Paying Attention To The Sky

This is a book that it is said Chesterton preferred not to write, but did so near the end of his life after much insistence by friends and admirers. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of the most prolific authors of modern times an intellectual giant who bestrode the Victorian and modern age, and who wrote some one hundred books on philosophy, theology, poetry, literature, fiction and history. His best-selling works include Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, St. Thomas & St. Francis, The Man Who Was Thursday and Father Brown Stories.

At the end of the World War and the Great Depression prefigured by the rise of fascism, the major issue was the clash between modernism’s Idea of Progress and despair. In some ways this echoes one of the major issues of our time, the clash of civilizations between the secular and the religious, Islam and Modernity, the Church and the secular state, Western atheists and Christian/Jewish believers. To the readers of his age, Chesterton advised that “The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.” He went on to say that what we should really be doing is not presuming that things will go right, or despairing that they will go ill, but rather we should be appreciating what we have. As a reader on Amazon stated, “some things are perhaps hard to appreciate, but this book is not one of them.”

As is my habit, my reading notes and favorite passages follow:

The Advent of  Flashy Finance
Anyhow there has been a change from a middle-class that trusted a businessman to look after money because he was dull and careful, to one that trusts a businessman to get more money because he  is dashing and worldly. It has not always asked itself for whom he would get more money, or whose money he would get.
[What goes around, comes around, eh?]

Family
I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.

In Childhood, The Fragmentary Suggestions of A Philosophy
All my life I have loved edges and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show. I also have a pretty taste in abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasizes a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself. I can no longer behold the beauty of the princess; but I can see it in the bridge the prince crossed to reach her.
And I believe that in feeling these things from the first, I was feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth. For it is upon that point of truth that there might perhaps be a quarrel between the more material psychologists and myself. If any man tells me that I only take pleasure in the mysteries of the window and the bridge because I saw these models of them when I was a baby, I shall take the liberty of telling him that he has not thought the thing out.
To begin with, I must have seen a thousand of other things before as well as after; and there must have been an element of selection and some reason for selection. And, what is still more obvious, to date the occasion does not even begin to deal with the fact….of why I was so happy. Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard [a toy theatre] lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness at any time of life? Why should it specially do so at that time of life? That is the psychological fact that you have to explain; and I have never seen any sort of rational explanation.

Mind Is Manufactured By Accidental Conditions?
I do not wish my remarks confused with the horrible and degrading heresy that our minds are merely manufactured by accidental conditions, and therefore have no ultimate relation to truth at all. With all possible apologies to the free-thinkers, I still propose to hold myself free to think. And anybody who will think for two minutes will see that this thought is the end of all thinking. It is useless to argue at all, if all our conclusions are warped by our conditions. Nobody can correct anybody’s bias, if all mind is all bias.

Memory
The things we remember are the things we forget. I mean that when a memory comes back sharply and suddenly, piercing the protection of oblivion, it appears for an instant exactly as it really was. If we think of it often, while its essentials doubtless remain true, it becomes more and more our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered.

A Miraculous World
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the thing I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and it is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.

The Changeless World Of Childhood
We have read countless pages about love brightening the sun and making the flowers more flamboyant; and it is true in a sense; but not in the sense I mean. It changes the world; but the baby lived in changeless world; or rather the man feels that it is he who has changed. He has changed long before he comes near to the great and glorious trouble of the love of woman; and that has in it something new and concentrated and crucial; crucial in the true sense of being as near Cana to Calvary. In the latter case, what is loved becomes instantly what may be lost.
[Expression: near Cana to Calvary John's Gospel, the last of the four, speaks twice of Mary. At Cana in Galilee she intercedes with her son for a newly married couple and he changes the water in wine. (John 2:1-12) On Calvary she stands beneath the cross at Jesus' death. (John 19:25-27) At Cana and on Calvary Jesus calls his mother "Woman," which early Christian tradition saw as an allusion likening her to the first woman, Eve. In God's plan, Mary, by her faith, reversed the failure of Eve and so became the new "mother of all the living." Through the centuries the stories of Cana and Calvary have led Christians to seek Mary's intercession with her Son and to rely on her as a mother with compassion for those in need.]

About His Father
[My father] He never dreamed of turning any of these plastic [artistic] talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. To us he appeared to be indeed the Man With the Golden Key, a magician opening the gates of goblin castles or the sepulchers of  dead heroes; and there was no incongruity in calling his lantern a magic-lantern. But all this time he was known to the world, and even the next-door-neighbors, as a very reliable and capable though rather unambitious business man. It was the first good lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole I am glad that he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur.

Hobbies
A good game is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as a hobby; and many go golfing or shooting grouse because this is a concentrated form of recreation; just as what our contemporaries find in whiskey is a concentrated form of what our fathers found diffused in beer. If half a day is to take a man out of himself, or make a new man of him, it is better done by some sharp competitive excitement like sport. But a hobby is not half a day but half a lifetime. It would be truer to accuse the hobbyist of living a double life. And hobbies, especially such hobbies as a toy theatre, have a character that run parallel to a practical professional effort, and is not merely a reaction from it. It is not merely taking exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognized thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing.

Adults and Children
Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasizing their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the a world was anything but a real world. I am much more disposed now to fancy that an apple-tree in the moonlight is some sort of ghost or gray nymph; or to see the furniture fantastically changing and crawling a twilight, as in some story of Poe or Hawthorne. But when I was a child I had a sort of confident astonishment in contemplating the apple-tree as an apple-tree. I was sure of it, and also sure of the surprise of it; as sure, to quote the perfect popular proverb, as sure as God made little apples. The apples might be as little as I was; but they were solid and so was I. There was something of an eternal morning about the mood; and I liked to see a fire lit more than to imagine faces in the firelight. Brother Fire, whom St. Francis loved, did seem more  like a brother than those dream-faces which come to men who have known other emotions than brotherhood.  I do not know whether I ever, as the phrase goes, cried for the moon; but I am sure that I should have expected it to be solid like some colossal snowball; and should always  have had more appetite for moons than for mere moonshine. Only figures of speech can faintly express the fact; but it was a fact and not a figure of speech.

Four Statements of Childhood
I will here sum up in four statements…First: my life unfolded itself…I have…come to believe in development; which means the unfolding of what is there… I was not conscious of them but I contained them. In short, they existed…in the condition called implicit…Second pretending is not deceiving…a child understands the nature of art long before it understands he nature of argument.. dolls are not idols but in the true sense images…things necessary to the imagination… imagination is the opposite of illusion…I enjoyed Punch and Judy as a drama and not a dream…the whole extraordinary state of mind I strive to recapture was really the very reverse of a dream,. It was rather as if I was more wide-awake then than I am now, and moving into the broader daylight, which was to our broad daylight what daylight is to dusk. Only, of course to those seeing the last gleam of it through the dusk, the light looks more uncanny than any darkness. Anyhow it looks quite different; of that I am absolutely and solidly certain; though in such a subjective matter of sensation there can be no demonstration…Fourth, ….I was often unhappy in childhood like other children; but happiness and unhappiness seemed of a different texture or held on a different tenure…I never doubted for a moment the moral of all the moral tales; that, as a general principle, people ought to be unhappy when they have been naughty. That is I held the whole idea of repentance and absolution implicit but not unfolded in my mind…I was by no means unacquainted with pain….the pain did not leave on my memory the sort of stain of the intolerable or mysterious that it leaves on the mature mind.

My Real Life
…I have been a journalist and have seen such things; there will be no difficulty in filling chapters with such things; but they will be unmeaning, if nobody understands that testily mean less to me than Punch and Judy on Campden Hill…In a word I have never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living….I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.

Christian Apologist
As an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic…I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds, for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated. I am very proud of what people call priestcraft since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the medieval truths that, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass. I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy.

Skeptics
On this matter a man may be intellectually right only through being morally wrong  I am not impressed by the ethical airs and graces of skeptics on most of the other subjects, I am not over-awed by a young gentlemen saying that he cannot submit his intellect to dogma; because I doubt whether he has even used  his intellect enough to define dogma.
I am not impressed very seriously by those who call Confession cowardly; for  I gravely doubt whether they themselves would have he courage to go through with it.

The Ouija Board: Divination
The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lie may be larks or they maybe lures to the imperiled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.

Impressionism And The Age of Skepticism
I think there was a spiritual significance to Impressionism, in connection with this age of skepticism. I mean that it illustrated skepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow.
In one sense the Impressionist skeptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow, He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. What ever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and skeptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of illusion. And this atmosphere also tends to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.

The Splendor Of Being Alive In Mean Cities
It was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendor of being alive in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he can, or even when he can’t, that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men had resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own inhabitants.

Spontaneous Style of Talking: Lucidity
W.B [Yeats] is the best talker I ever met, except his old father, who alas will talk no more in this earthly tavern, though I hope he is still talking in Paradise. Among twenty other qualities, he had that rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style. The words will not come pouring out, any more than the bricks that make a great building come pouring out; they are simply arranged like lightning; as if a man could build a cathedral as quickly as a conjurer builds a house of cards….That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost…Since then some muddled notion has arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because a man knows what he means and means to say it. I know not from what nonsense world the notion first came that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate. But it seems to be a notion that a man must mean what he says, because he beaks down even in trying to say it, or that he must be a marvel of power and decision, because he discovers in the middle of a sentence that he does not  know what he was going to say. Hence the conversation of current comedy; and the pathetic belief that talk may be endless, so long as no statement is allowed to come to an end.

Patriotism
The truth is that for most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believe in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in.

Theosophy
There had already appeared in that world the beginnings of a reaction against materialism; something analogous to what has since appeared in the form of Spiritualism. It has ever taken the yet more defiant form of Christian Science, which denied the existence of the body merely because its enemies had denied the existence of the soul. But the form it took first, or most generally, in the world of which I speak was the thing commonly called Theosophy: also sometimes called esoteric Buddhism…When I disliked Theosophy I had no Theology. Perhaps I did not dislike Theosophy but only Theosophists…I disliked them because they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood.

Yeats And Theosophy
It is certain that Yeats was not deceived. He was not taken in by the Theosophical smile; or all that shining, or rather shiny, surface of optimism. He having a more penetrating mind, had already penetrated to the essential pessimism that lies behind that Asiatic placidity; and it is arguable that the pessimism was not so depressing as the optimism.

Yeats And Mysticism
In the scheme of mysticism to which he [Yeats] more and more tended after his first more fortunate adventures among farmers and fairies, the ancient religions stood more and more for he idea that the secret of the sphinx is that she has no secret. The veil of Isis was more and more merely the veil of Maya; illusion, ended with the last illusion that the veil of Isis is rent the last and worst illusion that we are really disillusioned. He said to me once, apropos of somebody’s disappointment about something achieved, “You would not get out of your chair and walk across the room, if Nature had not her bag of illusions.” Then he added, as if against a silent protest, “It isn’t a very cheerful philosophy that everything is illusion.”

Yeats Play: The Land of Heart’s Desire
In that magic burst of music, there was only one thing said by the fairy with which I fully and entirely sympathized; and that was the line: “I am tired of winds and waters and pale lights.” I do not think I have anything to alter in the sentence of literary criticism that I wrote long after: “There is only one thing against the Land of Heart’s Desire; the heart does not desire it.”

Practicing Religion: The Secretary of the Debating Club
On the other hand she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practiced gardening…and on the same perverse principle, she actually practiced a religion…practicing a religion was much more puzzling than professing it [to all that agnostic or mystic world].

The Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia of the artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs was indeed a very strange world. And the strangest thing about it, I fancy, was that, while it thought a great deal bout thinking, it did not think. Everything seemed to come at second or third hand; from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw; and there was a pleasant atmosphere of discussing all these things, without any particular sense of responsibility for coming to any conclusion on them…A large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of any Intelligence. As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard and deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, “What we need is Love,” or “All we require is Love,” like the detonations of a heavy gun. I remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said, “Heaven is here. It is now!” which seemed a disturbing thought under he circumstances…A sort of Theosophist would say to me “Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of he same upward movement of the universe.” Even at this stage it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?”

Idealistic Theists and Realistic Atheists
One half of the sensible men were more and more arguing that, because God was in His heaven, all must be right with the world; with this world or the next. The other half of hem were specially bent on showing that it was very doubtful if there was any God in any heaven and that it was so certain to the scientific eye that all is not right with the world, that it would be nearer  the truth to say that all is wrong with the world. 
One of these movements of progress led into the glorious fairyland of George MacDonald, the other led into the stark and hollow hills of Thomas Hardy. The one school was specially insisting that god must be supremely perfect if He exists; the other that if He exists, he must be grossly imperfect. ….
I think the first thing that struck me as startling was exactly this: that these two schools, which were logically in contradiction, were practically in combination. The idealistic theists and the realistic atheists were allies, against what? It has taken me about two-thirds of my life to answer that question. But when I first noticed it the question seemed unanswerable; and what was queerer still, to the people themselves it did not seem even questionable…the glamorous mysticism of George MacDonald…a full and substantial faith in the Fatherhood of God, and little could be said against it, even in theological theory, except that it rather ignored the free will of man. It’s universalism was sort of optimistic Calvinism…that was my first faith, before anything could be called my first doubt.
To my simple mind there could be no connection between the man whose whole faith was in the Fatherhood of God and the man who said there was no God or the man who said that God was not father…Meredith maintains on the whole that Nature is to be trusted and Hardy that nature is not to be trusted…I had not yet discovered the higher synthesis which connects them.. For the higher synthesis…consists in wearing liberty ties and curiously shaped beards and hats and meeting in cultured clubs where they drink coffee.
These skeptical doctrinaires do not recognize each other by the doctrines. They recognize each other by the beard or the clothes, as the lower animals know each other by the fur or the smell…I believe the congregation of these semi-secular chapels consist largely of one vast and vague sea of wandering doubters, with their wandering doubts who may be found one Sunday seeking a solution from the Theists and another Sunday form the Theosophists… They are only connected by the convention of unconventionality.

Fragments Of The Old Religious Scheme
Amid all this scattered thinking, sometimes not unfairly to be called scatter-brained thinking, I began to piece together the fragment of the old religious scheme; mainly by the gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even those it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of moral and metaphysics to support them. Men who believed ardently in altruism were yet troubled by the necessity of believing with even more religious reverence in Darwinism about a ruthless struggle in the rule of life. Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly,  under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. There hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and skepticism, crabbed barren, servile and without any light of liberty or hope…the old theological theories seemed more or less to fit into experience, while he new and negative theories did not fit into anything, least of all into each other.

Orthodoxy: A Spiritual Asylum
In all the welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy…It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was the unbelievers who began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane of rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist, who told me at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look about for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum.

Questions Of The Skeptic
There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure in this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called “other-worldly”. He can be content with commonsense about headwomen, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the skeptic strike at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly commonsense that they disturb the most. There could not be a better example that this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; shouting to a mob of millions that no man ought to be blamed for anything he did, because it was all heredity and environment. Logically, it would stop a man in the act of saying “Thank you” to somebody for passing the mustard…In the grossly unjust social system we suffer, it is probably enough that many of these really are punished unjustly; that some ought not be to punished at all, that some, perhaps, are really not responsible at all…a pity for the weak and the unfortunate, a slightly lopsided exaggeration of Christian charity…He was so anxious to forgive that he denied the need of forgiveness.

Philosophical Differences
For in fact all these [philosophical] differences come back to a religious difference; indeed I think all differences do. I did not know myself, at the beginning, what the religious difference was; still less what the religion was. But the difference is this; that the Shavians [Of, relating to, or characteristic of George Bernard Shaw or his works] believe in evolution exactly as the old Imperialists believed in expansion. They believe in a great growing and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim; and the mediaeval mystics used the same metaphor and called it Fruition. And as applied to man, it means this; that man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey; that his very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.

The Chief Idea Of My Life
I am not here defending such doctrines as that of the Sacrament of Penance; any more than the equally staggering doctrine of the Divine love for man. I am not writing a book of religious controversy; of which I have written several and shall probably, unless violently restrained by my friends and relatives, write several more. I am here engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines on my own feelings and actions. And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of my childish happiness and my boyish brooding.
And they specially affected one idea; which I hope it is not pompous to call the chief idea of my life; I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted. Thus the Sacrament of Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do it. The gift is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession. In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which may also be called Reality; but it is facing the reality about oneself. When the process is only applied to other people it is called Realism.

Comparison Breeds Contempt: Presumption And Despair
The pessimists of my boyhood, when confronted with the dandelion, said with Swinburne: “I am weary of all hours Blown buds and barren flowers Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.” … But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you.
These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.
Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, “What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?” we are to say like the discontented cabman, “What’s this?” or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, “Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?” Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair.

A Great Deal Of Gratitude Even For A Very Little Good
In short, as it seems to me, it matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyze his power of appreciating what he has got. The real difficulty of man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes; that is the practical problem which the philosopher has to solve.
And it seemed to me at the beginning, as it seems to me now in the end, that the pessimists and optimists of the modern world have alike missed and muddled this matter; through leaving out the ancient conception of humility and the thanks of the unworthy. This is a matter much more important and interesting than my opinions; but, in point of fact, it was by following this thin thread of a fancy about thankfulness, as slight as any of those dandelion clocks that are blown upon the breeze like thistledown, that I did arrive eventually at an opinion which is more than an opinion. Perhaps the one and only opinion that is really more than an opinion. For this secret of antiseptic simplicity was really a secret; it was not obvious, and certainly not obvious at that time. It was a secret that had already been almost entirely left to, and locked up with, certain neglected and unpopular things. It was almost as if the dandelion-tea really were a medicine, and the only recipe or prescription belonged to one old woman, a ragged and nondescript old woman, rather reputed in our village to be a witch.
Anyhow, it is true that both the happy hedonists and the unhappy pessimists were stiffened by the opposite principle of pride. The pessimist was proud of pessimism, because he thought nothing good enough for him; the optimist was proud of optimism, because he thought nothing was bad enough to prevent him from getting good out of it. There were valuable men of both these types; there were men with many virtues; but they not only did not possess the virtue I was thinking of, but they never thought of it. They would decide that life was no good, or that it had a great deal of good; but they were not in touch with this particular notion, of having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good. And as I began to believe more and more that the clue was to be found in such a principle, even if it was a paradox, I was more and more disposed to seek out those who specialized in humility, though for them it was the door of heaven and for me the door of earth.

Why This [Roman Catholic] Theology
And if it be next asked why this [Roman Catholic] theology, I answer here–because it is the only theology that has not only thought, but thought of everything. That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of. Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth, theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything.
A very brilliant Hindu scholar and man of science said to me, “There is but one thing, which is unity and universality. The points in which things differ do not matter; it is only their agreement that matters.” And I answered, “The agreement we really want is the agreement between agreement and disagreement. It is the sense that things do really differ, although they are at one.” Long afterwards I found what I meant stated much better by a Catholic writer, Coventry Patmore: “God is not infinite; He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary.” In short, the other teachers were always men of one idea, even when their one idea was universality. They were always especially narrow when their one idea was breadth. I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one.

Existence Is Still A Strange Thing To Me
I have said that I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness, which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome. Well, to begin with, I put that beginning of all my intellectual impulses before the authority to which I have come at the end; and I find it was there before I put it there. I find myself ratified in my realization of the miracle of being alive; not in some hazy literary sense such as the skeptics use, but in a definite dogmatic sense; of being made alive by that which can alone work miracles.

The Practice Of Confession
I have said that this rude and primitive religion of gratitude did not save me from ingratitude; from sin which is perhaps most horrible to me because it is ingratitude. But here again I have found that the answer awaited me. Precisely because the evil was mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy. I had found only one religion which dared to go down with me into the depths of myself. I know, of course, that the practice of Confession, having been reviled through three or four centuries and through the greater part of my own life, has now been revived in a belated fashion.
The scientific materialists, permanently behind the times, have revived all that was reviled in it as indecent and introspective. I have heard that a new sect has started once more the practice of the most primitive monasteries, and treated the confessional as communal. Unlike the primitive monks of the desert, it seems to find a satisfaction in performing the ritual in evening-dress. In short, I would not be supposed to be ignorant of the fact that the modern world, in various groups, is now prepared to provide us with the advantages of Confession. None of the groups, so far as I know, professes to provide the minor advantage of Absolution. I have said that my morbidities were mental as well as moral; and sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental skepticism and solipsism. And there again I found that the Church had gone before me and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things; so that even madmen might hear her voice; and by a revelation in their very brain begin to believe their eyes.

Learning That Liberty Is Human Dignity
Anybody who cares to turn up the files of the great newspapers, even those supposed to be Radical newspapers, and see what they said about the Great Strikes, and compare it with what my friends and I said at the same date, can easily test whether this is a boast or a brute fact. But anybody reading this book (if anybody does) will see that from the very beginning my instinct about justice, about liberty and equality, was somewhat different from that current in our age; and from all the tendencies towards concentration and generalization. It was my instinct to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor. I did not really understand what I meant by Liberty, until I heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity. It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old.
In short, I had blindly desired that a man should be in possession of something, if it were only his own body. In so far as materialistic concentration proceeds, a man will be in possession of nothing; not even his own body. Already there hover on the horizon sweeping scourges of sterilization or social hygiene, applied to everybody and imposed by nobody [A distant echo of Obama Care?]. At least I will not argue here with what are quaintly called the scientific authorities on the other side. I have found one authority on my side.

My End Is My Beginning
But for me my end is my beginning, as Maurice Baring quoted of Mary Stuart, and this overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of sensation. And there starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.

 G. K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” is available as a series of eight 15-minute MP3s, read by Joshua Christensen.