Look out! Eyes Wide Open and Frightfully Alive

As usual I was reading something interesting - which happened to be about one of the Popes and his work on the eye, and so I thought it would be fun to start our study today with a relevant scripture quote:

They shall take up serpents: and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay their hand upon the sick: and they shall recover.
[Mark 16:18]

Now this happens to be a complex little bit of the Gospel, and I am not going to pull out the Catena Aurea to see what the Church Fathers had to say about it. I'd rather let it lead into what I have read about that Pope and the eye, and thereby take us into our excerpt from Orthodoxy.

Most of us know what it is like to have our eyes examined: not just the "refraction" to determine the kind of corrective lenses we may need, but the dilation and numbing - for the purpose of things like testing intraocular pressure, and for the examination of the retina, the "little net" of rods and cones and nerves (I defer the discussion of the extremely high tech parallel processing here) which actually catches the light, does some preliminary computation, and sends the information onward to our brain. Now the mystery of that gospel passage - of deadly things and of serpents - might be specifically aimed at the eyedrops used in these tests, for they often contain a poison called "belladonna" which dilates the pupil, and another substance which anesthetizes, which I seem to recall is chemically like something in snake venom.

Why does this connect with a Pope? Simply because of Pope John XXI (that's John the twenty-first) who lived in the 13th century. He was born Petrus Juliani, and was known as "Peter of Spain" (though he was really Portuguese); he was elected Pope on September 8, 1276 and died May 20, 1277. (That's about 3 years after Thomas Aquinas died.) He had been professor of medicine at the University of Siena, where he wrote Summulæ logicales which became the favourite textbook on logic; later he had been physician to Pope Gregory X. Please note: he had been a physician - specifically, an eye doctor! According to this report he had his own "papal lab" where he worked, but it collapsed on him, and he died shortly thereafter. (Imagine a physician Pope, and one with his own lab. Wow.)

I bring all this up because we're going to need the delicacy and wisdom of such a man today: we shall see some fairly difficult matters. Anyone who dares to bring up what is called "comparative religion" runs all kinds of risks - people think the only reason one ever mentions more than one religion at a time is to be insulting. Maybe some people do that, but Chesterton has more useful things to do. He brings up things so we can see them and think about them, and he tries to shed more light on them. He follows Aquinas and the whole Scholastic tradition in trying to find the very best in a thing, and using it to its fullest advantage, and more often than not when he points out a negative about something, he is making a far larger point than a mere disparagement. He's got bigger game in his sights.

(( Click here when you're ready to see more! ))

Chesterton, as usual, is talking about ideas and principles. We have heard him speak about people, true - just pick up Heretics for one example - but even there we see him attacking ideas, not people. Hear again his words on his friend and enemy, George Bernard Shaw:

I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.
[GKC Heretics CW1:46]

In our selection today, when he mentions certain religions, he is getting at certain philosophical principles, and their validity - or their error:

But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps the liberation of the world. The second example of it can be found in the question of pantheism - or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism. But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it with rather more preparation.

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue. Here is a case. There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach." It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man were to say, "Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times and the Freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing." The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don't say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided. So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
[CW1:333-4]

Don't let the local English example distract you: Wimbleton and Surbiton are London suburbs, rather close to each other. The newspapers are those issued by the Anglicans and the Free Thinkers (which are rather a bit different from organized religion). A Swedenborgian is a member of a small nominally Christian sect - but from the context he is making no particular comment about its details, merely using it as the antithesis to the "atheist stockbroker". But please read this again. This careful study will reveal details of a complaint we still hear these days: how all religions are really the same, but simply differ in their church or the worship, etc. And once you're read it again, proceed into the next paragraph:

The great example of this alleged identity of all human religions is the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity. Those who adopt this theory generally avoid the ethics of most other creeds, except, indeed, Confucianism, which they like because it is not a creed. But they are cautious in their praises of Mahometanism, generally confining themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes. They seldom suggest the Mahometan view of marriage (for which there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish worshippers their attitude may even be called cold. But in the case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.
[CW1:334]

Yes, Confucianism is often called a religion, but though it contains rules of life, a system of morals, it isn't about worship, or about God. He is not insulting it, but trying to point out details. Nor is he insulting Mahometanism, which we usually call "Islam", nor Buddhism. I am not going to delve into this curious point about "the Mahometan view of marriage"; I think that can safely be left for anyone seeking a research project. Thugs? Well, you might wish to look up that term for yourself; you may be enlightened even as you are horrified, but then I think September 11 speaks quite a bit louder.

But the name "Gautama" I must point out is merely the real name - Siddhartha Gautama - of the man who lived from ca. 563 B.C. to ca. 483 B.C. who is called the Buddha, "the Enlightened One". Yet another project - oh, for a grad school to help! - would be to trace GKC's comments on the topic and the person. But I shall give one succinct line, as perfectly phrased as GKC's famous words about Shaw in Heretics:

Gautama was a great and good man, who had a profound philosophy with which I, for one, profoundly disagree.
[ILN June 4, 1927 CW34:320]

One other useful reference I shall quote at length, both to help you see GKC's care even in dealing with an intellectual adversary, but also to enlighten you about this world figure:

The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the philosophers; but I am more and more convinced, from all information that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace life could be lived well. The fierier Egyptian king concluded that it could be lived even better after a palace revolution. But the great Gautama was the only one of them who proved he could really do without his palace. One fell back on toleration and the other on revolution. But after all there is something more absolute about abdication. Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch. The Indian prince, reared in Oriental luxury and pomp, deliberately went out and lived the life of a beggar. That is magnificent, but it is not war; that is, it is not necessarily a Crusade in the Christian sense. It does not decide the question of whether the life of a beggar was the life of a saint or the life of a philosopher. It does not decide whether this great man is really to go into the tub of Diogenes or the cave of St. Jerome. Now those who seem to be nearest to the study of Buddha, and certainly those who write most clearly and intelligently about him, convince me for one that he was simply a philosopher who founded a successful school of philosophy, and was turned into a sort of divus or sacred being merely by the more mysterious and unscientific atmosphere of all such traditions in Asia.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:262]

GKC is very Thomistic here, finding what good he can in his antagonists, and seeking learning even from those he disagrees with.

But, as we are about to see, it is not really the Buddha, or Buddhism, or any specific Buddhists - or all Buddhists - which GKC is arguing about. He is addressing those strange kind of post-Christians who seem to think they are dealing with a cafeteria, a smorgasbord, a box of chocolates: to pick and choose what they like... (Recall "heresy" comes from a Greek root meaning "choice"!) ... people like an great and worthy enemy GKC has crossed verbal swords with before: the great Robert Blatchford [see note at end] :

Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all. The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different. Thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar. Or, again, it was gravely urged that these two Eastern teachers, by a singular coincidence, both had to do with the washing of feet. You might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash. And the other class of similarities were those which simply were not similar. Thus this reconciler of the two religions draws earnest attention to the fact that at certain religious feasts the robe of the Lama is rent in pieces out of respect, and the remnants highly valued. But this is the reverse of a resemblance, for the garments of Christ were not rent in pieces out of respect, but out of derision; and the remnants were not highly valued except for what they would fetch in the rag shops. It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head. It is not at all similar for the man. These scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much or not proving anything. That Buddhism approves of mercy or of self-restraint is not to say that it is specially like Christianity; it is only to say that it is not utterly unlike all human existence. Buddhists disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess because all sane human beings disapprove in theory of cruelty or excess. But to say that Buddhism and Christianity give the same philosophy of these things is simply false. All humanity does agree that we are in a net of sin. Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.
[CW1:334-5]

Again GKC considers another series of comparisons which do not compare, and distinctions which do not distinguish. We might learn very much here, not so much about Buddhism, but about a powerful technique of argument. This might be just a Chestertonian literary form of the famous Scholastic distinguo: "I distinguish": that most important intellectual power which enables us to see two things truly. It is a grand power, far too little used in our day, and we can learn its honorable technique from GKC. He goes further into one particular issue, the one which resonates with the well-known Chestertonian "appeal to the sense of vision" - in so many things GKC will be seen as an artist, as one who relies on sight, be it physical or intellectual:

Even when I thought, with most other well-informed, though unscholarly, people, that Buddhism and Christianity were alike, there was one thing about them that always perplexed me; I mean the startling difference in their type of religious art. I do not mean in its technical style of representation, but in the things that it was manifestly meant to represent. No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.
[CW1:336]

Alas, we have to break off our selection here, but we're not quite through for the day - first we'll have a bit of fun.

Right about now, I expect someone to jump up and down, like a suit-crazed lawyer, yelling "Contradiction!" This person is one who has poked into Chesterton in a more-or-less academic manner, rather as far too many bible scholars have poked into the Bible: not to learn from it, but to find flammable grist for their whine-presses. (Yes, I know it's a mixed metaphor: very well mixed, too.) But this time it is a very meticulous whiner, who will point out that GKC has changed his perspective between his writing of Orthodoxy in 1908, and 1925, three years after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, when he wrote that "all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now turned inward to the smallest." [GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:304] Ah, my dear sir! You need to be a bit more careful when you do that. The TEM quote refers to Christ, the Baby in the manger; today's words refer to the saint living in an age some years afterwards. But it is the whiner who has the wrong perspective.

You see, the eyes of the saint turn outward, for he is still looking "inward" to the Baby! But the saint knows, as the unfortunate whiner doesn't, that the Baby is yet to be seen, here and now - yes, the saint stares outward to see the Baby, still in the world, as was told us by the Baby Himself when He had grown up: "As long as you did it to one of these least ones, you did it to ME." [Mt 25:40] Indeed, these are words the saint expects to hear someday! No; the argument fails, for the apparent contradiction is rather an emphasis - or an exaltation. A saint stares outward - oh, yes, it's the Latin ex+specto = I look out, expect, await (see the penultimate clause of the Nicene Creed) - and ALSO "hope"... for the saint expects to see his Master again... in disguise, wrapped in other garb... We hope to learn from our mistakes: we were caught once when He hid, on the Road to Emmaus, but we won't be fooled that way any more.

Look out: you never know when you might see Him again!


====

Note: we've met Robert Blatchford before (CW1:233 and 322); he was the editor of the Clarion. He and GKC had a series of important articles which you can find reprinted in CW1 with Heretics and Orthodoxy - they are usually referred to as "The Blatchford Controversies" and they are a very early statement (1904) of GKC's views about religion and related matters.

Life Against the Current

An interesting blog post by Frank Wilson.

Chesterton, Obama and Economics

Blog post by Mark Nielsen, which is interesting.

Manalive: The Movie

Synopsis

In all my years as a detective, I have never had a case like this one. I'm searching for a man... No... I'm HUNTING a man! A man who calls himself "Innocent Smith." He abandoned his wife and embarked on a worldwide crime spree that includes murder and burglary. This man shoots at university professors, breaks into homes and even hypnotizes young women into going away with him. And what has become of these poor women? Nobody knows. I dare say, perhaps they were murdered! But I'm about to bring this man to justice. I have it on good authority that Innocent Smith is hiding out at a nearby boarding house. So I'm going there to arrest him. What could possibly go wrong?

Detective Cyrus Pym

Principal photography for Manalive begins on March 2.

Chestertonian Music

An interesting find: a very young music group with an album based on The Everlasting Man, the band's name A Hope for Home is Chestertonian, as well.

The band's description is interesting, too: Oregon-based post-hardcore band, this is the first I've heard the term "post-hardcore".

The music is hard for this oldster to listen to, but I like the effort and the idea.

There is an old saying that claims time brings change. No one would know this better than A HOPE FOR HOME, which has seen drastic change and growth since the band's inception in early 2006. What began as an emotional outlet for a group of friends during a season of loss has blossomed into a dedicated project that finds them on the road supporting their newest album. A concept record based on G.K. Chesterton's novel of the same name, "The Everlasting Man" tells the story of mankind's fall and awaiting redemption. It is A HOPE FOR HOME's second album, following 2007's "Here, The End"...

There's a New Blog in Town: The Flying Ins

They're having a contest right now, to write a "new" Chestertonian ILN column.

The first entry is in, and it's good. Even Aidan Mackey liked it. ;-)

ALERT! Auditions Today for Manalive!

If you live near Atlanta, looks like you could be in a Chesterton movie.

UPDATE FROM DALE AHLQUIST:

I attended those auditions for “Manalive” today in Savannah, Georgia. We had a great turnout. We finished casting the whole movie. Fascinating experience. And a lot of fun, too.

Free Daily Chesterton Quote in your Email Box!

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Ladies, a Question

If you could spend some time with Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand asking her anything, what would you ask her?

In case you aren't familiar with her, here are some links.

Alice
Dietrich
On Feminism and Feminity
Her books

True Liberality, or, Going to the Seashore on Flying Dragons

Yes, this week there's more about that pesty term "liberal" again. And some other very curious things. But first, let's have a romp with a flying dragon. Hee hee. I mean my brief aside last week about Catholic colleges, and a comment posted since then.

Well, I was going to. But I decided not to, since it goes a little too far afield of our topic. So I shall settle for a much briefer romp, again rather an aside:

My purpose here is not to debate the layout of the coursework of Catholic colleges - even large Catholic universities - or even make some attempt at advising them. It was an aside, bolstered by the current discussion of last week: the whole thrust of GKC's discussion of the term "liberal" demands the inclusion of such subjects in a truly "liberal" school. A physicist at a secular school ought know enough of the history of his subject to acknowledge its Christian underpinnings, even if he is very distant from Christianity in his belief. I might as well struggle to avoid Greek or Latin terms since they arose in a pagan world - which would be quite silly, since even St. Paul quoted pagan poets in his evangelizing! (See Acts 17:28) But in the same way, a theologian at a Catholic school ought to know enough of the disciplines upon which his electric light (see John 1:4, 8:12; cf lumen de lumine in the Nicene Creed) and his e-mail (see Ps 18:5/19:4) - or even his ink and paper (see 3 John 1:13) - come from, even if he never studied the technical details of such things. It is only fair. And it also is humbling, which is a healthier thing for us:

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him forever.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:244]

Humility has greater freedom, as it asserts there's always more to learn. Would you want the final, the ultimate and last book to be written in your discipline, even by yourself, O Professor? I didn't think so.

You might wonder whether even this small aside is relevant. (Can any ride on a flying dragon be irrelevant? Hardly! Though it might be dangerous.) But, as you will see from today's very interesting excerpt, it is quite relevant - perhaps shockingly so. Often one will read GKC's work from 100 years ago, and sit back in amazement, thinking GKC is writing in the present day! But the errors are the same, and GKC's point in bringing up certain current stupidities, or certain wildly popular and very dangerous philosophies of his day, is simply to warn his reader of the dangers - which is why they are useful to us today. A child ought to be warned from eating something dangerous - say a toadstool. But adults (who often are very childish) usually need a little more explanation, even as they bite into the deadly mushroom...

(( click here for an explanation ))

The very next line of our text contains two phrases which for some readers will suggest "Vatican II" or related topics. But GKC is warning about something else, something very dangerous, and definitely not a "Catholic" or even a "Christian" kind of thing, even though its fruits are still deadly and active a century afterwards:

Now let us take in order the innovations that are the notes of the new theology or the modernist church. We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them. The very doctrine which is called the most old-fashioned was found to be the only safeguard of the new democracies of the earth. The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people. In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin. So it is, I maintain, in all the other cases.

I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me. For some inconceivable cause a "broad" or "liberal" clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave. It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine? And this is not because (as the swift secularist debater would immediately retort) miracles cannot be believed in our experience. It is not because "miracles do not happen," as in the dogma which Matthew Arnold recited with simple faith. More supernatural things are alleged to have happened in our time than would have been possible eighty years ago. Men of science believe in such marvels much more than they did: the most perplexing, and even horrible, prodigies of mind and spirit are always being unveiled in modern psychology. Things that the old science at least would frankly have rejected as miracles are hourly being asserted by the new science. The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them. It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it. Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth-century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt. There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth. In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist.
[CW1:331-2]

Now just one or two small notes to help you see a little more.

The "Serpentine" is a lake in Hyde Park, London; one map I have shows it has only one bend, which is not very "serpentine" to me. Matthew Arnold (1822-88) was an English poet and critic. After a desultory glance at the nearly 150 references to him as reported by AMBER, I might think GKC would regard him as a "Heretic" though he is not singled out in that book, but with such a casual study it is hard to be fair - as GKC struggled to be fair - to someone like him. I would direct the interested student to the ILN essay for Jan 27, 1923, a somewhat delayed memorial for the centenary of Arnold's birth - it will assist you in grasping more of the picture about Arnold's beliefs, which were "Positivist" and "Comtean". (See my footnote at the end about "monism".) Regarding "honest doubt": a footnote from the IP edition states this: "From Tennyson's In Memoriam, poem 96":

There lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Great pun there, you notice? That line is also quoted in GKC's poem "The Road To Roundabout" [CW10:465-6] which also appears in The Flying Inn. Well worth considering... though I doubt I have time or space to discuss "doubt" just now. Hee hee.
You will note this phrase "the incurable routine of the cosmos". This is almost horrifyingly close to the very serious danger Jaki warns of in the first six chapters of Science and Creation: the old pagan idea of eternal recurrence or the "Great Year" - the concept that all events are repeats, and have ever been so, and shall always be so. It is strange to see it rearing its head in early 20th century England. But GKC is here to fight it and its sinister correlatives, and proceeds to do so:

Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards. Here we are only concerned with this clear point; that in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles. Reform or (in the only tolerable sense) progress means simply the gradual control of matter by mind. A miracle simply means the swift control of matter by mind. If you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible - but you cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely. A holiday, like Liberalism, only means the liberty of man. A miracle only means the liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea. The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."
[CW1:332]

Wow, GKC had "liberal theologians" too? Yes; and it would be very easy to go into even more dangerous topics here, with this concept of "binding the Creator" - which is done in at least one certain well-known religion - a binding which GKC mentioned just a few pages back. Yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, by exalting God's utter freedom of will, that religion forbids God a certain liberty: "the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself." [CW1:328] But again, to be fair, I cannot go further into that matter here. For now, I would simply call your attention to GKC's own answer which we have read in Chapter Four:

...perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. ... The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
[CW1:263-4]

Some very great mysteries here, and worth far more time that I can spend at present. Besides, GKC has a little more to say about this matter of "miracle":

This, as I say, is the lightest and most evident case. The assumption that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth. If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance. Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naïve way, even by the ablest men. For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will. Just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal? No, if it is desirable that man should triumph over the cruelty of nature or custom, then miracles are certainly desirable; we will discuss afterwards whether they are possible.
[CW1:332-3]

This topic of "miracle" is still a matter of interest and concern to us. Another interesting study might be made of GKC's comments about miracles, some of the best of which appear in his fiction: "The Trees of Pride" in CW14 uses the topic as a centerpiece. And since I have often mentioned Fr. Jaki's writing in these notes, I would suggest his booklet Miracles and Physics or his God and the Sun At Fatima, which examines the evidence and presents some very interesting speculations. But of course GKC, the wise lover of the Common Man, has given what is really the best argument, the most democratic, and the most liberal, and I shall jump ahead in our reading to give it to you. It deserves several readings to savour the logic, and to feel the true liberality, to enjoy the delightful freedom it presents:

Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism - the abstract impossibility of miracle.
[CW1:355]

Powerful stuff, no? But then a ride on a flying dragon is not what you expected today. (At least we are back in one piece.) Next time we shall proceed to GKC's second example of the "new theology" or the "modernist church"...

* * * * *

A footnote: I didn't quite feel I could work this into the main text, but I thought it would help a little in the allusion to the "Monist" topic. It also gives us a bit of warning about my wandering babble about Science" and related matters:

The Schoolmen may have shot too far beyond our limits in pursuing the Cherubim and Seraphim. But in asking whether a man can choose or whether a man will die, they were asking ordinary questions in natural history; like whether a cat can scratch or whether a dog can smell. Nothing calling itself a complete Science of Man can shirk them. And the great Agnostics did shirk them. They may have said they had no scientific evidence; in that case they failed to produce even a scientific hypothesis. What they generally did produce was a wildly unscientific contradiction. Most Monist moralists simply said that Man has no choice; but he must think and act heroically as if he had. Huxley made morality, and even Victorian morality, in the exact sense, supernatural. He said it had arbitrary rights above nature; a sort of theology without theism.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:526]

To save you time, the dictionary says that "monism" is "the doctrine that there is only one kind of substance or ultimate reality, as mind, or matter; or, the doctrine that reality is one unitary organic whole, with no independent parts." [Webster's] Extreme protagonists are Spinosa and Parmenides of Elea; Christian Science is based on a monistic theory of reality. [Dictionary of Philosophy] Obviously another interesting study for some future scholar.

Thoughts on the Inaugural?

I didn't watch. Heard about her dress, his dancing, his speech (serious) and the word stumbling (not his fault) and Beyonce.

Thoughts? Impressions? Chestertonian insights?

C.S. Lewis Talks in Athens, GA this weekend

They'll be discussing Chesterton and Sayers, as well. If you live near the First Baptist in Athens, maybe you'd like to attend. Here is more info.

Dave in the News Quoting Chesterton

Some of you know our intrepid Chestertonian futurist, and here is an article about one of his upcoming talks.

After reading it, I wish I were a southern Illinois Businessperson. Especially for those warm temps down there.

Gilbert as a Character in a Neil Gaiman Book

It all sounds a bit too nightmarish for me. Has anyone around here read it?

http://jennysbooks.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/the-dolls-house-neil-gaiman/

Check Out the Chillicothe, OH Chesterton blog!

Bob, owner of the blog, says to me:

"Keep in mind that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery..."

His blog still has it's own feel. If you live near there, the newest Chesterton Local Society is just starting up--join in the fun!

A Politician Reads (and enjoys) Chesterton

I believe it is because he is a libertarian, though, not simply by virtue of his politicianism.

H/T: David Z., thanks.

Statuary and Arithmetic: Words and Bridges

Now that we are two weeks into 2009, we can feel quite confident in setting forth into a new adventure: the eighth and penultimate (second-last) of the chapters of GKC's Orthodoxy, entitled "The Romance of Orthodoxy".

We have already had a kind of premonition - or a flash-forward - to this chapter some time ago, and it may be well worth your time to review:

...if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
[CW1:305, emphasis added]

Yes, indeed. After reading an excerpt like this you would expect that even very serious tech types would find something curious in Chesterton - and in Christianity. (I don't count, since I am rarely serious. Hee hee!) Yes, every time that line of the gospel comes up about "the smallest part of a letter" [this is one translation of Mt 5:18] I think our Lord is talking about computer software, for in computing, even more than in law or in theology (to say nothing of philosophy) are the smallest parts of letters important. The INTERNET and all the various forms of software stand strongly against all the sick modern philosophers, lawyers and theologians who worship the "feels right" way, proclaiming the "everything is relative" dogma from their little thrones. Yes, even for them, our Lord's dictum holds: unless you type your password correctly, regarding even the "smallest part" of a letter - which we call a "bit" - you shall by no means log onto the system to check your e-mail, or to post a comment. Yes, indeed. You've heard me quote this before

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. No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him, by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind. No sceptic who believes that truth is subjective has any hesitation about treating it as objective.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:543]

Even the most twisted relativists, even evolutionists, even philosophers, become strict absolutists and stern literalists when they sit down at a computer! Or when they flip a light switch. Thank God.

There is another phrase in that above quote which is fun to discuss: "the accuracy of arithmetic". Now, ever since the 1930s it has been known just how "accurate" arithmetic can be. If you have never heard the name "Kurt Gödel" that's a shame; you need to explore his important work, which has forever closed the door on all "mathematical proofs" supposedly demonstrating how the universe is. Why? In short, because math cannot even prove itself consistent - which is a horror to certain atheistic views of physics and philosophy. There's significant information about Gödel in various books by Fr. Jaki (see especially the title essay in A Late Awakening, and the dramatic meeting in 1976 recounted in A Mind's Matter) but unfortunately I cannot go further here and now. I mention Gödel partly to keep his name out in view, but also because of his importance to any study of this "accuracy of arithmetic" which GKC couples with the "grace of statuary"... This mystical "corpus callosum", which Chesterton reveals time and time again in his writing, culminates in his neurological comments on the joining of the two hemispheres (he calls them "lobes") of the human brain in The Everlasting Man [CW2:380] - GKC's book on Jesus Christ, the true Bridge Builder. Of course you may not have read that book yet, as you may have not yet read Gray's Anatomy to learn what the "corpus callosum" is. It's the part of the brain that joins the two hemispheres, and permits coordination of the eyes to give us binocular vision. You see?

You may ask: "are you wandering, Doctor?" Well, I often do, at the beginnings of these things, until we get into the meat of the matter. But I feel it is important to set up a certain view for you - a larger view to see more, not so much with your physical eyes, but with your mental ones - so that you can see statuary and arithmetic together - and in equilibrium. (Cardinal Newman would delight in this sort of thing; it is such hints of links from him to GKC which suggest an interesting project for some future scholar to tackle.)

But while it may be accurate in some sense to make statements like this - "Chesterton's Orthodoxy contains 63791 total words using 6665 unique words in 227 paragraphs" - it is not very amusing. And it may even provoke a quarrel, since it is unclear what is meant by "unique" words (do capitalised or hyphenated words count?) - or imprecise because the edition is not stated, nor whether any professional care or rigor has been applied regarding what version (or versions) were used in the analysis. Another view, coming from the "statuary" side of things, might suggest that such silly word-counts are a waste of energy, when one ought to be contemplating the greater mysteries which GKC is presenting. Or another might suggest one should be taking action to implement GKC's ideas in one's life, family, neighborhood, or world... But then we remember what GKC told us:

There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:43]

It is to stimulate you, O reader, to think such things that I begin in such a manner. There's more. There's always more. This is true in any serious technical work of engineering or science, in any serious effort of art or music, in any serious form of writing... and if I lean rather predominantly towards a scientific or technical style in my hints and suggestions, well, you should expect that from an actual scientist. If you wanted merely "lit'ry" comments, you can find them elsewhere, though I do try to sprinkle my tech stuff with savoury word flavours!

Besides, we are going to hear something rather sharp about science today, and about words - so you ought to be prepared.

((click here when you are prepared))

Yes, be prepared, for this first paragraph is stunning:

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
[CW1:329]

Just as the distorted relativism held by so many philosophers, theologians, and lawyers does not deny the true law, theology, and philosophy - but it does forbid simple humdrum tools like pens and paper, cars, electricity, or the INTERNET - well, so today's paragraph which opens Chapter Eight attacks not science and engineering, but literature and the "media". You may not see this at first, because you may have heard some one say that GKC didn't like "technology" or "science" - which is silly. He was not hypocritical: you think he made his own parchment and ink? Not he! He sent his manuscripts off to a printer, and was glad. You think he walked or rode a horse to go places? No, he rode on trains and praised them in many places. He "often thanked God for the telephone" [What's Wrong With the World CW4:112] and he even talked on the BBC radio! (He was very popular, too.)

It is time for a Scholastic distinguo (I distinguish): Chesterton is not opposing science; he is opposing scientism. In Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science - a short four-chapter study of GKC's attitude to science which ought to be read and studied by every Chestertonian and every scientist - you will find a chapter called "Antagonist of Scientism". That is what is going on here. Scientism is the funny hat that some in the media and academics like to put on, thinking it's a lab coat which endows them with the mighty power of doctorates: they suddenly begin to use long words, though they have no idea what those words really mean. GKC was swift to battle the pretentious attitudes of these "social" scientists - and the attitude of scientism - that is, thinking science can answer anything - which is almost as dangerous as its Luddite opposite (thinking that science can answer nothing at all).

I need to be precise here, as GKC is, lest you mistake the meanings. There is nothing wrong with using long words (I defer a discussion of GKC's famous 38-letter word to a better time and place) or precision and delicacy in the use of technical or field-specific terms. Rather than confound my reader with some abstruse term from my own discipline, I will simply quote the great parallel GKC sets up between the grandest of technical disciplines (that is, medicine, specifically anatomy) and theology:

...dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.
[GKC The Thing CW3:303]

GKC here is following Cardinal Newman. It is just as stupid - yes, I will say it again, with a blow on the table - stupid to oppose science as it is to oppose religion. The media anchor-being or lit'ry scholar or atheistic physicist who oppose philosophy and theology are almost as stupid as the little Catholic college who has web pages and electric lighting but teach no technical courses. (The Catholic college is of course worse, since it's their business to be better - and to be "catholic". Newman would weep.) Ahem. This is serious business, and needs to be dealt with, but let us get back to our text.

That remarkable paragraph is just the beginning of our chapter, and although it might be easy for some to pretend that GKC is kicking at science, he is really attacking those who refuse to use words correctly:

But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. In the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt. So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives" in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.
[CW1:329-330]

Indeed! As you see, he is not quarrelling about "finite automata" or "igneous intrusives" or "Cepheid variables" or "protein catabolism" - such lovely tech terms - but about philosophical and political terms! It's not the right use of tech terms, but the wrong use, whether those words be "tech" for literature or for science, which GKC is complaining against.

And now, hold on to your lab coats. The word GKC is going to bring up is very loaded. It is the dreaded "L" word, which has a different sense today, and yet what GKC says still applies:

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society. It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free. You might just as well say that all idealists ought to be High Churchmen, because they ought to love everything that is high. You might as well say that Low Churchmen ought to like Low Mass, or that Broad Churchmen ought to like broad jokes. The thing is a mere accident of words. In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal, as it is the purpose of this chapter to show.
[CW1:330]

Yes, it should come as no surprise that there is a good sense and a bad sense to "liberal" (just as there is to "conservative"!) It is just like nuclear physics, like metallurgy, like any other skill and effort of Man. The same power which enables the atomic bomb enables your home's smoke detectors - and an almost unbelieveable amount of the work of modern biology has been made possible by our use of radioisotopes. The same metal which makes the gun which kills also makes the plow which sustains life. But we might go even further back: fire is our great friend, and our deadly enemy. The Scholastics had a saying: Abusus non tollit usum: Abuse does not take away use. (As GKC tells us, it is right to study hydraulics when Rome is burning.)

You may feel quite stimulated by now, ready to get active, to assist in any number of worthy but difficult human undertakings. But there is one undertaking which is our current aim: that is, to understand GKC's work, and thereby to understand better our world and our place in it. Again, you may here ask, how on earth can this book be really about Christianity? And the answer to that is simple. We hardly ever think of a tool until we are faced with a problem that that tool can assist us in solving. One does not use (or even think of) the car's windshield wipers on a sunny day! Christianity has the nature of a tool: a solution to a problem. When we consider the mess of things around us - the problems of the world - we look for a solution. Before we conclude today's study, you will find (to your great surprise) that Christianity is in fact an engineering solution! But there are other proposed solutions which won't work:

In the few following pages I propose to point out as rapidly as possible that on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal. Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas loosely called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these (and we will take them one by one) can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression. In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression - and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
[CW1:330]

A tyrant is really just a supreme example of a lack of liberty. People often say they want to be free. But they hardly ever wish to talk about what that means. GKC has a very elegant statement of what it means:

What exactly is liberty? First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself.
[GKC, "The Yellow Bird", The Poet and the Lunatics]

This is eminently scientific, being almost pure ontology, and a horror to so many who despise the technical disciplines. But it is therefore necessary to use certain terms, to work carefully, and not to distort things. That is the point. It is just as important to the realms of "statuary" as it is to the realms of "arithmetic". Yes: that means there must be something which links these two great and all-so-severed domains, much as in The Phantom Tollbooth Rhyme and Reason restored the Kingdom of Wisdom.

It requires a bridge.

You have heard me quote GKC about that bridge before, and I shall no doubt quote it again. But it really is the clue to GKC's work, which we need to learn: the clue to restoring the unity of all the disciplines of knowledge, to governing our actions, to make actual progress in human action in assisting human life:

Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.
[GKC, The Defendant 74-75, emphasis added]

I must therefore quote the corollary, the answering verse, which I alluded to near the beginning of today's notes, for the key question is who is to build this bridge? Chesterton tells us that the answer is found in the Everlasting Man:

The more deeply we think of the matter the more we shall conclude that, if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world. Otherwise the two sides of the human mind could never have touched at all; and the brain of man would have remained cloven and double; one lobe of it dreaming impossible dreams and the other repeating invariable calculations. The picture-makers would have remained forever painting the portrait of nobody. The sages would have remained forever adding up numerals that came to nothing. It was that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge.
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW1:380]

So now you see the real romance of orthodoxy: Orthodoxy really is about Christianity, for it is about Jesus Christ, the Bridge Builder: the Everlasting Man "in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge". [Col 2:3]

ChesterTeens Report on the Conference of 2008

One of our regular readers here reports on the experience of being at ChesterCon08.

Times Literary Supplement Takes Note of Us

Time Literary Supplement author Sir Peter Stothard notes that Father Brown is good reading for these economic times.

After stumbling upon our blog, he ponders the mysteries of pancakes and economics in an interesting essay.

Father Brown

I'm working on a project that involves Father Brown, and it has taken about three or four readings of the same story each time for me to be truly amazed at Chesterton's depth of knowledge about everything.

Right now, I'm working on the Perishing of the Pendragons, and there is an amazing amount of nautical information in there. Did Chesterton have to look things up to write that? I doubt it.

And his vocabulary! Yesterday, I was making french toast with my girls, and we were sprinkling the pieces with cinnamon, and I was reminded that Chesterton used a word in the book mentioned above that I had to look up. This word

cop·pice (kŏp'ĭs) n. A thicket or grove of small trees or shrubs, especially one maintained by periodic cutting or pruning to encourage suckering, as in the cultivation of cinnamon trees for their bark.

coppice, which I was unfamiliar with. Since the definition mentioned cinnamon, I remembered it when we were making french toast.

Chesterton's vocabulary was HUGE. Enormous. WAY bigger than mine. I'm looking up words at least twice per page. And every time, my amazement at him grows.

Here is just a short list of words I've looked up. See how many you know:

mousquetaire
osiers
prow
funnel (in a ship sense)
piebald
fissiparous
paling (in terms of a fence)
spud (not in terms of a potato)

Figuring out why I like Chesterton

I like Chesterton. I suppose, in some sense, it is a personal preference. In another sense, it is quite practical. In a third sense, it is totally impractical.

Reading Chesterton will probably not make one rich. Although it could contribute to one's happiness, a far greater reward.

Reading Chesterton will probably not make one famous. Unless one's name is Dale Ahlquist and repeatedly shows his face on EWTN. But for the rest of us: no fame.

Reading Chesterton will not help your health. In fact, there are many Chestertonian arguments on the merits for and against cigar smoking, wine drinking, steak eating and other various perilous activities. Reading Chesterton will probably not contribute to your fitness, unless you download some podcasts and listen to them on the treadmill. Which some people actually do. Really.

However, Chesterton will be your gatekeeper, a worthy occupation for an old dead man. He will teach you how to think. He will help you exercise the old white matter upstairs.

Thinking may lead to lifestyle changes. Belief changes. Monetary changes (such as working to get out of debt). Job changes (such as becoming self-employed). Pet changes (such as obtaining a cow, donkey or other domestic beast of burden).

Why do you like Chesterton? Has reading Chesterton changed your life in any way?

Gilbert Mourns the Loss of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Father Richard John Neuhaus of First Things has passed away, sadly. First Things has posted a message from him, in the form or an essay he wrote in 2000, about the fact that we are born to die.

May he rest in peace.

Subsidiarity

What is Subsidiarity, anyway?



And what's a satellite dish got to do with it?

For the answer, please check out the newly posted parts of my new book, Subsidiarity. (It's just the non-fiction companion to my novel, Joe the Control Room Guy.)

Welcome, Ye New Year!

Yes, it is 2009 now, and for those of us who are interested in such things, 2009 is the product of 41 with the square of seven. As you may expect from a Chestertonian, we shall start the year by making a final posting - that is, today we shall finish off Chapter Seven of Orthodoxy, which means we shall have just two more chapters to study and we shall be finished! Wow.

But instead of talking about numbers I am going to talk about words, at least briefly, before we get into the final (and very bumpy) selection of this new year. Hee hee.

Specifically the word "Ye" and how it is pronounced. In the context of "O come all ye faithful, it rhymes with "we" and is simply an older form of the second person plural "you". But when we see it on fake "old" things like the store that just opened downtown that sells antiques, you know - "Ye Goode Olde Stuff" - it is pronounced "the" because it is the old way of writing the old English letter called "thorn" when your printer doesn't have the requisite characters.

What! Are you gone totally bonkers, Doctor? Maybe a bit too much - ah - mulled wine?

No, there were some older letters that got lost over the centuries. Just as we got this new-fangled "J" and "W" added in, we threw out the "Þ" and "þ" (capital and small Thorn) and the "Ð" and "ð" (capital and small Eth), which stand for the two kinds of "th" we use in English - voiced "th" in "the" and unvoiced "th" in "three". When the old printers didn't have any "Thorn" letters, they used a "Y", and so "Þe" (which is read "The") became "Ye". Oh, yes.

Why fuss about this "ye"? Well, it was bought on by another bit of research I did in order to unravel something we'll see in these concluding paragraphs of this chapter. An authentic Englishman - I mean of course a Chestertonian Englishman - would understand, but perhaps everyone else will think I am being too hard on Englishmen. Which is silly, since GKC is the one being hard on them. It is quite like someone saying how "stiffnecked" the Jews are, and opening the whole can of worms called "antisemitism" - when they are merely quoting God's own words to Moses: "And again the Lord said to Moses: I see that this people is stiffnecked." [Ex 32:9] (Now of course someone will think my using that quote is antisemitic!) No. We need to read carefully, and understand how someone might speak with a bit of sharpness, with some honest intellectual criticism, maybe even pointing out a negative trait or flaw, and yet having true human respect for the person or persons. That is what is happening here.

What is the problem GKC is criticizing? Simply, the idea of aristocracy. You know, the stupid lord-earl-duke stuff they have in England. We have it in America too, though we do not have the those formal ranks. The media force the classes and castes upon us: we all know that movie stars, rock stars and pro athletes (including race-car drivers) are far higher than scientists or teachers or even physicians, though they do not have coats-of-arms or all that, they get the preferential treatments, and the homage of the commoners. Sure: people pay money to have stuff on their shirts or bumper stickers... actually now that I think about it, perhaps they do have coats-of-arms: I've often seen athletic and racer logos on car bumpers. In England you can get taken to court for such things. How odd.

We Americans like to pat ourselves on the back (a very awkward position) because we aren't "stoopit" enough to have all that lord-earl-duke nonsense: we know we're equal, and even our government officers are called silly things like "the guy that sits in front" (the president) or "the old men" (the senate) just so that they don't get uppity. (We just say it in Latin to take the sting out.) Equality was put into the Declaration of Independence, and we threw all that rank stuff out when we threw out all that unjust taxation. Er... oh. Did you just say 1040? Well... at least we threw out the lord-earl-duke thing, and even those old men have to do the 1040 thing. We're equal, once we're born anyway, and we even have amendments about that.

But it was not Jefferson who invented the idea of equality of men. That was made clear some 1700 years before, written in blood on a hill outside Jerusalem when God died. Yes, we really are equal as Chesterton says:

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.
[GKC Charles Dickens CW15:44]

He meant English pennies, of course. But there is some satanic itch in fallen Man which makes him want to hold someone higher - usually himself, when possible, but someone else when that can be done conveniently. Sad to say, holding someone higher is often the only exaltation so many people ever get. But it is the whole point of moral theology that it is not the person, but his actions which really are worthy of praise - or of damnation. While in America we do not have social rank embedded in our constitution, we do have it in a popular sense, and so have not yet applied the remedy that the English have. But we are aware of the division - and this division is the last of the points which Chesterton now makes.

(( click here to read on ))


The remedy to the exaltation called aristocracy is to see it as a weakness - to refuse to take it seriously:

Now, it is the peculiar honour of Europe since it has been Christian that while it has had aristocracy it has always at the back of its heart treated aristocracy as a weakness - generally as a weakness that must be allowed for. If any one wishes to appreciate this point, let him go outside Christianity into some other philosophical atmosphere. Let him, for instance, compare the classes of Europe with the castes of India. There aristocracy is far more awful, because it is far more intellectual. It is seriously felt that the scale of classes is a scale of spiritual values; that the baker is better than the butcher in an invisible and sacred sense. But no Christianity, not even the most ignorant or perverse, ever suggested that a baronet was better than a butcher in that sacred sense. No Christianity, however ignorant or extravagant, ever suggested that a duke would not be damned. In pagan society there may have been (I do not know) some such serious division between the free man and the slave. But in Christian society we have always thought the gentleman a sort of joke, though I admit that in some great crusades and councils he earned the right to be called a practical joke. But we in Europe never really and at the root of our souls took aristocracy seriously. It is only an occasional non-European alien (such as Dr. Oscar Levy, the only intelligent Nietzscheite) who can even manage for a moment to take aristocracy seriously. It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.
[CW1:326-7]

Well, perhaps some people in America do see the silly media ranks as a weakness. Certainly these wealthy "stars" are to be pitied, and most wise Americans do pity them, and the even more pitiable people who feel compelled to carry their logos on their cars or teeshirts or shoes. But are you clear on what Chesterton is getting at? It is not really that aristocracy is wrong - it's fine if you want Mr. Hot Racer's race-car logo on your own car, or want to bow or curtsey when that fine old Lord Duke Earl swanks into his club. The error would be in thinking that Mr. Hot Racer or the Honourable Lord Duke Earl is somehow better - just because of his exalted status. And that is a very serious issue indeed. It is not just a constitutional issue. It is something human that rubs the wrong way:

In short, I had spelled out slowly, as usual, the need for an equal law in Utopia; and, as usual, I found that Christianity had been there before me. The whole history of my Utopia has the same amusing sadness. I was always rushing out of my architectural study with plans for a new turret only to find it sitting up there in the sunlight, shining, and a thousand years old. For me, in the ancient and partly in the modern sense, God answered the prayer, "Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings." Without vanity, I really think there was a moment when I could have invented the marriage vow (as an institution) out of my own head; but I discovered, with a sigh, that it had been invented already. But, since it would be too long a business to show how, fact by fact and inch by inch, my own conception of Utopia was only answered in the New Jerusalem, I will take this one case of the matter of marriage as indicating the converging drift, I may say the converging crash of all the rest.
[CW1:327]

We come to the point which brought up my introductory talk of "ye" (pronounced "the"): the prayer that GKC quotes. Unless you are an Anglican, you will have no idea what that is. It is from what they call the "communion service" and appears in the Second Prayer Book of Edward the Sixth:

Preuent us, O Lord, in al our doinges, with thy most gracious fauoure, and further us with thy continual helpe, that in all our works begon, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorifye thy holy name, and finallye by thy mercie obtayne euerlasting lyfe: through Jesus Christ our Lorde. Amen.

Now you see why the fusty old "ye" business came up. Of course the "U" versus "V" problem goes back to ancient Roma, so we cannot fault old Ed #6 for that. But I ought not let you suffer such wretched spelyng:

Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings, with thy most gracious favor, and further us with thy continual help, that in all our works began, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy name, and finally by thy mercy obtain everlasting life: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Rev. Percival Jackson's The Prayer Book Explained states that this prayer came from an ancient sacramentary by Pope Gregory the Great, but I do not have either book to check further. However, I do have Chesterton's books, and he had something further to say, which I think may clear up the somewhat awkward use of "prevent":

It will be noted that many quotations from Chaucer in these pages are recast in a manner that may well distress Chaucerians; though it is done with the hope of increasing the number of Chaucerians in the world. I can only say that I am acutely sensitive to all that can be said against what I am doing. To say that I have modernized Chaucer has a very ugly sound, and might stand for a very ugly thing. The first difficulty about disturbing any ancient language, that is good of its kind, is that the man who turns it into new language may turn it into pretty thoroughly bad language; in the sense of something worse than slang. There is also this paradoxical but practical fact: that the very examples in which the meaning of a word has changed are the examples in which we know what it means. If we substitute a very modern word, we may find that everybody uses it and nobody knows what it means. It marked the use of an old phrase, of which the meaning has changed, when the Prayer-Book said, "Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings." But nobody does imagine that the vicar, who reads it out in the parish church, means that he wants to be tripped up with boobytraps and butter-slides in everything he attempts. The dead word, like the dead language, does in a sense remain sacred. 'Prevent' is a Latin word and still makes sense in Latin. But there is always the peril that turning it into modern English might mean turning it into more modern American; and ghastly possibilities open before us, of some future reformer altering "prevent us" to "put us wise." Or, to take another example, it is now extremely archaic English to talk about the Holy Ghost. But it is perfectly intelligible English, although it is archaic English. It stands for a certain idea which was strong when the language was made, and it stands exactly where it did.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:315]

Oooh, Latin! "Prevent" comes from prae+venire = to come before - thus the archaic sense is "to anticipate". But GKC gives the American as well, and so the point is clear.

There is a little more which needs to be clarified, and GKC proceeds to do so. Here, however, we shall find an even more narsty issue: the idea of duels and of bets - but these are minor matters to a far larger one. In fact, it is something about which I hope to write more elsewhere, though it is not easy to do so without getting into a very hot topic: the idea of how freedom requires the ability to bind one's self. But for now, see how GKC argues, and remember that this is the logical and correct requirement for the much-lauded "equality" which we must have as human beings:

When the ordinary opponents of Socialism talk about impossibilities and alterations in human nature they always miss an important distinction. In modern ideal conceptions of society there are some desires that are possibly not attainable: but there are some desires that are not desirable. That all men should live in equally beautiful houses is a dream that may or may not be attained. But that all men should live in the same beautiful house is not a dream at all; it is a nightmare. That a man should love all old women is an ideal that may not be attainable. But that a man should regard all old women exactly as he regards his mother is not only an unattainable ideal, but an ideal which ought not to be attained. I do not know if the reader agrees with me in these examples; but I will add the example which has always affected me most. I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing. You could not even make a fairy tale from the experiences of a man who, when he was swallowed by a whale, might find himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or when he was turned into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo. For the purpose even of the wildest romance results must be real; results must be irrevocable. Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing. And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.
[CW1:327-8]

I have heard dozens of rock songs whining about rebellion and revolution and "working for The Man" and stuff like that. They are so very dull, so very abject, so very subservient.... yet these same rockers turn around and swear undying loyalty to their lover? What? Why that's - yes - that's SO Chestertonian! Hee hee! Let's read this again, and set them against (or really beside) the discussion of aristocracy, but also against our rocker-rebellious modern world:

I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun.

Yes: "the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself" Why isn't there a heavy-metal drum-pounding song which centers on this! There ought to be. It would be far more rebellious than the insipid tuneless drivel which were just sops thrown to the Soviets - or to Hollywood. For this rebellion is the true human kind: the rebellion against the Fall. It is the makings of all fairy-tales (remember that chapter? Oh yes!) and also of all adventure (nasty inconvenient things, as Bilbo said - but that was before he had one!) We shall see more of this good rebellion in the next chapter - far more. So much more it will shock you.
It may sound as if GKC is urging us to some sort of Utopia - but it is actually the key to something far better, and far more real:

All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties. But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. "You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there."
[CW1:328]

And thus concludes the seventh chapter, "The Eternal Revolution". They are mystical words, perhaps the most mystical of all in the book: one of the strange insights in to what awaits us in eternity. People somehow think heaven is boring, and will be rather a lot of sitting around playing harps and staring at God... but GKC's view is vastly more exciting: "my Utopia" will have "real adventures" with "real obligations". If God is "in act" being simply "pure act" (as the Scholastics say) and "at work" [see John 5:17] and not withstanding that He rested "on the Seventh Day" [Gen 2:2] why would it be the case that He has to be busy while we goof off? Oh, no. GKC implies that Eternity will be far busier - and far more interesting. But our "hardest obligation and steepest adventure" is to get there. Let us work together to make it happen. It sure sounds worth it.

Gandhi Reference

I was recently sent an inquiry into the Chesterton/Gandhi connection, and the evidence proving what Chestertonians often say, that is, that Chesterton had some direct influence on Mahatma Gandhi, which caused Gandhi to begin his movement to free India from English control.

There is direct evidence of this, and since the question is not a new one, nor infrequent to those doing scholarly work, research or thesis papers, I think the evidence should be put forth here for all future inquiries.

So, this will be a long post, but if you aren't interested in Chesterton's influence on Gandhi, you can skip this by not clicking here.

In his Illustrated London News column on September 18, 1909 (Oct. 2 – American edition), Chesterton wrote the following:

It is this lack of atmosphere that always embarrasses me when my friends come and tell me about the movement of Indian Nationalism. I do not doubt for a moment that the young idealists who ask for Indian independence are very fine fellows; most young idealists are fine fellows. I do not doubt for an instant that many of our Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive; most Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive. But when I am confronted with the actual papers and statements of the Indian Nationalists I feel much more dubious, and, to tell the truth, a little bored. The principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national. It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what. What is the good of the Indian national spirit if it cannot protect its people from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the philosophy of Buddhism; but it is not so shallow as Spencer's philosophy; it has real ideas of its own. One of the papers, I understand, is called the Indian Sociologist. What are the young men of India doing that they allow such an animal as a sociologist to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes?

When all is said, there is a national distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: "I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it." Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him. But the Indian Nationalists whose works I have read simply say with ever-increasing excitability, "Give me a ballot-box. Provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor's wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the Editorship of the Daily Mail," or words to that effect.

Now this, I think, is not so difficult to answer. The most sympathetic person is tempted to cry plaintively, "But, hang it all, my excellent Oriental (may your shadow never grow less), we invented all these things. If they are so very good as you make out, you owe it to us that you have ever heard of them. If they are indeed natural rights, you would never even have thought of your natural rights but for us. If voting is so very absolute and divine (which I am inclined rather to doubt myself), then certainly we have some of the authority that belongs to the founders of a true religion, the bringers of salvation." When the Hindu takes this very haughty tone and demands a vote on the spot as a sacred necessity of man, I can only express my feelings by supposing the situation reversed. It seems to me very much as if I were to go into Tibet and find the Grand Lama or some great spiritual authority, and were to demand to be treated as a Mahatma or something of that kind. The Grand Lama would very reasonably reply: "Our religion is either true or false; it is either worth having or not worth having. If you know better than we do, you do not want our religion. But if you do want our religion, please remember that it is our religion; we discovered it, we studied it, and we know whether a man is a Mahatma or not. If you want one of our peculiar privileges, you must accept our peculiar discipline and pass our peculiar standards, to get it."

Perhaps you think I am opposing Indian Nationalism. That is just where you make a mistake; I am letting my mind play round the subject. This is especially desirable when we are dealing with the deep conflict between two complete civilisations. Nor do I deny the existence of natural rights. The right of a people to express itself, to be itself in arts and action, seems to me a genuine right. If there is such a thing as India, it has a right to be Indian. But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; "Sociology" is not Indian; all this pedantic clatter about culture and science is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is our first abstract difficulty, that we cannot feel certain that the Indian Nationalist is national.

According to P.N. Furbank (“Chesterton the Edwardian,” G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal. John Sullivan, ed., Harper and Row, 1974)ISBN 13: 9780236176281 & ISBN 10: 0236176285, Gandhi was “thunderstruck” when he read this article.

He immediately translated it into Gujarati, and on the basis of it he wrote his book Hind Swaraj, his own first formulation of a specifically “Indian “ solution to his country’s problems. Thus you might argue, not quite absurdly, that India owed its independence, or at least the manner in which it came, to an article thrown off by Chesterton in half-an-hour in a Fleet Street pub.

This account was first described in Gandhi by Geoffrey Ashe (Stein & Day, NY, 1968) p. 137-138, and is repeated in his new book, The Offbeat Radicals (London, Metheun, 2007).

I also have a fascinating interview with GKC that was published in the NY Times in 1916. It is with an Indian journalist, and Chesterton repeats his point that India should be for Indians. Use a library's article research function, and look up:
"India for Indians, Says Gilbert K. Chesterton", by Harendranath Maitra, New York Times, May 21, 1916 subtitled: Noted English Author Declares That She Must Be Nationalistic and be Represented as a Nation in Councils of British Empire. Indian author Maitra interviews GK Chesterton in this fascinating piece.
***
Here is something you can look up in the Chesterton Review.
Feb 1993 Vol XIX No 1 pp 88-93 of Chesterton Review which quotes some of Gandhi's actual writing about GKC.

Society for Distributism holds meeting

CATHOLICISM AND ECONOMICS
CAPITALIST-DISTRIBUTIST-SOCIALIST DEBATE


Garden City, NY, USA. A conference hosted and sponsored by the Nassau Community College for Catholic Studies in Long Island, New York, is confirmed for April 4th, 2009 at the College Center Building. The debate will present and contrast the Capitalist, Socialist, and Distributist positions in economics. The Conference, Catholicism and Economics, will present and compare the intellectual arguments about the compatibility of Catholicism with, respectively, democratic socialism, democratic capitalism, and distributism.

Thomas Storck will speak for the distributist position. Dr. Charles Clark will be the speaker on democratic socialism. Michael Novak will be the main speaker for the democratic capitalist position.

From 11:30pm until 12:30pm there will be a luncheon for all in attendance (speakers and audience) including sandwiches, salads, cake, coffee/tea/cold beverages. Following lunch, there will be a brief tribute to the recently deceased Catholic scholars, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., and Msgr. Michael Wrenn. The debate will begin at 1pm with a half hour presentation by each participant. Subsequently, there will be an opportunity for the participants to respond critically to one another, with a brief summary statement made by each main speaker. Dr. Stephen M. Krason, President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, will close the event with a short reflection on the conference from the perspective of Heinrich Pesch and Solidarism. The event will conclude by 4:30pm.

Thomas Storck is an author, a member of the Editorial Board of the Chesterton Review and of The Society for Distributism.

Dr. Charles M.A. Clark is a Professor in the Department of Economics and Finance, Peter J. Tobin College of Business, St. John's University, Jamaica, Queens, New York.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute of Washington, D.C.

Stephen M. Krason is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

All conference attendees must register. In order to register for the conference, contact:

Nassau Community College
Office of Life Long Learning
One Education Drive
Garden City, New York, 11530
1-516-572-7472.

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

For more information, contact Richard Aleman
The Society for Distributism

When Authors Speak for Themselves: Chesterton included

The Wall Street Journal speaks again about Chesterton, this time he is included in a collection of audio CDs of famous authors who are recorded saying something. Chesterton reportedly speaks on "The Spices of Life":

'G.K. Chesterton, too, comes off well. He starts out with precisely the sort of absurd gambit that one would expect from a writer of his impressive wit: "But while I should resist the suggestion that we must eat beef without mustard," he intones, "I do recognize that there is now a more subtle danger: that men may want to eat mustard without beef." What follows is an amusingly disjointed ramble about the "spices of life."'

A Blessed Epiphany from G.K. Chesterton

The Wise Men
By G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And served the mad gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

The Defendant on Line

The 'Defences' of which this volume is composed have appeared in The Speaker, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by permission of the Editor. Portions of 'The Defence of Publicity' appeared in The Daily News.

October, 1901.

And "In Defence of a New Edition":

The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium...GKC

Good reading and a great on line resource. The Defendant, by GK Chesterton, on line here.

H/T: Stacie, thanks.

January One

Happy Octave of Christmas and a Blessed 2009 to all our readers!

God willing I shall continue to write - at least from time to time - here or elsewhere - but to start the year on a Thursday, hm.... such possibilities present themselves. And there's so much to say about Christmas and about New Year's - you might even combine the two as in the mystical poem New Years Chimes by Francis Thompson... The one Is is... oh, yes. What is the song the stars sing? Yes, yes. Get out the star charts, people.

Ahem. Really, however, we ought to start off the year with some Chesterton - and here's the perfect essay for the day.

God bless you in 2009 and always!

Dr. Thursday

"January One"
From GKC's Lunacy and Letters

Last night as I heard the New Year bells go like great guns in the darkness, I made a New Year resolution, which consisted of forty-eight sections, forty-six of which are intensely interesting, but do not concern the reader. The last two may possibly be of public interest, because I intend to break them. They were (1) that, heaven helping me, I would not write about the New Year; (2) that I would not write about anything else, but retire to a monastery of my own religion, which is not yet quite what you could call founded. These were exaggerations, born of that exhilaration which is greater than the exhilaration of light, the living exhilaration of darkness. Daylight is in many ways an illusion, since it makes us feel that the secret of things is a long way off; darkness makes us feel that it is very close.

In the dark I feel as if I were a savage. The one result on my mind as a result of reading recent studies of savage worship, is that savages are sensible whoever else isn't. I feel, I say, like a reasonable philosophical savage who has not allowed a mechanical chatter of words to rob him of his natural and delightful ecstasy, of his natural and delightful terror. I feel like a savage who believed that a bear of enormous size had made the stars, and that this bear had suddenly taken a fancy to him personally and embraced him. So much for how I feel in the dark.

New Years and such things are extraordinarily valuable. They are arbitrary divisions of time; they are a sudden and ceaseless cutting in two of time. But when we have an endless serpent in front of us, what can we do but cut it in two? Time is apparently endless, and it is beyond all question a serpent. The real reason why times and seasons and feasts and anniversaries arose is because this serpent of time would otherwise drag his slow length along over all our impressions, and there would be no opportunity of sharply realising the change from one impression to another. So far from interruptions being in their nature bad for our aesthetic feelings, an interruption is in its nature good. It would be an exceedingly good thing if we had the dread of such an interruption constantly before us when we are enjoying anything. It would be good if we expected a bell to ring towards the end of a sunset. It would be good if we thought the clock might strike while we were in the perfect pleasure of staring at sea and sky. Such a sudden check would bring all our impressions into an intense and enjoyable compass, would make the vast sky a single sapphire, the vast sea a single emerald. After long experience of the glories of sensation men find that it is necessary to put to our feelings this perfect artistic limit. And after a little longer experience they find that the God in whom they hardly believe has, as the perfect artist, put the perfect artistic limit - death.

Death is a time limit; but differs in many ways from New Year's Day. The divisions of time which men have adopted are in a sort of way a mild mortality. When we see the Old Year out, we do what many eminent men have done, and what all men desire to do; we die temporarily. Whenever we admit that it is Tuesday we fulfil St. Paul, and die daily. I doubt if the strongest stoic that ever existed on earth could endure the idea of a Tuesday following on a Tuesday, and a Tuesday on that, and a Tuesday on that, and all the days being Tuesdays till the Day of Judgment, which might be (by some strange and special mercy) a Wednesday.

The divisions of time are arranged so that we may have a start or shock at each reopening of the question. The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. It is that we should look out instantaneously on an impossible earth; that we should think it very odd that grass should be green instead of being reasonably purple; that we should think it almost unintelligible that a lot of straight trees should grow out of the round world instead of a lot of round world growing out of the straight trees. The object of the cold and hard definitions of time is almost exactly the same as those of the cold and hard definitions of theology; it is to wake people up. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Of such dramatic renascences New Year's Day is the great example. Doubtless this division of time can be described as an artificiality; but doubtless also it can be described more correctly, as a great artificial thing ought always to be described - that is, as one of the great masterpieces of man. Man has, as I have urged in the case of religion, perceived with a tolerable accuracy his own needs. He has seen that we tend to tire of the most eternal splendours, and that a mark on our calendar, or a crash of bells at midnight maybe, reminds us that we have only recently been created. Let us make New Year resolutions, but not only resolutions to be good. Also resolutions to notice that we have feet, and thank them (with a courtly bow) for carrying us.