Our Lenten Adventure

We embark upon Lent 2009 - and we likewise embark upon the last and ninth of the chapters of GKC's Orthodoxy, which we began to study about a year ago, in celebration of the centennial of its publication. As divine providence has arranged, I expect that we shall finish both Lent and our study at the same time, barring unforseen complexities or diversions.

In this chapter we shall see some of the most amazing of GKC's verbal fireworks, some of his extreme and mystic insights into the New Testament, and some distant hints (in fact the high-level outline) of what he will say at greater length in his co-masterpiece, The Everlasting Man. We shall hear some powerful logic, such amazingly strong reasoning, that you will be jotting down quote after quote for use the next time you hear the silliness that GKC also heard - and tore apart.

This chapter, the ninth, is called "Authority and the Adventurer" - and it is indeed an adventure. We ought to recall GKC's own words about such things:

Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected - that is, most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense adventures are to the unadventurous.
[GKC Heretics CW1:74]

These words, of course, will echo for all who have gone down the Road, "There and Back Again", by reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Like Bilbo Baggins, GKC once struggled with some unexpected events (in GKC's case it was a flood caused by some two inches of rain falling within 24 hours) and like Bilbo he tried to make the best of things, even though he was not affected. He got a wonderful ILN essay out of it, with these most Hobbit-like insights:

I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
[ILN July 21 1906 CW27:242 emphasis added]

But, as we may expect from our Uncle Gilbert, he has more than inconvenience in mind. He has - what do you expect?

Why, Christmas, of course!

...the return of old things in new times, by an established and automatic machinery, is the permanent security of men who like to be sane. The greatest of all blessings is the boomerang. And all the healthiest things we know are boomerangs - that is, they are things that return. Sleep is a boomerang. We fling it from us at morning, and it knocks us down again at night. Daylight is a boomerang. We see it at the end of the day disappearing in the distance; and at the beginning of the next day we see it come back and break the sky. I mean, we see it if we get up early enough - which I have done once or twice. The same sort of sensational sanity (truly to be called sensational because it braces and strengthens all the sensations) is given by the return of religious and social festivals. To have such an institution as a Christmas is, I will not say to make an accident inevitable, but I will say to make an adventure recurrent - and therefore, in one sense, to make an adventure everlasting.
[GKC ILN Dec 20 1913 CW29:602]

Hmm: Christmas recurs so as to make an everlasting adventure! So that must mean... well, I can't go into that just now. (Ahem!) Perhaps you found that too long? Try this:

...even an adventure must have an aim.
[GKC New York American Aug. 6, 1932 reprinted in Chesterton on Shakespeare]

But perhaps this probing into the nature of "adventure" does not yet remind you of Christianity, despite the mention of Christmas, and all the inferences one might make from such profundity. Then perhaps this next bit will give you a steer to the direct road:

It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.
[GKC Heretics CW1:74]

And now (drum-roll, please) you may also hear another Voice:

You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you...
[Jn 15:16]

Ah, ha. Just to set the stage, as it were, remember this is from the "Priestly Prayer" after the Last Supper. Yes, this really is an adventure, (though somehow inconvenient) and we recur to the memory of that Great Adventure, as He commanded [Lk 22:19] But we must defer study of that matter to another time and place. For now, let these hints of a future study suffice, and link up to our previous hints about the Great Story:

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy-tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies - except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:378]

Excited? You should be. It keeps on getting better... providing you keep your aim.

(( Take aim, and then click here to proceed ))


GKC begins his conclusion by a quick look back at what he accomplished in the previous chapter, which you may recall was called "The Romance of Orthodoxy". (True romance, one might point out, is always an adventure, and the best adventures are romantic. Don't forget the "Adventure and Romance Agency" in GKC's The Club of Queer Trades and the above Hobbit-like quote from Heretics, and the discussion we saw some time ago when we considered how rules are necessary even in order to have fun: "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." [CW1:328] (By now you may realize how big a topic this is.) But let us proceed into today's excerpt:

The last chapter has been concerned with the contention that orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and advance. If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind; we can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter. If we wish specially to awaken people to social vigilance and tireless pursuit of practise, we cannot help it much by insisting on the Immanent God and the Inner Light: for these are at best reasons for contentment; we can help it much by insisting on the transcendent God and the flying and escaping gleam; for that means divine discontent. if we wish particularly to assert the idea of a generous balance against that of a dreadful autocracy we shall instinctively be Trinitarian rather than Unitarian. If we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.
[CW1:346]

Besides the very interesting verbal fireworks summarizing chapter 8, there is that very important line (important for us as we begin Lent) about how a God was crucified. In The Everlasting Man GKC will point out the real reason that Jesus came:

The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:339]

My own footnote for that first line adds Mt 16:21, Lk 12:49-50; that first reference results in Jesus admonishing Peter who objected to this very blunt and tragic intention - we ought to bear this in mind as we proceed.
But there is also that curious insight about rules and clubs... you might try applying it for yourself to any convenient issue involving "government". As important as the organizations of Man are, GKC is getting to much larger and more profound matters...

And now we come to the crucial question which truly concludes the whole matter. A reasonable agnostic, if he has happened to agree with me so far, may justly turn round and say, "You have found a practical philosophy in the doctrine of the Fall; very well. you have found a side of democracy now dangerously neglected wisely asserted in Original Sin; all right. You have found a truth in the doctrine of hell; I congratulate you. You are convinced that worshippers of a personal God look outwards and are progressive; I congratulate them. But even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines? Granted that all modern society is trusting the rich too much because it does not allow for human weakness; granted that orthodox ages have had a great advantage because (believing in the Fall) they did allow for human weakness, why cannot you simply allow for human weakness without believing in the Fall? If you have discovered that the idea of damnation represents a healthy idea of danger, why can you not simply take the idea of danger and leave the idea of damnation? If you see clearly the kernel of common sense in the nut of Christian orthodoxy, why cannot you simply take the kernel and leave the nut? Why cannot you (to use that cant phrase of the newspapers which I, as a highly scholarly agnostic, am a little ashamed of using), why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible?" This is the real question; this is the last question; and it is a pleasure to try to answer it.
[CW1:346-7]

Ah, finally. This is the real cutting issue. It bothers even more people these days than it did 100 years ago: "Why don't we just have that nice warm and fuzzy 'unconditional love' and avoid all the hassle with those hard-line dogmas, doctrines and rules?" Let's see what GKC has to say:

The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. If I am treating man as a fallen being it is an intellectual convenience to me to believe that he fell; and I find, for some odd psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise of free will if I believe that he has got it. But I am in this matter yet more definitely a rationalist. I do not propose to turn this book into one of ordinary Christian apologetics; I should be glad to meet at any other time the enemies of Christianity in that more obvious arena. Here I am only giving an account of my own growth in spiritual certainty. But I may pause to remark that the more I saw of the merely abstract arguments against the Christian cosmology the less I thought of them. I mean that having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense. In case the argument should be thought to suffer from the absence of the ordinary apologetic I will here very briefly summarise my own arguments and conclusions on the purely objective or scientific truth of the matter.

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion. Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. ...
[CW1:347-8]

Please note. Here you have it, right from GKC's pen: Orthodoxy is not a book "of ordinary Christian apologetics". (Of course, we now know it's quite extraordinary; some people may still call it apologetics but let's not worry about that here. Hee hee.)

In other words, his belief is based upon reason, which is common sense. It's what St. Paul refers to as logike latreia = "reasonable service" [Rom 12:1] - which Fr. Jaki explains as "a worship that satisfies all legitimate demands of a human mind created in the image of an infinitely rational God" [Bible and Science 211]

Why?

Read GKC's answer again:

[I reply] "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence.

That may seem a bit pompous, but it isn't. For I have split the paragraph, so I could give some comments here, but GKC immediately goes on with examples as we shall see in just a moment.

But I must call your attention to one other line, perhaps the most elegant of all GKC's lovely phrases and the most stunning of all his verbal fireworks in our text. It's not quite an epigram, and is a bit tricky to grab hold of, but please look at this, especially the part I put in bold:

I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

This is what is called "converging evidence". It is an incredibly powerful means of argumentation, and is used in all kinds of sciences, as well as philosophy and the liberal arts. It is why I bother calling your attention to parallel arguments in GKC's fiction, used often quite casually or in passing - but it shows that these ideas and arguments truly represent his thought, and are not some trick of pedantry, and the more we see them, the more important they loom.

Now, let us hear GKC's three examples.

... Let us take cases. Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue. ...
[CW1:348]

Again, I have split the paragraph, since I would like you to examine these three cases for yourself. They are not what most typical Christians would expect to hear launched against Christianity, but they are certainly common enough - one can hear them all too often in the Media these days.

Next, look at what GKC says about them. You may seem to hear Aquinas as GKC says these issues "are all quote logical and legitimate"! Look at them again, and consider. Do you see that this is true? But - yes, there's going to be a "but". Logic isn't enough, and so I heartily shrug off the famous "logic" of the green alien:

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs. ... Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic - for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
[GKC Daily News, Feb. 25 1905 quoted in Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox]

In other words, you can be quite logical, and yet quite wrong.

So, you need something more than logic. You need truth. And GKC proceeds to deal with the falsehoods of each of these three questions.

... If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like, is in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.
[CW1:348-9]

When we come to study The Everlasting Man we shall see GKC examine this matter in much greater detail, as he rebuts the famous Outline of History by H. G. Wells. (See especially CW2:169 on birds building nests.) But there is another essay, from almost the same time as our text, which brings this argument to bear against those who condemn what they call "alcohol" but GKC and the Common Man calls "beer":

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head. In neither case can we really argue very much from the body of man simply considered as the body of an innocent and healthy animal. His body has got too much mixed up with his soul, as we see in the supreme instance of sex. It may be worth while uttering the warning to wealthy philanthropists and idealists that this argument from the animal should not be thoughtlessly used, even against the atrocious evils of excess; it is an argument that proves too little or too much. ... Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.
[GKC ILN April 20, 1907 CW27:445]

Read it in its entirety, you will be amazed. But let us proceed.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none. Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way. In the earliest legends we have, such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia, human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.
[CW1:349-50]

A note about Isaac and Iphigenia, which are two dramatic stories of human sacrifice. God orders that Isaac, the only son of Abraham and Sarah, be sacrificed; you can read the story in Genesis 22 (I omit the ending in case you've forgotten what happens.) "Iphigenia" is a play by Euripides (ca. 406 B.C.) in which she is to be sacrificed to obtain favorable winds on the sea. (It's connected with Troy and all that, but I don't have time to give even a synopsis; again I omit the ending.)

But please consider the even more dramatic point GKC makes about the Fall! "History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. ... Learned men literally say that this pre-historic calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it." Ha, ha!

You are now expecting GKC's third example, but we shall defer that until next time.

Lent

Here is a good lenten post to read.

Today, Ash Wednesday, marks the beginning of the penitential season of Lent. I plan to pray for all the blog readers here every day, and ask that you remember me, too, when you think of it, in your prayers.

Audio Archive of Chesterton Materials

Check out some Apostle of Common Sense episodes for MP3.

Milwaukee Area Chesterton Society

The Milwaukee, WI area is going to try again for a Chesterton Society meeting, the plan is for March 7th in downtown Wauwatosa at the Little Read Book Store 7603 W. State St. 414-774-2665

If anyone is interested, please contact me or the book store.

New Gilbert arrives at homes across the nation...

I've heard it already said that it is ironic that the "Food" issue of Gilbert should arrive just prior to the Lenten season. We planned it that way, naturally, on purpose, to test your powers of overcoming temptation.

But this *is* the time to eat, drink, and be merry, prior to the upcoming Wednesday of Ashes.

I await my mailman, who will probably read my issue before delivering it some time next week.

Dale Denies Wearing Lipstick

Yes, Dale answered the questions (badly) and denies wearing lipstick, but I think we all *wink* know better.

Saying, for example, that there were no bloopers. Ridiculous. There are no stars. Uh-huh. Yeah, I didn't mean Dale there, I meant Kevin and Chuck. That the DVD extras will come out in season 25. Dream on.

I'm thinking season five better have some extras, or there will be riots.

Subidiarity, Dr. Thursday, and a High School Class

Dr. Thursday writes us today:

My book Subsidiarity (partially available on the web here) is being used in a high school theology class! Several have already made comments, including one which surely suggests an addition (what happens if rules are broken) and another on the use of Subsidiarity in "Spongebob" !!!

What a great joy this is! Young people will learn about WATCHER, PUMP, spot delivery and ad insertion - but more importantly, they will learn the principles of this important idea. (and with just a couple of weeks to go before its ninth anniversary (March 2)...

Finally, I wish to once again express my sincere thanks to my friends who helped make this work possible, especially the two Joes and the Control Room guys...

I tried to look up the Spongebob episode (thinking perhaps it is on Youtube) and if anyone knows how to find that episode, please let me know. Thanks.

Dale Ahlquist and Fr. Mitch Pacwa Event

Click image to see full page.

A Note About Our Thursdays of Orthodoxy

One of our readers asks if these columns will be available in a complete form eventually for download. It is very gratifying to be asked such a thing, and also humbling. It means someone is reading them, and finds them useful and interesting. Wow.

For the present, you can get the entire collection directly, week by week, from the index, which appears just below the most recent excerpt/commentary.

We will look into making it available by other means. If you are interested, please let us know.

GKC - Heretic Squared?

Today's column is a continuation of last week's - the commentary, not the sketchy fictional example. (If you want a continuation of that, it's here.) And yet today's continuation is a conclusion, since it is the last Thursday column before Lent begins next Wednesday. Moreover, it will complete our study of chapter eight, "The Romance of Orthodoxy". It must be considered logically a continuation for another reason: we shall see GKC go even further into heresy, proposing for our consideration strange words, and even stranger images - surprising, mystical images. Not goofy or pop-art, or psychedelic. Mystic. That is, images of something quite real, but images only seen by mystics.

I hope that you will understand. I have no special knowledge of the true mystics, and indeed very little awareness of their thoughts, except in a most casual sense. Yet, I feel very strongly that we are about to hear some authentic mystical insights, as GKC leaps (it appears) beyond the normal human powers of thought so he can show us his view. But please attend carefully as you read. There will come some words which sure sound heretical to an outsider - and even more to an insider. Atheists do not talk about God this way, nor do serious theists, specifically orthodox theologians. Yet, that is why I think it mystic.

I use this word "mystic" here. Just what do I mean? For the present, I mean it in GKC's own sense, with a nod towards St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese the Little Flower, and great souls like them, who see the commonplace in a utterly new way. This idea is so important - but let us hear GKC explain:

A verbal accident has confused the mystical with the mysterious. Mysticism is generally felt vaguely to be itself vague - a thing of clouds and curtains, of darkness or concealing vapours, of bewildering conspiracies or impenetrable symbols. Some quacks have indeed dealt in such things: but no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible - by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend.
[GKC William Blake 131]

Too long? As usual we find the same idea in GKC's fiction, here as an epigram on the lips of Father Brown:

Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery.
[GKC "The Arrow of Heaven" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

That is what GKC is about to do. He is about to take some very well-known verses from the Bible, and apply once again his deep - and mystical - insights. This time, the verses deal directly with Jesus and with His passion, and so are rather a good way of preparing to enter into Lent.

(( click here when you are ready to proceed ))

Why did it take GKC so long to get to Christ? (You might as well ask why do I take so long to get to GKC in these postings? Hee hee.) Well, that's an interesting issue. Mainly because there's a lot of modern garbage to be cleared away so we can begin to talk with some reasonable effect. The tool called "common sense" is not very common, but our exercises on our journey have helped to restore this power to us. Moreover, this very next paragraph will contain another startling, mind-blowing "verbal firework" which you need to be able to consider - and not just shrug off...

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." [Mt 4:7 quoting Dt. 6:16] No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: [Gn 3] and in a garden God tempted God. [Mt 26:36-45, Mk 14:32-42, Lk 22:39-46] He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.
[CW1:342-3]

Isn't that just awesome? Read it again, to get the full impact: "only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." Wow. GKC, the heretic-squared. What does it mean? It means, as GKC said, somehow "God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king".

Why?

We can of course go hunting in the Catena Aurea, in which Aquinas collected all the commentaries from the Church Fathers on the gospels, and see how these verses are explained. We have no doubt heard that this was part of the "expiation", of the "atonement" and we might understand - if that word "understanding" really can be said to apply to anything at all about the Passion. (Did St. Francis understand, even with the Stigmata?) It happened, and Mary and John and Mary Magdalen and the Roman guards and whole crowds saw it "because the place where Jesus was crucified was near to Jerusalem" [see Jn 19:20] But GKC suggests there is something we need to learn, something just as important, but in some sense more directly tied to our humanity, and not to the Passion in itself. (Note: this teaching on multiple levels is one of the great Chestertonian points on the Literary Style of our Lord, and needs its own study someday. See TEM CW2:305, 332 for more.) Here, GKC suggests, we need to learn that "Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break."

But this is what he said back in Heretics, and we ought to have those words by heart already: "But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all." [CW1:125]

You will note how cautious GKC is here. He knows he is doing something very unusual. But perhaps he also learned courage (in its true form of Fortitude, one of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit) once he had converted to Catholicism (in 1922) - for afterwards (1925) he wrote more on this very scene, with no apology at all:

There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

Yes, just as TEM gives us good meditation for Christmas, it gives excellent meditation for Lent. Read the Passion as you have never read it - and weep.

(Let us pause here for a bit.)

Now, let us proceed. We are nearly finished, and so, as usual, GKC gives a little summary.

These can be called the essentials of the old orthodoxy, of which the chief merit is that it is the natural fountain of revolution and reform; and of which the chief defect is that it is obviously only an abstract assertion. Its main advantage is that it is the most adventurous and manly of all theologies. Its chief disadvantage is simply that it is a theology. It can always be urged against it that it is in its nature arbitrary and in the air. But it is not so high in the air but that great archers spend their whole lives in shooting arrows at it - yes, and their last arrows; there are men who will ruin themselves and ruin their civilization if they may ruin also this old fantastic tale. This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool. I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.
[CW1:343-5]

Yes: every time one takes up tools or weapons to fight Christianity, he hurts himself and wrecks his tools long before he ever begins to harm her. It's the same principle I've quoted several times 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 CW2:542-3]

You may be murmuring about this... or (more likely) you have heard murmurings about this, especially if you listen to the Media, or are going (or have been) to an "Institute of Higher Learning". Ah, it's an old murmur, because as we shall see, GKC quotes it in the final chapter - the short form is "Why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines?" [CW1:347] But just hold on. We are coming to the conclusion of this chapter, the second-last - and thus we are already "in the cadence" of the conclusion. GKC is setting up the question (which is really just a review, as you ought to know) so as to give the conclusion with greater force. And that is what I am trying to do as well:

And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.
[CW1:345]

Some notes. We had the term "sweater" before: it means a a person who manages or employs workers at starvation wages for long hours (as in a sweatshop). Also, Americans can read "Walmart" or "Sears" for "Marshall & Snelgrove". The "Titans" were the primeval gods in ancient Greek mythology, children of Uranus (the god of heaven) and Gaea (the goddess of earth); they warred against the gods of Olympus but were themselves destroyed.

You may note the term "the thing" in the first sentence - that may be an early premonition of his eventual book The Thing where he studies Christianity and the Church in greater detail. Which may be a good thing (no pun). I was hunting for a quote I vaguely recall which reveals a little more about how Christianity might really be considered the religion of the Story, and I found this famous whine where someone or other complained about GKC's own work: "But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?" (Which might be said of some lesser writers also.)

This line comes in an important essay, very relevant to our present matter, especially as I had framed it last week, in the sense of a story. It is an entire chapter, rather short, but it must also go into the collection of reference works for some future study of "Story". It is the chapter called "On the Novel With a Purpose" in GKC's The Thing, CW3:225 et seq. Since he wrote that in 1929, it is phrased with "Catholicism" and not with the mere term "Christianity" - though of course GKC was always thinking in a very Catholic sense, rather like Newman, but we have no time for that matter just now. So please understand when I give you this excerpt, and see how it gives the same large sense:

A Catholic putting Catholicism into a novel, or a song, or a sonnet, or anything else, is not being a propagandist; he is simply being a Catholic. Everybody understands this about every other enthusiasm in the world. When we say that a poet's landscape and atmosphere are full of the spirit of England, we do not mean that he is necessarily conducting an Anti-German propaganda during the Great War. We mean that if he is really an English poet, his poetry cannot be anything but English. When we say that songs are full of the spirit of the sea, we do not mean that the poet is recruiting for the Navy or even trying to collect men for the merchant service. We mean that he loves the sea; and for that reason would like other people to love it. Personally, I am all for propaganda; and a great deal of what I write is deliberately propagandist. But even when it is not in the least propagandist, it will probably be full of the implications of my own religion; because that is what is meant by having a religion.
[CW3:225]

But then we've heard it here, back in the Elfland chapter: "I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller." [CW1:264] And here I shall myself be heretic and state, perhaps mystically, that THAT is why the Creed attests per ipsum omnia facta sunt = "Through Him all things were made". Remember that line from GKC's Chaucer about how a poet is Maker? (Greek poieo = I make) Oh yes.

And there's other points, scattered throughout GKC's writing, which is why this study of Story is a big project: "The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story; and even a story must be about a person." [GKC "The Priest Of Spring" in A Miscellany of Men] "Literature must always revolve round loyalties; for a rudimentary psychological reason, which is simply the nature of narrative. You cannot tell a without the idea of pursuing a purpose and sticking to a point. You cannot tell a story without the idea of the Quest, the idea of the Vow; even if it be only the idea of the Wager." [GKC ILN July 15 1922 CW32:410] "Shakespeare enjoyed the old stories. He enjoyed them as tales are intended to be enjoyed. He liked reading them, as a man of imagination and intelligence to-day likes reading a good adventure story, or still more a good detective story. This is the one possibility that the Shakespearean critics never seem to entertain. Probably they are not simple enough, and therefore not imaginative enough, to know what that enjoyment is. They cannot read an adventure story, or indeed any story." [GKC ILN Oct 18 1919 CW31:549-50] "Cities are (like the Universe) for good or evil a very important, and therefore a very poetic, thing. If they suffer in any respect from a literary point of view, it is from the vastness of their claims, the multiplicity of their dues. There are more stories to be told about them than would go to make a new "Arabian Nights". There are more poems involved in their chronicles than any minor poet would dare to publish in one volume."[GKC "The Poetry of Cities" in Lunacy and Letters] "There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgment." [GKC TEM CW2:378-9]

And, at the risk of sounding like a political commentator (!) I shall conclude by giving you a nice piece of tough "meat", which is only verbal, and is actually meant for your Ash Wednesday fare:

I am more and more convinced that what is wanted nowadays is not optimism or pessimism, but a sort of reform that might more truly be called repentance. The reform of a State ought to be a thing more like the reform of a thief, which involves the admission that he has been a thief. We ought not to be merely inventing consolations, or even merely prophesying disasters; we ought, first and foremost, to be confessing our own very bad mistakes. It is easy enough to say that the world is getting better, by some mysterious thing called progress - which seems to mean providence without purpose. But it is almost as easy to say the world is getting worse, if we assume that it is only the younger generation that has just begun to make it worse. It is easy enough to say that the country is going to the dogs, if we are careful to identify the dogs with the puppies. What we need is not the assertion that other people are going to the dogs, but the confession that we ourselves have only just come back from the swine. We also are the younger generation, in the sense of being the Prodigal Son. As somebody said, there is such a thing as the Prodigal Father.

It is amazing how hard it is to get people to begin the story at this end, which is really the right end. There would be comparatively little harm in their anticipating progress in the future, if they were not so obstinate in insisting that there has always been progress in the past. We might almost believe that they were right in their prophecy if they would only admit that they had been wrong in their practice. As a fact, they have been very wrong indeed. Man in modern times has made some very big and very bad mistakes; and, if he would only say so, they might really be set reasonably right. Such a confession would be far more practical than the cosmic generalizations that are really no more than moods. It would not be optimism, because it would begin with the admission of evil. But neither would it be pessimism, for it would go on confidently to the achievement of good. We should purchase hope at the dreadful price of humility. But all thinkers and writers, of all political parties and philosophical sects, seem to shrink from this notion of admitting they are on the wrong road and getting back on to the right one. They are always trying to pretend, by hook or crook, that they are all on the same somewhat meandering road, and that they were right in going east yesterday, though they are right in going west to-day.
[GKC ILN Jul 8 1922 CW32:403-4]

Suggestive? I should hope so. But it ought to suggest something larger than any mere comment on some politician. No, it's more like Harry Potter telling Voldemort to try for remorse - a strange story indeed, when the hero tells his foe to repent. Do you not hear John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert?

Next week, in Lent, we shall begin to conclude as we enter into the final chapter of Orthodoxy.

Apostle of Common Sense Season Four

Things I wanna know:

1. Where are the DVD extras?
2. Is Dale wearing lipstick?
3. Where are the bloopers, outtakes and deleted scenes?
4. Where are the interviews with the stars?
5. Where is the behind the scenes "How We Made the ACS" stuff?
6. Does Dale use a teleprompter?
7. Why the risque bedroom scene with Chuck?

Yeah, yeah, the Chesterton is worth the price, and yes, Dale does a great job--but only because he has a cast of helpers like Chuck Chalberg, Kevin O'Brien, and Julian, Ashley, Catherine (LOVE those dimples!) and etc.

But I want more. When I'm done with an episode, I just sit there, wanting more. I hear season Five is even better than Four....

Belloc Visiting Ohio Soon--Don't Miss Him!

Old Thunder: An Afternoon with Hilaire Belloc

Sunday, March 15th at 1 p.m.

St. Sebastian's Church
Zwisler Hall
476 Mull Avenue
Akron, OH

St. Sebastian's Church, Akron, will be hosting a performance of "Old Thunder: An afternoon with Hilaire Belloc", a one-man show featuring Kevin O'Brien, founder of Theater of the Word, on Sunday, March 15th at 1 p.m. in Zwisler Hall. The program is free and open to the public; a free-will offering will be taken.

Come and meet Catholic historian and poet Hilaire Belloc, who lived in England from 1870-1953. "Old Thunder" provides a stirring presentation, which includes Belloc's prophetic take on modern society and culture.

Father Joseph Fessio called "Old Thunder" "fantastic and unforgettable." Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, says, "Everyone in America needs to see this show."

"Old Thunder: an Afternoon with Hilaire Belloc" is produced by Theater of the Word, a new company performing Christan drama throughout the United States. It is suitable for teen and adults and is approximately one hour long.
There will be books and other items available for sale after the program.

Distributism on the Radio again Tonight!

Dear friends of the Society for Distributism,

This evening, Jeremiah Bannister, host of Paleo Radio (broadcast from Olivet College), will interview Thomas Storck, author of The Catholic Milieu, Foundations of a Catholic Political Order, and Christendom and the West. Mr. Storck is on the editorial board of The Chesterton Review and was formerly a contributing editor of Caelum et Terra and New Oxford Review.

Mr. Storck will be discussing Distributism, with a particular focus on the topic of the Guilds.

We hope you will tune in and listen to this exciting broadcast.

The program begins at 6pm EST, and you can listen to it here. (Internet Explorer users only.)
--
Servire Deo regnare est!

Richard Aleman
Director
The Society for Distributism

2010: Movie version of The Man Who Was Thursday

Looks like someone is making a movie of The Man Who Was Thursday.

St. Valentine's Day: Chesterton on Love

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

“Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.”

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

"A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage."

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."

47 Minute Primer on Money: Money as Debt on YouTube

It is a five part series, this is the first one, when you are finished, it will show you two choices of videos to watch next, click on "Money as Debt 2/5" and keep going till you watch it all. It is quite fascinating, and seems accurate, but I'm not a banker or an economist. Still, there's a lot of common sense in it, so it rings true.

G. K. Chesterton: Heretic

Hello - you're new here, aren't you? Glad you've come to visit. (Amazing how quick you can hook someone with the right title, hee hee.) Yes, this is our Thursday study of Orthodoxy. (If you were looking for thermodynamics, car repair, wine-making, automata theory, or Victorian fiction, try another time. We deal with everything here. Well, actually we may get near that final topic today...) We're in the second-last chapter, "The Romance of Orthodoxy".

Hmm. But for today's excerpt, I think I will use an example....

He checked his bedside clock. It was quarter of midnight. He sighed, and shifted around in his bed under the covers, trying not to let his flashlight shine out and wake his brother. He had to keep going, it was the exciting part...

"Logic! Truth! Speculation on angels dancing!" he yelled. She stared as he tore out the last yellowed pages and scattered them around the room. "Utter useless nonsense!" Then he took a deep breath as his eyes widened. He shook his head and seemed to grow calmer, but more horrifying. "Medieval nonsense. Dreamers. Charlatans. Fanatics." Chuckling, he piled another stack of books around her, tied fast in the big chair. "You found me cold. You preferred these things to me. I think you were the cold one. Very well. Let them warm you now."

Wide-eyed, she stared as he pushed a stack of folios into the fireplace. She tried to pull herself free, but the ropes were tight. At first it seemed as if he had overwhelmed the fire with all those ancient texts, but slowly the flames were taking hold.
Terror rose up in her. "No!" she cried. "Don't leave me!"
"What do you mean - don't leave me! You can say that now?" he sneered. "Bah. I've wasted my life here. Your books and reading. There's nothing for me. Nothing."
She was weeping. "Then at least let me go. For God's sake, please! I beg you! Let me go!"
He laughed, then turned and hurried out of the room. Again she struggled at her bonds, but he knew his knots.
Her voice barely audible, she tried one last plea: "Please, darling. If not for me, for your son's sake! Let him live!"
In the hall she heard him snort. "My son?"

He heard his brother grunt in his sleep. He turned off the flashlight, but the room was silent. He turned it back on, then turned the page, his hand shaking a little with excitement.

"Yes, your son. I just found out. I bear your son. Free me, for his sake, if not for mine."
"I don't believe in that medieval rubbish, 'darling'."
"But I do. He's real. He lives. Please. I beg you."
The door slammed closed, and he laughed insanely as he hurried out of the doomed building.

The fire, so pleasant and comforting just minutes ago, now began to lick about the rare works she had worked so hard to obtain. She heard the front door slam and all was silent, except for the slowly growing sound of crackling flames...

To be continued...

He sighed as he read those words. Oh, no.

Oh, no! No! Doc! You can't stop now!

Yes, there they are - those horrifying words.

If you like books - perhaps I ought to say if you like stories, you know those words. No monster, no villain, no archenemy, whether real or imaginary, could ever produce the terror - the direct emotional blow that those three words convey.

Yes: To be continued. Aren't those the worst words which have ever appeared in print? You read them and sigh - and then you have to turn to the next chapter, or hunt up the next book - or worse, wait - who knows how long - until it is written, or it is published, or you find a copy...

And oh what dread lest it be a case like the famous unfinished tale of Dickens called The Mystery of Edwin Drood, or Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston...

How much worse it is to surmise that all the mysteries of our own life - the real story which we are living - are to remain unresolved. I have heard some odd commentary which claims that the word "mystery" in its high and churchy or theological sense, ought to be gravely distinguished from the lesser fictional sense of detection... but I think this distinction is vacuous.

All one has to examine is the famous story of the encounter of the disciples with the Risen Lord on the Road to Emmaus. The perfection of the scene: the Master (in divine disguise) giving the complete explanation to His "Watson", with a comparable manner "How slow you are to believe" - and yet the true Holmesian compassion in explaining to the slow yet dedicated witness of all the many clues... the one and the only case where the Master Detective solved His own murder! Certainly, the Mystery of Calvary is of that type, and the Resurrection is the supreme Detection of all time. (Latin: detego, detegere, detexi, detectum means to uncover. I'd say "hee hee" here, but "alleluia" is a bit more appropriate.)

Yes, even more to the point, those who try to claim that theological "mystery" is of another class from that of detection are thereby shown to have not read Chesterton. For it is of the nature of mystery of both kinds that it persists in its mysteriousness even when seen. We have heard about this some time ago:

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health.
[CW1:231]

It is well worth considering this point at some length today, since today we are about to enter into the greatest, the most profound of all mysteries, and hear our Mister Chesterton commit what may be heresy... Let us, then arm ourselves with another, even more profound text, drawn from his own splendid fiction, from the great treasure of hitherto uncollected GKC we call "CW14":

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

You cannot look at the sun. But in its light we see all earthly things. The mystery of Calvary, like any Holmes or Poe or other story, might be seen - and yet still requires explanation. And that explanation might be accepted, and yet still remain mysterious: like the sun.

This may sound to you like Dr. Thursday's own feeble form of "verbal fireworks". But here, in this chapter, we shall hear the first faint rumblings of Chesterton's most mystical insight: perhaps it might be called the "Proof From Literature" which will put him in the company of Francis and Thomas, the study which we shall hear all in its detail in The Everlasting Man. But if we are to even approach it, we must enter through a dark and dangerous gate - a gate which seems to be labelled "Heresy"...

(( click here to enter ))

Yes, for in the next paragraph GKC approaches the highest mystery of Christianity, the most true, and yet the most unfathomable, of all mysteries ever written or ever encountered by humans. And we shall hear, a most crazy, a most insane, a most unbelievable application of what last week I called GKC's greatest paradox: the idea that "Love Desires Division". Yes:

If we take any other doctrine that has been called old-fashioned we shall find the case the same. It is the same, for instance, in the deep matter of the Trinity. Unitarians (a sect never to be mentioned without a special respect for their distinguished intellectual dignity and high intellectual honour) are often reformers by the accident that throws so many small sects into such an attitude. But there is nothing in the least liberal or akin to reform in the substitution of pure monotheism for the Trinity. The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not well for man to be alone." [Genesis 2:18] The social instinct asserted itself everywhere as when the Eastern idea of hermits was practically expelled by the Western idea of monks. So even asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were sociable even when they were silent. If this love of a living complexity be our test, it is certainly healthier to have the Trinitarian religion than the Unitarian. For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence) - to us God Himself is a society. It is indeed a fathomless mystery of theology, and even if I were theologian enough to deal with it directly, it would not be relevant to do so here. Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.
[CW1:340]

Heresy! I say it again - Heresy! But how else are we to understand - how can God be love if there is no division? And what sense can there be in that utterly mysterious junction of the singular and the plural which Jesus is recorded as having said: "...baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" [Mt 28:19] One Name, which is One Nature, yet Three Persons.... It's not a math puzzle, folks, and it's not a riddle. It's a truth - like the sun. It will hurt to stare at it, but its light reveals so much. Say it again, with reverence, and confess "God Himself is a society" - for it is not well for God to be alone.

Does this "Trinity" put an end to the Mohammedan view? Yes. [See note at end.] Does it argue against the dogmatic anti-dogmas of tradition-based Protestantism? Yes. Does it defeat the coldness and the blather of the bland, empty hyper-modern media? Yes.

Does it restore virtue, renew the basis of the family, of all human society from club and sports team to nation-state and international organization? Yes. Does it enlighten literature, give humility to science, power to engineering, wisdom to philosophy, and restore honesty to theology? Yes. Is it the foundation-stone of fiction and the rich wellspring of poetry and the ratification of all possible intellectual effort? Yes. And more besides.

So why is this so hard?

Oh. You are waiting for Mr. Holmes to come and hold up his big magnifying lens for you to examine the clues. But there is a wiser than Holmes here; one who grasped something about the nature of Story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer and great subcreator who gave us Sherlock Holmes, was an eye doctor, so it might be appropriate to quote the old proverb, "Physician heal thyself." But GKC was also a writer, and he saw something the eye doctor didn't see, despite all his grand stories which GKC so admired: "I do not think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has ever been thanked enough for them. As one of many millions, I offer my own mite of homage." [ILN Aug 19 1922 CW32:432] If you are seeking a topic for research work, I strongly encourage you to examine this matter of Story. But I must not delay us here. No, let us proceed, and you will see it for yourself:

Again, the same is true of that difficult matter of the danger of the soul, which has unsettled so many just minds. To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it is not specially favourable to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice. To say that all will be well anyhow is a comprehensible remark: but it cannot be called the blast of a trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man "damned": but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable. All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? - that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
[CW1:341]

Yes. Now you understand why I began the way I did! In GKC's time, magazines often published successive chapters of mysteries, nearly always giving a most horrible cliffhanger, much as the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories were written, to the great annoyance of children who read them under the covers ("Just to the end of the chapter, Mom!") The magazines want you to get hooked to find out what happens, so you would keep buying them to find out. Several famous authors have done this most unconscionable (but clever) trick, most recently demonstrated by J. K. Rowling's series, which belong to the mystery category as well as any of Doyle, Tolkien, Sayers, or Chesterton. (It is too easily forgotten that Tolkien's six-book trilogy came out separately, but dragons will not force from me the secret of its horrible cliffhangers, especially those that come at the end of books four and five.)

I shall put this as an aside. Just to be complete, and in case for some reason I do not get to mention this elsewhere, I will give you a little more about the research topic of Story. You will need the very important essay called "On Fairy-stories" by J. R. R. Tolkien, reprinted in The Tolkien Reader. You will need GKC's The Everlasting Man, in particular the chapter called "The Escape from Paganism", with this singular clue:

The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises, particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum.
[CW2:379]

You will also want to find The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers. Of her GKC remarked she "is one of those who do write murder stories as if they could write something else" [ILN Aug 17 1929 CW35:149] and this book is a good example of her ability. Be forewarned: it is not so much about God's mind as the mind of one who "makes" in the ancient sense - that is, one who writes or subcreates: "The medieval word for a Poet was a Maker, which indeed is the original meaning of a Poet. It is one of the points, more numerous than some suppose, in which Greek and medieval simplicity nearly touch." [GKC Chaucer CW18:155] You will also most likely want our current text, as you can see from our current excerpt:

But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free will. It is a large matter and too much to one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as many people want to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from forging, he must be not a patient but an impatient. He must be personally impatient with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
[CW1:342]

A lovely piece of verbal fireworks. The truely repentant sinner must not come to the physician as a patient but as an "impatient"! (We might wish to recall this as Lent draws near.) Some time past we had a discussion about the nature of Differential Calculus, which we must not digress on just now: suffice it to say that there are varying ways of expressing the idea of this branch of mathematics, one of which was proposed by Leibniz and the other by Newton, and you can no doubt find others in modern textbooks - but they all communicate the same idea, which is phrased (in a famous but not Chestertonian verbal firework) as "finding the slope of a curve".

Here again we reach the same substantial conclusion. In so far as we desire the definite reconstructions and the dangerous revolutions which have distinguished European civilization, we shall not discourage the thought of possible ruin; we shall rather encourage it. If we want, like the Eastern saints, merely to contemplate how right things are, of course we shall only say that they must go right. But if we particularly want to make them go right, we must insist that they may go wrong.
[CW1:342]

Now, here GKC touches on one of reasons why I think he ought to be required reading for computer scientists. I will not bore you with the details from my own realm, but this is a bit too clever to skip over. You see, a very large amount of software in the real world - I mean what we usually call "industrial" computing, as opposed to "academic" - is given over to checking for what can go wrong. Countless checks, verifications, cross-checks, and duplications of energy are required in real programs. (I do not mean the stuff you buy in stores, of course, which are really the same old programs with a few minor changes wedged in, so as to force you to buy the new version - but without the fun of the "to be continued" sequel as GKC suggested.) When I designed my system - yes, the one that did "Subsidiarity" - I had to embed all kinds of such checks to make sure things kept working - and to alert Those Who Watched when something unexpected did occur. (If you are curious, there's plenty of detail in my novel.) It is just another form of that "eternal vigilance" we heard about last week... I tried to see as far as I could, by the cunning of my own code, and what I could not see, I gave to others who would be my own eyes... Yes, Chesterton played a major role in our systems design. But let us proceed.

Well, no. I think we'll stop for now. And so, we might well quote here today's great epigram: "to be continued". But before I finish off the posting, I think you deserve to read a little more.

"Huh? To be continued? But that's not the end," he whispered to himself. He sighed as he closed the little piece-of-a-book which his father called a "signature", and checked his watch again. It wasn't midnight yet. He reached under his bed and pulled out the very last signature his father had given him. He tucked the covers around him, and began to read...

Once again she struggled. It was futile. Her head sunk down as she prayed, fervently, not for herself, or even her unborn son, but for her poor husband.
Then she heard a strange creaking sound. It sounded as if it was coming from the chimney! She raised her head and stared at the fireplace.
Big black boots appeared, and she heard a coughing. She almost laughed - but it was not St. Nick. The flames, nearly smothered by the old folios, were kicked into life - and they spread into the room.
A talll man climbed out, coughing from the smoke, his silhouette strange against the fire. As he strode towards her, he glanced down and paused - then he grabbed one small volume. In moments his pocket knife had cut her bonds.
She rubbed her wrists, trying to breathe. "Who... who are you?" She had never seen him before, but he smiled as if they were old friends.
He coughed again. "That doesn't matter. Not now. No don't look back. Come quickly... you must live - you and your son."

They hurried out of the house.

She was sobbing - she could hardly tell her tears from the pouring rain. There, on the front path, he gave her the ancient tome. "You'll need this. It will serve, if you use it well, to set your son on the path. If your husband is to have any hope at all, it will come from your son. Fare well."
She reached out her hand to him. "Might I not know your name?"
"Not now. Someday your son will tell you." He turned and went back into the house, never looking back at her.
Smoke was already pouring from the upper windows. She clasped the volume, protecting it from the rain with her own body, and yet she smiled as she hurried away. A great future lay before her.

The boy shrugged as he turned off his flashlight and put it down on top of the last signature beside his bed. Pretty exciting stuff. Too bad about all those books. But it was the best birthday present he had ever had. Tomorrow he'd have to tell Dad he had put that "to be continued" at the wrong place. He pulled up the covers again, wondering what the book was that got rescued, and what the woman did next, and what the boy grew up to be, and what happened to her husband.... He yawned. Someday he'd find out.

But, as Bastian Balthasar Bux (the hero of The Never-Ending Story) knew: "that is another story, and will be told another time"...

================

A note on the Trinity with respect to Christianity vs. Mohammedanism: this is not the place to delve into this matter at any depth, as it involves a number of related and difficult issues - consider GKC's "Lepanto", Belloc's The Great Heresies and the chapter called "Delay in Detour" in Jaki's Science and Creation to start with. But on the very specific issue of the Trinity, it is worth hearing what GKC said in another context:

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:49]

Belloc and Chesterton Collectors Alert!

Loome has some title and collections you may need for your home library.

UPDATE: Sean D. sends us more Belloc news:

I have some other Belloc news you will like. Fr. C. John McCloskey wrote to tell me he's working on a book of Belloc quotes, passages, and poems and is asking for people to send him their favorites. I blogged on it here.

285 (Currently) Chesterton Titles on Kindle

Many versions of the same title, of course, since many are now public domain.

H/T: TechnoChestertonGeek Dave Z.

GKC, Distributism, and Multi-Level Marketing

OK, I need your brain power here to help answer an inbox question. These are the kinds of things I get every day, and normally, I spend 25 hours working out the answers, but today, I'm giving you all a chance to be the experts. So, put some answers in the combox, ok? Thanks.

What do you think GKC would say about a multi-level marketing company? I can't figure out how Distributism applies to something like what my sister, my friend, and my brother-in-law are involved with--an MLM that provides telecommunications services. A grocery store can be distributist even if they don't grow all the food, right? Any insight will be helpful. My Gil-dar [Editors note: I believe this is a brand-newly coined phrase, which is new to me, and for those who don't know what it means, the writer is suggesting that he has a "Gil"bert-Ra"dar" system installed in his brain which rings whenever something either sounds or doesn't sound Chestertonian] is telling me that there's something not right about that kind of work.

Gil-dar. I don't know. I think we should also take a vote on that. Is that a working Chestertonianism like ChesterCon?

Oh, and don't forget to answer the distributism question.

Audio Archive of Chesterton Materials

An audio collection of Chesterton work.

H/T: Dave Z.

Dale on the Radio Tonight

This is from Richard:

This evening, Jeremiah Bannister, host of Paleocrat Radio (broadcast from Olivet College), will be interviewing Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society. We hope you will tune in and listen to this exciting broadcast. Dale will no doubt talk about the life and works of our beloved Chesterton, as well as touch upon his distributist thinking.

The program begins at 6pm EST, and you can listen to it here: http://wocrfm.com (Internet Explorer users only). Jeremiah also wishes to convey that the phone lines will be open for questions starting at 6:20pm EST, so please call 269-749-7398, and ask Dale a question about distributism. Remember to email your friends and let them know to tune in and call the show.

--
Servire Deo regnare est!

Richard Aleman
Director
The Society for Distributism

Searching for a Chesterton Review article?

It appears that the Chesterton Review is now available on line and searchable (somewhat). It's a start, and for those of you with academic needs, this will probably be quite helpful.

H/T: Peter F.

Dale Ahlquist and Fr. Mitch Pacwa Event

Catholic Radio Network/KFEL 970AM and
The Colorado Catholic Herald
Present:

“ARMOR OF CHRIST”
Feb. 27-28, 2009
St. Paul Church
9 El Pomar Rd. (Across from Broadmoor Hotel), Colorado Springs

ADMISSION: $10 per person until Feb. 14; $25 after Feb. 14/at door.

FRIDAY
5-6 p.m. Registration
5:30 p.m. Rosary in the church
6-6:45 p.m. Chesterton and St. Paul Dale Ahlquist
BREAK
7:15-8 p.m. St. Paul-Apostle for Our Times Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
BREAK
8:30-9 p.m. Catholic Social Teaching Dale Ahlquist
FRIDAY NOTE: For those who wish to eat before the talks, St. Paul Parish will be holding its regular Lenten Soup Supper from 5-7 p.m. in the parish hall.

SATURDAY
7:30-8:30 a.m. MASS Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
BREAK
8:45-9:30 a.m. Catholicism and Islam Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
BREAK
10-10:30 a.m. Chesterton and Mysticism Dale Ahlquist
BREAK
11-11:50 a.m. Catholicism and New Age Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.

11:50-1 p.m. LUNCH (For those who do not wish to drive to a
restaurant, a group will be selling lunches; to guarantee a
lunch, please preorder on reservation form.)

1-1:35 p.m. Chesterton and Beauty Dale Ahlquist
BREAK
2-2:45 p.m. Discernment (or Q&A on Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
earlier talks?)

Parish anticipatory Mass is also at 5 p.m. for those who wish to stay.

New Book on GKC: Fanatic, Prophet or Clown?

Read about the book, published in the Czech language here. Google translation (not perfect, you you can gain an idea of it) here.

GKC's Greatest Paradox?

Well, I have been a Chestertonian most of my life - ever since I heard my father reciting Lepanto when I was perhaps four or five - though I was about 30 when I began my serious reading of his works. Since the late 1980s I've read just about all the GKC books there are, and all the major ones multiple times - and have picked through them far, far more carefully than almost any known person can or ever will pick through them, because I am - er - let us say - "the AMBER collector"... but all this about me is not important. What is important is that I've had to apply all the tricks of computing, including some very high-tech trickery which I used in my doctoral research, in order to hunt for quotes for my friends and relatives... No, we never did find the quote, and speaking professionally, it is very unlikely that it has escaped the hunt altogether: for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.

(Do not feel envious. It was a lot of very dull and very tedious work, and the computer did NOT help with most of it - and besides that was back in the 1990s.)

But it is true that I, like Smaug the dragon of The Hobbit, sleep upon a vast amber-coloured treasure trove of GKC, and I also have tools that would make "Goggle and Company" try to hire a hobbit to burglar my lair. (Heh, heh.) But I am no "search engine" (whatever that is). I do not have the books memorised, but just as the jewels of Smaug's bed slowly embedded themselves in him, so too the far more valuable gems of GKC have finally begun to penetrate my dullness. One of the best for me to recall at this moment is this, which I almost know by heart now:

...it is the test of a good encyclopaedia that it does two rather different things at once. The man consulting it finds the thing he wants; he also finds how many thousand things there are that he does not want.
[GKC "Consulting the Encyclopaedia" in The Common Man]

Now, in today's excerpt from Orthodoxy we shall find something I have not noticed before. Our President Dale Ahlquist has often remarked that one discovers, on re-reading a Chesterton book, that somehow GKC has snuck into one's house and changed the book since the last time it was read.... but that means he has burglared himself into AMBER also, and changed that as well. For in today's excerpt, we shall read a sentence of three short words which I believe is the greatest of all his many paradoxes. And we all know there are many... he is spoke of as "the Master of Paradox" (though I have argued elsewhere that title belongs to our Lord; GKC is merely His disciple). GKC was being accused of "paradox" as early as 1904:

The Blatchfordian position really amounts to this - that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary, therefore it cannot be true. And then this bashful being, veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched G. K. C. of paradox! I like paradox, but I am not prepared to dance and dazzle to the extent of Nunquam, who points to humanity crying out to a thing, and pointing to it from immemorial ages, as a proof that it cannot be there.
[GKC The Blatchford Controversies CW1:375]

We must not accuse the wretched GKC of paradox - especially when God is responsible for their existence. GKC is merely the trumpeter, the announcer, the evangelist who brings us the good tidings, as inverted, as amazing, as unbelievable, and as crazy as they seem.

And, I am merely a lesser vessel, one who stores up and repeats these gems, proclaiming them through the marvels of electricity (you wonder why it is called AMBER? Try the dictionary, or see GKC:

...we have to go on using the Greek name of amber as the only name of electricity because we have no notion what is the real name or nature of electricity.
[GKC "Vulgarity" in The Common Man]

Ahem. (Yes, that really is where the name is derived from!) As I have said, I have hunted elusive quotes and figures and paradoxes all through the deep-delved mansions of the AMBER collection... but this sentence stands high above the others. And it is time for you to know about it too.

But, in order to give you a little thrill, and perhaps entice you into reading some more of what GKC wrote, I am not going to tell you what it is... yet.

((If you want to know it, you must click here, and read on...))


But it's not obvious. You will most likely read right past it. I have, several times, until my guardian angel nudged me this time. Don't worry, I will let you know.

Let us not forget where we are. We were hearing about how people like Mr. Blatchford insist that "Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism." and how GKC rebuts this statement... today we'll hear from another foe, Annie Besant (1847-1933) who was an English Theosophist, who was for "free thought" and also "limitation of population" - a strange mix:

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.
[CW1:336-7]

Wow. Here we see another example of Chestertonian Scholasticism: even when he rebuts an error, he teaches, and enlarges upon the topic. There is something remarkable here in this very mature insight into the nature of real, authentic love: "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible."

Now, we are almost there. We have set the stage. If I have done this right, you ought to have goosebumps, or whatever the term is... But let us read on.

It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say "little children love one another" [See 1 John] rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. We come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed. Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord. According to Himself the Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other. But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other at last.
[CW1:337-8]

Yes, a long paragraph. And no sentences of three words! No, it was a relative clause, but it can stand on its own. And it is SO shocking, since it is SO counterintuitive. Everyone, lover, or beloved, thinks of love as something which brings us closer. The whole formula of matrimony, of popular idiom - "and the two shall be as one"... In the greatest song of love ever sung, the so-called "Priestly Prayer" of Jesus after the Last Supper, we read this:

And now I am not in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name whom thou hast given me: that they may be one, as we also are.
[Jn 17:11]

Yes, "That they may be one": which in Latin is Ut Unum Sint, a great encyclical of John Paul II. But none of these people ever thought to write this all but insane trio of words:

"love desires division"

You think this is crazy. You think it's nuts. And you think I am nuts for making a big deal about lunacy!

Don't try to hide behind your computer - I can hear you murmuring: "Whoa - you're crazy, Doc!"

You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for.

Yes, I know Billy Joel wrote that, though it sure sounds like something Gabriel Gale would say. (He's the hero of GKC's The Poet and the Lunatics.) But don't forget what St. Paul said:

...the foolishness of God is wiser than men: and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
[1 Cor 1:25]

It is not really so crazy at all - just utterly unexpected - as well as a signpost pointing to a very difficult yet very enticing trail of thought. Indeed, in a very few pages (probably next week) we shall hear something which is a mere corollary of this statement, something which approaches the greatest of all mysteries: the nature of the Trinity - as well as the lesser but very important (and related) question about the nature of love.

Certainly the correct study of this remarkable statement requires a powerful background in ontology, which I do not have. It may be that for an Aquinas, or a Gilson, or a Pope Benedict XVI, it is "obvious"... whatever that word might mean when applied to a paradox. But it provides a great clue to one of the greatest of mysteries: why did God create the universe - and us - and me in particular? It is very mystical, as mystical as it is the height of intellectual challenge.

GKC went into this some pages back: "This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered; it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided God from the cosmos." [CW1:281] and again I refer you to the discussion of the Hebrew verb bara (to divide, hack) in Fr. Jaki's Genesis 1 Through the Ages. There is a whole lot of very putrid and tiresome whining in our era about "peace on earth" (which for some diseased reason ought to begin, not with the incarnate God, as the angels sang, [Lk 2:14] but "with me"! Or that illogical alien idea of "infinite combinations in infinite diversity" - merely a paraphrase of those for whom (as GKC said) "the universe is an immense melting-pot". Formally illogical and truly sick; it was bad enough in a fictional setting where the prime directive existed only to be violated, but people have dragged it into our real world and it reeks. Or in some places we are commanded (most intolerantly) to be "tolerant": we are "get along" in "peaceful coexistence" and we are to be "one" though diverse. All of these horrible threats might be right out of Mordor or from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named... Yes, they come from our Enemy, and they are mind-darkening, hope-killing, love-destroying... People have forgotten what Tolkien pointed out:

"It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden," answered Ëowyn. "And those who have not swords can still die upon them."
[JRRT, The Lord of the Rings Book VI Chapter V "The Steward and the King"]

Indeed: "It needs but one foe to breed a war". Yes, and there is a threat from those who wish this evil and untrue "one-ness"! We Christians have been warned in the Gospels:

Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.
[Mt 10:34]

We are not "one" in the amorphous way desired by our foes. We are one Body, the mystical Body of Christ, but very distinctly its members, and very different individuals, endowed with many distinct and different gifts.

This idea that we are "one" is dangerous - and sick since it is so unreal. Yet, far more dangerous is the idea that GOD and "us" are one (one in the here-and-now, not in our future reward, the hoped-for enjoyment of His presence). And it is this ersatz "unity" which is what GKC is warning us of. Please recall how last week we considered the mystical matter of the two statues, one with open eyes, one with closed eyes...

This is the meaning of that almost insane happiness in the eyes of the mediaeval saint in the picture. This is the meaning of the sealed eyes of the superb Buddhist image. The Christian saint is happy because he has verily been cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment. But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things? - since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself. There have been many pantheist poems suggesting wonder, but no really successful ones. The pantheist cannot wonder, for he cannot praise God or praise anything as really distinct from himself. Our immediate business here, however, is with the effect of this Christian admiration (which strikes outwards, towards a deity distinct from the worshipper) upon the general need for ethical activity and social reform. And surely its effect is sufficiently obvious. There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action. For pantheism implies in its nature that one thing is as good as another; whereas action implies in its nature that one thing is greatly preferable to another. Swinburne, in the high summer of his scepticism, tried in vain to wrestle with this difficulty. In "Songs before Sunrise," written under the inspiration of Garibaldi and the revolt of Italy he proclaimed the newer religion and the purer God which should wither up all the priests of the world:

What doest thou now
Looking Godward to cry
I am I, thou art thou,
I am low, thou art high,
I am thou that thou seekest to find him, find thou but thyself, thou art I.

[CW1:338]

Usually, we expect to find a correlation from our text to one or another of GKC's fiction. Today, we find a correlation to one of his plays: "The Surprise". Like a grand mystery story of detective fiction, we must be careful not to reveal the "solution" here for those who have not yet read it. It is not yet common to our heritage, though it ought to be: it is a powerful commentary on Orthodoxy and on Christianity. But I have said enough on this. Please read it and you will rapidly grasp the point. (There is, in fact, a clue: it is in the last four words of both Act I and Act II.)

But let us proceed.

Of which the immediate and evident deduction is that tyrants are as much the sons of God as Garibaldis; and that King Bomba of Naples having, with the utmost success, "found himself" is identical with the ultimate good in all things. The truth is that the western energy that dethrones tyrants has been directly due to the western theology that says "I am I, thou art thou." The same spiritual separation which looked up and saw a good king in the universe looked up and saw a bad king in Naples. The worshippers of Bomba's god dethroned Bomba. The worshippers of Swinburne's god have covered Asia for centuries and have never dethroned a tyrant. The Indian saint may reasonably shut his eyes because he is looking at that which is I and Thou and We and They and It. It is a rational occupation: but it is not true in theory and not true in fact that it helps the Indian to keep an eye on Lord Curzon. That external vigilance which has always been the mark of Christianity (the command that we should watch and pray) has expressed itself both in typical western orthodoxy and in typical western politics: but both depend on the idea of a divinity transcendent, different from ourselves, a deity that disappears. Certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest that we should pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of our own ego. But only we of Christendom have said that we should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains: and we have killed all monsters in the chase.
[CW1:339]

First, a few notes: "King Bomba" was the nickname given to Ferdinand II (1810-59) king of the Two Sicilies (1830-59) for his cruel bombardment of his own cities. Lord George Curzon (1859-1925) was governor of India 1898-1905. That command to "watch and pray" is what Jesus told the apostles in the garden of Gethsemani. [Mt 26:41, Mk 14:38, Lk 21:36] Also, the bit about hunting the eagle might be a reference to Lamentations 4:19, which comes shortly after a verse about watching!

GKC brings the unfortunate Eastern mess of pronouns into even harder resolution here:

If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming at least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely. The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated; we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the farther they are away.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:215]

Or, if that's too unclear, try this, from the same source:

A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhistic unity would be annoyed.
[CW2:347]

All this, of course, looks like some very heavy theory at first, and then one realizes that it is dealing with eminently practical matters. So, too, do both Buddhism and Christianity. Especially Christianity.

I checked, and the book really has "external" vigilance, not "eternal" as in the famous misquoted quote: "The condition upon which God hath given liberty is eternal vigilance." - which is from a 1790 speech by John Philpot Curran (1750-1817), upon which GKC makes a very important addendum: "which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin" [The Thing CW3:312]

Vigilance - yes. Let us remember about those eyes which look out!

Here again, therefore, we find that in so far as we value democracy and the self-renewing energies of the west, we are much more likely to find them in the old theology than the new. If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R. J. Campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity. By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference - Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation - Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
[CW1:339-40]

I hunted for a short introduction to R. J. Campbell, and was amazed to find that much of the ILN essay for March 23, 1907 (CW27:422 et seq) is about him - it is very valuable as an example of GKC's care in argument. Here is a sample:

Mr. Campbell and his admirers are not keeping the truth and altering the form. On the contrary, they are keeping the form and altering the truth. ... Mr. Campbell would like to preach anew doctrine, but still to preach it in a particular chapel, in a particular dress, and under particular conventions. Now, what he ought to do is to preach the old and really interesting doctrine of his sect, but to preach it from somewhere else - say, the top of a tree. ... I understand that the actual documents of Mr. Campbell's settlement are Calvinistic. I do not in any sense mention this in order to express a reproach towards him, but merely as expressing an aspiration for him. It would be very delightful if Mr. Campbell could see his way to continue to preach the doctrine, but to change its expression of form. Calvinism is a highly intellectual and reasonable doctrine; personally I think it atrocious, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that it has not been expressed adequately in fresh and modern shapes.

There's more in this excellent essay, and more to say about our main text, but I must stop here. Next week we shall hear something even more startling - a phrase which might almost border on heresy - but is simply an enlargement of the great paradox we have learned today. Get ready.

Neil Gaiman heralds Chesterton's influence again

I like this guy. He's using every opportunity to quote Chesterton. And he's more famous than I am so he gets to do it more than I do. Rats. He does have this creepy dark side, but it seems like he's doing some good.

Coraline opens this weekend, go see it. Tell me what you think.

Stratford Caldecott News

For those of you who have been to the annual conference, you may have heard Stratford speak or met him at dinner. He's got a lovely British accent, a beautiful family, and writes some great stuff.

And he's got a new job, too.

Hey Pittsburgians and surrounds (this includes you Franciscan University of Steubenvillians)

Click image to enlarge.

Who's the Big Man On Campus?

Chesterton, of course.

H/T: Ignatius Insight

Backwards Thinking

Seems quite Chestertonian. Via Rob D. Thanks.

Dale Fights Back Against Literary, er, I mean, Personal Criticisms of Chesterton

Dale will be reviewing William Oddie’s new biography of Chesterton in the March issue of Gilbert.
Dale adds:

“A. N. Wilson has reviewed the book for the Times Literary Supplement. Apparently William Oddie has written reviews of Wilson’s books in the past and panned them thoroughly. So Wilson returned the favor. However, he did no favors to the reading public. His review indicates that all of Oddie’s points could be lost on the very audience that might most benefit from this book. After Oddie has methodically and thoroughly smashed much of the conventional (and wrong) wisdom about Chesterton, the reviewer simply repeats the conventional wisdom, as if it were some sort of rebuttal. Certainly the most egregious suggestion of Wilson’s is that Chesterton was a repressed homosexual. His information is third-hand. Otherwise There isn't a shred of evidence. But if he had bothered to give Oddie’s book a fair reading, he would not have even raised such a ridiculous charge. It is abundantly clear that this was not one of Chesterton’s temptations. It looks like this is the next battle brewing, now that we have dealt with the anti-Semitism charge. The most aggravating thing about having to swat all these gnats, is the distraction they cause. But the battle goes on.”

I Never Cease to Be Amazed...

...at how much Chesterton's clear thinking would help some people at the Times Literary Supplement to think.