tiny (apparently insignificant) issues can cause terrible difficulties elsewhere if the precise truth is lacking. I think previously we talked about the idea of eating a doubtful mushroom... it matters very much whether something edible or poisonous when (let us say) your child picks it up and starts to eat it. Likewise, it matters to the Church whether something is true or false, and the precision necessary to know the difference, like the degree of danger in the error, is far greater than any distinctions of mycology (the study of fungi) on edibility.

One famous example is the debate over the "filioque" term in the Nicene Creed - that is, "I believe ... in the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son..." This term is an issue in the nearly millennium-long division between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Church, and is very sad; I've talked about it with a Greek friend, and have tried to pray daily about this. It does bother me, and I have heard that there are discussions going on over the matter, in hope of finding a healing to the schism.

But there is a much more ancient issue, on a much smaller variation: the famous "single iota of difference" - the homoousion versus homoiousion, which comes a bit earlier in the same Creed: "I believe... in one Lord Jesus Christ... consubstantialem Patri..." I have to leave it in Latin, because I am told that the English that we presently say at Mass is misleading - we say "one in being" but it ought to be "of one substance" or "consubstantial" - and the precise meaning is supremely important. The Greek homoousion means consubstantialem or "of one substance" - BUT homoiousion means "of similar substance"! A big difference in meaning from just one letter of change. This change seems like one of those subtle distinctions that only matter to very academic and not practical people. But it is not. It is very much practical. On it hangs simple things like Easter eggs and Christmas trees and statues, but much larger things as well:

Theological distinctions are fine but not thin. In all the mess of modern thoughtlessness, that still calls itself modern thought, there is perhaps nothing so stupendously stupid as the common saying, "Religion can never depend on minute disputes about doctrine." It is like saying that life can never depend on minute disputes about medicine. The man who is content to say, "We do not want theologians splitting hairs," will doubtless be content to go on and say, "We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs." It is the fact that many a man would be dead to-day, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead to-day, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine. Nobody will ever write a History of Europe that will make any sort of sense, until he does justice to the Councils of the Church, those vast and yet subtle collaborations for thrashing out a thousand thoughts to find the true thought of the Church. ... If such a theological distinction is a thread, all Western history has hung on that thread; if it is a fine point, all our past has been balanced on that point. The subtle distinctions have made the simple Christians; all the men who think drink right and drunkenness wrong; all the men who think marriage normal and polygamy abnormal; all the men who think it wrong to hit first and right to hit back; and, as in the present case, all the men who think it right to carve statues and wrong to worship them. These are all, when one comes to think of it, very subtle theological distinctions.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW21:3201]

In short there could not even be a European Union unless there had first been the other union which is Roman Catholicism. (The alternative would not be a union - which has parts - but simply the old Roman Empire, a rather different thing. That's the error seen in the over-federalizing of things in the United States, an error which might be called "anti-subsidiarity".)

But what larger things are included in this Clash of the Iota? One of them is the idea, the "self-evident truth" phrased in the American Declaration of Independence as "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator". It is perhaps flippant to say that the Arian word-with-the-iota ultimately leads to the Darwin/Marx/Nazi/Communist view expressed in Animal Farm that some animals are "more equal" than others - but it is quite logical. It's just shorter to say "similar". Yes, that's how bad one little bit of difference can be. Just in case you are wondering, the point about the homoousion was settled in 325 by the first Council of Nicea which gave us that creed (that's why that word is in the Nicene Creed!) And the point about the statues was settled at the second council of Nicea in 787 - which, as odd as it sounds, is tied to the first issue - since if Jesus was indeed true God and true Man, He in Himself was a visible image of God, and hence even the physical world was now exalted:

The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it. The senses had truly become sanctified; as they are blessed one by one at a Catholic baptism. "Seeing is believing" was no longer the platitude of a mere idiot, or common individual, as in Plato's world; it was mixed up with real conditions of real belief. Those revolving mirrors that send messages to the brain of man, that light that breaks upon the brain, these had truly revealed to God himself the path to Bethany or the light on the high rock of Jerusalem. These ears that resound with common noises had reported also to the secret knowledge of God the noise of the crowd that strewed palms and the crowd that cried for Crucifixion. After the Incarnation had become the idea that is central in our civilisation, it was inevitable that there should be a return to materialism, in the sense of the serious value of matter and the making of the body.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:493]

But as interesting as that is, we do not have time to explore it further just now, as we have finally reached the last paragraph, and the culmination of the argument:

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom - that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
[CW1:305-6]

And here, I shall leave you. Please read this chapter again, if you have time, and review the advance we have made, and if you have issues or questions, please ask, and we shall try to respond.

GKC on the election

I'm quite certain Chesterton would have something interesting to say about this election. Whether it be the historic changes about to occur (either a person with some African heritage becoming president or a woman becoming vice-president), or because either one of them should be begging to be removed from the ticket in fear of all the mess they have to clean up once elected.

However, I'm also certain that the conversations at the local pubs and in our own kitchens are far more interesting to us and to Chesterton than the stuff going on on tv, which is yawningly boring.

Another debate tonight. Ho-hum. Will they talk about real issues? Will they actually answer the questions posed? Will they give up the sound bites and actually think about their answers? One can always hope.

But I'm sure the Thursday morning quarterbacking that we'll hear in at our breakfast table tomorrow morning will be more interesting than tonight's televised and well-rehearsed propaganda.

Some Thoughts on Chesterton and Fairy Tales

From a site called Journey to the Sea via Deb--thanks!

New Item for your Christmas Wish List!

Volume Ten: Poetry Part II

Some of these poems are uncollected. Add it to your wish list.

And if anyone already has it, let us know what you think.

Gilbert Magazine update

Gilbert magazine is preparing for another issue, so watch your mailboxes. Meanwhile, we are going to do what we did last year, and double up the next issue, so that we can once again get back on schedule. Please be patient with us, as we are all just a huge group of very devoted people who love Chesterton and want to promote him and his writing in the world, but have very limited resources: and what we have is thanks to YOU (thank you!)

Autumn has officially arrived here, with the beautiful colors, and the start of colds and flu. Since at one point our country wanted to celebrate this day as Columbus Day (now out of political vogue), and since we have some illness going on here, we, too, are taking the day off. Happy Columbus Day!

For your political reading pleasure, I offer you Peggy Noonan.

The Power Of Little Words And Ten Percent of Chesterton

Well... actually the title ought to be "The Of And".

Yes, this is the usual Thursday posting in our on-going study of Orthodoxy. Sometimes it takes some energy to find just the right way of framing the topic of the week. Today, "The Of And" is exactly what I want to say.

The Of And? What does that mean? Are you writing this before lunch again, Doctor? Oh, no. Maybe too many beers? No beers were used in the concoction either. (Hmm: maybe that would help... I'll try beer next week.)

Well, it means two things, as usual. First I will tell you the easy-to-explain meaning. These three words - the, of, and - account for over ten percent of the more than 9 million words of Chesterton (and related authors) in the AMBER collection as of the last time I did any statistical analysis:

Total words: 9095714
the 469924
of 281584
and 208931

But "the of and" also means "this particular something which belongs to the coupling conjunction" - that is, the very special quality of the union, the joiner, the added-together, the in-both-at-once operator that we write as kai or et or y or và or "&".... No, I am not really going to spend time talking about Boolean Algebra today, though that would be fun. Or poke the Latinists by asking what the genitive of et should be. That would be fun too. But perhaps I ought to bring up the classic example anyway, just to set the proper mood:

Mom: Do you want ice cream or cake?
Kids: YES!

All this goes to show is that the kids know "the of and".

And so does Chesterton - or I should say, so does Christianity. And Chesterton wrote about it in the paragraphs we shall now examine.

(( click here to read more ))

The trick which the kids know - and Chesterton noted as being demonstrated within Christianity - is that what "Mom" (or the world) proposes as seeming opposites, what computer people call "XOR" - the exclusive or - the conjunction which means one-or-the-other-but-not both - that is, two seemingly incompatible things, only one of which is to be chosen - the trick is to have both of them. Maybe this is the real meaning about that verse: "Unless you change and become like little children" you will never have both ice cream and cake! But let us hear Chesterton present this in his own way:

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism - the "resignation" of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.
[CW1:297-8]

We heard about Matthew Arnold back on CW1:275; Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a dark German philosopher and pessimist. Alice? Well, no doubt you know her already, but she needs some introduction here.
I think that I have said somewhere that Chesterton's most powerful work has been about humility and pride, and it bears repeating, just as it bears study. We ought to re-read his "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" essay every year, and think about it - at Lent if at no other time - since we need to come to understand what true humility is, (it does not mean being a doormat) and how horrible true pride is (it does not mean hiding your talents - even Jesus criticised that in Mt 25:14-30.) Earlier in this book we heard how even fairy tales help us with that most important lesson, how "Cindarella" teaches same the grand thought as the Magnificat: "exaltavit humiles" = "He has lifted up the humble" (see CW1:253 quoting Lk 1:52) Here GKC links in the same lesson from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the great mathematical treatise of C. L. ("Lewis Carroll") Dodgson, sometimes called a modern fairy-tale. Remember how I said it is the first (and last) lesson for a scientist? He must be SMALL before the world, if he is to learn what the world is. He cannot make it to be what he thinks it is! You need not know very much Greek at all (and I know so little) to marvel at the truth of this phrase: "Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland" - for the name "Alice" comes from Aletheia, the Greek word for Truth. Obviously there now ought to be some comment here about the mystery of the Word-Made-Flesh, the God Who said "I am the Truth" [Jn 14:6] dwelling as the single human cell within Mary - but I must leave that for another time and place. You must ponder "Truth Made Small" for yourself.
But you may think I am neglecting pride. That of course is a far harder matter to discourse upon, because at first it may look like we are condoning a crime, and pride is the worst crime of all - as the common man in the pub said about the proud visitor: "He comes in here and he thinks he's God Almighty". You need to read that essay about Pride, because then you will realise that there really is a place for pride as well. But I cannot quote it here, nor is it necessary, for Chesterton proceeds to give an almost identical argument.

It [Christianity] separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny - all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one's self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go - as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here, again in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.
[CW1:298-9]

There are a few references for us to note before we proceed. The reference to Ecclesiastes might be 3:19: "Therefore the death of man, and of beasts is one, and the condition of them both is equal: as man dieth, so they also die: all things breathe alike, and man hath nothing more than beast: all things are subject to vanity." The reference to Homer may possibly be this from Book XVIII of the Odyssey: "Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heaven vouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come to no harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon him, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; for God Almighty gives men their daily minds day by day." There may be an allusion to Genesis 1:28, where God orders the newly created Man and Woman to "fill the earth, and subdue it". The peacock plumage gives us a link to fiction, in the story called "The House of the Peacock" in The Poet and the Lunatics which links these feathers to pride, and is well worth considering:

"...what, for instance, can be the basis of objecting to peacocks' feathers?"
Crundle was replying with a joyful roar that it was some infernal rubbish or other, when Gale, who had quickly slipped into a seat beside the man called Noel, interposed in a conversational manner.
"I fancy I can throw a little light on that. I believe I found a trace of it in looking at some old illuminated manuscripts of the ninth or tenth century. There is a very curious design, in a stiff Byzantine style, representing the two armies preparing for the war in heaven. But St. Michael is handing out spears to the good angels; while Satan is elaborately arming the rebel angels with peacocks' feathers."
Noel turned his hollow eyes sharply in the direction of the speaker. "That is really interesting," he said; "you mean it was all that old theological notion of the wickedness of pride?"
"Well, there's a whole peacock in the garden for you to pluck," cried Crundle in his boisterous manner, "if any of you want to go out fighting angels."
"They are not very effective weapons," said Gale gravely, "and I fancy that is what the artist in the Dark Ages must have meant. There seems to me to be something that rather hits the wrong imperialism in the right place, about the contrast in the weapon; the fact that the right side was arming for a real and therefore doubtful battle, while the wrong side was already, so to speak, handing out the palms of victory. You cannot fight anybody with the palms of victory."

Very significant. (Incidentally, if you ever come across such a painting, please let us know!) The Latin word quâ here means "in the character or capacity of" or simply "as": thus GKC is saying "a man, as man". The point of linking "Calvinist" with "damned" comes from the usual attitude of Calvinists - just about all humans are damned - but it is not really worth exploring such a dead-end heresy. Instead, let us turn to the larger matters of this paragraph.
The summary phrase you might record in your notebook is this:

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

Which of course is the secret of "The Of And" I want you to consider! But there is another phrase which jumps out, which perhaps is the real solution to the as-yet undiscovered "GKC quote" about his supposed answer to the media-posed question, "What's Wrong With the World?" It is said (but not in any document so far uncovered) that he wrote:

Dear Editor:
I am.
Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton.

But we have just seen a phrase giving a parallel insight, and in it we see the marvel and power of little words - the word "a" comes fourth on the list, ranking just below "and". But look at this again, and think about it:

In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures.
In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.

GKC is not giving us a precise piece of math to clarify the pride/humility puzzle - he is giving us a very shocking example. Next week we shall hear another treatment of this same matter, which I think might do well to quote for you now:

Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can grovel" - that was an emancipation.
[CW1:303}

Remember how I keep insisting on the mighty distinguo = "I distinguish", the power of discrimination? It is a two-ended tool: it enables the telling apart two things, sometimes insanely similar - and also the sensing the commonality of things that are impossibly distant! All this is the extreme case, which is what we expect when dealing with extremes.

Now, I have belabored this humble topic at length so let us follow GKC as he applies this furious method again:

Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things - pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
[CW1:299-300]

Ah, the power of division! And people say Orthodoxy doesn't have a lot about Christ? But Who was it that said: "Think ye, that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, no; but separation. For there shall be from henceforth five in one house divided: three against two, and two against three." [Lk 12:51-52] Again, I doubt that any serious bible scholar has looked to GKC in the study of these verses, and yet here is a light which helps understand something. We have this other, most mathematical quote about 70 times 7 [See Mt 18:21-22] which might have a comic drawing with Peter working it out and getting 490, and Jesus saying something like "your math is fine, but not your theology." Jesus forgives sin, and tells sinners "Go and sin no more" - He never but never says there isn't any such thing as sin! As if to clarify it beyond doubt, He even gives a most terrifying view of where sin ends - in the eternal city dump. But this implies the mystery of choice and will, and that powerful word "liberty"...

What does GKC mean about good things running wild? Well, this goes into some technical stuff which we might call the ontology of liberty, and GKC answers succinctly: "What exactly is liberty? First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself." ["The Yellow Bird" in The Poet and the Lunatics] You note that it is good things which are to run wild. If you do not understand the qualifier he uses, you will have a good example if you read that short story. But you see there really is something going on - it is the idea of order - of the right use, the right place, of things. Rules (good rules, that is) produce freedom: liberty means that good things that can run wild. And this is what GKC now examines:

Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside "Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.
[CW1:300]

Again we see some power of the little words "of" and "from"... but the rest is sheer pudding, sweet and easy to swallow. Which may mean we are missing something. I once tried to write something about liberty and said (as an example) how traffic laws make it possible for a road to be a road - since we abide by the laws (most of the time) the road can actually take us from one place to another. If we decided to ignore something fundamental - say the direction of a highway - we would very quickly have such an insane jam of cars no one would get anywhere. GKC uses the literary analogy, and does a better job: the horror of that wall (locked in or locked out, don't matter none) ought to shock the modern lit'ry man to his senses. But just in case you didn't get the reference to Homer or to Shakespeare, GKC will give more examples:

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de theâtre of morality - things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.
[CW1:300-1]

Some more references to clarify: the French phrase coup de theâtre means a sudden, sensational turn of events (on stage or elsewhere); Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet, full of praise for common things, which GKC liked very much. St. Francis of Assisi wrote the great "Canticle of the Creatures". St. Jerome (ca. 342-ca. 420) was the great translator of the Bible, but had his dark and argumentative side. St. Catherine of Siena (1347-80) a Doctor of the Church, really did hold the head of Nicholas di Toldo as he was executed, and kissed it - she had won him over from raging anger against God to repentance for his sins, and he died saying "Jesus and Catherine". Cadbury was the famous English chocolate maker; "gaol" is an alternative spelling for "jail". Ah, but the "scourging of the first Plantagenet" - that was the public whipping of King Henry II (1133-89) for the murder of Thomas Becket, also called "of Canterbury", the great English martyr and saint, whose tomb was despoliated by Henry VIII.

What more is there to say? We must hear GKC, and he will give us more examples, and a handy image to remember the method, the image of the Red Cross, and a "healthy hatred of pink":

Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the faith. It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray. In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.
[CW1:301-2]

I spoke last week about heraldry and the importance of strong colours, but I might call attention to the additional images we have, especially "white is a colour". Any artist knows this, just as black is also a colour:

Black is a bad modifier [of other paints] but it is an interesting color in itself. ... If you look at black as a color with its own unique properties, then you'll see why the Chinese masters considered black the most exciting color of all.
[Wendon Blake, Acrylic Painting: A Complete Guide 23]

Yes, I do acrylic painting on occasion, but I am not going into the principles of pigments nor of lights just now. I was thinking rather of the Transfiguration: "And his garments became shining and exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller upon earth can make white." [Mk 9:2] (A fuller is a bleach.) There is much more to say here, and many implications to consider (yes, even the racial topic), but I must defer them to another time and place. So until I get a sample of "shot silk" to better understand that reference, I will conclude with a histological observation about colour. There is one organ of the human body which, regardless of race, is both black and white at once, both strong, and both together. It is the eye. (Yes, the pars ciliaris retinae, the inner lining of the "white" of the eye, is black.) It is designed that way, of course; you might ask why at your camera store. And so, it is no coincidence that Chesterton's vision is clearer than many others.