Chesterton's Art

Chesterton was an artist before he was a writer. In fact, he went to art school, but discovered it wasn't for him. Still he drew everywhere on everything his whole life. Even on wallpaper and ceilings.

So it was with great curiosity that I read in the recent Gilbert magazine that some of Chesterton's art will be on display, for what I believe is the first time, in England.

This will take place (if you are so lucky to be able to travel there) in Oxford, England, at a new art gallery called ART JERICHO, opening on May 18, 2008 (you still have time to make travel plans).

One of the people attending the opening and speaking there is Dr. William Oddie, the author of the forthcoming book, The Making of GKC. But if you miss Dr. Oddie there, you have another opportunity to hear him speak at the Annual Chesterton Conference in June.

However, you won't get to see Chesterton's artwork unless you get over to England.

Pearce on Shakespeare

I've had it from a good source (Thanks, Dave!) that Joseph Pearce's new book on Shakespeare is ready early and shipping now.

Since Joe will be speaking on this very topic at the annual Chesterton Conference, you'd be well prepared to read his book first.

From the Inner Workings of the Blog

"I just wanted to let every Chesterton fan out there know that I am producing Chesterton's play "The Surprise" in my home town on North Wales, Pennsylvania! It has been a long road so far, and I'm not even CLOSE to finishing yet! Wish me luck! The performances are on June 7th @ 6:30pm and June 8th @ 3pm! Any and all prayers are welcome:)
signed, an aspiring Chestertonian!"

More on the Current Gilbert Magazine

After just reading The Tripods Attack, I read with interest the article in the recent Gilbert magazine which was about GKC's relationship with HG Wells. Wells is a character in the above mentioned novel.

I found it fascinating to read the difference between GKC's and Wells's relationship, and Belloc and Wells's relationship. And this difference is where Chesterton's sainthood cause comes into play. I would be far more likely to react like Belloc, and carry things too far when it comes to differences in opinion. In fact, I've done that. I've gone too far and now there are people who won't talk to me.

I wish I could be more like Chesterton. Still able to be friends with people you totally disagree with. To be able to separate the person from the ideas.

David Zach: Future Man

I got my latest Gilbert magazine.

David Zach is on the cover and the theme is "The Future." The interview with Dave was really interesting, as he is the only professional futurist I know. I loved the quote in his interview about statistics getting tortured. It brought to mind a funny thought about numbers being hanged, drawn, and quartered. The forty-four turned into an eleven right before my eyes, poor thing.

Anyway, a lot of other great articles in there, including Chesterton on telephones, which I loved.

Speaking of interviews, I interviewed Betty Aberlin today for the magazine. Not to be confused with Lady Aberlin, niece of King Friday XIII, whom she plays on television. She was wonderful and I can't wait for you to read all about her in a future issue of Gilbert.

Dr. Thursday's Post

Looking for Answers and Feeling Groovy

With all my emphasis on science or philosophy in the last few weeks, you may be happy to hear GKC's digression into some literary matter - somebody named Tennyson. Asking me who Tennyson was is probably like asking your typical Lit'ry Scholar who Gödel or Schnitger or Planck was. Then again I read GKC so I know a little...Ahem.

Anyway, it is quite funny, because of the parallel place where GKC quotes the same line, he uses a word which became lots more famous in the 1960s... I think it is called the 59th Street Bridge Song, which has a very nice little woodwind backup band playing - I think rock bands should get five extra points when they use a bassoon! Ahem again. But first the quote from Orthodoxy:

It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote -

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.
[CW1:239]

Click here to get into the groove.And now, from two years further back:

Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress. I have forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and true. In any case, what I say now is this. Human history is so rich and complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement or retrogression. I could make out that the world has been growing more democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more aristocratic. I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way. I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately men have invented absinthe and the Westminster Gazette. I could prove the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters, and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses, half consciously, how very conventional progress is? -

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps there was never anything so groovy.
[ILN August 18, 1906 CW27:259-60,emphasis added]

You may not know what "absinthe" is - it's from the Greek word for "wormwood" [see Rv 8:11] and contains a dangerous alkaloid (that means POISON, kids) It's a GREEN liqueur, tasting (I'm told) of anise. The Westminster Gazette, I'm told, was originally printed on green paper. My same source tells me that the Tennyson quote is from his "Locksley Hall".

Is all this somehow linked to evolution? Or, more importantly, to the "Suicide of Thought"? Certainly. If all there is is CHANGE, there cannot be thought. We know change may often be needed (this makes me think of a baby crying with a dirty diaper!) and change is a reality, since that's what "time" is all about. But, in one of the most profoundly scientific statements Chesterton ever made, we find this truth:

"There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable."

Is this Chesterton's version of the First Law of Motion? Just about. (It also reminds me of Francis Thompson's great poem "New Year's Chimes" - but I must not digress into that just now; perhaps another time.) What's hilarious - and simultaneously deeply moving - is the context of this quote. GKC is speaking about woman. It's in the chapter called "The Emancipation of Domesticity" in What's Wrong With the World. Your assignment: ponder both the physics and the mystical anthropology in that line; it's home work. Pun intended. But jot it down in your log and let us move on.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever. My meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.
[CW1:239-240]

What is pragmatism? Simply, the idea that truth depends on practicality; thought is only important in its result in action. Here for a moment we see the eminent fairness and true Scholastic character of GKC: he sees, admits, and defends its partial truths and good purposes, while warning of the dangers in its extreme form. This issue of "extremes" hints at something we shall see in a later chapter. Jot that down too.

Now, GKC himself pauses, and gives us a quick review of our recent journey:

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, "Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already morning." We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.
[CW1:240-241, emphasis added}

Exactly. And though GKC shall review just a little more in this chapter, we have now passed some important peaks in this leg of our journey. Just past that next little dark spot (Nietzche Ridge) which we'll tackle next week, we shall encounter some very lovely, yet very dangerous territory. Risky, yes; but even more bountiful in its answers - and its goodness. You will be surprised.

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Having brought up the "unrolling" word recently, I thought I would give you a bonus quote from a little-known source, copied when I was in high school, revealing how true GKC's views on these matters really are, and how children can always grasp their depth:

"While fish in the ocean were just playing around and having a good time, man was hard at work thinking how to evolve."

All I have for reference is this: "quoted by Harold Dunn, a grade school teacher and collecter of children's malapropisms". Dunn's collection is quoted at length in Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things, though I can't seem to locate this particular gem in that reference work. Sorry.

Shatter and Shake us Awake!

Happy Feast of St. George, patron of England!

The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
-- The Red Angel in Tremendous Trifles

From "The Queen of Seven Swords":

"St. George of England"

Mine eyes were sealed with slumber; I sat too long at the ale.
The green dew blights the banner; the red rust eats the mail.
And a spider spanned the chasm from the hand to the fallen sword,
And the sea sang me to sleep; for it called me lord

This was the hand of the hero; it strangled the dragon's scream,
But I dreamed so long of the dragon that the dragon was a dream:
And the knight that defied the dragon deserted the princess.
Her knight has stolen her dowry; she has no redress.

Mirror of Justice, shine on us; blaze though the broad sky break
Show us our face though it shatter us; shatter and shake us awake !
We were not tortured of demons, with Berber and Scot,
We that have loved have failed thee Oh, fail us not !

with gratitude to Dr. Thursday...

Speaking of Evolution...

"ILN January 16, 1932 (reprinted in All I Survey)

I saw in this paper - which sparkles with scientific news - that a green-blooded fish had been found in the sea; indeed, a creature that was completely green, down to this uncanny ichor in its veins, and very big and venomous at that.

Somehow I could not get it out of my head, because the caption suggested a perfect refrain for a Ballade:: A green-blooded fish has been found in the sea. It has so wide a critical and philosophical application. I have known so many green-blooded fish
on the land, walking about the streets and sitting in the clubs, and especially the committees. So many green-blooded fish have written books and criticisms of books, have taught in academies of learning and founded schools of philosophy that they have almost made themselves the typical biological product of the present stage of evolution.

There is never a debate in the House of Commons, especially about Eugenics or the
Compulsory Amputation of Poor People, without several green-blooded fishes standing up on their tails to talk. There is never a petition, or a letter to the Press, urging the transformation of taverns into tea-shops or local museums, without a whole string of green-blooded fish hanging on to the tail of it, and pretty stinking fish too.

But for some reason the burden of this non-existent Ballade ran continually in my head, and somehow turned my thoughts in the direction of poisonous monsters in general; of all those dragons and demi-dragons and devouring creatures which appear in
primitive stories as the chief enemies of man.

It has been suggested that these legends really refer to some period when prehistoric man had to contend with huge animals that have since died out. And then the thought occurred to me: Suppose the primitive heroes killed them just when they were dying out. I mean, suppose they would have died out, even if the Cave Man had sat comfortably in his Cave and not troubled to kill them."

More Information on the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference

Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Annual Conference October 30 - November 2, 2008
Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Sheraton Fallsview Hotel & Conference Center
6755 Fallsview Boulevard. Niagara Falls, Ontario L2G 3W7, Canada
Phone: (905) 374-1077

For conference Information: www.mapacagazette.net

Looking for Some Chestertonian Presenters

As some of you may recall, Jill presented a paper to us at the Chesterton Conference about two years ago, a fascinating look at Dickens's Dombey through a Chestertonian point of view.

Jill has a request:

I have the wonderful and unique opportunity of bringing our friend, GKC, to the forefront at the 2008 MAPACA conference (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association). After presenting a Tolkien/Chesterton paper there (a largely secular and postmodern arena) last year, I was asked many positive questions about Chesterton, enough that the panel chair suggested that I propose a panel for 2008. Happily, with the support my friend, professor Bill Mistichelli from Penn State/Abington, and God's help, my proposal was accepted.

Now, the important thing is for me to have abstracts for papers. In order for the panel to exist, I will need to have 3-4 presenters, and this is where I really need your help,. If there is any way for you to spread the word, I would so appreciate it. Below, I am including my specific panel proposal and contact info. And you will find the general Call for Papers for the MAPACA conference (Ed. note: I can't include it all here, but if you are interested, email me). There will be found all the details of the conference itself. You'll note there that Bill annually chairs a session on Tolkien and Lewis, one in which acquaintances of yours may also be very interested.

On Bill's suggestion, too, I just sent a similar proposal for the NEMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference in 2009. I'm all for letting GKC do his magic in all of these places so sorely in need of his common sense!

Thanks for your help. God bless.
Jill
Details: Click here.
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.

In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.

Looking for a Game of Gype? Head to London!

I received this from Holly:

I'm writing from the Hide and Seek festival; we have monthly events in London where we play interesting games, and on 10 May we're going to be running a night of Chesterton-influenced and inspired games at BAC (the Battersea Arts Centre, not far from where Chesterton lived in Battersea).

We're always keen to have new designers and players, and I wondered whether any of your London-based readers might be interested in running a game at the event. We're keen on pretty much any type of game or playful activity: grown-up versions of playground games, games where the players work together to create something, scavenger hunts, quiet card games, anything that involves the overlap of games and other art forms, and just general exciting stuff along the lines of the Adventure and Romance Agency from Chesterton's "Club of Queer Trades". There's a little more information about it here and on the rest of the website, but anyone who's interested can contact me.

If you think your readers might be interested, I'd be grateful if you could pass the information on to them.

Regards, Holly

Doesn't this make you wish you lived near Battersea?

Dr. Thursday's Post

Thanks again to Dr. Thursday for this hilarious post.

Rolling the other way: all chairs - or all camels?

Last week I omitted a warning I used several times previously. I did not mention that GKC was using "evolution" as an example - a rapid, en passant kind of example. I did so because I think it was well worth stopping to see what we were able to see in the brilliant light GKC provided. We have learned something almost NO other writer in the last century has been able to attain - an approach to true Scholastic thought, applied to one of the most pesty of issues. Alas for the scientists, and alas-squared for the philosophers, if that's what they still call themselves, who have not yet read GKC, and taken his writing to heart!

Now, we resume - and we find in front of us yet another chasm, shaped quite remarkably like last week's. But where evolution makes all things the same thing (or a flux and nothing more besides), this is the opposite. This is another failure to see things as they are - but now to see no degree of similarity of any kind.

But this time, instead of provoking thought, or anger, or boredom, I think this will provoke laughter. Actually, I laughed a good bit about last week's posting, and since then as well; I read some really strong comments in Fr. Jaki's The Road of Science and the Ways to God which made evolution seem... ah well but we must go on. Please finish your drinks and let us proceed...
Click here to read on.

GKC goes from one error of modern thought to another, shining light into the dark corners...

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."
[CW1:238]

Are your chairs quite different? Hee hee. If you have read GKC's earlier book, Heretics you may perhaps recall that we've heard something like this before. But it's lots funnier:

...it is a very common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally nothing at all. If the two moralities are entirely different, why do you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, "Camels in various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings, some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have in common." The ordinary man of sense would reply, "Then what makes you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel? How do you know a camel when you see one?"
[GKC Heretics CW1:167]

Some of you may be thinking this has something to do with evolution (it does, but probably not in the way you're thinking!) But animals can be fun, as well as dangerous, again, not in the way you are probably thinking. Let GKC explain:

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
[ILN Jan 4 1908, CW28:21 - another 100 year old quote!]

Which reminds me of GKC's very hilarious view about giraffes:

When first the giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.
[ILN Oct 21 1911 CW29:176]

Or this:

A man can coil a snake round and round inside his hat, though only a few individuals have indulged in this form of nature-study. If a man were to attempt to fold up a giraffe, or even to deal in this manner with the most compact or collapsible horse or dog, he would find that they were not sufficiently articulated animals.
[ILN July 25 1931 CW35:561]

I bother you with this nonsense because our good long-necked friend shall appear again in a little while, unless of course he has evolved into something else by then. Hee hee.

Ahem. But this is getting into something quite serious. The correct philosophical term is "universals" - the idea of something (and idea such as a quality like green or tall, or a category of thing, like chair or camel) which is common to various real (existing) things... Please remember what path we are on: the Suicide of Thought - the modern crimes which are attempting to destroy, prevent and eliminate thought. Let us hear the next bit, then:

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age is wrong in another." This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat. It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress.
[CW1:238-9]

Pigs! Another animal, but I must stop here. No; I shall give the linking quite which unites this last thought to his previous work:

...this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
[Heretics CW1:117]

Make sure you select a stable means of measurement, or you'll never know if you are rolling, unrolling, or re-rolling - or just staying in one place. It may take all your running - as the Queen told Alice - to stay in one place - but sometimes you need to do it.

--Dr. Thursday

Emphasis by the editor, who sees connections there to the current political campaign.

Links to Orthodoxy

Just in time to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Ryan at Catholic Audio has announced a page of links, including audio Orthodoxy, chapter by chapter. Put this in your iPods and smoke it. (Pardon my old-fashioned expression.)

Thanks, Ryan.

In case your readers are not aware already, there exists a monthly based on Chesterton in Madrid, Spain. This publication is called "Chesterton" and is a magazine dedicated to current analysis based on Chesterton's common sense.

Thanks to reader: Rich

New Chesterton and Belloc Books at Loome

I just saw that Loome got in a BUNCH of GKC and Belloc books....

Thanks to blog reader: Peter

YouTube: Orson Wells's The Man Who Was Thursday

Hi Nancy,

Thought you would be interested to know that someone has posted Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre adaption of "The Man Who Was Thursday" on youtube. Here is a link to part 1 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyHoT1oa0j4&feature=related

Thanks to: Mary B.

Anti-subsidiarity in Action

We are in Austin, TX, setting up an art show yesterday. We've been doing art shows for 11 years and have done over 300. This was the most unorganized set up ever.

Although, God did provide us with an absolutely gorgeous day to sit around and wait in, which we thanked Him for many times.

And, the long wait, which began at 1PM and ended with us finally getting to bed at midnight, also allowed us to see one of Austin's most unusual tourist attractions. We saw the bats. We were waiting on a bridge that was only one bridge down river from the "Bat" bridge.

The reason this art set up was so anti-subsidiarity was because the people setting up seemed to be working under the assumption that we artists didn't know how to set up, and we needed their help.

The art show also seemed to assume that if given the option, we artists wouldn't understand where to go or how to park our vans and trucks so that the maximum number of people could set up at the same time. So they organized us. And it took forever.

But we are set up, albeit tired, and the show begins today. If we have weather like yesterday, I think we'll all be happy.

Have a great weekend, and if you live near Austin, come by and see us, ok y'all? (that's Texas talk ;-))

New Blogzine Announced: World of Forms

My name is James Hoskins and I've created a new blogzine called "World of Forms." It combines two things that I, and I'm sure several of you, are quite passionate about: Art and Philosophy. Anyone who is a fan of music, art, film, literature, and/or philosophy will, I think, enjoy the articles at http://worldofforms.net.

I'm also an avid lover of G.K. Chesterton and frequently quote him (or blatantly rip him off) in my articles. The reason I'm sending this email is because I want to build relationships with other like-minded people and associations. I would love for anyone at the American Chesterton Society Blog to link to http://worldofforms.net, or maybe even mention it in a blog. It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks James

Dr. Thursday's Post

Unrolling: the Truth

We ended last week's leg of our journey with talk about a bridge... some very serious talk.

It is now time for us to screw up our courage to the sticking point, as we face the steep, narrow path ... the yawning chasm... the fearful abyss... the danger...

Yes, for the topic today is among the most debated, most boring, most important, most feared, most confusing, and most fight-provoking of topics...

But there is also a bridge. Click to read more here.

The topic is one word: EVOLUTION.

The issue is (according to SOME) exactly that war between faith and reason. Is there a God? Is there design? Is there science? What am I? What is Man? Is evolution a theory? What is a theory? And so on.

I find some of it very boring, because it is always the same tired words, never clear, never precise.. but more to the point, never quoting Chesterton, who has it phrased so well!

Father Stanley Jaki, the great historian of science, author of some 50 books, calls GKC the "Critic of Evolutionism" in his little study Chesterton A Seer of Science - one of its four short chapters examines why. But even more, this simple title clarifies the matter for us - and settles us boldly down the path.

The distinction, you see, is between Evolution (as a science) and EvolutionISM (a philosophy).

You see the chasm? The terror of the abyss which divides the various fields of human thought! And our path leads across it?

But I promised a bridge. Chesterton, like Aquinas, "has thrown out a bridge across the abyss of the first doubt, and found reality beyond and begun to build on it." [St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:543]


The abyss is easily seen, the fear is intense. Let us look at the bridge, then, and gain confidence.

Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.

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

The scholastics, for whom argument meant Pursuit of Truth, used a tool called "distinguo" = "I Distinguish." In order to study something they considered it according to similarity, but even more, according to DIFFERENCE.

So does GKC.

Read those words again. IF IT IS ANYTHING MORE...

You see, there are TWO things here, hiding in that word "evolution" (which is just Latin for "unrolling"). Yes, once you've recovered from your acrophobic spasm, you can look and see there really are two chasms here.

(the word I wanted was "rapture of the heights" but perhaps better that I left it out.)

One is the error being made by the scientists. They think they can stop being philosophers - which means being WHOLE men - while they do their biology. No physicist ever says "Ah, what a pleasant day. I think I could go for a bit of measurement, maybe a length, a velocity, or something fun. Yes, I am going to do some physics now. So I shall by no means do any mathematics. That would be to abandon my field, and I must be a TRUE physicist."

What a loon.

Well, by no means can a biologist STOP DOING philosophy while he is doing his biology. The error is quite widespread; GKC wrote about this for most of the last chapter. But some 50 years before GKC wrote Orthodoxy Cardinal Newman was saying the same thing:

The human mind cannot keep from speculating and systematizing; and if [some field] is not allowed to occupy its own territory, adjacent sciences, nay, sciences which are quite foreign to [that field], will take possession of it. And this occupation is proved to be a usurpation by this circumstance, that these foreign sciences will assume certain principles as true, and act upon them, which they neither have authority to lay down themselves, nor appeal to any other higher science to lay down for them.
[Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse IV]

Ah. See those strong cables, those mighty foundations? We are reassured. The chasm does not bother us at all.

Then there is that second chasm - the one where the philosophers play a game, trying to pretend that there cannot be a science at all. Newman's warning applies just as well here, but I shall give another example for you.

Some centuries ago, people believed that the "heavens" (that is, the stuff you see above you when you are outdoors) were "divine" - or at least somehow "holy". It was not possible to "explain" them by means of the tools of earth - that is, terrestrial mechanics. (I hear some people yelling "Galileo" and "Newton" - but that does not explain anything at all. We're not talking about science yet.) You see, even to this very day, in 2008 there are people who REFUSE to believe certain truths about reality, because their religion, er, I ought to say, their PHILOSOPHY forbids them to believe it.

And since the forbidding is from a Philosophy (you can read "religion" here if you like), the freeing or the granting of access, must also occur within that same realm, or it cannot "take hold".

That is what happened back in the 13th century, when the truth we proclaim every Sunday: "Credo... in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum" - I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ only-begotten Son of God - was brought to bear on the matter. The heavens could not be divine, because Jesus was the Only-begotten - and not the heavens, as the Greeks taught. The really serious work anticipated Newton by several hundred years:

The Aristotelian dichotomy between superlunary and sublunary matter was dealt a decisive blow, and the unitary approach of classical physics to earthly and heavenly bodies was foreshadowed, when Buridan, inspired by his faith, discussed the substance of stars in a manner which patently deprived them of the divine and imperishable characteristics which Aristotle attributed to them.
[Jaki, Science and Creation chapter 10]

Indeed! If you want to explain the birth of modern science, you must look to a CREED which freed us from a wrongful belief. ("Reason itself is a matter of faith" - we heard that last week, didn't we?)

The heavens are NOT divine. They may use their own laws, or they may use "terrestrial" laws - but at least for CHRISTIAN philosophers, there is NOTHING which prevents "science" from exploring them with even earthly tools.

It's even funnier to think, as one glances through the history of science, how scientists found something strange in the sun which had NEVER been found on earth.... WAS THIS A COUNTER-EXAMPLE? Oh, no. It was first found in the sun, but you can buy it in the store... they called it after the Greek word for "sun" but now you can get helium in a balloon.

Then there's that strange weird blue color, again something apparently impossible on earth - scientists used the word "forbidden" - and called the substance "nebulium" - but it proved to be nothing more than oxygen, in an extremely ionised state, possible only in VERY empty space.

One more example, to bring us back to earth. The scientists of maybe two centuries ago thought that the physical substances which exist in LIVING things were somehow FORMALLY different from those in NON-living things. They used the word "organic" to mean those which came from life (from organisms), and "inorganic" for rocks, rivers, and the rest of things.

Until 1829 when a German chemist named Wöhler produced something called "urea" (yes, it sounds like "urine" where it is found) - but he did it in the lab, in glassware, from non-living (inorganic) compounds. (It caused quite a bit of war; see Jaki's The Relevance of Physics chapter 11 for the hilarious whining about this!)

That brought about (or at least began, or provided the possibility of beginning) the junction of two disciplines, which henceforth had a new hallway joining them: biology and chemistry. So now we have biochemistry, molecular biology, and whole departments of sub-disciplines.

Now, let us turn to that other chasm. And here I shall for once speak about my own experience. The SAME thing is happening (has been happening) between biology and computing. I do NOT mean that computers are helping to do searches in DNA sequences. I mean that the question of DESIGN, invoked or opposed, belongs at least in part to computing, where the idea of a thing-which-specifies-the-building-of-a-thing is a way of life. (We computer people call them "compilers"; without them we are cooks without kitchens, utensils, and ingredients.)

The ribosome is the machine of the living cell which makes proteins. But its code exists in the DNA. A ribosome is able to build the parts for new ribosomes, because it is given (1) the recipe or blueprints and (2) the raw materials. A compiler can produce another compiler, provided... Ah - the bridge! (I was going to say "the Surprise"... hee hee!)

But in just about any of the daily whine about "evolution" you will NOT hear the real matters being explored - you will only hear the boring stuff as the children fight.

Enter GKC. And, like Aquinas, with a blow on the table, he divided the science from the philosophy. Read it again. Yes - "stingless for the most orthodox" - isn't that a GREAT phrase? Learn it; learn these paragraphs. GKC gives us the bridge by which we cross those chasms and safely arrive on the other side.

The whiners, scared, silly, little ones that they are, are left behind, and we advance.

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Yes, evolution is a science inasmuch as it measures something real: the relation between a living being and its offspring. That is all. The obedient Mendel, the monk, ought to be its patron saint - not Darwin the cagey secretive God-basher. Oh, yes; he had another, non-scientific, purpose, which he kept hidden; see e.g. Jaki's The Purpose of It All for more. And talk about purpose? Can there be such a thing? Will your purpose now be to post a comment arguing against it? How odd. I could quote GKC: "No sceptics work sceptically; no fatalists work fatalistically; all without exception work on the principle that it is possible to assume what it is not possible to believe." (CW2:542) but here's an even more curious version: “Those who devote their lives to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose, constitute an interesting subject for study.” [A. N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason, 1929]

One more thing. If you'd like to know more about the relation between compilers and ribosomes, please ask. I do hope to write about it someday. It will be lots of fun, and very Chestertonian.

GKC on NYC

Why he will never visit.