The Chesterton Academy Advisory Council

Just Announced: Members of the Chesterton Academy advisory council.

Please Join the new Chesterton Library Connection Yahoo Group

What the heck is that-- you ask?

What if you found out there was a way to get your library to buy the Chesterton books you wanted to read?

What if you could influence your library to purchase Chesterton books so that your goofy friends and neighbors would read Chesterton so you could have a decent argument with them?

What if your library had Chesterton on its shelves and the local high school and college kids had the chance to read something worth reading for a change?

Well....you CAN influence your library. You can suggest library purchases. And I'm here to help YOU to help US get more Chesterton into YOUR local library. How?

If your library has a website go to it now and see if you can make purchasing suggestions online. If so, make a suggestion. If not, next time you visit the library ask for a patron request form and then fill it out.

Some tips:
--The form you need to fill out may be called a variety of things: patron request, item request, purchase suggestion, or something similar.
--Sometimes it's easier to ask a main library instead of a suburban or branch library.
--You'll have a better chance of a purchase at a big library than a small one which needs to get rid of books to save room.
--Titles published in the past year are more likely to be purchased. Librarians want their purchases to have a long shelf life and so are weary of older books.
--If you do suggest an older title, make sure to comment that it is a "classic" and will be checked out for years to come.
--Don't give up if you feel that your suggestions are ignored. Your voice will eventually be heard!
--Tell all of your like-minded friends to make purchasing suggestions too. There is power in numbers.
The Three Yahoo Groups:
For Chesterton purchases:GKChestertonLibraryConnection : G.K.ChestertonLibraryConnection
For Catholic purchases:
PopeSaintNicholasV : Catholic Book Lovers Influencing Library Purchasing Decisions
And for Homeschool Book purchases:
HomeschoolLibraryConnection : Homeschoolers Influencing Library Purchasing Decisions

It's easy to join, and I promise you won't get any junk mail or even too much mail. Suggestions go out approximately once a week.

Sonic Society presents: Father Brown Readio Dramas

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post: Infinity

It may be a stretch of the imagination to connect last Sunday's gospel (the woman at the well) with our discussion of last Thursday - or perhaps not. The woman's "madness" was shattered - as if a spell was broken - by the Voice of Authority who told her "Go get your husband". So deep was her restoration that she was able to bring others to that same fountain... Ah. But for today I shall resist plunging into the deep waters this imagery brings up.

In thinking of insanity, and Lent, I must bring to your attention one of the most unusual and perhaps most insightful views of a gospel event I have ever read. The event is the "Good Thief" hanging in crucifixion next to Jesus - an apologist defending Christ even on Calvary! "We are but suffering as we deserve - but This One has done nothing wrong... Lord, remember me when You come into Your Kingdom."

The insightful view is not mine. It is contained in the rich notes and the amazing play-sequence, "The Man Born To Be King" of Dorothy L. Sayers (DLS), a series of radio plays she wrote on the life of Christ. I don't have the text here to transcribe, so I shall merely give you a hint of her argument. She claims that the Good Thief perhaps took Jesus to be a harmless nut-case - a crazy man - YET - the thief still treats Him kindly, and "plays along" - only to receive a most unexpected reply. The scene DLS only hints at is the one I love to ponder: for behold, later that day, the Lord would tell the thief, "Nope, I wasn't nuts, but it was kind of you to think so. The charity you showed to the harmless lunatic You showed unto Me!" A strange, yet somehow most dramatic view. Read it for yourself.

I had previously thought I would write up a "proof" about GKC's interesting mathematical bit about the circles, but there will be more of this philosophical geometry before you know it, and I don't feel like making such a long detour today. So let us proceed. We have finished GKC's comments on lunacy and madness - which he expresses using the mystery of the circles: infinite in one sense (for it has no end) yet still not so very large (for it is no bigger than it is drawn). We have seen an omnibus labelled "Hanwell" and thought about those unfortunates who believe themselves to be chickens, or glass, or Kings of England, or Jesus. We have heard of the limits of literature, the risks of reason - and been challenged to cut off our own head if it offends us. What is all this? Why are we seriously contemplating insanity? GKC has a reason, and not merely a poetic one.

Click here to continue the adventure.

GKC tells us himself what he is up to:

I have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason: that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers. That unmistakable mood or note that I hear from Hanwell, I hear also from half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day; and most of the mad doctors are mad doctors in more senses than one. They all have exactly that combination we have noted: the combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin explanation and carry it very far. [CW1:225]

We might take this as the bridge-passage, the musical riff that brings us from Heretics to Orthodoxy. Recall that in Heretics we saw a long line of men - writers, thinkers, philosophers - men whom GKC respects, even admires - some of whom he would readily claim as friends - and yet men with whom he is in bitter and utter disagreement: "a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong." [Heretics CW1:46]

Those men are the men LIKE the lunatics. Note he does NOT say they ARE lunatics! He is not pulling an ad hominem argument. He is talking about a general idea, dealing with the IDEAS of those men. What does he tell us about them? He says those are the men with the SMALL PATTERNS, even though they are "infinite":

But a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black. Like the lunatic, they cannot alter their standpoint; they cannot make a mental effort and suddenly see it black on white.[CW1:225]

He proceeds to give an example (about materialism) but almost immediately points out that he is NOT making an argument about the detail, but about the generality. He links the flaw in the materialist view of the kosmos back to the flaw in the man in the asylum. It may be true enough. But it is so much smaller a truth than can be found elsewhere.

I hope you are reading along with me - and so you will readily note that it is futile for me to try to skip the example. GKC himself tried to do that. In one of his amazing leaps, he goes from that example to a stark generality of epistemology (the study of knowledge itself): "In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves." [CW1:226] It is the paradox of words, the strangeness of a homework assignment like "Define 'infinity' and use it in a sentence." It hints at another mysterious line of GKC's which he put in another mystery: "Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason." ["The Blue Cross" in The Innocence of Father Brown]

Whew, let's stop for a bit. Do you feel stuck in a swamp of ideas? You are wrong. It's the brisk fresh air. You are at a peak of a mountain, and seeing a vista. It's at these points where you feel most congested, you are actually most free, and actually presented with a greater wideness of vision than elsewhere. So let us pick this matter apart so we can grasp where we were and better handle where we're going next. I can't do all the epistemology, I didn't bring that in my knapsack today. Let's see if we can deal with it directly. Let's read it again:

"In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves."

The point of the paradox is we can handle things far bigger than our hands - because we have words which can reduce infinity to eight letters. (Count them: I, N, F, I, N, I, T, Y.) The strict philosophers will now throw eggs at me, saying I have committed the "Fallacy of Equivocation", confusing the word "infinite" and the idea "infinite". But I catch the eggs, and scramble them to make our lunch. They are not reading along. (Recall "poetry floats on the infinite sea"...) It would be just as adequate for me to cite the Summa of Aquinas (I Q10 A1) to help them out, since they like that kind of citation, it shows I do read those kinds of things. Ahem! But for us, this "paradox" is as simple as this mountain-peak. We're stopped here - and need to choose a path. But we can choose ANY direction - as long as it's down. (We are walking, you know; remember we said last week, "let it be solved by walking".)

The "fallacy of equivocation" is a kind of error in logic, in the use of words. How about an example? Here's one: saying "God is limited because he is only three letters long". But GKC is telling us there is the same kind of error in saying "we cannot hold the idea of 'infinity' since it is INFINITELY BIG". It is a paradox in reason itself, not merely written by GKC, to state without further quibble, that Infinity is narrow, and God is limited. This is not because of the things-in-themselves, but because of our equipment. (We are on a journey, we are NOT going EVERYWHERE AT ONCE. We are walking, and so are SOMEWHERE.)

I will try once more. (This one is great, and will shock any computer scientists in the audience.) Watch carefully, and I will use YOUR computer to represent BIG integers, including for example, the number of electrons required to fill the sphere bounded by the diameter of the most distant galaxies. Or, even bigger: the factorial of that number. Or even bigger: that number raised to its own power... that many times. Big numbers. BIG big numbers. HUGE numbers. (Even more than GKC weighed.) I can even use the computer to deal with transfinite numbers, the mysterious "aleph-one", which is the cardinality of the real system of numbers. And there are even others... Wow, look: before your very eyes, all those things are being communicated by what I have just written! HAVE I NOT COMMUNICATED THEM TO YOU? Of course I have. They are formally represented - as ideas. No, not directly as tick-marks on a sheet of paper or tokens in a box. (Please. Don't be silly. When was the last time you saw 1000 of ANYTHING? We gave that up about 5000 years ago, when the Egyptians began to write Ç to stand for "ten".) You cannot represent such gigantic numbers by that means. It is like asking how much God weighs. It does not have meaning. But you can communicate the idea of such numbers - which means you have communicated the number. The idea of such vast quantities has a meaning, and so we can accomplish the communication of that idea. And if we failed to say it in symbols of mathematics, we would resort to the symbols of poetry: I think of "Tonight" in "West Side Story":

Today the minutes seem like hours,
The hours go so slowly...
And still the sky is light...

That is what GKC is saying. In order to talk about anything, and reason about anything, we use something narrow. We do not have the infinite time or an infinite box of tokens to play around with the real thing, so we use what we can.

OK. Maybe it was futile - I ought to stick to my own toys - so let's resume with GKC, and I will let the high-tech philosophy for others to play with. Perhaps this next sentence will tell you the same thing, which is just GKC's own version of the very important Principle of Contradiction: "Nothing can be, and not be, at the same time."

A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist.
[CW1:226]

Again, please read this carefully. You need to think about the simple sentences, not about some deep quippy insult or brag. You can put in any partisan or sectarian words you like, and it has JUST the SAME meaning and power. YOU ARE ON A PEAK of FREEDOM, my friend, not stuck in a swamp! Try it again. Then we'll proceed.

Now that you have a NEW tool, then, we shall actually approach this example of materialism - and its opponent, spiritualism. (We are using the terms rather generically here; materialism means there is nothing but material: nothing spiritual at all. Whereas spiritualism means there also exists an unseen realm.)

I shall quote at length again, because you are surely tired of reading MY words, and also because the "verbal fireworks" here are SO good:

...there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
[CW1:226-7]

(An aside: if you are wondering who "McCabe" is, you can read his chapter in Heretics CW1:157 et seq. Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was a Roman Catholic priest turned rationalist.)

And while I greatly doubt that you can possibly be satisfied with my writing, here I must leave you for today. Please try to think a little about these things. Not about the math, or about the epistemology, the knowledge OF meanings of words and ideas - but ABOUT the meanings, and the ideas.

Still lost? When we think about our mother (let us say) we do not think about her picture, but about HER. But when we talk about her, we may show the picture, or use that six-letter word - but everyone knows who it is we are talking about, even if they have never met her or seen her. IN THE SAME WAY: when we think about infinity, we do not think about that splendid and funny little proof of the math dudes about "increasing without bound" or about a bottomless box of tokens - nor simply about that eight-letter word - but we use that word to talk to others about, as I have just done with you.

And this limited limitlessness applies even to the matter of God, which we do not narrow to a mere word of three letters, and Who has even more meaning and even more intimacy to us than our very mothers...

Onward to the next the peak, dudes!

--Dr. Thursday

Reading Orthodoxy and discussing it

As this is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Chesterton's masterwork, Orthodoxy, I have the feeling there are many discussion going on in the world about this book.

A highly unusual look at Orthodoxy.

The Wikipedia entry for Orthodoxy.

A student stumbles upon EWTN.

Raw thoughts on Orthodoxy.

Notre Dame is teaching Orthodoxy.

Dale Ahlquist discusses Orthodoxy.

Now, if you read all that, you may be prepared for the 27th Annual Chesterton Society Meeting in June. Each speaker will be taking a chapter from Orthodoxy and discussing it as best he/she can. Educational level will be high, but so will the humor level. Come if you can.

Lamp-posts

Robert Moore-Jumonville has a great meditation in the Jan/Feb Gilbert magazine on lamp-posts, and Gilbert's poem entitled, "The Lamp Post."

I wonder if C.S. Lewis ever read that poem, and if it didn't make the lamp-post in Narnia become a reality. So to speak.

An interesting remark of GKC's

Gilbert magazine has been running a bit called "GKC on GKC" where they provide quotes Chesterton made about himself. Many are amusing, some are touching, and some are mysterious, like this one:

"So little, I realize with a groan, after an obscure and laborious life of writing, does anybody know about anything that I think or feel."

I do hope Frances knew. And perhaps he simply felt misunderstood? Certainly one does feel as if one knows Chesterton after reading him for a while. But maybe that is an illusion. After all, how well do we know ourselves? How well can we know someone else?

March Gilbert now arriving on doorsteps throughout the country

Theme: Feminism.

Should be interesting, no?

New George MacDonald Titles

Those interested in reading the souls of others, and especially those interested in how others travel through the tragedies of their lives, will be interested in reading this new edition of George MacDonald's work, along side a new (or perhaps just new to me) poet, Betty Aberlin.

The two poets, one long dead, and one very much alive, dance side by side in a sort of duet, singing different passages of each other's song.

Betty has put in much work to respond to George's poetry. It is not easy to write this kind of poetry today, nor to try to respond to another's sorrow and rhyme. But it works, and I believe anyone interested in poetry will be fascinated by Betty's responding song, echoing George's heartfelt longings.

In some ways, I believe it would be nice to have left a third page free, so that the reader could add another voice, and make the work a trio. But, by entering into the poem, simply by reading it, the reader does enter in, and become a part of that dialog.

Recommended for poets and George MacDonald fans.
***
George MacDonald may have died 103 years ago (1905), but his legacy lives on. Those who love his work and those who study his work apparently had a rare meeting at the 100th anniversary of his death in 2005. The outgrowth of this meeting was the enlivening of minds towards the works of this great writer.

The essays contained in this collection analyze MacDonald's writing from many points of view. His literary past is discussed and how his own work built upon his predecessors. His literary present is discussed, as to how his work was viewed amongst his contemporaries; and his literary future is discussed in the context of his continuing influence on today's writers.

To appreciate this work, one should be a MacDonald scholar, or interested in becoming a MacDonald scholar. This is not a work for the general public. However, it will serve its purpose and has its place. And if it can revive interest in MacDonald's work, it is well worth it.

Both books reviewed by: Nancy Carpentier Brown

Thursday's Dr. Thursday Post

Insane Juxtapositions, Desperate Decisions - Circles and the Cross

So we had another surprise! Last Sunday was the Lenten edition of the Transfiguration of the Lord - all about sight, vision, and light. In case you've forgotten, there is an "official" feast of the Transfiguration on August 6; we recall it during Lent because it plays an important role in our preparation, as it did for the Apostles. We need to keep two very different truths fixed in our minds: one and the same Man, Jesus Christ, is the One Who shone with His own light - and He is also the One Who suffered and died on the cross. It is this wrenching, nearly insane juxtaposition which GKC is going to emphasize - the Christian Thing which is two things and also one: two things impossible together which are nevertheless one single thing. If we were really pagan, and heard talk of such a thing, and sat with all the books of human writing, we would find no more perfect analogy than the strange words the physicists have told us reveal the true nature of light - the photon which is particle and wave, somehow neither, yet somehow both at once - and still real. But then, "in Thy light we shall see light." [Ps 35:10]

But we are not physicists, most of the time. Nor are we philosophers - most of the time. We are merely trying to read this book Orthodoxy, and get a little further into it than we have before - to learn a little more from GKC. It is one of those books - you can make a list for yourself - which yields new delights each time it is read. You will, as our beloved president Dale Ahlquist has said, come to think GKC has rewritten it while it was on your shelf...

Ahem. Let us, then, proceed into the first "real" chapter - the second (or third) which is called "The Maniac". Remember: we are on an adventure. We have our guide, GKC. We have our tools - several of them. What are they? Let's review:

1. Our eyes - we are trying to see things for the first time
2. A kind of warning that things we know really well will probably start looking exceedingly strange
3. A sense that we need to start seeing opposites together, and at once - which will help us to see
(a) the way they both depend on something deeper
(b) the way they really are different

Yes, you need to remember one other thing. This is a verbal journey. We are in one sense blind. We are going to see with our ears - I mean we must listen to GKC telling us certain things which he sees - and then, it is to be hoped, we shall start seeing for ourselves.

When the physicists do this, especially in those strange places where no experiments can be performed, they use a German word - they call this a "Gedanken experiment" - a "thought" experiment. GKC is going to put certain ideas into the test tubes of our heads... er... if you don't like that image, use a stewpot (it's about lunchtime when I write this). He will let us stir, and turn up the heat, and even add our own spices... Of course such a splendid analogy comes from our Mr. Chesterton - one of the funniest, and thoroughly pro-woman truths he has written:

A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
[GKC ILN Apr 7 1906 CW27:161]

As the dwarves said to Snow White, "Mmmm! Soup!" Oh boy! Just check, one last time: Do you have your big spoon in your hand? Are you nice and hungry? Ready, set, cook!
Click here to sample some stew.
Chesterton starts with a question - the question which was asked of him by G. S. Street in his review of GKC's Heretics:

"I shall not begin to worry about my philosophy of life until Mr. Chesterton discloses his."
[G. S. Street, in the Outlook June 17 1905, quoted in CW1:211]

Or, as GKC puts it in CW1:216, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" Those are the words of an anonymous "prosperous publisher" who asked this of GKC, as they were walking somewhere together, just as an "omnibus" labelled "Hanwell" happened to pass them. Though in What I Saw in America GKC gives a playful poke to the American use of "elevator" for "lift" and "automobile" for "motor", here we see an inverse: America has a shorter term and calls such things a "bus". But anyone with Latin in his background will leap to the -ibus ending, murmuring "dative or ablative plural" - for an omnibus is called that because it is a ride to all places for all people - presuming, of course, that you pay the fare! (That is, the omnibus is in contrast to a taxi or other conveyance, hired by an individual to get to a specific destination.) An aside: speaking of the dative plural, as a tech I always scratch my head when I see "SCSI-bus" and wonder... (It's a communication channel used for disk drives and other equipment.)

But Hanwell? I have written about that before. Hanwell (is/was) an insane asylum in the west of London. As GKC proceeds to explain, the asylums are full of people who believe in themselves - that is, to the exclusion of just about everything else. In other words, a place where a normal person has somehow lost his way, lost his focus, lost (perhaps) everything - except one thing, which is wrong because it has nothing else to go along with it. It's just another way of explaining "heresy". (If you'd rather think of this in terms of fantasy, it's the City of the Old Emperors in The Neverending Story.)

The next paragraph is one of those which critics would quickly label "verbal fireworks". It is kind of like skipping some 20 steps in working out an equation - it is well argued, but not quite as complete as one would like. It is well worth considering now (during Lent) because GKC brings in the idea of sin. Sin is as real a problem as heresy or as lunacy - a form of damage to something, a wrongness, a narrow choosing without awareness of something larger. But most of us don't want to talk about sin - and this makes the reader of this paragraph really uncomfortable! Here's just one, very loud, very bright little firecracker:

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
[CW1:217]

So, after GKC gives a number of very powerful lines to demonstrate the link, he reverts back to talk about Hanwell - which is easier to bear for some:

Men deny hell, but not, as yet, Hanwell.
[CW1:218]

Yes, there are people - nowawdays, often writers of TV shows or rock songs - who think it's "cool" to be crazy. We ourselves, familiar with GKC's writing, might think that GKC had a warm spot for lunacy, given his books like The Poet and the Lunatics or Lunacy and Letters. GKC quickly shuts off the supposition that he considers it "attractive":

...if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease. A blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is only because we see the irony of his idea that we think him even amusing; it is only because he does not see the irony of his idea that he is put in Hanwell at all. In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life.
[CW1:218]

Ah, you say - if you are still with me, and not looking for some bread to go with this very thick stew - this is something we already know about! This is the idea of adventure, an ordinary man in an extraordinary place. Exactly. Full marks! What a cook you're proving to be!

Now, just because our guide is a "lit'ry" man, and not a dull computer guy like me, he brings in a GOLDEN allusion to his own discipline - a grand triumphal link which is brought to its fullest power in his discussion of the Story in his 1925 The Everlasting Man [CW2:380], and somehow alluded to by J. R. R. Tolkien in his very important essay "On Fairy Tales". We shall see far more in Chapter Four, when we take a tour of Elfland, but for now, look at this almost mathematical treatment of an important, if much debated, branch of literature:

...odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.
[CW1:218]

Again I must restrain myself from filling all your disk with comments, but take just this one sterling line from another essay:

The fairy-tale means extraordinary things as seen by ordinary people.
[GKC ILN Dec 2 1905 CW:27:72]

Yes, and you can see that even in this high-tech world, as I hope to demonstrate in my own writing someday... but for now, think not about the "mechanics" or "details" within "fairy tales" but about the "story" - the adventure - we are on an adventure, ordinary people in an extraordinary place: the kosmos, the World.

You may laugh, if you are reading along with me, at this point. It is here GKC uses nearly the same words as me (I did not consciously intend this, nor recall the quote!)

Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey.
[CW1:218]

Indeed, we advance from danger into danger. If you were already uncomfortable, all bothered and ready to fight over the topic of "fairy tale", perhaps you will be even more perturbed by the next coordination made by GKC. But it gives us the next important tool in our stock of equipment, and as difficult as it will be to work through, we must accept it gratefully, and study it to learn its correct, if uncomfortable, use:

the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance.
[CW1:218-9]

Hm. Did you bother to read the link I provided last week - the one called "Mike's Job"? If you did, you may already understand this great rule. The idea is not that we refuse to touch technical or scientific matters. Nor that we must somehow write thesaurus-rich, poetic, furry-animal, cute-cute, pretty-pretty "stories", to the exclusion of any precision or awareness of real things. Oh, no. Not at all. It is something which pervades GKC's writing, from his 1901 The Defendant to his 1925 The Everlasting Man and elsewhere: the idea (WHICH I MUST REMIND YOU WE ARE ALREADY CARRYING AS A TOOL) that we need both things - as paradoxical, as contrary, as (YES) as crazy as it may be to unite them. It is true craziness, real heresy, when one chooses ONE thing to the exclusion of all others. (Remember, the Greek root of "heresy" means "to choose"!) This is the error; this is the warning. Do not get trapped by math, by chess - or even by poetry.

Those of us who have watched "The Miracle on 34th Street" will recall how Kris Kringle tells Susan that there is an English Nation and a French Nation - there is also an IMAGINE-Nation. We are not simply talking about fantasy. We are talking about the power of mental vision. Remember how I said this was a verbal journey, which you would hear (or read) but build for yourself, like Bastian, in your own way? The true imagination means pondering, considering, bringing into mental vision. The Greeks used a deep and thoroughly mystical word for this "inner vision" - the word theoria, from which we get our "theory". Many writers have begun to plumb this rich word, but it is deep, deep:

Theoria and theoretical are words that, in the understanding of the ancients, mean precisely this: a relationship to the world, an orientation toward reality characterized entirely by the desire that this same reality may reveal itself in its true being. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of truth; nothing else but the self-revelation of reality. Thus we may state that the contemplation of reality is properly called theoretical whenever the aim is to discover the truth and nothing else.
[Joseph Pieper, In Defense of Philosophy 45-6]

But perhaps that is too rich, too concentrated. Then try GKC:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.
[CW1:220]

Please do not ask me to "prove" this sort of thing. We are not doing that sort of thing.... we are just looking, observing, theoria-ing. There is something true here, as odd as it sounds. And if you are a mathematician - remember Zeno? He wrote a trick riddle, to the effect that "you cannot move, because to go from A to B, you have to go halfway first, but then you'd have to go half of that distance..." and so on. Oh, my; poor Zeno - are you stuck? (hee hee) Does that mean we cannot move???? Of course not! Er... (pardon my math here!) What is the infinite sum of all the inverse powers of two? Oh, yeah... it's just one - a finite distance after all. So we've just crossed the infinite sea of steps from A to B! That's why some smart-aleck Scholastic answered Zeno with solvitur ambulando - let it be solved, by (or while) walking! Do you see the poetry - which is NO LESS mathematical for all that? To put it into modern terms, it's this: "Hey math dude - take a walk!" You see, poetry is a more robust piece of equipment - it can deal with things which might break the more delicate gears in - uh - other parts of the brain. (Are you getting a little itchy here? Remember: BOTH THINGS TOGETHER, in their right places!)

GKC does not mention Zeno (though he does mention the Scholastic quip in ILN Nov 4 1916 CW30:538). Instead he uses literary men like Poe, Cowper, and a line, often misquoted, from Dryden. Most of us (especially those of us who know our Mr. Ahlquist, or read his books) know how easy it is to misquote GKC. But here GKC points out that Dryden's line, "Great wits are oft to madness near allied" is frequently misquoted. He is not dealing with a bibliographic matter - he is explaining this greater matter of madness:

It is the pure promptitude of the intellect that is in peril of a breakdown. Also people might remember of what sort of man Dryden was talking. He was not talking of any unworldly visionary like Vaughan or George Herbert. He was talking of a cynical man of the world, a sceptic, a diplomatist, a great practical politician. Such men are indeed to madness near allied. Their incessant calculation of their own brains and other people's brains is a dangerous trade. It is always perilous to the mind to reckon up the mind. A flippant person has asked why we say, "As mad as a hatter." A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head.
[CW1:220]

Some critics try to say how careless, or lacking in precision, GKC is in this book. But here GKC "goes in motion" - he covers the equation (or argument) in both directions: "And if great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners." [ibid] Again, we have another rich interlink, shooting down en passant a rather stupid line from a Marxist, all while explaining (rather fairly and delicately, I think) about real lunacy:

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
[CW1:221-2]

GKC is not writing a text on lunacy, or on its treatment - though I would be interested in hearing the comments of real pathological psychologists on this. He is getting at something... something akin to what he was getting at in Heretics. He is using the terrifying breakdown of reason in a person to assist in understanding how reason in general can break down: "Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way." [CW1:222]
And then, he again varies the analogy, going to about as non-literary a realm as there is. As if to demonstrate his own real respect for, and accurate grasp of true mathematics (in case the math dudes in the audience are still feeling a kind of sting), he says this, which might be right out of Euclid: "A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large." (I do hope you know who Euclid is. You may be delighted (or horrified) to know his books are still in print! I got mine from Dover.) You MIGHT want to brush up on this stuff, as we shall study more of this very important and quite mystical union of geometry and philosophy next week.

I suspect that GKC was somehow uncomfortable with this topic of lunacy, because he exercises (again, in my view) a sense of compassion for those who truly are insane. I wonder how a real physician-of-the-mind would take his words. But he is coming to a point. It is the point made at powerful length in the Harry Potter Story, that it is one's choice that matters:

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle [a circular route on the London Underground] will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil. And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant - as intolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living. Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell - or into Hanwell.
[CW1:224; emphasis added; cf. Mt 5:30, 18:8]

Whew. Kind of tired, after today's strenuous hike? Eaten a big bowl of rich food from the stewpot? Certainly. Good stuff... But next week you shall see how necessary this was - for at this point GKC gives us the concluding line, the transition chord to take us to the next movement of the chapter: "I have described at length my vision of the maniac for this reason: that just as I am affected by the maniac, so I am affected by most modern thinkers." [CW1:225] Next time we shall hear the details of this reason.

--Dr. Thursday

GKC answers the latest Blog Meme

Here is GKC's answers to the latest meme blogg-game...
GKC was reading the "Blue Boar" blogg and saw that someone had tagged "Chestertonian" in one of those games. He sent us his answers. He wishes to tag Belloc, Shaw, Wells, his wife, and his brother - and YOU if you care to play.

GKC writes:

Ah, another game. It's been quite some time since I played one, and it shall be a delight to do so. Few writers have bored their readers with countless details about their lives as I have - so much so that I myself termed my Orthodoxy a "slovenly autobiography". [CW1:215] So perhaps you will enjoy this game as I have.

G. K. C.

Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

1. I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the esoteric name of Nothing. At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practicing (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances. Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the Daily News (this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.
In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me pass.
["Some Policemen and a Moral" in Tremendous Trifles]

2. I once read a history of China (I need hardly say that I was paid to read it) and in this work there was an account of the Twenty-Four Types of Filial Piety. Of twenty-three of them I can now give no account. But one of them has stuck in my memory; he was an elderly statesman and Prime Minister of the Empire, or something of that description. And on his fiftieth birthday he dressed up as a child of four and danced gaily in front of his aged parents in order to soothe them with the illusion that they were still quite young. It would certainly be interesting if Mr. Balfour or Mr. Asquith would dress up as four-year-olds and dance before their gratified parents; but, upon the whole, I think this is carrying the principle of reminiscence and ritual unification a little too far, and requires at least a power of Oriental gravity which may not be completely at our command. But the principle involved is sound enough. Happy is he who not only knows the causes of things, but who has not lost touch with their beginnings. Happy is he who still loves something that he loved in the nursery: he has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and has saved not only his soul but his life. I can count a fair list of things I have always desired and still desire - sword-blades, the coloured angels of religious art, a kind of cake called jumbles, Grimm's "Fairy Tales" and a shilling paint-box. Some of these things I confess thankfully that I now have (though jumbles have died with a decaying civilisation), but I am more thankful still that the desire in these cases remains. For this is a great gift from God, to have things and still to desire them.
[ILN Sept 26 1908 CW28:186]

3. I once lectured before a congress of elementary schoolmasters, trying to persuade them to tolerate anything so human as Penny Dreadfuls or Dime Novels about Dick Turpin and Buffalo Bill. And I remember that the Chairman, with a refined and pained expression said, "I do not think Mr. Chesterton's brilliant paradoxes have persuaded us to put away our Alice in Wonderland and our" - something else, possibly The Vicar of Wakefield or Pilgrim's Progress. It never struck him that the nonsense tale is as much an escape from educational earnestness as the gallop after Buffalo Bill. For him it was simply a classic, and it went along with the other classics. And I thought to myself, with a sinking heart, "Poor, poor little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others. Alice is now not only a schoolgirl but a schoolmistress. The holiday is over and Dodgson is again a don. There will be lots and lots of examination papers, with questions like:
(1) What do you know of the following; mime, mimble, haddock's eyes, treacle-wells, beautiful soup?
(2) Record all the moves in the chess game in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and give diagram.
(3) Outline the practical policy of the White Knight for dealing with the social problem of green whiskers.
(4) Distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
["Lewis Carroll" in The New York Times 1932, printed in A Handful of Authors]


4. I once borrowed a corkscrew from [Mr. J. L.] Hammond and found myself trying to open my front-door with it, with my latch-key in the other hand. Few will believe my statement, but it is none the less true that the incident came before and not after the more appropriate use of the corkscrew. I was perfectly sober; probably I should have been more vigilant if I had been drunk.
[Autobiography CW16:152]

5. I once waited for rather more than two days in a palatial Prussian post-office for a common money order addressed to me; while the officials conducted an elaborate correspondence with an old lady of about ninety, whom I did not know, and whom they finally insisted should come in person to the post-office and swear to my identity. There is nothing particularly practical in this. Marble post-offices, however, palatial, are not the most profitable places in which to spend one's days. The oaths of dying German school-mistresses are not an indispensable condition of the transfer of two pounds of a man's own money to his own pocket. But, upon the whole, Germany is neither more nor less efficient than France or England, but its success is national and peculiar. The marble post-office pleases the national appetite as if it were something to eat; Teutons do not mind waiting if they can wait in a pleasant and impressive place. It is not the efficiency of Germans that produces their rules and regulations, their buttons and their notice-boards. It is their sentimentality; they like behaving in omnibuses and railway-stations as if they were in church. Germany does not manage better in the abstract. But Germany manages Germans better than even Napoleon could do when backed by the right reason of Europe; and so the sword of liberty was broken at Leipzig. That is the whole argument for nationalism.
[ILN July 1 1911 CW29:113]


6. Some time ago, seated at ease upon a summer evening and taking a serene review of an indefensibly fortunate and happy life, I calculated that I must have committed at least fifty-three murders, and been concerned with hiding about half a hundred corpses for the purpose of the concealment of crimes; hanging one corpse on a hat-peg, bundling another into a postman's bag, decapitating a third and providing it with somebody else's head, and so on through quite a large number of innocent artifices of the kind. It is true that I have enacted most of these atrocities on paper; and I strongly recommend the young student, except in extreme cases, to give expression to his criminal impulses in this form; and not run the risk of spoiling a beautiful and well-proportioned idea by bringing it down to the plane of brute material experiment, where it too often suffers the unforeseen imperfections and disappointments of this fallen world, and brings with it various unwelcome and unworthy social and legal consequences. I have explained elsewhere that I once drew up a scientific table of Twenty Ways of Killing a Wife and have managed to preserve them all in their undisturbed artistic completeness, so that it is possible for the artist, after a fashion, to have successfully murdered twenty wives and yet keep the original wife after all; an additional point which is in many cases, and especially my own, not without its advantages. Whereas, for the artist to sacrifice his wife and possibly his neck, for the mere vulgar and theatrical practical presentation of one of these ideal dramas, is to lose, not only this, but all the ideal enjoyment of the other nineteen. This being my strict principle, from which I have never wavered, there has been nothing to cut short the rich accumulation of imaginative corpses; and, as I say, I have already accumulated a good many. My name achieved a certain notoriety as that of a writer of these murderous short stories, commonly called detective stories; certain publishers and magazines have come to count on me for such trifles; and are still kind enough, from time to time, to write to me ordering a new batch of corpses; generally in consignments of eight at a time.
[Autobiography CW16:312]

Two bonus answers, in case you are still curious:
I can swim: I cannot ride. I can play chess: I cannot play bridge. I can scull: I cannot punt. I can read Greek lettering: I cannot read Arabic lettering. In this strong, sound, fundamental sense, I can write literature; whereas I could not write music. Or, if you like to put it so, I can't play the piano, but I can play the fool. But the distinction is decisive. I can do it; and therefore I am a trader and not a thief. And I would sooner call myself a journalist than an author; because a journalist is a journeyman. He has a real working human trade; he even has a trade-union.
[Preface to A Miscellany of Men]

There are some who complain of a man for doing nothing; there are some, still more mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do. When actually presented with some beautiful blank hours or days, they will grumble at their blankness. When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, they will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards or a little ball. I speak only for myself, I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I never can get enough Nothing to do. I feel as if I had never had leisure to unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts. I need not say that there is nothing particularly misanthropic in my desire for isolation; quite the other way. In my morbid boyhood, as I have said, I was sometimes, in quite a horrible sense, solitary in society. But in my manhood, I have never felt more sociable than I do in solitude.
[Autobiography CW16:202]

Gretchen Rubin: Right On

A discussion of Chesterton's "It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light" thoughts.

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton Reviewed by J. Peterson in Gilbert magazine

Thanks to John for allowing me to put this here for those of you (Nick, et al) interested in Chesterton, philosophy, and Orthodoxy.

A Landmark Chesterton Study

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton
by Randall Paine
Peru Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1999
Reviewed by John Peterson


This 160-page study of Chesterton is the book many of us have been hoping for, and a book many of us feared would never be written.

Since his death in 1936, ninety books about Chesterton have been published in the English language. There are major book-length studies of Chesterton from expert and scholarly professors of Literature, Journalism, History, Government, Political Science, Physical Science, Drama, Theology, and Pop Culture. It is not easy to think of another writer whose major commentators come from such a variety of disciplines.

Unfortunately, the list has not included a satisfactory book on Chesterton as a philosopher. Read more.The previous effort in this direction, Philosopher without Portfolio by Fordham's Quentin Lauer, S.J., consisted largely of the kind of faint praise that is both dismissive and condescending. ("Chesterton's ingenious mind enabled him to find what he considered rational grounds for affirming what he preferred to be true.")



In 1989, the year after Father Lauer's book was published, another priest completed a study of Chesterton the philosopher. This was Father Randall Paine, an American who has lived abroad since 1974, and who is for all practical purposes an unknown in Chesterton circles. After he was ordained by Pope John Paul II in 1983, Paine studied philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. His dissertation bore the title Chesterton and the Universe, and, as happens with the vast majority of such documents, has been lost in obscurity ever since.



But no longer. Fortunately for us all, Sherwood Sugden Publishers have come to the rescue. Now a newly edited paperback version of Father Paine's dissertation has appeared with a new title, a brief new concluding chapter, and an added appendix. You must read it. Paine's is the definitive study of Chesterton the philosopher.



After a brief overview of Chesterton as a thinker and rhetorician, Paine launches into a review of western philosophy's descent into subjectivism or what Etienne Gilson called the "300-year detour in Western thought." Paine terms this "The great refusal of modern philosophy" that began with René Descartes systematic doubt and ended in the blind alley of Edmund Hussert's phenomenology. Paine next discusses the remedy for such errors, which he believes to be nothing less than heavy doses of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. With this background in place, the author takes us through a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Chesterton's Orthodoxy to show that it is essentially a new and original exposition of the fundamentals of the Aristotelian and Thomistic approach. Paine's conclusion is that Chesterton's "remedial metaphysics" has truly enriched our philosophical heritage.



The foregoing summary was sketchy and deliberately so. I would not want to spoil this book for you by posting all of Paine's conclusions minus his arguments and documentation. I will simply promise that if you read The Universe and Mr. Chesterton you will learn exactly what was behind Gilson's remark that "Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed."

Thank you John "Gramps" Peterson.

To read another interesting article by Father Paine on the "Dead" language of Latin, click here. To read an article by Father Paine on Chesterton's Autobiography, click here.

Season Four: Apostle of Common Sense

The 4th season of “The Apostle of Common Sense” with all-new episodes will begin to air on Sunday, March 2nd (9 pm EST, 8 pm CST) on EWTN. The first episode “The Only Man I Regularly Read” will have a bedroom scene!!!

The Press takes note of the new Chesterton Academy

Read about an article which appears in the Wanderer about the Chesterton Academy.

UPDATE: Now you can read it here.

Great Commentary on Orthodoxy

Read it here.

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton

From the Combox, Nick asked:

"Do you know of any systematic theologians or philosophers who have done in depth explorations of Orthodoxy?"

And Mr. Ahlquist answered:

The Universe and Mr. Chesterton by Randall Paine is about the closest he’s going to come.

I hope that helps.

Chris Discovers Chesterton

"My parents bought me Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton for Christmas. I was a few weeks before I was able to get to it, but once I read the first few pages I couldn’t put it down. I finished it just a few days later wondering how I could have never read anything by Chesterton before. He has a very unique style, very funny, with deep insights into human nature and society. He uses metaphor extremely effectively, and quite frequently to humorous effect throughout his works. His works have had an influence on other writers I love, including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Orthodoxy was written in 1908, 100 years ago now. And yet amazingly it’s still relevant today."

Want to Review Chesterton Books?

From Mike:
Looking for places to send review copies of Chesterton on War and Peace, I came across what seems to be an excellent provider of book reviewers, the Midwest Book Review. Quite a few libraries use them to discover new books and Amazon quotes them.

Given the volume of submissions, they only review about half the books they get. Chesterton fans with a knack for reviewing might want to volunteer as a reviewer. They'd get free copies of Chesterton books as they come out and have an opportunity to make sure Chesterton books get reviewed as well as to persuade libraries to carry them.

They can contact the editor-in-chief, James Cox.

There are more details.

It'd be a great way to get Chesterton in more libraries.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

Dr. Thursday's Post

Before we begin, an observation: If you went to Mass on Sunday, you may have been surprised - as I was - to hear the reading from Genesis about how in Eden, after the eating of the forbidden fruit, "their eyes were opened". I certainly didn't plan that juxtaposition. I wonder what eerie parallel will happen this week. Hee hee.

If I had my own blogg again (which seems ever more unlikely due to, uh, matters beyond my control) I could probably fill several gigs of your disk space with comments about the eye, eyesight, light, and a variety of related matters. As a Roman Catholic, a scientist-without-restrictive-adjective, a Chestertonian, and a worshipper of He-Who-Is-Light-From-Light, the whole thing is just about as exciting and interesting and inspiring an idea as one could look for. (And then there's water. And food. But I mustn't get off topic.)

For example, I am told there are about 150 million rods and cones - the light-detection cells - in the human retina. However, I am also told there are only about ONE million neurons in the optic nerve. So, on the average, the signals from 150 detectors have to be funnelled down into just one message-carrying line. Hm. (I omit several pages of discussion, but if you want a bit more see here for another view.)

I am also told that it is possible, under the right conditions, for a person to sense as few as five photons - maybe even just one! I understand there are arrangements to handle the brightness and dimness, not only by changing the aperture (the size of the pupil) but by the "adaptation" of the various sensors themselves...

And then there's that thing about colour. Though we can hear well over nine octaves of different frequencies, we can see only a little less than an octave's worth of colours. But what a variety of colours there are! And how they affect each other - speaking of AMBER, the "amber waves" look lots more amber in front of those "purple mountain majesties" - so that means there's "colour-in-itself" but also "colour-in-its-neighbourhood"... The other sense of that word "colour" (the racial sense, or "Black" and "White") might make some uncomfortable, but in talking about the eye, we see their united and simultaneous importance: the eyeball is white to reflect extra light away, but behind the white (inside) is a deep black to absorb any stray light - all this, like every man-made camera - arranged so that the only light hitting the retina comes in as focussed by the lens, shuttered down by the iris, and aimed by the six wonderful opposing muscles...

Ahem. But for today, since we are trying to talk about GKC's Orthodoxy, I would like to consider the strange paradox that there are certain things we can see - things which appear to be the most tiny and subtle of sights, and yet are really among the most gigantic and vast things in existence. Oh, "science", you moan. Or (from the other side of the hall, or the brain) you scream "fairy-tales". Well - as you shall see in a future chapter, either you must have science or you must have fantasy. (Chestertonians have both...) You can say it is all magic, or you can say it is all physics. But you cannot ignore these things and go outdoors at night - who would dare? This may sound mystifying at the moment, but it is thoroughly in keeping with GKC's vignette we examined last week: the Man Who Discovered England. Today, we must go a step further in our adventure...

Click to read more, if you dare.
In the next, and last, little segment of GKC's "Introduction In Defence of Everything Else", he stresses that he is NOT trying to make jokes, riddles, paradoxes - he is not being "flippant" about what he is writing. So much of his writing has that flavour - one of the great detractors of GKC calls this "Verbal Fireworks" - pretty, noisy, soon over, and futile. But others will contend (as I do) that this is a secondary effect, deriving from his work on the primary material. As Falkor the Luck-Dragon states in The Neverending Story, "All the languages of joy are related." And so they are! When GKC begins to examine something, be it a doorknocker (in Lunacy and Letters) or a traffic light (called a "signal-box" in Heretics CW1:55) he pulls off the veil - the veil over the thing itself, or over his own eyes, and ours too - and suddenly it is seen in a whole new light. It stands revealed. We see it, and so we know it. This may be GKC the Good Magician:

It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation, illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people, saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form of restoring things or people to their proper shapes.
[GKC ILN Nov 22 1913 CW29:588]

Or it may be GKC the Scientist:

If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.
[GKC The Thing CW3:167-8]

You will, I am sure, be puzzling over that last quote. Why does Doctor Thursday say he is talking about Science and then quote some nonsense about medieval mystics?

For a very good reason, O dear reader. Because one must be a mystic before one can hope to be a scientist. One must humble one's self before the universe, and take the needle - the rock, the plant, or the star - for what it is - if one is to know it for itself. Which is both the ancient meaning (Latin: scientia = knowledge) as well as the modern one, for Science. Why do I say "humble"? Because one removes one's self (one's thought, feelings, concerns, and, to the extent possible, even one's own senses) from the matter at hand, in order that one may find the truth of the thing.

What is the "thing", then, that GKC is going to look at, see, know, and ponder in this book? It is what he calls "orthodoxy" - which is used here in its old sense: Greek: straight/right/true opinion/judgement. (It is not tied to the thorny issue of primacy or ecclesial structure; this is not about Greek or Russian Orthodoxy; one might say it is the lower-case sense of the word.) He explains very carefully, in order that another sort of argument (or fist-fight) be prevented in advance:

When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. [CW1:215]

He immediately follows this restriction of study with another, framed in a rather different manner, and well worth some study:

I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. [Ibid., emphasis added]

If that last line were placed in more college textbooks and popular novels, we would perhaps be quite a bit further ahead - at least we would hear one truthful sentence. (You note that I've quoted it previously; indeed, all I can do is tell you my own thoughts about this book...)

But we have skipped a few paragraphs. GKC gives an alternative phrasing to his "Man Who Discovered England" parable. It is thoroughly Chestertonian, because he reveals that he once had hopes of having his own chapter in his previous book, but found he would not fit:

I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy..[CW1:214, emphasis added]

What a superb explanation.

You are perhaps still wondering about the dangling participle (oh, sorry; that's not what it is called) - the unresolved chord I left in my little prelude. You know - the thing that looks small but is really big? You may have guessed it already - I mean the stars. It is little wonder that the pagans worshipped the sun, they knew it gave light and warmth, was dramatic in its birth, glorious in its death - the right sense of this is fully supported by no less an authority than St. Francis of Assisi, who wrote:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.
["The Canticle of the Creatures"]

It is nearly beyond belief, in an almost ridiculous extravagance of fantasy, to go out at night and try to affirm that all those tiny pinpoints of light (points where the angels dance?) are really and truly utterly gigantic nuclear furnaces of terrible power and glory. (Yes, I am sure that's the dance the angels do...) Yes. It is time to begin our looking, our study, our observation:

"Treading fearfully amid the growing fingers of the earth, I raised my eyes, and at the next moment shut them, as at a blow. High in the empty air blazed and streamed a great fire, which burnt and blinded me every time I raised my eyes to it. I have lived many years now under this meteor of a fixed Apocalypse, but I have never survived the feelings of that moment. Men eat and drink, buy and sell, marry, are given in marriage, and all the time there is something in the sky at which they cannot look. They must be very brave."
["A Crazy Tale" CW14:70]

But then - as we shall hear GKC shortly tell us, "The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid." [CW1:231] But then that is how science works.

And if, perhaps, in that line you hear an echo of St. Paul: "Christ Jesus in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" [Col 2:3, emphasis added] you will begin to realize just how wonderful this adventure is - and to WHOM it will lead: "But unto you that fear My Name, the Sun of justice shall arise..." [Mal 4:2]

--Dr. Thursday

PS That last bit brings up another one of those odd phrases we bounce around in Chestertonia: "The question about 'Home' is to be asked with Who, not What or Where."