Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London.Yes, there really was a Eucharistic Congress in London - the nineteenth of such meetings, which are world-wide, and still being held - that one was held September 9-13, 1908. See here for some more about the amazing story.
[GKC, "The Blue Cross", The Innocence of Father Brown, emphasis added]
Orthodoxy is about how GKC found it.So. Having settled another seeming paradox of "A OR B" by choosing "A AND B", as is my right, since I know Boolean Algebra, I shall now proceed to make a first examination of Orthodoxy. Every Chestertonian is going to be doing this during 2008. The whole Conference, according to last report, is going to be doing this. I can only hope to do it differently by trickery. I shall do it by NOT doing it, like Calvin (from the comic "Calvin and Hobbes") touching the "Opposite Pole", or as one sees the sun at night by its reflection from the moon. Or I shall do it like Valentin following Flambeau: that is, by following "the train of the unreasonable". I shall stop at odd things in the text, things others might stride past, and look at them by the light of the moon. So, let us begin, with the help of God.
The Everlasting Man is about what he found. (Or, rather WHOM. Remember that "the Everlasting Man" is GKC's own title for Jesus Christ.)
This book is meant to be a companion to Heretics, and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical.First, we see that this book almost presumes that you have already examined GKC's earlier book, Heretics, in which he skewers some great names of his time - some still known, others forgotten except for their appearance within it. For example, the great playwright, George Bernard Shaw:
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:209]
I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quiteChesterton is not being a 21st century (or better, a 19th century) journalist, intent on throwing mud, or ink (since the streets have now been paved). He is being something far more amazing: a thirteenth century scholastic. He is aiming, not at the person, but at that person's ideas. GKC says GBS's philosophy (his ideas) are wrong - an important distinction.
coherent, and quite wrong.
[GKC, Heretics CW1:46]
It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer.People wonder about the link from GKC to JRRT - that is from the Master of Paradox to the Master of Hobbits and the Subcreator of Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien. There are many points to explore (and topics for other days), and here is another point of contact. GKC sees the essential question of truth as a riddle. (remember Bilbo and Gollum?)
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:209]
"Um, where is that? Because I'm from Chesterton [Indiana] and I didn't think there was a University there..."I would reassure them it was about G. K. Chesterton and that it was sort of a joke about his writing being so universal and thorough, you could get a University degree just by reading him, etc.
How have different authors depicted Catholic life in their literature?
Seton Hall University will explore this question through “Saints and Sleuths II: Catholic Life in Literature.” The event, which spans two weekends in January, will feature dramatic readings of four literary works, along with commentary on each. Free and open to the public, it will be held at Theatre-in-the-Round in the Bishop Dougherty University Center. For more information, please call (973) 275-2431.
The event will include the following programs:
* January 18, 8 p.m. – Dramatic reading of The Chesterbelloc, by James P. McGlone. Commentary by Dr. John McCarthy.
* January 19, 8 p.m. – Dramatic reading of The Fallen Idols of Father Brown, adapted by John Dandona. Commentary by Reverend Ian Boyd, C.S.B., and Dr. Dermot Quinn.
* January 20, 2 p.m. – Dramatic reading of Newman’s The Parting of Friends, arranged by James P. McGlone. Commentary by Monsignor Thomas Ivory and Monsignor Richard Liddy.
* January 25, 8 p.m. – Dramatic reading of Canon Sheehan’s My New Curate, adapted by John Dandola. Commentary by Dr. Dermot Quinn and Monsignor Robert Emery.
* January 26, 8 p.m. – Repeat performance of My New Curate. Commentary by Monsignor Brendan Madden and Monsignor Kevin Flanigan.
“Saints and Sleuths II: Catholic Life in Literature” is sponsored by Seton Hall University’s Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership, G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture, Center for Catholic Studies and Celtic Theatre Company.
I dedicate this essay to the memory of a truly great writer and adventurer, Bertrand R. Brinley.While I ought to continue the prolongation of Christmas by a special commentary on the upcoming (new-style) Baptism of the Lord, which is concurrently celebrated with the old-style Holy Family (First Sunday after Epiphany), I have had an interesting kind of Second Christmas, which, as you may see, might even play into the present liturgical scheme.
In gratitude,
--Dr. Thursday
The mental digestion of boys is as strong as their physical digestion. They do not heed the cookery of art any more than the art of cookery. They can eat the apples of the tree of knowledge, and they can eat them raw. It is a great mistake to suppose that boys only read boyish books. Not only do they privately revel in their sisters' most sentimental novels, but they absorb cartloads of useless information. One boy in particular, with whose career from an early age we have the best reasons for being familiar, used to read whole volumes of Chamber's Encyclopaedia, and of a very musty and unreliable History of English Trade. The thing was a mere brute pleasure of reading, a pleasure in leisurely and mechanical receptiveness. It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in grazing all day long. But when all allowance has been made for the omnivorousness of youth, we incline to think that there is probably a considerable amount of truth in the idea that boys' books have to some extent degenerated. They have degenerated probably for the reason that all forms of art degenerate, because they are despised. Probably they were less despised in the days when they still had upon them, as it were, the glamour of the great masters of historical romance. The spirit of Scott and Ainsworth and Fenimore Cooper remained in them even if it was only the reflection of a hundred reflections and each in a distorting mirror. No one will ever understand the spirit at the back of popular and juvenile literature until he realises one fact, that a large amount of it is the result of that enthusiasm of the young reader which makes him wish to hear more and more about certain heroes, and read more and more of certain types of books. He dowers the creatures of fiction with a kind of boyish immortality. He is not surprised if Dick Deadshot or Jack Harkaway renews his youth through a series of volumes which reaches further than the length of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These books have the vital philosophy of youth, a philosophy in which death does not exist, except, indeed, as an external and picturesque incident which happens to villains.Clearly, GKC liked and appreciated Books for Boys. In his other foundation-essay of this topic, he illuminates us further: "The essence of adventure stories, as Stevenson pointed out, is that the reader is himself the adventurer. He imagines himself sharing the combat and the comradeship..." [GKC, ILN Sept 23, 1922 CW32:450] These two elements, the seeming perpetual life, and the reader's sharing in the participation, stand at the foundation to this matter, and deserve some deep study - which I hope to return to. But for today I wish to go into another aspect of "Boy's Adventures".
[GKC, The Common Man 228-9]
...it was a mark of the old English school of boys' literature that the authors were full of scientific hobbies. Where they differed from the scientific futurists of to-day is that they never were tormented with the sceptical fancy that material changes must be accompanied by moral changes. The morality they expressed - or rather, assumed - was the sane and simple morality which is the soul of all adventures. Adventure involves loyalty because it involves purpose; it involves courage because it involves peril; it involves a certain receptiveness and readiness to be easily pleased because it involves making the best of anything. The modern story-teller is disturbed with a vague evolutionary notion that this morality can change. We can only say that, if it does change, there will be no adventure stories, and probably no adventures. Thus a real adventure story cannot be made on a certain moral or immoral model not uncommon in modern books. I mean the sort of story in which the hero is the villain. The hero need not be directly dealing in morality, but his own moral position must be by implication secure and satisfying; for it is the whole meaning of adventure that his soul is the fixed point in a wildly agitated world.Wow. But I seem to be drifting into a discussion of such Stories in general, and today I want to talk about some very specific stories. Specifically, the short stories by Bertrand R. Brinley, written in the early 1960s and first appearing in Boys' Life, about the Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls.
[GKC, ILN Sept 23, 1922 CW32:453]
Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy-tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. It is all very well to talk of the freedom of fairyland, but there was precious little freedom in fairyland by the best official accounts.For, I regret to inform my friends who live in the Midwest area near the southwest end of Lake Michigan, Mammoth Falls is NOT in Illinois, or Wisconsin. it is in Fairy Land, and the boys battle the usual giants, sometimes with unsympathetic deceptions, and sometimes with practical jokes. But the point, as GKC lectures at length in his Orthodoxy, is that the Science (often termed "magic") of that land provides very little freedom. Perhaps this is why these scientists are "mad"...
[GKC ILN Feb 29, 1908 CW28:53]
There are a great many things about it [the Gospel] which nobody would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made any particular use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained rather as puzzles. For instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly likely to invent in order to prove something; and nobody so far as I know has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive, but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of hero-worship and myth-making is much more likely to say the precise opposite.It may be, as I have pointed out somewhere, that this was because He wished to be "full-grown" since the epiphyses of the clavicle do not fuse until then - the collarbone is the last of the long bones to "finish" being put together. Or it may be, as GKC continues in the above-quoted text, that "there is indeed something strange in the thought that the who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most. Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or some truth of which we see the shadow in the longer domestic tutelage of the higher creatures of the earth, I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply as an example of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations, quite apart from recognised religious speculations." [Ibid CW2:321-2]
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:321]
Mr. Obama and Mr. Huckabee both have the potential to bring about a clean break with the hyper-partisan politics of the recent past. You could see this in their gracious, hopeful victory speeches. Quoting the English writer G.K. Chesterton, Mr. Huckabee said, "A true soldier fights not because he hates those who are in front of him, but because he loves those who are behind him." Mr. Obama's remarks were in the same generous spirit. It's thrilling to see two happy warriors prevail in such an important battle.
The presidential primary races are far from over, of course. But come what may, it's hard to shake the sense that a new era in American political history has begun. Dallas Morning News, 01/-5/08
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