Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: A Review

Prayer Request

I have just received word that Father Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., is in a hospital in Madrid awaiting surgery. Please pray for a fellow Chestertonian and diligent student of history, science, religion, and philosophy.

New! Manalive Teaser Trailer

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Hot Off the Press: Scholarship Deadline Extended!

Application Deadline for Scholarship Extended to May 31st

Application deadline for the Gilbert and Frances Scholarship has been extended from March 31st to May 31st. This scholarship, named for Gilbert Keith Chesterton and longtime Chestertonian and Gilbert Magazine Contributing Editor Frances Farrell, is generously endowed by Bob and Joan Farrell in honor of Mrs. Farrell. Its purpose is to assist Christian college students to engage the world on controversial issues and encourage them to pursue a career in journalism. Two scholarships of $2500 each are awarded every year: one to a high school senior who is entering college the following year; and another to a college freshman, sophomore, or junior who is continuing in college the following year. Competition for the Gilbert and Frances Scholarship is open to students majoring in any subject. For more information and to apply, visit http://chesterton.org/scholarship.html.

A Very Clever Piece

One of the fiction stories I thought was very clever came from the talented James G. "Gerry" Bruen, Jr., titled "The Jackass".

The pun caught me off guard, and surprised me at the end of the story, and as I love surprises, I thought the story worked our quite well. Good work, Gerry!

GKC and the Fifth Ghost

We are nearing the end - the very end - of our study of Orthodoxy, and just as one expects to find more and more grand chords at the end of the symphony, more dangerous car chases and literal cliff-hangers at the end of the movie, or terribly stark and unexpected revelations at the end of the detective novel, we are finding such things here.

But unlike those things, instead of getting wilder, GKC is getting closer and closer to the heart - and to the hearth. In ancient Roma, the "household gods" were kept at the focus - the hearth, the fireplace for food and for heat - where the family fire burned, since they stood for the ancestors who guided and guarded the family. In Christian Roma, our worship does not require a fire, or even a fireplace. We still need the food, and the heat - but instead of looking to the ancestors for guidance, we look to the Child...

(( click here to read more ))

It is true that I am grossly anticipating the study GKC will make in The Everlasting Man - but as we have seen that study is anticipated here. And in the next paragraph, we shall hear something very startling. If this was a symphony, we would hear again the "questing theme" which opened the first movement - then it was heard in doubt and dissonance, but now that it is set in its place, with the complete accompaniment, we understand its full glory. It's the search for Home. It's quite misleading to think of this as a Dorothy-like "over the rainbow" thing. It's not. Kansas was where she lived, but she was right in thinking there was another Place, a good and glorious place, ruled by a great and unseen Power, Who fought against dark Witches and their minions, and Who gave incomparable gifts of intellect and heart and will... (Hmm... maybe we Christian Romans do have a fire, at that! See Acts 2:3.) But I cannot give a Chestertonian review of "Oz" here! Besides, I am getting ahead of myself, and of the actual text.

Remember, the last time we heard about miracles and GKC's belief in them - about the question whether the "spiritual realm" makes itself evident in this world. We are now going to hear a very brief review of several points which we have seen in greater detail earlier: the idea of evolution, the idea of evidence, and the curiously complex character of human beings... and then - GKC reintroduces that opening theme, about the man who went on an adventure, and discovered England! (We're also going to find out he discovered something else, which is alluded to in my spooky title. Hee hee.)

Ready? Let us proceed...

Given this conviction that the spiritual phenomena do occur (my evidence for which is complex but rational), we then collide with one of the worst mental evils of the age. The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word "spiritual" as the same as the word "good." They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil. A man of genius, very typical of that time of bewilderment, expressed it perfectly. Benjamin Disraeli was right when he said he was on the side of the angels. He was indeed; he was on the side of the fallen angels. He was not on the side of any mere appetite or animal brutality; but he was on the side of all the imperialism of the princes of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery, and contempt of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose, spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them, must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate. If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly, that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time, we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods. We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena - in order to discover which are really natural. In this light I find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins, quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told that the Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important, just as the sun and the moon looked the same size. It is only slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master, and the small moon only our satellite. Believing that there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good. Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found.
[CW1:358]

We have already heard plenty about evolution (see CW1:237-8 if you have forgotten); I shall not deal with the allusion to Disraeli; I think the CW edition has a footnote anyway. But that was an aside, and not the thrust of the argument. Rather, please consider the strange inversion GKC paints of "sunken pride and the towering humilities of heaven".

But now - watch the supreme mastery of the artist. How this theme easily modulates over to that of the opening, the adventure-search. Again it would be elegant to refer to any astronomy text about the strange (yet convenient) truth that the sun and the moon are same size - or even quote Fr. Jaki about why that matters in the history of science (and it DOES, in a really big way!) - but like the bit about evolution and Disraeli, that also is an aside. GKC is painting with his full palette of instruments (to mix my metaphor, hee hee) and quoting themes from the other movements.

Isn't his last line charming? It is the master theme of this book. Let us be like the little child and demand "Do it again!" (CW1:263)

I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water, and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity, where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found.

Next comes a very curious little note, which almost looks like a recanting of his argument. But it is not. GKC is restating his argument about miracles, but also pointing out that there is more to the matter. You may recall the term "converging evidence", that powerful tool used in science and other disciplines when one is faced with a multitude of issues all dealing with one topic. It is more than that. We are going to hear something startling about this strange journey that GKC has undertaken...

I have now said enough to show (to any one to whom such an explanation is essential) that I have in the ordinary arena of apologetics, a ground of belief. In pure records of experiment (if these be taken democratically without contempt or favour) there is evidence first, that miracles happen, and second that the nobler miracles belong to our tradition. But I will not pretend that this curt discussion is my real reason for accepting Christianity instead of taking the moral good of Christianity as I should take it out of Confucianism.

I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. ...
[CW1:359-60]

I have a couple of notes here before we proceed. We saw a little earlier about the "shape of the cross" - there is more in The Everlasting Man, and a whole elegant dialog/debate in the opening chapter of The Ball and the Cross. The whole point about the shape of Gothic windows is simple: they come to a point, and we heard GKC on this before:

...for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance.
[CW1:266]

But there's another reference worth quoting here, since it unites more of our themes in one of GKC's trademark analogies of art:

Both romance and religion see everything as it were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point - to the point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.
[GKC Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens CW15:254]

There is some hilarious discussion about beards in The Thing, which simultaneously recalls the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic where Calvin tells his mom he wants to grow a beard: "a long one, like the guys in ZZ Top" and GKC's dictum that "You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." [GKC "How I Met The President" in Tremendous Trifles] And if you did not know, a mitre is the conical (NOT comical!) hat worn by bishops; those also come up from time to time in GKC's writing, perhaps because people seem to find the conical comical, or at least curious. Hee hee. Yes. But let us proceed to our discussion.

The Church provides a "living teacher, not a dead one." Yes. All this time we have had a Guide - invisible most of the time - but active. Now, this is not about a Ghost - or if it is, it is the mystical Fifth Ghost of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, whom I am sure you were not aware of!

Huh? you gasp.

Oh yes. There's a Fifth Ghost.

You are now trying to figure out what I mean. You think through the story. Marley (that's one) and the Ghosts of Christmas Past (two) Present (three) and Yet To Come (four). Who is it?

Ah. I knew you would forget. Hee hee! But that's GKC's point too.

Now you are lost, wondering what allusion I am making. You got diverted, just as you did by GKC's mention of Plato and Shakespeare, and expect he is making some point about the awful plays and the even more awful philosophy they spawned. (You see - you are getting distracted again! Pay attention.)

There is someone else in the picture, and GKC proceeds to tell us, rather elegantly.

... There is one only other parallel to this position; and that is the parallel of the life in which we all began. When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine, to whom this book is dedicated. Now, when society is in a rather futile fuss about the subjection of women, will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women. Every man is womanised, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminised man. And if ever men walk to Westminster to protest against this female privilege, I shall not join their procession.

For I remember with certainty this fixed psychological fact; that the very time when I was most under a woman's authority, I was most full of flame and adventure. Exactly because when my mother said that ants bit they did bite, and because snow did come in winter (as she said); therefore the whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn. Inch by inch I might discover what was the object of the ugly shape called a rake; or form some shadowy conjecture as to why my parents kept a cat.
[CW1:360-61]

Do not get entangled with that very wonderful encomium (that means a note of praise) about women! If you want to hear more about that, you can find it elsewhere, especially in GKC's What's Wrong With the World in CW4. Though that of course sounds misleading; he is NOT saying "women" are what's wrong, but the MISTAKE about women. But the point is simply that a man's mother is much more important to him than most anyone ever realizes - especially the feminists. I always laugh when people moan about words like "chairman", which they say is "sexist" though they never seem to complain about MANageMENt. But even more important the easily overlooked fact that his MA is a big part of every MAN. (hee hee)

Ahem. I've wanted to get that into print for some time, and it certainly fits nicely here. But again, the thrust of the argument is not (strictly) a discussion of feminism, or of the importance of women, or of mothers. It is a larger concept. And yes, there is a veiled encomium of science, too: the idea that the world (be it the child's garden, or the physicist's cosmos) is rational and reasonable - we have a clue to it. But though relevant that will take us into another kind of discussion, which you can find in Fr. Jaki's books; perhaps another time and place I can deal with it. For the point is not (simply) about the use of reason to grasp the mysteries of our world. It is far more profound, though both the ideas of "mother" and of "science" are part of the larger point GKC is making.

It is the sense of the presence in one's learning life of a living Guide and Teacher - and even more than a father, a mother is the chief exemplar of this natural and human truth. Likewise, one cannot have science if one cannot reliably "know" things: sciencia is Latin for knowledge.

And of course that's the whole point of these paragraphs, like the presence of the Fifth Ghost in Dickens...

WHAT? Hey, c'mon Doc, you can't close off this posting until you explain! Who is that Fifth Ghost?

Well, I guess I will have to quote it out for you. It rather blows a bit of "The Surprise" but then you really need to read the playscript (in CW11). Well, maybe it won't blow it at all. But you ought to be able to work it out for yourself given my continual references to Tolkien and the idea of Story. The scene you are about to read is Scrooge's bedroom, just before the first of the three Christmas Ghosts appears:

Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
[Dickens, Stave 2, A Christmas Carol, emphasis added]

Aha! you say. Yes, the Fifth Ghost is Dickens, the author of the story.

You see, we have the Author still with us. Our Guide made the trail we travel:

Et ecce ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi.

And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
[Mt 28:20]

Movie Update: Manalive

Kevin O'Brien reports:

While I had my doubts about this project, its executive producer, Dale Ahlquist, was always filled with faith in it. Dale abandons himself to Divine Providence in a way that makes cynics like me wonder. And in this case, once again something that has no reason to be happening – a movie made by a first time screenwriter and director, on a shoestring budget, on a very tight schedule – actually shows promise, at least on set. There is something wonderful and hopeful about making a movie, something that draws from us great acts of trust –

Read more by clicking here.

March Gilbert Editorial

Dad49hobbits requested that this month's lead editorial be published on line so that he could send links to friends and family to read. His wish is our command. Here is the editorial in full (and here is the link):

Editorial 12.5

“Ideals,” says G.K. Chesterton, “are the most practical thing in the world.” This is why we still defend the family. This is why we insist on the ideal of marriage as a permanent union between... read more...one man and one woman that creates the only proper setting for bringing new souls into the world. Governments and other institutions outside the family must not interfere with this purely natural act.

In the last century, social trends have steadily moved in the opposite direction. Attacks upon marriage and the family are no longer a matter of a few loud critics getting testy at quaint ideas of morality; the ideal of traditional marriage has gone from being attacked to being brazenly ignored. But if society at large does not understand the moral arguments for the family, perhaps it will gain some appreciation for their practical application. And the recent bad news has been good news in this regard. Arguments in favor of marriage and the family have received a significant boost with the collapse of the world’s financial markets and the continuing economic fallout.

An economy built on massive lending and spending cannot be sustained. The reason it cannot be sustained is not merely economic, but moral. A purely consumer economy embraces material wealth as its ultimate goal, and regards people as a commodity to be bought and sold to achieve that goal. Such an economy is selfish and therefore self-destructive.

An economy based on the family is self-sustaining. Its focus is on the nurturing and training of children and not on the mere acquisition of goods. The family ideal as defended by Chesterton is something quite different from the industrialized consumer family, where family members leave the house each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue work and recreation and a life outside the home. Chesterton's ideal is the productive home with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. Unlike the industrial home, life in a productive household is not amenable to scheduling. It is anything but predictable.

The only thing surprising about this ideal is that it was once shared by almost everyone. Children used to be considered an asset; at some point they began to be seen as a liability.

Chesterton saw the beginning of this problem when he noticed people preferring to buy amusements for their own enjoyment rather than to have children. He pointed out prophetically that children are a far better form of entertainment than electrical gadgets. The irony today is that the retailers that sell the electronic amusements are going out of business because there are not enough people to buy their merchandise.

But there is another reason why children are now considered a liability. The presence of children doesn’t merely make other material desires cost-prohibitive; they are cost-prohibitive in themselves. Children must be educated, and the costs of educating them have become crushing. A college education is the most overpriced product on the market, and the most over-rated as well. Many parents sacrifice nearly everything to send their children to college, where their heads are filled with doubts and destructive ideas that undermine all their parents have taught them.

But there are fewer parents because there are fewer children.

When social security was instituted, each retiree was supported by fifteen workers. Now each retiree is supported by three workers. Those of us who are still working spend fifteen percent of our income to support those who aren’t working.

The lack of domestic life in modern culture is reflected in the fact that its participants don’t have a domestic economy. We don’t produce anything. Workers are now experiencing massive layoffs, but the people losing their jobs (no offense to them) were not producing anything. They were selling things that other people made, or paid with borrowed money to sit at a desk and computer terminal, their wages calculated in such a way that they might also go into debt. Now the financial center of the country has moved from New York to Washington, DC, as Gudge has passed the baton to Hudge, who has promised that all the problems that were caused by too much borrowing will be solved by even more borrowing. Whom shall we borrow from? Our own grandchildren.

But the younger generation cannot pay the debts of the older generation because we have committed demographic suicide. We are paying a very high price, not only for slaughtering our unborn children but for preventing their conception in the first place. In fact, we have demonstrated that we cannot afford the high price.

We have seen the natural consequences of unnatural acts. We are witnessing a monumental economic disaster that is not the result of inflation or recession but of the devaluation of children.

Chesterton reminds us that every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. The obvious things are the ordinary things, and we have forgotten them. The world we have created has brought about such great strain and stress that even the things that normal men have normally desired are no longer desirable: “marriage and fair ownership and worship and the mysterious worth of man.” Those are the normal and ordinary things. Those are the things we have lost, and we need to recover them.

“The disintegration of rational society,” adds Chesterton, “started in the drift from the hearth and the family; the solution must be a drift back.”

Gilbert Magazine March 2009

Trivia Question: What's funny about the illustration at the head of the Lunacy & Letters section of Gilbert?

Someone mentioned that for the first time ever, we had a listing of Dale's speaking engagements. Two people so far clapped heartily to see this, hoping to get to see Dale in person some day soon. How about you?

And speaking of people responding to the magazine, I am hoping to entice a few of you to take some time and write a letter to the editor. Praise, criticism, critique, horror, send it here.

Gilbert Magazine March 2009

If you like the cover, you can buy it here. And by doing that, you support our local Gilbert artist, illustrator and art director, Ted. Thank you.

Quiz question: What is the meaning of the cover? What article inside this issue of Gilbert is relevant to it?

St. Austin Review Blog

Joseph Pearce is having contributors blog for his magazine, the St. Austin Review. It's getting pretty good - kind of like the First Things blog, but better. The revival of Catholic culture from a variety of perspectives. Kevin O'Brien is one of the bloggers, and he shares his adventures on the road with wacky actors and Catholic playgoers.

New Gilbert races out to mailboxes

It feels like I just got an issue, and now I'm hearing that some people have a *new* issue of Gilbert!

Did you get yours yet?

I like the cover [click it to see it larger]...can't wait to see the inside.

Chesterton's Uncertainty Principle?

(subtitled, "the Story - Preparation for Miracles")

Happy Feast of St. Joseph!

Here's a riddle for you: How is St. Joseph like a detective novel? And what does that have to do with miracles? Or, if you don't care for that one, how about this: What good is counterfeit money? Oh, that's tricky. Hee hee.
St. Joseph, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus, is the silent witness to the greatest miracle that ever occurred: the incarnation of the divine Word, which we shall celebrate next Wednesday. And so it is very fitting that we spend some time today with three very powerful and deep paragraphs from Orthodoxy about miracles...

(( click here when you are prepared... ))


Last time we concluded with this lovely cliff-hanger:

...there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.
[CW1:356]

Remember GKC's main argument for miracles "is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America." [CW1:355] And I pointed to stories like "The Trees of Pride" (in CW14) or "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" in The Incredulity of Father Brown, which is well worth your time in reading (or re-reading), for seeing the context of these incomparable words:

"But I thought you believed in miracles," broke out the secretary.
"Yes," answered Father Brown, "I believe in miracles. I believe in man-eating tigers, but I don't see them running about everywhere. If I want any miracles, I know where to get them."

Ah: "If I want any miracles, I know where to get them." We might pray that as an antiphon at Mass. And this, perhaps even more striking: "Lying may be serving religion; I'm sure it's not serving God." Which gets to the heart of the issue. In that last paragraph (and in the stories I have mentioned, GKC points out that serious court cases, trials for vast sums, or even ending with death sentences, are based strictly upon the testimony of ordinary people - who are trusted to tell the truth. Yet, there is an issue about this "truth", when it comes to the testimony of an ordinary person - even of a trained observer. (See Jaki's God and the Sun at Fatima or Carrel's Journey to Lourdes for more on that.) But the evidence... is there something that has been overlooked there?

Yes - in Scholastic manner, GKC voices yet another rational argument against miracles:

He may say that there has been in many miraculous stories a notion of spiritual preparation and acceptance: in short, that the miracle could only come to him who believed in it. It may be so, and if it is so how are we to test it? If we are inquiring whether certain results follow faith, it is useless to repeat wearily that (if they happen) they do follow faith. If faith is one of the conditions, those without faith have a most healthy right to laugh. But they have no right to judge. Being a believer may be, if you like, as bad as being drunk; still if we were extracting psychological facts from drunkards, it would be absurd to be always taunting them with having been drunk. Suppose we were investigating whether angry men really saw a red mist before their eyes. Suppose sixty excellent householders swore that when angry they had seen this crimson cloud: surely it would be absurd to answer "Oh, but you admit you were angry at the time." They might reasonably rejoin (in a stentorian chorus), "How the blazes could we discover, without being angry, whether angry people see red?" So the saints and ascetics might rationally reply, "Suppose that the question is whether believers can see visions - even then, if you are interested in visions it is no point to object to believers." You are still arguing in a circle - in that old mad circle with which this book began.
[CW1:356]

Hmm, it is the feast of St. Joseph, yet we are in Lent - the season of preparation for Easter - this is a very curious junction of ideas here.

Even more so, (as AMBER reminds me) because it joins with what for the pleasure of the pedantry I shall call the Chesterton-Tolkien Theory of Story, as GKC stated in his important essay on Secrets:

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human wisdom does permit privacy. The first is the case I have mentioned - that of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only in order to explode and smash privacy. The author makes first a fastidious secret of how the Bishop was murdered, only in order that he may at last declare, as from a high tower, to the whole democracy the great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. In that case, ignorance is only valued because being ignorant is the best and purest preparation for receiving the horrible revelations of high life. Somewhat in the same way being an agnostic is the best and purest preparation for receiving the happy revelations of St. John.
[GKC ILN Aug 10 1907 CW27:524]

Remember, being agnostic is not a denial - an affirmation of the negative of a statement - it is rather a state of the lack of knowledge. But, as we see so dramatically in the story of St. Joseph, it is a state which is very hard to endure, and which cries out for light, for revelation... However, to keep within the context of the Theory of Story, GKC is saying it is very pointless to say "the mailman did it" or "the murderer used a vacuum cleaner" or "the horse was stolen by its trainer" or whatever the secret of the detective mystery may be - if you haven't read the rest of the story, the secret itself tells you NOTHING, and so is not even a secret. I might as well tell you that the system password at my second job was "CAMRY". It is a key to no lock. It helps explain that moving line in "O Little Town of Bethlehem", about "the hopes and fears of all the years"... if we do not understand the story of the Jews, from Abraham to Moses to David and all the rest, it is very hard to see the point of Bethlehem - or of Calvary.

Now, there is something more to this issue. GKC comes at it rather sideways, but it is a very striking insight, and touches on a very interesting part of modern physics:

The question of whether miracles ever occur is a question of common sense and of ordinary historical imagination: not of any final physical experiment. One may here surely dismiss that quite brainless piece of pedantry which talks about the need for "scientific conditions" in connection with alleged spiritual phenomena. If we are asking whether a dead soul can communicate with a living it is ludicrous to insist that it shall be under conditions in which no two living souls in their senses would seriously communicate with each other. The fact that ghosts prefer darkness no more disproves the existence of ghosts than the fact that lovers prefer darkness disproves the existence of love. If you choose to say, "I will believe that Miss Brown called her fiancé a periwinkle or, any other endearing term, if she will repeat the word before seventeen psychologists," then I shall reply, "Very well, if those are your conditions, you will never get the truth, for she certainly will not say it." It is just as unscientific as it is unphilosophical to be surprised that in an unsympathetic atmosphere certain extraordinary sympathies do not arise. It is as if I said that I could not tell if there was a fog because the air was not clear enough; or as if I insisted on perfect sunlight in order to see a solar eclipse.
[CW1:257]

What is a periwinkle? It's a "trailing evergreen herb" with flowers - there are several kinds. One type is called myrtle in the U.S. I seemed to recall that GKC used it in an important context, and was rather amazed to find it appears only three times in AMBER, and the other two are indeed important, so I shall give them to you:

The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle.
[GKC Heretics CW1:68]

The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert.
[GKC Daily News Nov 28, 1902 in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks]

Remarkable... these lend a very deep mystical ornamentation to our feast. It is one of the lesser biblical mysteries to ponder the two long genealogical lists, often called the "begats" which give the family tree of Jesus. One explanation might be grasped by recalling a very famous line of Chesterton:

"A Social Situation."
We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.
[from GKC's "Notebook" quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 63]

Again this is an enrichment of our Lenten study: in thinking of St. Joseph, we learn how Jesus consented to have this long list of nobodies and criminals recorded as His family. But then as St. Paul tells us,

Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross.
[Philippians 2:5-8]

Which of course is not too far away from the topic GKC mentions, of communication between the dead and the living... But I am going a bit far from the topic.

I wonder whether anyone has looked into the connection - from this very scientific insight of our Mr. Chesterton, to the famous "Uncertainty Principle" formulated by Heisenberg in 1927. I have not as yet found anything on it by Jaki, though he brings up some very important points, since it gets into issues of philosopy beyond its relevance for physics. For example Heisenberg ought to have called it "the principle of imprecision of measurement" [Jaki, Catholic Essays 159] But as I read this excerpt it certainly (hee hee) seems that GKC has anticipated Heisenberg. (Whew... another project for another time.)

I have brought up physics - and so (to my surprise) does GKC...

As a common-sense conclusion, such as those to which we come about sex or about midnight (well knowing that many details must in their own nature be concealed) I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day. Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it. I suggest the Regalvanisation. But the strongest of all is the dilemma above mentioned, that these supernatural things are never denied except on the basis either of anti-democracy or of materialist dogmatism - I may say materialist mysticism. The sceptic always takes one of the two positions; either an ordinary man need not be believed, or an extraordinary event must not be believed. For I hope we may dismiss the argument against wonders attempted in the mere recapitulation of frauds, of swindling mediums or trick miracles. That is not an argument at all, good or bad. A false ghost disproves the reality of ghosts exactly as much as a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England - if anything, it proves its existence.
[CW1:357-8]

On the hint about "concealing" I have already quoted that important essay on secrecy. There is also an echo from a previous essay:

No conceivable number of forged bank-notes can disprove the existence of the Bank of England.
[GKC ILN Apr 14, 1906 CW 27:164]

If you find yourself thinking that GKC was in any way opposed to Science, you ought to read Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science, especially the chapter called "Antagonist of Scientism". There's a big difference. It's not opposing Science to expect a scientist to act, speak, and write "scientifically" - that is, with a healthy amount of reason, thought, and care for making sense. And yes, sometimes scientists (good ones, too!) say things that are quite senseless, and need someone to grab the sleeve of their lab coats and show them their error. Let me give just one example, which resonates with this bit about ghosts:

Mr. Edison as reported does not say much about whether we "live again," but in a few well-chosen words he disposes of the soul: "My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding." So far, so good; all right; amen. But I ask the reader to remember this agnostic statement in considering what follows. He then goes on to deal with the origin of life; or rather, not to deal with it. The following statement is of such fearful intensity and importance that the interviewer prints it all in italics, and I will so reproduce it. "I believe the form of energy that we call life came to the Earth from some other planet or at any rate from somewhere out in the great spaces beyond us." In short, there will henceforth be branded upon our brains the conviction that life came from somewhere, and probably under some conditions of space. But the suggestion that it came from another planet seems a rather weak evasion. Even a mind enfeebled by popular science would be capable of stirring faintly at that, and feeling unsatisfied. If it came from another planet, how did it arise on that planet? And in whatever way it arose on that planet, why could it not arise in that way on this planet? We are dealing with something admittedly unique and mysterious: like a ghost. The original rising of life from the lifeless is as strange as a rising from the dead. But this is like explaining a ghost walking visibly in the churchyard, by saying that it must have come from the churchyard of another village.
[GKC ILN May 3 1924 CW33:321-2]

Which somehow brings up one of GKC's famous quotes, the solution of which I think is in its context:

Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith. The man says there is no God; if he really says it in his heart, he is a certain sort of man so designated in Scripture. [see Ps 13(14):1] But, anyhow, when he has said it, he has said it; and there seems to be no more to be said. The conversation seems likely to languish. The truth is that the atmosphere of excitement, by which the atheist lived, was an atmosphere of thrilled and shuddering theism, and not of atheism at all; it was an atmosphere of defiance and not of denial. Irreverence is a very servile parasite of reverence; and has starved with its starving lord. After this first fuss about the merely aesthetic effect of blasphemy, the whole thing vanishes into its own void. If there were not God, there would be no atheists.
[GKC Where All Roads Lead CW3:37-8]

But we need not belabour this, as we have already heard GKC say "let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." [CW1:343]

Tales from the Quotemeister

Yesterday was the first time in 13 years (since we instituted the Quotemeister online) that I did not get an inquiry as to the source of “The Great Gaels of Ireland” quote.

Distributism Meeting in New York

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMICS:
CAPITALIST-DISTRIBUTIST-SOCIALIST DEBATE
Garden City, NY, USA. A conference hosted and sponsored by the Nassau Community College Center for Catholic Studies in Long Island, New York, is confirmed for April 4th, 2009 at the College Center Building.

The debate will present and contrast the Capitalist, Socialist, and Distributist positions in economics. The Conference, Catholicism and Economics, will present and compare the intellectual arguments about the compatibility of Catholicism with, respectively, democratic socialism, democratic capitalism, and distributism. Read more.
Thomas Storck will speak for the distributist position. Dr. Charles Clark will be the speaker on democratic socialism. Michael Novak will be the main speaker for the democratic capitalist position.
From 11:30am until 12:30pm there will be a luncheon for all in attendance (speakers and audience) including sandwiches, salads, cake, coffee/tea/cold beverages. Following lunch, there will be a brief tribute to the recently deceased Catholic scholars, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., and Msgr. Michael Wrenn. The debate will begin at 1pm with a half hour presentation by each participant. Subsequently, there will be an opportunity for the participants to respond critically to one another, with a brief summary statement made by each main speaker. Dr. Stephen M. Krason, President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, will close the event with a short reflection on the conference from the perspective of Heinrich Pesch and Solidarism. The event will conclude by 4:30pm.
Thomas Storck is an author, a member of the Editorial Board of the Chesterton Review and of The Society for Distributism.
Dr. Charles M.A. Clark is a Professor in the Department of Economics and Finance, Peter J. Tobin College of Business, St. John's University, Jamaica, Queens, New York.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute of Washington, D.C.
Stephen M. Krason is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

All conference attendees must register. In order to register for the conference, contact:
Nassau Community College
Office of Life Long Learning
One Education Drive
Garden City, New York, 11530
1-516-572-7472.

The Office of Life Long Learning will send you registration material and a mandatory parking permit through the mail. Parking on campus without a valid permit could result in being issued a parking ticket. Those lost on campus and in need of directions to the College Center Building can contact the Office of Public Safety, 1-516-572-7100.

A Little Creepy, but with a possible new recording of Chesterton

H/T: Dave Z. This is the first time I've heard this recording of Chesterton (is it Chesterton's voice?) but the animation is a little creepy, don't you think? It's a section of The Ballad of the White Horse.

Chestertonian Explanation of the Fall of AIG

From Paul Cella, on the Red State Blog:

G. K. Chesterton, demonstrating his genius at the art of paradox, once referred to optimism as “morbid.” Since the moment I read that (it appears in the second chapter of The Everlasting Man, I have felt in my bones that it is true, and have accordingly nurtured a healthy repugnance for the braggarts of optimism. But as with many paradoxes... Read more ...it is difficult to explain without vitiating its power to surprise and thus enlighten. A true paradox is not a mere turn of phrase, a linguistic subtlety. It is attempt to fill a gap in man’s power of understanding. It is a rhetorical reach, a heuristic device to explain what is in the end a mystery to our meager powers of mind. The paradox is a human reflection of the mystery of being.

So in the hands of a master like Chesterton, the paradox becomes an instrument of extraordinary explanatory power. It can show us, as in a flash, a principle or precept which might by other means requires hours of lecture to impart. (There is an obscure masterpiece, long out of print, called Paradox in Chesterton, by a critic named Hugh Kenner, which lays all this out with great elegance. It ends with the astonishing claim for GKC that he be called a Doctor of the Church; and more astonishing still, the reader finds himself convinced.)

In this case of the problem of optimism, Chesterton’s paradox opened my mind’s eye to the surprising truth that optimism, being so engrossed with the potential for good things, courts ruin and despair by minimizing bad things — or, in the parlance of finance, by minimizing the downside risk. Especially when abetted by the modern doctrine of progress, optimism is morbid because of its tendency to induce blindness concerning man’s limitations.

Now I have a concrete, factual illustration of the problem of optimism, right in front of everyone’s eyes.

As I understand it, AIG was basically ruined by the wild bets of a 300-man unit out of London, the Financial Products office. This 300-man operation lost the equivalent of a big state’s budget and more, all by themselves. [Click here to read it all.]

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I was looking to see what Chesterton had to say about St. Patrick's Day so I googled "Chesterton St. Patrick" and discovered there is a St. Patrick's parish in Chesterton, Indiana.

For your reading pleasure, try Irish Impressions, by GKC.

Frank and Ann Petta: The Wall

Miki Tracy writes:

I took a couple of photos of 'the wall' in the kitchen at Frank and Ann's house. I couldn't resist. It was one of the best things about that house! Almost of the books and art were already gone by the time I got there, so it didn't really feel like 'the Pettas'' anymore, but the wall is one of a kind, so I memorialized it.

Click on picture to enlarge.

The Last Bottle of Petta Wine

From Sara B:

Miki Tracy led us in toasts to Frank and Ann with the last bottle of last year's Petta wine -- found unopened in Ann's refrigerator, and just enough for the group's toasts.

Art Livingston regaled our table with tales of early Chicago meetings, including Frank Sheed's appearance. Read more.

I called Bernice Haase, who mothered us through the Milwaukee conventions and took such good care of Fr. Dave Wilbur. She sends on her best to all of you. She is still shoveling her own snow, which doesn't surprise any who know her. She opines that milking cows in the early morning, as she did as a young woman, is far more conducive to a long and active life than sitting at a computer. Amen.

Ann's niece will send out corrected holy cards to those who left addresses in the condolence book. I'm sure Ann got a good laugh from having two years subtracted from her age.

Old timers would have known Bernice from the Milwaukee days. She sat at the back door of the Cousins Center to make sure people weren’t locked out and got their room keys while the rest of us were down the hall at the conference – many met her before they met the rest of the Chestertonians. I don’t think she got to hear a substantive lecture the whole time we were in Milwaukee. I got Dale and Laura to get flowers for Bernice, Frances and Ann one early year in St. Paul as the mothers of the Chesterton conference. Thanks Sara B. for this report.

Ann's Obit

Ann Petta of Elgin A funeral Mass for Ann Petta (nee Stull), 82, formerly of Hyde Park, will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 12, at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, Elgin. Read more. Burial will follow in Mount Hope Catholic Cemetery. Visitation will be held from 4 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, at the Laird Funeral Home, Elgin, and from 9:30 a.m. until the time of Mass Thursday morning at the church. Born Dec. 3, 1926, in St. Louis, Mo., the daughter of the late Wilfred and Irene (Taylor) Stull, she passed away Sunday, March 8, 2009. Mrs. Ann Petta was born Ann Stull in St. Louis, Mo. Mrs. Petta moved to Chicago after graduating from Webster College, a Catholic women's college at the time. Mrs. Petta, or Ann, moved to Chicago to work at Friendship House, an organization dedicated to improving race relations. Mrs. Petta taught English at Kelly High School in Chicago for 30 years. In addition to teaching, Ann was interested in solar energy and became very involved in the Pro-Life Movement as well as promoting and enjoying the writings of G. K. Chesterton. Mrs. Petta was a founder of the Hyde Park/Kenwood Pro-Life Association in 1984, and the Respect Life Committee in 1980. Mrs. Petta was a board member of the Illinois Federation for the Right to Life and the Illinois Right to Life Committee. Mrs. Petta worked with other Pro-Life and pregnancy help organizations including the Pro-Life/Pro-Family Coalition, where she worked closely with Dr. Hiram Crawford Sr. and Dr. Hiram Crawford Jr. Mrs. Petta was a founder of The Midwest Chesterton Society and active in The American Chesterton Society. A daily communicant at her Catholic parish, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park, then St. Thomas More in Elgin, Mrs. Petta's Catholic faith filled her with joy and gratitude. Her joy was engulfing to those who met and knew Ann. Her sense of mirthful awe, wonder, and piety pointed to the charitable Catholic approach to God, and all who knew her felt the persuasion of her faith. Mr. and Mrs. Petta were appreciated in the Chesterton circles for their "Petta wine" made from grapes picked near their cottage in Michigan. No Chesterton gathering was complete without that delicious, if mysterious, basement fermentation. A large group of nieces, nephews and cousins with surnames of Stull, MauIler, Hilliard, Brown, Hobold, Taylor, Diehl and others, survive Mrs. Petta. She also held dear her large group of friends from all areas of her life. She was preceded in death by Frank Petta, her husband of seven years. Memorial donations may be made to Human Life International, National Right to Life, any Pro-Life organization, and to The American Chesterton Society. For information, 847-741-8800.

Published in the Chicago Suburban Daily Herald from 3/10/2009 - 3/11/2009

Dale Update

Just got back from Nebraska. The same night I gave my “God is Dead” talk at Kearney, Richard Dawkins was speaking in Omaha. Everyone at Kearney was hoping that the two atheist biology professors on campus would come to my talk, but instead they drove 3 hours to hear Dawkins. Chickens.

Milwaukee, WI Area Chestertonians

Greetings, Chestertonians. The revival of the Milwaukee Chesterton Society had its first meeting last Saturday afternoon. It went well, and we're looking forward to the next meeting, which will be on Saturday, April 4 from 2:00 to 4:00.

The next meeting will be at the St. Joseph Center at 1501 S. Layton Blvd. Society members can go the front desk and will be directed to the meeting room.

We hope you can join us this coming month. We will be discussing the first three chapters of Dale Alquist's book on Chesterton, Comon Sense 101. See you then!

International Manalive Movie Fans

Manalive movie fans, some of you have asked if the DVD will be available for your region.

The answer is "probably". We don't have a distributor yet.

When I know more, I'll let you know. Keep checking here for the latest info.

Ann and Frank - laughing with GKC and Frances

You just gotta laugh. Or I hope you will.

I was hunting for something over on the wonderful collection of things from Dover, and stunmbled into something very curious. Dover you know does a great collection of GKC books, mostly his fiction, but including Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man; they also have some of Belloc's poems, and several books of Blake's art, but not yet GKC's book on Blake. Ahem. But it wasn't a Chesterton book I was laughing at.

But first, in order to see the humour, you'll need this Chesterton quote...

...when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called The Natural Philosophic Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois's theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary
universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism." But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr. Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages.
[GKC "The Strange Crime of John Boulnois" in The Wisdom of Father Brown]

Yes, you think that's all fiction, don't you?

Heh heh heh.

Here's what I stumbled on, available from Dover:

Catastrophe Theory for Scientists and Engineers

Robert Gilmore
Our Price $26.95
Availability: In Stock


Format: Book
ISBN: 0486675394
Page Count: 666
Dimensions: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Catastrophe theory attempts to study how the qualitative nature of the solutions of equations depends on the parameters that appear in the equations. This advanced-level treatment describes the mathematics of catastrophe theory and its applications to problems in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. 28 tables. 397 black-and-white illustrations. 1981 edition.

Yes, it's real, not something made- up. Here's the link, see for yourself.

This reminds me (as you would expect) of another Chesterton quote...

It is one of the journalist's tragedies that whenever he introduces a thing purely as an impossibility, somebody writes to say that it really occurred. If I use a foolish metaphor at random I generally receive two letters - one complaining that the thing is too violent and absurd, the other saying that it happened to the writer's aunt. My wild phrases are quite tame; they have been domesticated for centuries. This is pathetic and sometimes almost disheartening.
[GKC ILN Sept 22 1906 CW27:285]

No, I did not get Dover to help me with a joke. It's a real thing. (And Dale didn't, either. But if you ask him about it, he'll probably be selling them at the next ChesterCon along with the relevant Father Brown collection. Hee hee. At least then you'll know.)

You're not laughing? I sure am.

Oh well... it's just like those jokes Frank would read at the Traditions part of the final banquet at ChesterCons. But I hear Ann laughing too...

Fighting Words: Dogma, Ireland, Middle Ages, Evolution, Miracles...

This post is made in memory of dear Ann Stull Petta...

V. Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine.
R. Et lux perpetua luceat ei.
V. Requiescat in pace.
R. Amen.
V. Anima ejus et anime omnium fidelium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.
R. Amen.

She, of all people, (like her dear husband, who did so much to promote GKC, especially by supplying me by the last years of the ILN) would urge me to proceed with our study, especially as we deal with such important matters. So let us proceed.

Some of you may be wondering why, every so often, I use the spelling "Roma" instead of Rome. I guess it is a fighting word. Sometimes I cannot grasp why people insist on saying Bay Jing or Beiging or whatever they spell it for "Peking". The Chinese don't say it, they sing it. Sometimes I wish we sang more, or recognized the music in our own language. And they don't spell it at all; they draw it. While I see some complications in using that technique for serious communications, as art it is one of the grandest of human inventions... though I prefer Egyptian hieroglyphs to Chinese pictograms - they look better in stone. (But I do have Chinese brushes and instruction books, and someday I will make the attempt. However I have never wanted to chisel out an obelisk. Hee hee.) Ahem.

Yet these same people won't say "Hellenika" for "Greece", or "John Bernardone" for "St. Francis of Assisi"... and they ask me why I persist in calling that metal "aluminum" and not "aluminium", and why that gas is "helium" rather than "helion" like "neon" and "argon"! Then there's the word "object" in computing, which can apply to "code" which is produced by a compiler (or linker) - but can apply to language which means one is always writing PASCAL "WITH" statements using a kind of ellipsis... but I am sure all this is very boring, even to the techs and the linguists. Anyhow, I am not trying to argue for (or against) any of these things, but just pointing out the richness - and the challenges - of human language. Though I am also trying to egg on a fight about words.

But perhaps you'd prefer a little GKC about this odd kind of battle... here's an interesting bit, as we draw near the end of winter:

One of the elemental jokes of this earth is the fact that (going merely by the eye and its associations) a winter landscape looks warm and a summer landscape looks cool. In winter the earth seems to be comfortably huddled in white furs, which are called snow. In summer she seems to be fanning herself with green fans, which are called foliage. That heavy half-violet white of snow is really one of the warmest colours. That glistening or gleaming green of leaves is really one of the coolest colours. A white snow-bank looks as warm as a white blanket. A green forest looks as cool as a green sea. This is, no doubt, an illusion of my eye. In the curiously exact and philosophic phrase of our fathers, it is all my eye. A full and generous philosophy draws its strength from all the senses; and I can always correct the illusion of my eye merely by putting my nose out of the front door.
For this reason we should remember and treasure the spring which we are now enjoying. We shall never, perhaps, be able to recall it or bring it back. Other springs will come and go and disappear on dancing feet; but they will pass with a perpetual promise of return. The crocuses that tried to grow in my garden will try again, and will probably succeed next time.
But never again, perhaps, shall I look out on a garden in April covered, not with the gold of the crocuses, but with the splendid silver of the snow. As it is, I look on that most glorious of sights: a collision. You may call it, if you like, an overlapping: the spring has begun before the winter has left off. If it comes to that, you can call any collision an overlapping; you can say that the Horsham train overlapped the Brighton express and ten passengers were killed. The essential is that this entanglement of advancing spring with retreating winter has all the crashing qualities of a battle.
[GKC "The April Fool" in Lunacy and Letters]

But that almost poetic sketch (oh for a real illustration to go with it!) does not quite give the sense I wish for. Let's see...

First, democracy is founded on a certain thought or sentiment. If you do not like to call it the equality of men, you can call it the similarity of men. It is man considered in regard to the things which are common. Birth, sex, and death are the three most obvious instances. But birth is generally forgotten, and sex is highly specialised and often highly secretive: hence it is death which springs most easily to men's minds when they consider the common doom of men. But here another complication enters. For though death is the most obvious and universal fact, it is also the least agreeable one. Men will always turn their thoughts from it, unless it is presented in some light of dignity or hope. Highly civilised materialists will naturally think of life as alone interesting. Unfortunately, however, just as what most levels men is death, so what most varies men is life. The towering inequalities in wealth, wisdom, or beauty become all-important to the imagination if there is no cosmic background to dwarf them all. And people will not think about the cosmic background if the background is black. Only the universal can make fraternity possible. Only faith can make the universal endurable. To sum up: men may cling to the idea of "one man one vote" if it is associated with "one man one soul." They certainly will not linger over it if it is only associated with "one man one coffin."
[GKC ILN Jan 13 1912 CW29:223-4]

Wow. I don't remember reading that one at all. (Let's send that to our favourite politician - or political Media Person, it will blow their socks off!)

But it's still not quite what I want. Well, our esteemed bloggmistress asked... Doctor! Will you ever get to the point? Oh excuse me - I am sure waxing eloquent today, and I have a LONG excerpt, but it will be worth it. (Besides, most of this is GKC, not me.) As I was saying, our esteemed bloggmistress asked me some complex question about GKC and "strong verbs and short sentences" (sounds like a rock song, doesn't it?) and I ran into this... the technical grammar term is most likely "ellipsis", but in any case it sure reminds me of that "implied WITH" from object-oriented computer languages:

A very eminent and distinguished critic has done me the honour to criticise, in a private letter, the remarks I made recently in disparagement of the phrase "making good." ... I am, I confess, so degenerate a Latin type of mind that I think there ought to be some logic in grammar. And it seems to me a simple fact that "to make" is a transitive verb, and must have an object or accusative. We can make a plumber good, or make a Dean good, or even make a poor bewildered and overwrought journalist, writing in a weekly illustrated paper, good; but we cannot make good. If it is an allowable idiom, it must be an exception and not a rule; and it must be an exception by some exceptional process, such as that of depending upon words that are "understood." I know that this practice does exist; nor can the most logical Latin wholly condemn it, for it exists even in the logical Latin language. There is a form, which I remember learning laboriously in the Latin grammar as a boy, by which some such word as officium, for instance, could be understood. It is allowable to say in Latin: "It is of a good man to worship the gods," or "It is of a good father to feed his children." Here certainly there is some word, such as "part" or "duty," left to be understood.
But the worst of these words that are understood is that they are not understood. Even in face of the few Latin precedents I rather doubt whether it is wise to follow such precedents, and certainly whether it is wise to create new precedents. But it is particularly undesirable at the present day, at a period in which things are emphatically not understood; a period in which they are, beyond all previous precedent, misunderstood. For men do not now agree, even as much as the Romans did, about the relations of a good man to the gods or the relation of a father to the children. At the best, there is some ambiguity in saying "it is of a good man to go to church." For one man will read it in the form "It is the duty of a good man to go to church." Another may read it, in a cynical spirit, in the form "It is the interest of a good man to go to church." A third will read it in the form "It is the infernal bore inflicted on a good man to go to church." Now, that ambiguity did not so often happen in older and simpler social systems. There is less of that ambiguity in the Latin phrase. But there is nothing but ambiguity in the modern English phrase. There is only blank, unadulterated ambiguity in that English phrase - if you can call it an English phrase. And that is the root of my unrepentant revolt against it.
[GKC ILN Feb 27 1932 special thanks to Frank Petta and my mother]

Well, did any of that get your Irish up? (hee hee!) Are you in a fighting mood yet? All right, one more, the best...

"But you know this is a serious matter," he said, eyeing Turnbull and MacIan, as if they had just been keeping the table in a roar with their frivolities. "I am sure that if I appealed to your higher natures... your higher natures. Every man has a higher nature and a lower nature. Now, let us put the matter very plainly, and without any romantic nonsense about honour or anything of that sort. Is not bloodshed a great sin?"
"No," said MacIan, speaking for the first time.
"Well, really, really!" said the peacemaker.
"Murder is a sin," said the immovable Highlander. "There is no sin of bloodshed."
"Well, we won't quarrel about a word," said the other, pleasantly.
"Why on earth not?" said MacIan, with a sudden asperity. "Why shouldn't we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only things worth fighting about. I say that murder is a sin, and bloodshed is not, and that there is as much difference between those words as there is between the word 'yes' and the word 'no'; or rather more difference, for 'yes' and 'no', at least, belong to the same category. Murder is a spiritual incident. Bloodshed is a physical incident. A surgeon commits bloodshed."
[GKC The Ball and the Cross, emphasis added]

And since you probably expect me to mention something from The Phantom Tollbooth, I will. Apparently it was one of the little edits made in going from the book to the movie, because I cannot find it in the book, but when Milo meets King Azaz of Dictionopolis (the Kingdom of Words) Milo explains that he must still serve a sentence of six million years in prison. To which the King replies, "Six million... that's not a sentence, that's a number."

So rather than sentence you to any number of years of waiting, I will wait, laughing patiently, for you to choose to find out more about fighting words...

(( click here to enter the fray! ))

We proceed into the battle with the second of GKC's other trio of topics. We're so "multi-cultural" now - but we don't even know the ONE civilisation responsible for that word! Talk about a fighting word: multus,a,um = many. cultus from colo, colere = to cultivate. Yes, that's LATIN - from ancient Roma. Just as an Indian on a horse is the supreme praise of Columbus, using the word "multi-cultural" is the supreme praise of one single culture: the universal, the Roman one. And even its enemies are still harvesting its fruits. (I suspect their own field is barren, meaning "lifeless" - we heard about that issue last week.)

Even worse, we don't know about the one civilisation that links us back to Rome. Like the "multi-cultural" people in "The Curse of the Golden Cross" in The Incredulity of Father Brown, it is likely that you don't know the truth about the Middle Ages - and this is a sad shame:

"No, of course," said Father Brown. "If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried-up Africans preserved, heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth-brush or a collar-stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades and the very roads you walk on; it has never occurred to you to know anything about them."

That is a good story, and has a surprise, as good detective mysteries should, but in our next excerpt you will find an even more stunning surprise:

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
[CW1:352]

I know this comes as a shock to some of you, but you were taught a falsehood about that era, especially when it comes to science. For about 100 years, since the amazing pioneering work of the great thermodynamicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem, who found the scientific work of Buridan and Oresme (the antecedents of Newton and Galileo at the 13th century Sorbonne) - or since Dr. Walsh's collection of details on hospitals and medicine in his The Popes and Science and other works - to which I add the dozens of books of Stanley Jaki, and other like studies - it has been well known that to call them the "Dark Ages" is a gross insult, and quite simply false. The people of those ages were the ones who invented the term "modern". They had science, they had universities, they had hospitals, they had inventions and labor-saving devices... they were the Ages of Light. GKC gives you the tiniest taste - once you've read all the books I mentioned, you will have the truth with academic detail, and know there is far more that we inherit from that era. Just think, there are almost no manuscripts existing older than 1100-1200 years - all the ones we have, of the numerous ancient writers (pagan and other) were copied by hand by monks...

An aside: Read this paragraph again, and if you need more, start with GKC's The Everlasting Man, which will give you the Chestertonian method for handling history, and an encapsulated study of the big picture - especially when you read the chapter called "The Five Deaths of the Faith". Then you can go hunting. Duhem's masterworks are not yet available in English - someday a brilliant French scholar will get busy translating his work. Most of Jaki's books are in print, laden with scholarly detail and meticulously documented, and are available through Real View Books. Start with Science and Creation, chapter 10, and "Medieval Creativity in Science and Technology" in Patterns or Principles.

But, as GKC points out, all this can be known from history, if you actually find out what the history was.

Now, this next paragraph (which I have split for convenience) happens to come at a very suitable moment in the year, considering that the Feast of St. Patrick is next Tuesday...

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially hard professions - the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. ...
[CW1:353]

I cannot take the time to begin comments on GKC's dealing with Ireland and the Irish - if you wish two books, please consider Irish Impressions and Christendom in Dublin, both in CW20. Or, for a very brief hint from GKC's fiction:

The prisoner was defended by Mr. Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flâneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character - and those who had not been examined by him.
[GKC "The Man in the Passage" in The Wisdom of Father Brown]

I mention this character for a very curious reason. The great mystery writer John Dickson Carr (whose character Dr. Gideon Fell is a wonderful fictional edition of GKC!) wrote two mystery novels where this Irish lawyer Patrick Butler is the main character! (The French flâneur means one who strolls aimlessly, hence an intellectual trifler.)

Now, having completed his responses to the second trio, GKC gives a summary:

... In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopaedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?"
[CW1:353]

(Did you catch that allusion to the Magnificat? (Lk 1:53) I thought you would.)

But let us not stop now. GKC asked a question, and proceeds to respond:

There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnarok of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life - it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps - ever since.
[CW1:353-4]

If you were able to see me when I was reading that last line, you would see the strange reaction, well-known to ACS conference attendees, which I represent here by "hee hee"... I remember an odd bit of Latin I learned from one of Father Jaki's books:

Natura non facit saltum

Which means "Nature does not proceed by leaps." (literally "Nature does not make a jump" - from Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica.) I won't delve into the biological topic, but it sure seems that "Super-nature" makes "jumps". (Hee hee!) Ahem.

You were wondering about "Ragnarok" - in Scandinavian mythology that is the "Twilight of the Gods", or the final battle leading to the end of the world.

Now, GKC gives us another kind of review, which hints at the technique I mentioned recently of "converging evidence"...

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention - that my own case for Christianity is rational; but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.
[CW1:354]

Someone will be sure to whine about that bit on Darwinism - so I will apply our usual tool of distinguo and point out that there's a difference between the science of evolution (which studies traits of living things and how they are passed on from parents to offspring) and the philosophy of Darwinism (which is something else, but clearly not science). But then I might as well have said, GKC covered this already, back in chapter 3 "The Suicide of Thought". Then again, a Review is useful, so I will repeat the critical lines - which you ought to keep on hand to stop idiotic whines like that:

Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.
[CW1:237-8]

Yes, and well worth re-quoting. So let us proceed. We have a much harder topic than "evolution" to confront anyway, in one of the longest paragraphs in the book: the provoking word is miracles...

But among these million facts all flowing one way there is, of course, one question sufficiently solid and separate to be treated briefly, but by itself; I mean the objective occurrence of the supernatural. In another chapter I have indicated the fallacy of the ordinary supposition that the world must be impersonal because it is orderly. A person is just as likely to desire an orderly thing as a disorderly thing. But my own positive conviction that personal creation is more conceivable than material fate, is, I admit, in a sense, undiscussable. I will not call it a faith or an intuition, for those words are mixed up with mere emotion, it is strictly an intellectual conviction; but it is a primary intellectual conviction like the certainty of self or the good of living. Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism - the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence - it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is - that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. ...
[CW1:354-6]

It is hard to add much to that, it's so comprehensive and so well-argued. Just for completeness, and to hint at the larger topic, I will mention that GKC examines this issue elsewhere - one of the most notable is the story "The Trees of Pride" which is in the fantastic CW14. I will also add that Fr. Jaki has a small book called Miracles and Physics, and another very interesting book called God and the Sun at Fatima which examines the actual reports of the "miracle of the sun" and considers some of the science involved.

As you saw, I broke off this very long paragraph - but there was only one more sentence:

... It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.
[CW1:356]

And next week we'll see what it is.

The Gilbert and Frances Scholarship

With the economy the way it is, college costs seem unbelievable. If you know a student who could benefit from a very generous scholarship ($2500), please inform them of this Chestertonian scholarship. Applications now being accepted.

Update: Filming Manalive

From Dale:

We started shooting the movie “Manalive” last week. Here are a couple of pictures from the set. Mark Shea as Innocent Smith “holding a gun to the head of modern man.” [ed. note: Mark keeps his readers up to date via his blog] And director Joey Odendahl and the so-called Executive Producer [ed. note: that's Dale] surveying the rooftop of “Beacon House”. Things are off to a great start. The cast and crew are starting to gel.

Filming will continue in Savannah to the end of the month. Then we will film some scenes in Seattle in April. Editing and scoring will take a few months.

It’s especially heartbreaking that Ann Petta will not get to see this movie. It was a project especially dear to her.

I reminded Dale that Ann *will* see this movie, and is perhaps working with the crew already. She'll have the best seat in the house when it plays. ;-)

Funeral arrangements for Ann Petta

A wake for Ann Stull Petta will take place on Wednesday, March 11, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., at Laird's Funeral Home, 310 S. State Street (Rt. 31), Elgin, IL, 60123 (847-741-8800).

The Funeral Mass will be held on Thursday, March 12th, 10:00 a.m., at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, 215 Thomas More Drive (corner of Highland Ave. & Thomas More Dr.), Elgin, IL 60123 (847-888-1682).

There will be a graveside service following the Mass at Mount Hope Cemetery, 1001 Villa Street, Elgin, IL 60120.

A post-graveside gathering to share memories and stories of Mrs. Ann Petta and to celebrate her life is scheduled to begin 11:30 a.m. at Hennessy's Steak & Seafood restaurant, 2300 Bushwood Drive (1/2 mile N of I-90 on Randall Road on the left/West side at the Starbucks and Pantera entrance), Elgin, IL 60124 (847-844-3600).

Those wishing to make memorial gifts may donate to Human Life International, National Right to Life, other international, national, state or local pro-life organizations, pregnancy help centers, or to the American Chesterton Society. Short notices concerning the wake and funeral will appear tomorrow in The Chicago Tribune, the Hyde Park Herald, and the Courier News (Elgin, IL). A full obituary will appear in these papers on Wednesday.

Ann (Stull) Petta, RIP

It is with a sad heart that I inform everyone of the passing of a person who loved Gilbert, Ann Petta. From Dale:

Ann died this evening [March 8]. Her nephew just called me with the sad news.

Today’s Psalm at Mass was “How precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.” It could not have been more appropriate.

We lost a shining light in the Chesterton community today.

The funeral will be Thursday.

When I get the time and place, I'll let you know.

Her husband Frank [scroll down to see all the articles about Frank] died almost exactly one year ago. These two shining beacons of love, friendship, joy, humor, laughter, and faith touched the lives of most of the Chestertonians I know here in America. Frank and Ann were part of that first meeting in Milwaukee about 27 years ago, and they were also the premier Chestertonian lovers: falling in love over a common interest in Chesterton, and celebrating a Chestertonian wedding not all that long ago.

Ann was sweet, always took time to talk with me, and I felt a close connection because she once told me that what made her like Chesterton was not his writings, although she loved them too, but she loved his person. She said she fell in love with him as a person: his kindness, caring, love, listening ability, etc. And when she said that, I felt I'd met a kindred soul, because that was exactly how I came to love Chesterton: reading his biography and finding out what a wonderful person he was.

May Ann rest in peace, reunited with Frank, and joining Gilbert and Frances for a party in heaven.