Standford's Coming!

I just heard that Standford's coming to ChesterTen, and so I was searching for his latest video and found this. I'm not sure he's going to like our conference, do you?

Self-Employed

I don't think it was that easy for G.K. Chesterton to be self-employed. He seems to have had a difficult time with money-handling, book-keeping, record-keeping and such. He procrastinated his deadlines and never became rich. Although Frances didn't have to go to work, they had a gardener and a housekeeper and a cook, and so he obviously made an adequate living.

Today, in America, a person who is self-employed, and whether it's someone who is a sole proprietor or someone who has up to 100 employees (all considered by the government to be a "small" business), the endless paperwork can seem overwhelming. One might even think there might be a consipiracy to discourage small business.

Being one's own boss comes at a price. The price is keeping up with all of the government regulations, the paperwork, paying the taxes, (fees, fines, licenses and so forth are basically still taxes), and managing the headaches. But the upside is you are your own man (in the old fashioned sense of the word). Your own boss. The maker of your own fate. With God's help, of course.

Are you self-employed like Chesterton? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?

The Mysterious Benedict Society

My teens and I have recently read The Mysterious Benedict Society and enjoyed it quite a lot. We are delighted to discover that the author has written two sequels, and are now on book 2.

One thing we enjoyed is the way the kids are picked to be in the Society. The tests they must take are quite cleverly thought up.

We also enjoyed that the overarching reason the kids were picked was because of their love of the truth.

Additionally, the fact that the "bad guys" deliver their messages via the TV makes perfect sense.

And the thrill of the mystery and it's resolution was quite satisfactory. The fact that it was very hard to put this book down means it engaged the reader. Suitable for ages 9 and up, with no offending material as far as I remember.

If you like "Thursday"...

If you liked GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday, I think you might like Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery. I just finished it last night. I won't say more about the relation between these two stories, because it is best that you be surprised - which is what detective fiction is all about. As is Christianity.

Here's a bit of GKC on AC:

...Miss Marple, quite as meek and spinsterish as Miss Mitford, actually is a creation of modern detective fiction; a modest maiden lady who plays the demure detective in some excellent stories by Agatha Christie...
[GKC ILN May 23 1936; thanks to Frank Petta and my mother]

(Note, the Seven Dials story is not one with Miss Marple in it.)

GKC: the first cataract of innocence

As you will learn if you click here, this past week your lunatic writer became godfather of a young man named Mark, the son of two dear friends - poets and writers - brilliant young people whom I met at Chesterton Conferences...
And it reminded me of the following excerpt (among others) from our Uncle Gilbert.

--Dr. Thursday.

I have just received a long, elaborate, and very able document from the Moral Instruction League, describing what they conceive to be a complete system of sensible education in ethics; a scheme of ethics to which everyone assents and which can therefore be substituted for the moralities of all the creeds. It is supposed to represent the morality in which all men agree. And really, I do not think I ever read a document with which I disagreed so much. I do not mean at all that it is an exceptionally silly document; in many ways it is exceptionally capable. The only mistake in it is the mistake (as I freely admit), of almost all the enterprising educationalism of our day. That mistake is simply that all the people who think about education never seem to think about children. I solemnly assure the reader that I have read whole books about education written by intellectual people with great ingenuity; and I can only describe the effect on my mind by some kind of wild parallel. It felt as if I were reading a book called "How to Breed Horses," and it was all written like this: "Many people can enjoy the sweet voices of the horses singing at daybreak who nevertheless know little of the way they build their nests; and who (when they have tamed them) will often neglect to clean out their cages and be content merely with occasionally smoothing their feathers." One could only come to a sort of blear-eyed conclusion that the man was not talking about horses at all. Exactly in the same way many modern educational documents, including this one, strike me as not being either bad for children or good for children. They are not about children. The man who wrote them has obviously not the most glimmering idea of what a child is like. To take the most obvious point, they all talk as if the child stood still to be educated. They talk as if the government of your home were entirely concerned with what you should do with the children. A great deal of it is concerned with the desperate question of what the children will do with you. They talk of giving this or that final touch to the shape of the child's will, as if the child had no will of his own. They talk of forming the child's mind as if the child had not formed his own mind and did not know his own mind uncommonly well. A child is weaker than a man if it comes to a fight or to knowledge of the world; but there is nothing to show that the child is weaker in will or in desire. You come away from a modern educational work with the feeling that you have been putting together little pieces of different-coloured clay until you have made the image or statuette of a small child. You come away from having to do with a small child with the sense of having been wrestling with gigantic angels and gigantic devils, with the first eddy of evil as it enters the universe and the first cataract of innocence as it comes from God.
[GKC ILN 1908 CW:111-2]

The Errors of Mr. Chesterton

What! Can this title be real?

(It must be some sort of joke... Surely Dr. Thursday is not serious...)

Oh, but I am quite serious. I do mean to state here that there are real errors in the writings of G. K. Chesterton. And I don't merely mean merely typographical oversights.

You stammer and whine... You are horrified; you weep, you moan,you smash your keyboard. You write to Dale Ahlquist, to Father Boyd, to Father Fessio, to Dover Publications, to Aidan Mackey, to the Queen of England, to the Vatican, screaming "Denounce Dr. Thursday, crush him, destroy him! May he be erased, and may his all disk drives be overwritten with crayons! Let his words, indeed, let his very name be stricken from every pylon and obelisk..." Ahem.

Ah, but you see, as much as I delight in reading GKC, and admire his work, and struggle to study it and to teach it to others, I do not believe that GKC is Almighty God. Speaking in a vaguely generic sense, as I am a mere layman, I am probably more of a Dominican than a Franciscan - but I am at least a Franciscan in this, that I follow Jesus, and not Francis. If you misunderstand that, you'll need to re-read GKC's book on St. Francis. It means that even Francis submitted to the authority of the Pope, and did not set up a new religion - though he could have. In the same way, I follow Jesus, not Chesterton, who himself submitted to papal authority; it would be all too easy for someone to begin a sect of Chestertonism.

"But Doc" - you say - "you may feel you are lying when you assert that GKC is never wrong, but why worry? You could be serving Chesterton as no Chestertonian has ever served him before!"

Ah yes. But you forget I have read GKC.

"...you wouldn't suggest I should serve Chesterton by what I know to be a lie. I don't know precisely what you mean by the phrase; and, to be quite candid, I'm not sure you do. Lying may be serving Chesterton; I'm sure it's not serving God."
[cf "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

You sit and think a little - then ask: "do you mean this is some sort of exposé - you are going to enumerate all the little peccadillos and all the grave heresies committed by this wicked English journalist?"

No. At least not today. I'm not writing that sort of criticism. You really have to think again about what I do here, and why I do it. This is not that sort of column.

Rather, let me just quote a little from a marvellous book I am reading about St. Albert, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, which may give you some insight into the matter:

[Albert] tells us that in scientific matters one could not expect to investigate everything in person, though if this were possible, it would be the ideal method of procedure. Since, however, it is out of the question, the next best thing is to base one's theories on the observations of man whom one has no reason to suspect of lying or chicanery. If, therefore, he [Albert] chose Aristotle as his guide and authority in the sciences, it was because he had reason to conclude, owing to the instances when he had tried out and tested the Greek's [Aristotle's] sayings by his [Albert's] own observations, that the Stagirite [that is, Aristotle] was faithfully reporting his own observations and those of his pupils. Hence, it is unjust to identify Albert's scientific doctrine absolutely and exclusively with what Aristotle had said. Albert put it down as a fundamental principle, which he carried out frequently in his own case, that when Aristotle's findings were in contradiction with one's bservations the only honest and sensible procedure was to hold to one's own opinion. [see below] Albert did subject Aristotle's scientific statements to scrutiny. Thus he rejects Aristotle when he says that lunar rainbows appear only every fifty years, since he himself had witnessed two in one year. This is one case only out of many where he proves his contention that even Aristotle is fallible; God alone is infallible.
[Schwertner, St. Albert the Great, 193-4]

You see? That is not only true for science, or for history, but even for literature - we must check into things. But more important is that concluding line: even Aristotle is fallible - God alone is infallible.

Actually, the delight in reading Chesterton is that he can poke so much fun at himself, even when he is wrong. There is a very famous line often quoted about this, and I will repeat it for you:

Listeners especially noted the quickness with which he picked up the "feel" of the audience and returned the ball to the questioner, leaving him often holding it in bewilderment and not knowing what to do next. A rather conceited young man made quite a speech of patronizing approval, saying that he had really quite liked the lecture but ending up, "I feel, Mr. Chesterton, that there is one important matter you have not quite covered: in the event of your having to change your original position, what tactics do you adopt?"
G.K. answered, "On such occasions I invariably commit suicide."
[Ward, Return To Chesterton 152]

From which it has been derived (by good logic) that, since GKC never committed suicide, he never changed his original position. Which is trivially refuted by his conversion in 1922.

But that is not the point. The point is not that he was "wrong" - but that he was poking fun, both at himself and at his questioner. If you wish something even funnier, check out "The Real Journalist" which was collected in A Miscellany of Men and tells of how GKC misquoted or misrepresented some poem or other, and how it snowballed into a media "feeding frenzy" and silly accusations and letter-writing. One can only imagine how the "bloggosphere" would react if it had been a posting... of course it is far too long for a "twitter", thank God! Hee hee.

But let us hear a little more of GKC about making mistakes. It may not satisfy you - in fact, it may leave me unspeakably tarred with some sort of anti-Chestertonian brush (hee hee!) but then as the Master has suffered, so also should the disciple expect to suffer. It may be my business to find and correct errors, but I do spend time considering the errors in my own writing before I bother fussing about those committed by others. (Remember that thing about digging out the wooden beam from your own eye first?) Try thinking about all this, and refrain from commenting until you have spent some time on it; you may be surprised at the result. Maybe you will actually laugh.

There is nothing that needs more fastidious care than our choice of nonsense. Sense is like daylight or daily air, and may come from any quarter or in any quantity. But nonsense is an art. Like an art, it is rarely successful, and yet entirely simple when it is successful. Like an art, it depends on the smallest word, and a misprint can spoil it. And like an art, when it is not in the service of heaven it is almost always in the service of hell. Numberless imitators of Lewis Carroll or of Edward Lear have tried to write nonsense and failed; falling back (one may hope) upon writing sense. But certainly, as the great Gilbert said, wherever there has been nonsense it has been precious nonsense. Les Précieuses Ridicules might be translated, perhaps, in two ways. No one doubts that serious artists are absurd; but it might also be maintained that absurdity is always a serious art.

I have suffered as much as any man from the public insult of the misprint. I have seen my love of books described as a love of boots. I have seen the word "cosmic" invariably printed as "comic"; and have merely reflected that the two are much the same. As to Nationalists and Rationalists, I have come to the conclusion that no human handwriting or typewriting can clearly distinguish them; and I now placidly permit them to be interchanged, though the first represents everything I love and the second everything I loathe. But there is one kind of misprint I should still find it hard to forgive. I could not pardon a blunder in the printing of "Jabberwock." I insist on absolute literalism in that really fine poem of Lear, "The Dong with the Luminous Nose." To spoil these new nonsense words would be like shooting a great musician improvising on the piano. The sounds could never be recovered again. "And as in uffish thought he stood." If the printer had printed it "affish" I doubt if the first edition would have sold. "Over the Great Gromboolian Plain." Suppose I had seen it printed "Gromhoolian." Perhaps I should never have known, as I know now, that Edward Lear was a yet greater man than Lewis Carroll.

The first principle, then, may be considered clear. Let mistakes be made in ordinary books - that is, in scientific works, established biographies, histories, and so on. Do not let us be hard on misprints when they occur merely in time-tables or atlases or works of science. In works like those of Professor Haeckel, for example, it is sometimes quite difficult to discover which are the misprints and which are the intentional assertions. But in anything. artistic, anything which avowedly strays beyond reason, there we must demand the exactitude of art. If a thing is admittedly not possible, then the next best thing it can do is to be beautiful. If a thing is nonsensical, it ought to be perfectly nonsensical.
[GKC ILN March 11 1911, CW29:51-2.
Also see ILN June 9, 1906 CW 27:206: "Whatever is cosmic is comic."]

I am ready to admit I have made many mistakes in this posting, but I do not have any intention of committing suicide. I've got too much to do just now, so "I think I shall not hang myself today." [GKC "A Ballade Of Suicide" in Collected Poems 180]

Postscript. I had to poke into the Jaki part of AMBER to find out something more about Haeckel. As GKC says, "The religion of Haeckel the biologist is more important than his biology." [ILN June 22 1912 CW29:312] But he really was even more hilarious when you hear his science:

Some monists tried of course to camouflage their materialistic exploitation of the alleged fact of spontaneous generation with a propaganda long on scientific words but very short on science. Thus Haeckel boldly informed the German Association in 1877 that once the chemical components of a cell - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur - are properly united, they "produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nursed, become man." In all this of course there was only as little of "exact" physical science as there was logic in his concluding sentence: "With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in."
[SLJ The Relevance of Physics 310]

Oh my... Hee hee!

Apostle of Common Sense on DVD (Season 2)

E-bay offer, good price, check it out here.

On the office of Shepherd

Offered for your meditation... We shall talk more about St. Albert as time permits.
--Dr. Thursday.

When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward - in a word, a man. [see Mt 16:22, 26:33, 26:69-74] And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. [Mt 16:18] All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
[GKC Heretics CW1:70]

The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, "Feed my lambs." [Jn 21:15] He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, "Get thee behind me, Satan." [Mt 16:23]
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:320]

Christ founded the Church with two great figures of speech; in the final words to the Apostles who received authority to found it. The first was the phrase about founding it on Peter as on a rock, the second was the symbol of the keys. About the meaning of the former there is naturally no doubt in my own case; but it does not directly affect the argument here save in two more secondary aspects. It is yet another example of a thing that could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards. And it is yet another example of something the very reverse of simple and self-evident even in the language, in so far as it described a man as a rock when he had much more the appearance of a reed.

But the other image of the keys has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed. The keys have been conspicuous enough in the art and heraldry of Christendom; but not everyone has noted the peculiar aptness of the allegory. ... The Early Christian was very precisely a person carrying about a key, or what he said was a key. The whole Christian movement consisted in claiming to possess that key. It was not merely a vague forward movement, which might be better represented by a battering-ram. It was not something that swept along with it similar or dissimilar things, as does a modern social movement. As we shall see in a moment, it rather definitely refused to do so. It definitely asserted that there was a key and that it possessed that key and that no other key was like it; in that sense it was as narrow as you please. Only it happened to be the key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:346]

[on the papacy:] It is true that as yet large numbers of such social reformers would shrink from the idea of the institution being an individual. But even that prejudice is weakening under the wear and tear of real political experience. We may be attached, as many of us are, to the democratic ideal; but most of us have already realized that direct democracy, the only true democracy which satisfies a true democrat, is a thing applicable to some things and not others; and not at all to a question such as this. The actual speaking voice of a vast international civilization, or of a vast international religion, will not in any case be the actual articulate distinguishable voices or cries of all the millions of the faithful. It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope; it is some synod or bench of bishops. It is not an alternative between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy and oligarchy. And, being myself one of the democratic idealists, I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter forms of privilege. A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men; it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent and large enough to be irresponsible. A man in the position of a Pope, unless he is literally mad, must be responsible. But aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other; and yet create a common and corporate society from which is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world. These are conclusions to which many people in the world are coming; and many who would still be much astonished and horrified to find where those conclusions lead. But the point here is that even if our civilization does not rediscover the need of a Papacy, it is extremely likely that sooner or later it will try to supply the need of something like a Papacy; even if it tries to do it on its own account. That will be indeed an ironical situation. The modern world will have set up a new Anti-Pope, even if, as in Monsignor Benson's romance, [The Lord of the World] the Anti-Pope has rather the character of an Antichrist. The point is that men will attempt to put some sort of moral power out of the reach of material powers.
[GKC The Thing CW3:326-7]

... in commenting on St. John's words, "Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me," he [st. Albert the Great] have given in advance the ideal of a pastor which he would seek to realize in the immediate future. Albert says:
"It is the test of those to whom the pastoral office is confided. They are not examined with regard to knowledge, for they ought to receive this from the Holy Ghosst, but with respect to live, for it is love which is the measure of life, merit, and reward; as it is the cause of fidelity toward the flock. But why is the question put three times? It is because the love of our neighbor exacts three things: first, the ardor of charity, which enables us to love with strength and zeal. Hence it is said, 'The lamps thereof (love) are fire and flames.' Secondly, discernment in love, which causes us to lo9ve what ought to be loved, and to know the reason and the means of loving. This is the meaning of the word love (Latin dilectio from dis and legere [to choose].) It is also said, 'I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.' Thirdly, the order in charity, so as to know in what degree each sheep of the flok ought to be loved. 'He set in order charity in me.' Divine love possesses also three characteristics, since it is written, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole mind, and with thy whole soul': With the whole heart, so that nothing may turn us from the Sovereign Good; with entire submission of mind, in order that we may never be deceived; with our whole soul, so as to be screened from every distraction. When the sacred writer adds: with all the strength of thy soul, it means the same thing, because the powers of the soul must be used in order to love perfectly."
[Thomas M. Schwertner, O.P., St. Albert the Great 105-6]

The Merciful Master of Paradox

Lest my title be misunderstood, as some people misunderstood the book with the cover that had the author "Stanley L. Jaki" beneath the title The Savior of Science, rather as if the one referred to the other - I must say, NO, I do NOT mean that our Uncle Gilbert Chesterton is the "Merciful Master of Paradox". That title refers to the same Person as does the book by Father Jaki. Yes, when it comes to paradox, all that GKC can really be credited with is writing them - he did not make them, any more than he made the stars, those things which are simultaneously the smallest (in appearance) and also the largest (in existence) of visible things. But in order for you to grasp this, please read our excerpts for today, Quasimodo Sunday - Low Sunday - Divine Mercy Sunday - the first Sunday after Easter - and you will understand why Jesus is the Merciful Master of Paradox.

Alleluia!

--Dr. Thursday

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors until it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heartbreaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody with his eyes open [see postscript] can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises in a Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is unsound. In any case, there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath. There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a market-place, to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a generation of vipers [Mt 23:33], or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite [Mt 15:7]. The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the most merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that it is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:319-20]


All that people fear in the Church, all that they hate in her, all against which they most harden their hearts and sometimes (one is tempted to say) thicken their heads, all that has made people consciously and unconsciously treat the Catholic Church as a peril, is the evidence that there is something here that we cannot look on at languidly and with detachment, as we might look on at Hottentots dancing at the new moon or Chinamen burning paper in porcelain temples. The Chinaman and the tourist can be on the best of terms on a basis of mutual scorn. But in the duel of the Church and the world is no such shield of contempt. The Church will not consent to scorn the soul of a coolie or even a tourist; and the measure of the madness with which men hate her is but their vain attempt to despise.

Another element, far more deep and delicate and hard to describe, is the immediate connection of what is most awful and archaic with what is most intimate and individual. It is a miracle in itself that anything so huge and historic in date and design should be so fresh in the affections. It is as if a man found his own parlour and fireside in the heart of the Great Pyramid. It is as if a child's favourite doll turned out to be the oldest sacred image in the world, worshipped in Chaldea or Nineveh. It is as if a girl to whom a man made love in a garden were also, in some dark and double fashion, a statue standing for ever in a square. It is just here that all those things which were regarded as weakness come in as the fulness of strength. Everything that men called sentimental in Roman Catholic religion, its keepsakes, its small flowers and almost tawdry trinkets, its figures with merciful gestures and gentle eyes, its avowedly popular pathos and all that Matthew Arnold meant by Christianity with its "relieving tears" - all this is a sign of sensitive and vivid vitality in anything so vast and settled and systematic. There is nothing quite like this warmth, as in the warmth of Christmas, amid ancient hills hoary with such snows of antiquity. It can address even God Almighty with diminutives. In all its varied vestments it wears its Sacred Heart upon its sleeve. But to those who know that it is full of these lively affections, like little leaping flames, there is something of almost ironic satisfaction in the stark and primitive size of the thing, like some prehistoric monster; in its spires and mitres like the horns of giant herds or its colossal cornerstones like the four feet of an elephant. It would be easy to write a merely artistic study of the strange externals of the Roman religion, which should make it seem as uncouth and unearthly as Aztec or African religion. It would be easy to talk of it as if it were really some sort of mammoth or monster elephant, older than the Ice Age, towering over the Stone Age; his very lines traced, it would seem, in the earthquakes or landslides of some older creation, his very organs and outer texture akin to unrecorded patterns of vegetation and air and light - the last residuum of a lost world. But the prehistoric monster is in the Zoological Gardens and not in the Natural History Museum. The extinct animal is still alive. And anything outlandish and unfamiliar in its form accentuates the startling naturalness and familiarity of its mind, as if the Sphinx began suddenly to talk of the topics of the hour. The super-elephant is not only a tame animal but a pet; and a young child shall lead him. [cf Isaiah 11:6]
[GKC The Catholic Church and Conversion CW3:96-7]


Postscript: "nobody with his eyes open": this phrase has a curious antecedant, which ties the above two selections together:

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:336]

GKC: Art and Science point to the Resurrection

As a matter of fact, of course, there are a great many other languages besides the verbal. Descriptions of spiritual states and mental purposes are conveyed by a variety of things, by hats, by bells, by guns, by fires on a headland, or by jerks of the head. In fact there does exist an example which is singularly analogous to decorative and symbolic painting. This is a scheme of Esthetic signs or emblems, simple indeed and consisting only of a few elemental colours, which is actually employed to convey great lessons in human safety and great necessities of the commonwealth. It need hardly be said that I allude to the railway signals. They are as much a language, and surely as solemn a language, as the colour sequence of ecclesiastical vestments, which sets us red for martyrdom, and white for resurrection. For the green and red of the night-signals depict the two most fundamental things of all, which lie at the back of all language. Yes and no, good and bad, safe and unsafe, life and death.
[GKC George Frederick Watts 45]

The Apostles' Creed is not regarded as a pose of foppish vanity; yet the word "I" comes before even the word "God." The believer comes first; but he is soon dwarfed by his beliefs, swallowed in the creative whirlwind and the trumpets of the resurrection.
[GKC The Uses of Diversity 242]

Just in case the point is somehow not so clear, I will put it a bit more dramatically, as he himself did, from his deathbed. --Dr. Thursday.

"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."
[quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 650]

GKC: the Crux: Shaw versus the Felix Culpa

...in the Shavian atmosphere, the philosopher is not trying to get rid of the troubles of men, he is trying to get rid of men because they are the troubles of the philosopher. It is due to Mr. Shaw's unmatched directness and controversial courage, to say that he very early accepted this reversal of the normal order of means and ends. He most emphatically does not think that the Sabbath was made for Man. He most emphatically does think that Man was made for the Sabbath. [cf. Mark 2:27] And Man having now irrevocably broken the Sabbath, the Superman must create some other sort of Sabbath, even if it be to our eyes as wild as a Witch's Sabbath. I mean that he did begin very early to say boldly that if the Communist hat would not fit the human head, we must cut off the head and carefully preserve the hat. He did and does hold that if men must really have beef and beer, then we must all set to work to breed a race of gigantic chameleons that can live on light and air. The growth of these dragons is the chief theme of Back to Methuselah. But Mr. Shaw did really take this queer view long before he went back to Methuselah. Where all normal Socialists professed fraternity with the working-classes, he wrote, "I have never had any feeling about the working-classes except to abolish them, and replace them by sensible people." It is needless to explain that sensible people are always people who prefer water to wine, cabbages to cutlets, materialism to miracles, and utter subjection to a centralised government to any traditions of human liberty.

Now against all this, as its chief enemy, though he may not know it, stands the old Catholic philosophy of Man. The first and last idea of it is Resurrection, that is the resurrection of the whole of man. It is, as I have said before, a mystical refusal to despair of the original pre-historic monster of that name. It is true that the older creed often demands amputation in the sense of asceticism, as in the text about cutting off the hand to enter Heaven. But the difference is instantly made vivid by the rest of the text, which declares that even such amputation is better than casting the whole body of man into Hell. But the Shavian evolutionist does really want to cast the whole body of man into Chaos. He wants to cast it into the melting-pot, and boil it to nothing, that a new and superior something may at last emerge. This is indeed much more than amputation, it is annihilation. At least it is so for those who still see sanctity in Man as a potentially complete creature, even if we commonly see him as incomplete. I have concluded upon this point, because it is the crux of the controversy, in what I cannot pretend to be anything but a long series of controversies. Only I understand the crux better than when I began to controvert about it, ave crux, spes unica. We do not believe that man is a mass of mistakes that have to be shed until he has lost everything but shame in the very memory of his manhood. We think they are lower forms and fallen applications of his true powers and instincts, damaged by one great mystical mistake.
[GKC "Second Thoughts On Shaw" or "The Later Phases" CW11:603-4, written in 1934]

I feel it best that I add a note or two here...
--Dr. Thursday

Latin: Ave crux spes unica = "Hail, O Cross, the only hope". This is from the great hymn of the Passion, "Vexilla Regis Prodeunt" (The banners of the king come forth) by Venantius Fortunatus (530-609). [Hymns of the Breviary and Missal 123-6]. GKC here rebuts Shaw's heresy - which is still active in 21st century America - by expressing a sublime unity of Cross and Resurrection in what we might call Mystical Anthropology. Of course he expressed this elsewhere, as (for example) in one of my favourite quotes on this subject:

Christianity spoke again and said: "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is - the Fall."
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:321]

Yes indeed: Man's "one great mystical mistake" really is "the Fall". But remember as GKC did (and Shaw did not) that the Church also calls it something else:

O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!
[from the "Praeconium Paschale" (the great hymn for the Vigil of Easter) in the Missale Romanum]

O truly needful sin of Adam, which was blotted out by the death of Christ! O happy fault, that merited to have such and so great a Redeemer!
[tr from St. Joseph Daily Missal]

GKC: the Resurrection: Mystery and Dogma

Amid the million sensational novels which I have devoured with the most agreeable sensations, I remember one [* see postscript] which was really very thrilling; and the thrill consisted in the well concealed and well betrayed secret that there still exists in the world a group continuing the ancient and mysterious rite of Nemi; the temple of Diana where the priest sacrificed the priest. The story was so well told that the reader did really feel something like the icy shock of antiquity. He realized something unnaturally moving in the mere fact that a religion had somehow managed to survive out of ancient Roman times. Few of those who read that novel would pause to reflect that a religion really has survived out of ancient Roman times. But nobody notices it, because it is not secret but public; because it is not cruel but humane; and because in that antique Italian idolatry, it is not the priest but the god that died. [cf. my Easter quote from The Everlasting Man CW2:295-6]

Nevertheless, it is only by some such angle almost of accident, that it is possible to put a finger in that nerve of fear and unfamiliarity, by which we can really accept the stupendous fact that has happened. In one sense the idiots are perfectly right when they say that the Christian religion is but a continuation of the Pagan religions. Only it was nothing in the Pagan religions themselves that could possibly continue. It was in itself a Christian miracle to make Paganism live. When we look at the Mass, we see something that the heathens saw; the only thing that remains of them or their seeing. Despite the delights of the detective narrative I have mentioned, we most of us knew very well that there is not a modern priest of Diana quietly cutting the throat of the late incumbent of his parish. But there is something pretty nearly as old and every bit as sensational. The story is not only a romance, it is in the first derivative sense a novel; in that it is still novel, or has not left off being news.

The first example of this is that the very garments of the priests standing at the altar are essentially the garments of a man of ancient Rome, or even of heathen Rome. In being handed down for hundreds and hundreds of years, they have of course been modified in pattern, but they preserve the ancient plan. What looks so strange to us in a man standing at the altar would hardly have looked so strange to Horace or Catullus in a man walking in the street.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW21:455-6]


...it was a very special idea of St. Thomas that Man is to be studied in his whole manhood; that a man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man. The earlier school of Augustine and even of Anselm had rather neglected this, treating the soul as the only necessary treasure, wrapped for a time in a negligible napkin. Even here they were less orthodox in being more spiritual. They sometimes hovered on the edge of those Eastern deserts that stretch away to the land of transmigration; where the essential soul may pass through a hundred unessential bodies; reincarnated even in the bodies of beasts or birds. St. Thomas stood up stoutly for the fact that a man's body is his body as his mind is his mind; and that he can only be a balance and union of the two. Now this is in some ways a naturalistic notion, very near to the modern respect for material things; a praise of the body that might be sung by Walt Whitman or justified by D. H. Lawrence: a thing that might be called Humanism or even claimed by Modernism. In fact, it may be Materialism; but it is the flat contrary of Modernism. It is bound up, in the modern view, with the most monstrous, the most material, and therefore the most miraculous of miracles. It is specially connected with the most startling sort of dogma, which the Modernist can least accept; the Resurrection of the Body.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:433-4]


* Postscript: I am still trying to locate this novel. Going only from the title, one possibility is The Crime of Diana's Pool, by V. L. Whitechurch, which appeared in 1927 and so is a possibility; however I have not yet located that book to see if the story fits. If you have read it, or if you have any alternative suggestions as to what book GKC is referring, please let me know.
--Dr. Thursday.

S. L. Jaki: GKC is the Champion of the Universe

Today, April 7, is the first anniversary of the death of Father Stanley L. Jaki, O.S.B., a great Chestertonian. Regardless of your interest in science, all Chestertonians ought to read his Chesterton a Seer of Science, one of the smaller books on GKC's writing, yet one of the most penetrating and interesting. Its four chapters give our Uncle Gilbert four amazing titles, not to be found elsewhere:

"Interpreter of Science"
"Antagonist of Scientism"
"Critic of Evolutionism"
"Champion of the Universe"

Jaki references GKC in nearly every one of his fifty-odd books; he spoke at three ACS conferences. Below is a very interesting insight which links together GKC with the great physicist, artist, and historian of science, Pierre Duhem. (Jaki is not the only one to credit Chesterton with the revival of interest in Dickens; more on that another time.)

For more on Jaki and Duhem please visit The Duhem Society, founded on this date in 2009.

Of your charity please pray for the repose of their souls.

--Dr. Thursday.

On receiving a Kodak camera from her father Hélène Duhem also received a note of reservation. With the camera there came also an attachment for making close-up portrait photos. "Just to take snapshots makes no sense," wrote Duhem to her on April 28, 1914. Hélène, who by then had many opportunities to watch her father draw impressive landscapes, must have heard him refer to the enormous difference between a good drawing and a snapshot of the same scenery. Undoubtedly it was the graphic vividness and richness of detail that drew Duhem toward Dickens whom he used to read aloud at home in the evenings when Hélène was a child.

Duhem's attachment to Dickens around the turn of the century was not a vote for
novelty. Dickens' works had been in eclipse even in his own land for several
decades before Chesterton threw a powerful light on his perennial value in 1908.

[SLJ, Reluctant Heroine: The Life and Work of Hélène Duhem 58-9; the reference is to GKC's Charles Dickens available in CW15]

GKC: the Phoenix and the Mass

When I returned after Mass, on that last amazing Sunday in the Phoenix Park, to the house that had so nobly entertained me, I walked about for hours in long avenues or large quiet rooms, worrying and trying to resolve a certain problem. It was the highly practical problem of how, or whether, it was possible to convey to the world at large what an astounding thing had just happened in the Phoenix Park; a sensational event much more truly sensational, and properly much more of an event than the Phoenix Park Murders. I was not specially thinking of writing it then, as I am writing it now, for Catholic readers. Catholics know that the Mass is the Mass and in a sense can never be more magnificent than the Mass; but they would understand every attribute that made the magnificence more apparent. But though we walk the world as three hundred millions, I sometimes feel that we are still in the Catacombs; we still talk by signs like the Cross and the Fish, or at least with a secret language. And I sought in vain a language that would tell ordinary outsiders of something not in the same world with their normal notions of a sect or even a service; something which must either be expressed in the august theology they have forgotten, or in some sort of epic poetry which nobody now can write. The only thing I could think of was the parallel with the whole Pagan tradition and its witness to the world's need, not of worship, but of sacrifice. It was under the weight of these speculations that I wrote down the words that follow.

* * * * *

I cannot trace the name of the Phoenix Park, but it is quite certain that it contained a Phoenix. If I were simply to say, in the old straightforward style of the storytellers that we assembled to see the burning of a gigantic golden bird, as big as an orc and as beautiful as a hundred peacocks, who was consumed to ashes before our eyes; after which the golden feathers sprouted again out of the golden flames, and that vast and radiant monster rose again and ascended visibly into heaven - if I were thus to fulfil my duties as a conscientious reporter, there would be some so mean and small-minded as to complain of errors of detail in the report.

But it would be a very much more vivid and solid statement of what actually did happen, than if I merely stated that a Eucharistic Congress was held in Dublin and attended Mass in the large park round the Vice-Regal Lodge. The very nature of the neighbourhood was a reminder that something quite extraordinary had been completely burnt out and had somehow survived its own burning, and that on the very place where a strange spiritual monstrosity was destroyed because it was incredible, it had proved itself undeniable by proving itself indestructible. For the bird called the Phoenix was the ancient symbol of resurrection, as the bird called the pelican was the symbol of charity. It was merely a trivial accident that the Phoenix never existed and the pelican never was particularly charitable to anybody; so much the worse for the pelican.

* * * * *

But the figure of the Phoenix will serve as a symbolic introduction; because it has been used more than once by Irish poets even of the more Pagan school. Mr. W. B. Yeats recently wrote very touchingly of one of those beautiful women of Ireland who have done so much for her liberty, and been the muses of her poetry, and threw a tolerant encouragement to younger men innocently contented with younger women; saying: 'I knew a Phoenix in my youth; so let them have their day.' Even in reading that spirited poem, I was struck with a certain inconsequence in the image. For the Phoenix of legend is not merely a dog who has his day. He is a bird who very much outstrips the cat, in the possession of nine lives. But the pagan poet, by the very nature of paganism, called the dead lady a Phoenix, in the sense that she was as unique and marvellous as a Phoenix; not in the sense that she was as immortal as a Phoenix; certainly not in the sense that she would instantly rise from her ashes like a Phoenix. It is not a lack of sympathy, but rather a sign of sympathy, with Mr. Yeats' intensely imaginative and individual magic and power, to say that all such praises from him have a burden of finality, if not futility; and he does really regard love as 'a perpetual farewell.'. The extraordinary thing we have to deal with here is a belief as defiant as the most literal fable; a bird that can be burnt to ashes and continue to fly. For those who disbelieve in it, even more than for those who believe in it, it is an astounding historical fact that a poem can be acted before millions, as a fact and not a fiction: by which is truly killed and made alive, not one woman who lives in the memory of one man, but one Man who has lived in the memories of men since He died in the most distant days and regions of the Roman Empire. This is that part in poetry which is played by memory, multiplied on so colossal a scale that even a pagan may well admit that it is something of a portent in the midst of modern society.

[GKC Christendom in Dublin, beginning of chapter 4]

Reader Bleg

A request from a reader:

I first read that poem, "Xmas Day" by G.K. Chesterton in a small book which was a Christmas compilation - title and author/editor unknown to me. It was probably the last entry in the book, and had a color illustration with it.

The book also had a page about the queen of England (or the Queen Mother) going to visit the stables on Christmas Eve.

Have tried to contact the library where I first checked this out, but have gotten nowhere.

If you know the title of this book, or someone who might know, I would greatly appreciate the information.

If anyone has any information, please email me. Thanks.

GKC: the Pumpkin and the Resurrection

Well, I think it is time for all us Christian Chestertonians to adopt a new and most Chestertonian symbol for Easter: the pumpkin. No, not necessarily carved - though perhaps it might be fittingly emptied and illuminated...

No I have not gone loony. It's all here for you to read and consider. Get out your pumpkins, then, and sing Alleluia!
--Dr. Thursday

Mr. Blatchford has summed up all that is important in his whole position in three sentences. They are perfectly honest and clear. Nor are they any the less honest and clear because the first two of them are falsehoods and the third is a fallacy. He says "The Christian denies the miracles of the Mahommedan. The Mahommedan denies the miracles of the Christian. The Rationalist denies all miracles alike."

The historical error in the first two remarks I will deal with shortly. I confine myself for the moment to the courageous admission of Mr. Blatchford that the Rationalist denies all miracles alike. He does not question them. He does not pretend to be agnostic about them. He does not suspend his judgment until they shall be proved. He denies them.

Faced with this astounding dogma I asked Mr. Blatchford why he thought miracles would not occur. He replied that the Universe was governed by laws. Obviously this answer is of no use whatever. For we cannot call a thing impossible because the world is governed by laws, unless we know what laws. Does Mr. Blatchford know all about all the laws in the Universe? And if he does not know about the laws how can he possibly know anything about the exceptions?

For, obviously, the mere fact that a thing happens seldom, under odd circumstances and with no explanation within our knowledge, is no proof that it is against natural law. That would apply to the Siamese twins, or to a new comet, or to radium three years ago.

The philosophical case against miracles is somewhat easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against miracles. There are such things as the laws of Nature rationally speaking. What everybody knows is this only. That there is repetition in nature. [See postscript below. Dr. T] What everybody knows is that pumpkins produce pumpkins. What nobody knows is why they should not produce elephants and giraffes.

There is one philosophical question about miracles and only one. Many able modern Rationalists cannot apparently even get it into their heads. The poorest lad at Oxford in the Middle Ages would have understood it. (Note. As the last sentence will seem strange in our "enlightened" age I may explain that under "the cruel reign of mediaeval superstition," poor lads were educated at Oxford to a most reckless extent. Thank God, we live in better days.)

The question of miracles is merely this. Do you know why a pumpkin goes on being a pumpkin? If you do not, you cannot possibly tell whether a pumpkin could turn into a coach or couldn't. That is all.

All the other scientific expressions you are in the habit of using at breakfast are words and winds. You say "It is a law of nature that pumpkins should remain pumpkins." That only means that pumpkins generally do remain pumpkins, which is obvious; it does not say why. You say "Experience is against it." That only means, "I have known many pumpkins intimately and none of them turned into coaches."

There was a great Irish Rationalist of this school (possibly related to Mr. Lecky), who when he was told that a witness had seen him commit murder said that he could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it.

You say "The modern world is against it." That means that a mob of men in London and Birmingham, and Chicago, in a thoroughly pumpkiny state of mind, cannot work miracles by faith.

You say "Science is against it." That means that so long as pumpkins are pumpkins their conduct is pumpkiny, and bears no resemblance to the conduct of a coach. That is fairly obvious.

What Christianity says is merely this. That this repetition in Nature has its origin not in a thing resembling a law but a thing resembling a will. Of course its phase of a Heavenly Father is drawn from an earthly father. Quite equally Mr. Blatchford's phase of a universal law is a metaphor from an Act of Parliament. But Christianity holds that the world and its repetition came by will or Love as children are begotten by a father, and therefore that other and different things might come by it. Briefly, it believes that a God who could do anything so extraordinary as making pumpkins go on being pumpkins, is like the prophet, Habbakuk, Capable de tout. If you do not think it extraordinary that a pumpkin is always a pumpkin, think again. You have not yet even begun philosophy. You have not even seen a pumpkin.

The historic case against miracles is also rather simple. It consists of calling miracles impossible, then saying that no one but a fool believes impossibilities: then declaring that there is no wise evidence on behalf of the miraculous. The whole trick is done by means of leaning alternately on the philosophical and historical objection. If we say miracles are theoretically possible, they say, "Yes, but there is no evidence for them." When we take all the records of the human race and say, "Here is your evidence," they say, "But these people were superstitious, they believed in impossible things."

The real question is whether our little Oxford Street civilisation is certain to be right and the rest of the world certain to be wrong. Mr. Blatchford thinks that the materialism of nineteenth century Westerns is one of their noble discoveries. I think it is as dull as their coats, as dirty as their streets, as ugly as their trousers, and as stupid as their industrial system.

Mr. Blatchford himself, however, has summed up perfectly his pathetic faith in modern civilisation. He has written a very amusing description of how difficult it would be to persuade an English judge in a modern law court of the truth of the Resurrection. Of course he is quite right; it would be impossible. But it does not seem to occur to him that we Christians may not have such an extravagant reverence for English judges as is felt by Mr. Blatchford himself.

The experiences of the Founder of Christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of courts of law. I know quite well that nothing would induce a British judge to believe that a man had risen from the dead. But then I know quite as well that a very little while ago nothing would have induced a British judge to believe that a Socialist could be a good man. A judge would refuse to believe in new spiritual wonders. But this would not be because he was a judge, but because he was, besides being a judge, an English gentleman, a modern Rationalist, and something of an old fool.

And Mr. Blatchford is quite wrong in supposing that the Christian and the Moslem deny each other's miracles. No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

And why not? Because these things some men have always thought possible. Because any wandering gipsy may have Psychical powers. Because the general existence of a world of spirits and of strange mental powers is a part of the common sense of all mankind. The Pharisees did not dispute the miracles of Christ; they said they were worked by devilry. The Christians did not dispute the miracles of Mahomed. They said they were worked by devilry. The Roman world did not deny the possibility that Christ was a God. It was far too enlightened for that.

In so far as the Church did (chiefly during the corrupt and sceptical eighteenth century) urge miracles as a reason for belief, her fault is evident: but it is not what Mr. Blatchford supposes. It is not that she asked men to believe anything so incredible; it is that she asked men to be converted by anything so commonplace.

What matters about a religion is not whether it can work marvels like any ragged Indian conjurer, but whether it has a true philosophy of the Universe. The Romans were quite willing to admit that Christ was a God. What they denied was the He was the God - the highest truth of the cosmos. And this is the only point worth discussing about Christianity.
[GKC "The Blatchford Controversies" CW1:386-389]

Or, just to vary the source of our thought, you should recall those four powerful words - verbal fireworks from ancient Egypt, and a most fitting story for the present season:

"His God IS God."

(Said of Moses by the Pharaoh in C. B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments".)

A Postscript:

The bit about laws and miracles needs some further comments which, if I had the time, would easily fill a book or two. But I don't have time today or even next week, so I will just give you two links for your own examination, and perhaps I will someday get to write some more about it. The point I wish to indicate arises from Father Jaki's book Brain Mind and Computers in which he mentioned the great Charles Babbage, the first Computer Scientist, and his 1837 book called The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment. Babbage actually uses his own mechanical computer as an analogy to help explain the idea GKC is speaking about! Simply, God is a Master Programmer, and can set His machinery to perform anything at all... it is a bit too much to summarise quickly. You can obtain the Jaki book from Real View Books, and I have recently found that Babbage's book is available here.

Happy Easter!

I hope you had a nice Easter.

Here is some news from Milwaukee:

Please plan to attend the next meeting of the Milwaukee Chesterton Society. The April meeting will be held at the Elm Grove Village building, Wednesday, April 7th, from 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.

We plan to continue our discussion of GK's classic What's Wrong with the World? - Part 2, chapters 1 through 4, Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man.

Speaking of which, the G. K. Chesterton Institute is hosting a conference on June 11-12 celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of What's Wrong with the World? See the attached press release and flyer.

Also, there is an article of interest in the February issue of Homiletic and Pastoral Review titled "St. Thomas and Chesterton on Law, Human and Divine" by Thomas Storck.

GKC: Preferring Death to the Denial of the Truth of the Resurrection

Alleluia! He is risen!

In keeping with the liturgical delights of the Octave, I shall continue to Divine Mercy (Low or Quasimodo) Sunday with our meditative posts - in particular since GKC speaks with great wisdom about the Resurrection - this most awesome and exciting Surprise...

Remember, as Mr. Dickens has indicated, we must believe that Jesus is DEAD - or no good can come of the rest of the Story - and there is more to come. More of the Story, that is.

Incidentally, I ought to tell you that I just learned that the centurion at Calvary was technically called the exactor mortis as it was his responsibility to ascertain that the capital sentences were carried out. See Ricciotti's The Life of Christ for details.

--Dr. Thursday

Some time ago, when a stir was made by a rather striking book called Who Moved the Stone? which might almost be described, with all reverence, as a divine detective story and almost a theological thriller, a pugnacious little paper in Fleet Street made a remark which has always hovered in my memory as more mysterious than any mystery story in the world. The writer said that any man who believes in the Resurrection is bound to believe also in the story of Aladdin in the "Arabian Nights." I have no idea what he meant. Nor, I imagine, had he. But this curious conjunction of ideas recurs to my mind in connection with a rather interesting suggestion recently made by Mr. Christopher Dawson about what we may call the History of Science. On the face of it, the remark I have quoted from the pugnacious paper seems to have no quality whatever except pugnacity. There is no sort of logical connection between believing in one marvellous event and believing in another, even if they were exactly alike and not utterly different. If I believe that Captain Peary reached the North Pole, I am not therefore bound to believe that Dr. Cook also reached the North Pole, even if they both arrive with sledges and dogs out of the same snows. It is a fallacy, therefore, even where the two things are close enough to be compared. But the comparison between the Gospel miracle and the Arabian fairy-tale is about the most unfortunate comparison in the world. For in the one case there is a plain and particular reason for thinking the thing true, or at least meant to be true. And in the other case there is a plain and particular reason for realizing that the tale is not only untrue, but is not even meant to be
true.

The historical case for the Resurrection is that everybody else, except the Apostles, had every possible motive to declare what they had done with the body, if anything had been done with it. The Apostles might have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it is very difficult to imagine men being tortured and killed for the truth of a miracle which they knew to be a sham. In the case of the Apostles' testimony, the general circumstances suggest that it is true. In the case of the Arabian tale, the general circumstances avow and proclaim that it is false. For we are told in the book itself that all the stories were told by a woman merely to amuse the king, and distract his attention from the idea of cutting off her head. A romancer in this personal situation is not very likely to confine herself strictly to humdrum accuracy, and it would be impossible more plainly to warn the reader that all the tales are taradiddles. In the one case, then, we have witnesses who not only think the thing true, but do veritably think it is as true as death, or truer than death. They therefore prefer death to the denial of its truth. In the other case we have a story-teller who, in trying to avoid death, has every motive to tell lies. If St. John the Baptist had wished to avoid being beheaded, and had saved his life by inventing a long string of Messianic or Early Christian legends on the spur of the moment, in order to hold the attention of King Herod, I should not regard any "resurrection myth" he might tell as a strong historical argument for the Resurrection. But, as the Apostles were killed as St. John was killed, I think their evidence cannot be identified by sound scholarship as a portion of the Arabian Nights.
[GKC ILN Sept 28 1934; thanks to Frank Petta and my mother. This essay also appears in As I Was Saying.]

GKC: the First Day of a New Creation

The members of some Eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. One incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:295-6]

Christus heri et hodie
Principium et Finis
Alpha et Omega
Ipsius sunt tempora et saecula
Ipsi gloria et imperium per universa aeternitatis saecula.
Amen.

Christ yesterday and today,
The Beginning and the End,
The Alpha and the Omega,
His are the times and the ages,
To Him be glory and dominion through the universe of unending ages.
Amen.

-- from the ritual for the Vigil of Easter


Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,
for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,
and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,
for your watch hath not been in vain,
and the Black gate is broken,
and your King hath passed through,
and he is victorious.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,
for your King shall come again,
and he shall dwell among you all the days of your life.

And the Tree that was withered shall be renewed,
and he shall plant it in the high places,
and the City shall be blessed.

Sing all ye people!

-- J. R. R. Tolkien: The Return of the King


On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:345]

GKC: Holy Saturday

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:344-5]

You may be wondering why "second" cavern? The first was the cave of Bethlehem, and hence the first chapter of Part II of TEM is called "The God in the Cave" - but there is also a strong echo of the primary (primeval?) theme of the first chapter of part I, which of course is called "the Man in the Cave". (You mean you haven't read it yet? What on earth are you waiting for - an engraved invitation? GO READ IT. And if you read it before, go read it again. It's good any time of day or year, and quite nourishing too.

Also, I find that I must - simply MUST - quote another English writer today - one whose name is often associated with GKC, and indeed whose popularity has been claimed to date from GKC's book about him. [I will give the ref if anyone desires, but not today.] It is from a book you may already be familiar with, but not one which is often linked to the very special events of this sacred and silent time. But, since we are detectives in the very best sense of the term [more on that soon], it is very good that we hear these words, which might come from any grand mystery story - and in fact are echos of the Greatest of All Mystery Stories, the real one we are presently commemorating! But let us proceed.
--Dr. T.

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon `Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

...

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

[C. Dickens, A Christmas Carol opening lines of Stave One, emphasis added]

Please, please, please, my dear reader. Please read those bold-face lines again and think about them very carefully - until tomorrow.
--Dr. T.

GKC: Good Friday

As the High Priest asked what further need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words. Peter in a panic repudiated him: "and immediately the cock crew, and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly." Has anyone any further remarks to offer? Just before the murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying, "They know not what they do"; is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say? Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw him in hap-hazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution; and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet of the criminal; and he said to that nameless ruffian, "This night shalt thou be with me in Paradise"? Is there anything to put after that but a full-stop? Or is anyone prepared to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for his Mother a new Son?

It is more within my powers, and here more immediately to my purpose, to point out that in that scene were symbolically gathered all the human forces that have been vaguely sketched in this story. As kings and philosophers and the popular element had been symbolically present at his birth, so they were more practically concerned in his death; and with that we come face to face with the essential fact to be realised. All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, "What is truth?" [Jn 18:38] So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world. [Mt 27:24]

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away. Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Ever. lasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind. Since that day their representatives have been like blind men in broad daylight, striking to right and left with their staffs, and [#b215] cursing the darkness. But there has been that in their monumental monotheism that it has at least remained like a monument, the last thing of its kind, and in a sense motionless in the more restless world which it cannot satisfy. For it is certain that for some reason it cannot satisfy. Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world; since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.

And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumour. just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative. Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. [Jn 18:39-40] In all this we recognise the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people." [Jn 11:50-51] Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducces and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.

There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46]

[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:341-4]

GKC: the Feast of Love

As it is Holy Thursday, I forgo my usual lengthy posting and give you for your meditation a most curious passage from GKC. I struggled somewhat with a selection, for today (rather than March 2) is the true "Feastday of Subsidiarity" - it is not possible to hear the description of the Washing of the Feet of the Apostles without leaping to a deeper understanding of the reality of this technical and practical and useful design method... I have told you before GKC's famous epigram, "henceforth the highest thing can only work from below" [TEM CW2:313] but such is the mystical truth of the Plan of the Master Designer that even this ties in and links, forward and backward, to the Eucharist and to the Priesthood...
In GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday there is a chapter called "The Feast of Fear". Today's chapter ought to be called "The Feast of Love" - the intricate and splendid structure of which perhaps someday I may write more at length. But for the present, please read this excerpt from the famous CW14 of GKC's little-known and previously uncollected fiction, and ponder it. Should you have difficulty understanding, please find a cookbook and sit and read it for an hour or two, and perhaps you will find illumination.

--Dr. Thursday.

Gabriel Hope's voice came sudden and jarring, "What do you say to the third verse of the eleventh chapter of the gospel according to St. Luke? [That is, "Give us this day our daily bread."]

So sharply did the voice vibrate that Mrs Mandelhorne looked quite nervous for a moment and not at all as if she said anything to that authority.

"No," said Hope with a kind of bitterness, "we don't say anything to it, we cultured dogs. But it is there to be spoken to. The offices are open from everlasting to everlasting A.M."

Mrs. Mandelhorne glanced at the speaker, Janet at the ball-handle, and Mark at the poker, but Madge still sat, with her prominent chin on her hand, with an inexplicable spark under her eyelids.

"For my part," went on Hope, quietly, almost modestly, and evidently supposing everyone attentive, "I think it is a side of religion very much neglected. If anything is religious, food is religious."

Mark began to examine his bread and butter with some interest, but seemed to fail to find any visible traces of the morning service.

"Surely, a loaf of bread is the centre of the parable of life: it contains all parables, the sower, the seed, the blade, the ear, the harvest, the sweat of toil, the joy of hospitality, the joy of giving, the joy of receiving, the assimilation, the building-up, the invisible essence of life and limb. A crust of bread broken by the horny hands of fishermen was the last parable he spoke, was it not? We have flattened it into a wafer: and we deliver it by white-robed pontiffs with all the sacramental mystery of the worship of Isis. It is the Holy Eucharist, I know. Is it the Last Supper?"

"Don't know," observed Mark, cheerfully, and added a traditional supplement in an undertone which theoretically involves the utmost penalty of the law.

"I think not," said Hope, turning on him with an earnestness which greatly disconcerted him. "I think that they have wrung out of it exactly the point they should have left in: the humility, equality, and division of bread: all that is so admirably suggested by the act of sitting round a table. On that last night, in that dark garret, knowing the the gibbet hung above him, he gave those he loved a last symbol and memory: what did it mean? Surely it meant the central miracle of man, the miracle compared with which stopping the sun and moon is a conjuring trick, and cursing the fig-tree a scientific experiment, the profound revolutionary and dazzling miracle that a two-legged animal thrown free and hungry on the earth, should break a crust of which he might eat all and give half to his brother."
[GKC "Wine of Cana" CW14:559-561]

I almost forgot that I had been retaining another short line for today. It is not, properly speaking, GKC's own words, but he recorded them, and perhaps it required the heart and brain of a Chesterton to grasp them and their richness. They, too, are a strange and mysterious echo of Subsidiarity. Tonight, after the altars are stripped, and you think of Jesus in the Garden, you ought to recall them.
--Dr. T.

There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating the truth about the different influences of the West on the East. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; credo quia impossibile.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:353; emphasis added. The Latin means "I believe because it is impossible" (Tertullian)]

Sorry for this post-postscript, but I think you will find it worthwhile. In The Life of Christ by the wonderful Father Ricciotti, priest and archeologist, you can find out more about Gethsemane. Yes, it really means "olive-press", but the detail you must hear is this. When the Romans besieged Jerusalem about 70 A.D. they cut down every tree for miles around, as was their practice in such maneuvers. However, it seems that the roots of olive trees are notorious for maintaining their life, and it is possible that some of the present-day trees are sprung from ancient roots. Of course that may just be a parabolic way (y=x²) of speaking of the mystery. But I thought you ought to know. (If you wish, I'll get the reference for you another time.)
--Dr. T.