Paying Attention To The Sky

A reading selection from D.W. Fagerberg’s “The Size of Chesterton’s Catholicism.” I posted one on dogma and doctrine before. This functions as sort of a companion piece: on the authority that produces dogma.

Chesterton connects doctrine and authority because he believes doctrine requires a living authority. Some people eschew authority because they believe that freedom’s increase comes only in proportion to authority’s decrease; from such a starting point, both doctrine and authority are unwelcome impositions. Chesterton finds Catholic doctrine and authority imposing, to be sure, but he experiences them as an imposition in the way gravity imposes upon a body so it can walk the surface of the planet, or logic imposes itself on thought so that conversation can take place, or social rules impose on a society so we can cross a street without harm or enjoy a festive dinner party without anxiety.  The first objective will be to consider the paradox of freedom and limits, the second to organize the roomy images Chesterton uses to describe the Church, and the third to consider why he believes doctrine and authority require a real Church and do not function in the abstract.

We saw that Chesterton images doctrine as a map to a maze. But anyone who has been in a maze knows that the experience involves coming up against walls, fences, or gates which obstruct one’s original intentions. When one encounters such forced modifications of direction, what should be one’s general principle?

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution of law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it way. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.   

The truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
The Thing: Why I Am Catholic

What appear at first to be impositions placed upon us by an authority, turn out to be markers on an uncharted shore (which turns out to be England): someone has pioneered this path and has left warning markers if a certain way has been found dangerous or dehumanizing, or if it ill serves the cause of happiness. The purpose of the markers is the purpose of boundary lines on a playing field. “There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

As usual, Chesterton’s paradox operates by upsetting or inverting our normal assumptions. He suggests that the world conceives liberty “as something that merely works outwards,” whereas he has always “conceived it as something that works inwards.” This house is a strange and marvelous edifice: its inside is bigger than its outside. As the convert peers into the Catholic Church from the outside, “he often feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only, when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside.” The house, as any house, must be designed and ordered in deference to certain laws, just as any house must take account of the law of gravity if it plans to keep the roof from crashing in. But within the limits laid down by authority there is more room for good things to run wild than if they dwelled in a wild, albeit limitless, wasteland. Domestic does not mean servile; it means that by limitations, like that of four walls, a roof and a cozy hearth, a place becomes holy and habitable. The sense of limits stimulates a memory Chesterton carries from childhood, the source of so many of his paradoxes.

It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving stones. in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty’s pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was suite free to run wild…The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is the fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain…This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life.
The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton

Limits permit creativity not only in the child’s game but in an artist’s drawing as well. “It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. . . . The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.” And even on a metaphysical level it is evident that, “every act of will is an act of self’limitation.” At every real moment we are faced with a multitude of potentialities. To act is to make one choice, and to choose one act is to delimit the other possible acts. We are not faced with an infinity of potentialities. This belongs to the infinite Creator, not to finite creatures. “God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them. . . The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely.”

Chesterton really does want good things to run wild, but to do so good things must not themselves become wild things, because goodness lies in being proportioned to an end; disarrayed and erratic things cannot run to their good. That is why there is more room living within reason than without reason. Hence creeds and hierarchies were not organized, “as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.” We can be reasonably sure that a religion which liberates us from authority would leave us lighter, but we fear it would also, at the same time, liberate us from essential human goods the way a robber would leave us lighter one purse of gold.

Therefore Chesterton employs images of roominess to explain his experience of Catholicism as something which expands the mind, rather like the way post beams expand a room by holding up the ceiling, and our second objective in this chapter is to organize these images. He enlarges on the metaphor of size in three directions: the Catholic authoritative tradition makes our thought broader, longer, and taller. “The only difficulty about the evident reawakening of Catholicism in modern England is that conversion calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from a sleep may stretch his arms and legs.”

The only antidote to narrow, heretical thinking is its antipode, Catholic thinking, so it is not surprising that we continue to find images of width at play when Chesterton defines “Catholic.” “Of nearly all the non-Catholic types of our time we can truly say, that any such type must broaden his mind to become a Catholic. He must grow more used than he is at present to the long avenues and the large spaces.” Chesterton propounds this thesis in the context of pointing out that being Catholic involves being catholic, i.e., universal, comprehensive in scope, including or concerning all humankind. Being Catholic obliges involvement with the very world which presence in the Roman Church leads the puritan to charge it with having become too worldly a church. The allegation that the Roman Church is pagan, we remember, means that it leaves open the back door to a very long avenue connecting us with pagan antiquity; and that it leaves open the side door to the town square peopled with all sorts of dubious and disreputable people, tramps and pedlars who make up the life of an open marketplace; and that it has too gaudily decorated the door fronting the (Roman) forum.

Now a great deal has been said by Protestants, naturally enough, and not a little even by Catholics, about the danger of displaying before the world a pomp and triumph that might easily be called worldly. Undoubtedly some harm was done, and some misunderstandings did arise, when the Popes of the Renaissance filled Rome with trophies that might have marked the triumphs of the Caesars. . . . But, taking human nature as a whole, the method is justified; because . . . the Faith belongs to the heights and the open spaces, and the circle of the whole world. . . . That is, it does express the first essential fact that Catholicism is not a narrow thing; that it knows more than the world knows about the potentialities and creative possibilities of the world, and that it will outlast all the worldly and temporary expressions of the same culture.”
The Well and the Shallows

This Church is rather more like a mobile tabernacle than a fixed edifice, in the sense that Catholicism has pitched its tent in many lands and it has not been untouched or undecorated by any one of them: the inhabitants of these lands have brought with them into that ambulatory temple their cultures and philosophies and arts. Catholicism has also pitched its tent in each historical era. “Becoming a Catholic broadens the mind     For instance, many a man who is not yet a Catholic calls himself a Mediaevalist. But a man who is only a Mediaevalist is very much broadened by becoming a Catholic…As a Mediaevalist I am still proudest of the Gothic; but as a Catholic I am proud of the Baroque.”

By such an authoritative tradition we have a longer perspective, too. Making room for so many inhabitants requires an extensible, resilient, and flexible institution which can grow older without growing stiffer. It is by consequence of our mind’s unreflective association that we think of old as stiff and creaky, and the idea of ancient conjures up crumbling columns and faded frescoes. “It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we suppose that old things must be stilt. It is a mere metaphor from bones and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible…A thing as old as the Catholic Church has an accumulated armory and treasury to choose from; it can pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another. It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.” With this armory of insights the Church can save “a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” The defense against thinking narrow thoughts is to think a long time, but every age tends to think only about what it sees, and it only sees what is current, which does not last very long at all. The current opinion is always narrow because it is conditioned by what has gone before. The only way to avoid a “revolt against revolts” and a “reaction against reactions” is to “teach men to stretch their minds and inhabit a larger period of time. . . . It will be more apparent than ever that these jerks of novelty do not create either a progress or an equilibrium.” Such jerks of novelty, yanking history first port, then starboard, Chesterton records in this quick summary.

Perhaps there is really no such thing as a Revolution recorded in history. What happened was always a Counter-Revolution. Men were always rebelling against the last rebels; or even repenting of the last rebellion. This could be seen in the most casual contemporary fashions, if the fashionable mind had not fallen into the habit of seeing the very latest revel as rebelling against all ages at once. The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Woman’s Rights Woman of the ‘80s, with her stiff stick-up collars and strict teetotalism, as the latter was a rebel against the Early Victorian lady of the languid waltz tunes and the album full of quotations from Byron; or as the last, again, was a rebel against a Puritan mother to whom the waltz was a wild orgy and Byron the Bolshevist of his age. Trace even the Puritan mother back through history and she represents a rebellion against the Cavalier laxity of the English Church, which was at first a rebel against the Catholic civilization, which had been a rebel against the Pagan civilization. Nobody but a lunatic could pretend that these things were a progress; for they obviously go first one way and then the other. But whichever is right, one thing is certainly wrong; and that is the modern habit of looking at them only from the modern end.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Chesterton believes there was, beside “mere fashion or mere fatigue. a reasonable plan of the proportions of things” and that the proportionate plan which has the most plausible look to it is the plan of the Catholic faith because it has purposely and conscientiously sought an eternal equilibrium which will persist through the vagarious imbalances of each age. It is not as if only a Catholic can oppose an actual untruth, but Chesterton does think the Catholic is in a better position to oppose potential untruths. There may be allies to the Catholic position on this end of the playing field today, but will they be allies when the attack on human dignity redirects to the other end of the field.

Even the High Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the Puritans attacked. It is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have become a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has never had occasion to think about. If the next movement is the very reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world.
Letter to Maurice Baring

To think really broad thoughts, one must have both history and authority. History alone will not suffice because it is only a record of the aging process, and where something has been does not tell you where it will go, or where it should go. Catholicism is not true because it is old, it is old because its deposit of truth refuses to age. “It is not an old religion; it is a religion that refuses to grow old.” It is not just an old tradition, but an eternal tradition, and “the great difficulty is whether a man can stretch his mind, or (as the moderns would say) can broaden his mind, enough to see the need for an eternal Church.”

Every age has its own outlook. Persons who agree with each other agree on the basis of that outlook, and persons who disagree with each other disagree on the basis of that outlook. The only way to be truly broadened is to take a longer outlook, one where eternity and history have kissed and left behind a mark known as the character of that age. That is what gives certain portions of the Catholic household an alien feel to us. They embody truths in a way that we find difficult to assimilate through our particular gatehouse. The Church holds in its treasure house truths beyond our limited outlook.

That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honor of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahmanism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? . . . Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sects of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy’s tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field.
The Everlasting Man

Thus far Chesterton has claimed that Catholic authoritative tradition is broader than our narrow minds, and longer than our present minds. He finally claims that the height of Catholic authority enables human beings to stand up taller than alternatives which tend to stoop the human being. The size of Catholicism prevents its authority from being dehumanizing.

Chesterton knows that this is not how submission to Catholic authority is commonly perceived. He knows that a modern meaning of “docile” has replaced “willing to be taught” with “obsequiousness.” He knows that servanthood is mistaken for servility, and being refractory (vocab: Obstinately resistant to authority or control) is thought heroic in principle. He knows that “the man who fears to enter the Church commonly fancies that what he feels is a sort of claustrophobia,” even though we have already seen that Chesterton believes this person in fact suffers a sort of agoraphobia. For skeptics, “the typical Catholic act is not going into a great thing like a church, but into a small thing like a confessional box. And to their nightmare fancy a confessional box is a sort of mantrap; and presents in its very appearance same combination of a coffin and a cage.” This thought seems to amuse Chesterton, for he returns to it on other occasions. He describes outsiders looking at the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labeled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them.

Catholic heads are not hung in humiliation, they are bowed in humility. “When a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. .. . He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.” These youngsters attain passage through a doorway into a world bigger inside than it looks from the outside. In this small chamber, the free citizens of the cathedral do not hear Mr. Blatchford’s voice whispering through the cell bars that the will is already determined; neither do they hear Luther’s voice whispering that the will is already depraved nor Calvin’s voice that one’s salvation is already determined. This box wherein penitence can be performed and absolution bestowed is deliberately entered, and it accommodates the magnitudinous divine, human encounter. “It is almost a good thing that nobody outside should know what gigantic generosity, and even geniality, can be locked up in a box, as the legendary casket held the heart of the giant. It is a satisfaction, and almost a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity.”

Catholic tyranny, if that is what those who do not understand want to call it, is less oppressive than Protestant liberty which keeps the authority’s hands off the goods by prohibiting the good itself.

The fact is that Protestant tyranny is totally different from Catholic tyranny; let alone Catholic liberty. It is ineradicably rooted in a total opposite motive and moral philosophy. . . . Protestantism is in its nature prone to what may be called Prohibitionism…I mean that the Protestant tends to prohibit, rather than to curtail or control. . . . When puritans abolish ritualism, it means there shall be no more ritual. When prohibitionists abolished beer, they swore that a whole new generation would grow up and never know the taste of it…Thus there is a fanatical quality, sweeping, final, almost suicidal, in Protestant reforms which there is not even in Catholic repressions.

In short, apart from Catholic liberty, Catholic tyranny is either temporary in the sense of a penance or a fast, or temporary in the sense of a state of siege or a proclamation of martial law. But Protestant liberty is far more oppressive than Catholic tyranny. For Protestant liberty is only the unlimited liberty of the rich to destroy an unlimited number of the liberties of the poor.
The Well and the Shallows

The moralist will have difficulty understanding asceticism because the moralist, as legalist, fails to understand that while there is one path to salvation there may be many paths to holiness. Some heroic saints may make their way to sanctity through celibacy and retreat to the desert; but that is not required of everyone for their salvation. It is the authoritative creed which assures that even while the solitary life in the desert is admired, political life in the city and married life in the home are affirmed. Any human tradition would make more of the heroes who suffered for something than of the human beings who simply benefited by it, Chesterton wrote, but that does not alter the fact that there are more human beingsthan heroes.

This multiplicity is exactly what an authoritative Church protects. The only other alternative is a religion of mood and feeling.

If, in the really Dark Ages, there had been a religion of feeling, it would have been a religion of black and suicidal feeling. It was the rigid creed that resisted the rush of suicidal feeling. The critics of asceticism arc probably right in supposing that many a Western hermit did feel rather like an Eastern fakir. But he could not really think like an Eastern fakir; because he was an orthodox Catholic. And what kept his thought in touch with healthier and more humanistic thought was simply and solely the Dogma. He could not deny that a good God had created the normal and natural world; he could not say that the devil had made the world; because he was not a Manichee. A thousand enthusiasts for celibacy, in the day of the great rush to the desert or the cloister, might have called marriage a sin, if they had only considered their individual ideals, in the modern manlier, and their own immediate feelings about marriage. Fortunately, they had to accept the Authority of the church, which had definitely said that marriage was not a sin.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Creed and authority and doctrine set up the markers within which a teeming variety of paths to sanctification may be explored.

Catholic tyranny is also less oppressive than servitude to the state, Chesterton contends, which is why the Church has always remained at about the same distance from the state and its experiments. “It is the Church that excommunicates; but, in that very word, implies that a communion stands open for a restored communicant. It is the State that exterminates. .

Every Catholic enjoys much more freedom in Catholicism than any Liberal does under Bolshevism or Fascism. . . For the State has returned with all its ancient (errors out of antiquity; with the Gods of the City thundering from the sky.. . and we have begun to understand in what wide fields and playgrounds of liberty, the Faith that made us free has so long allowed us to wander and to play.” Chesterton finds Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw to espouse the more captivating philosophy — and he does not mean enchanting or charming — when they propose repair of social chaos by sweeping sqcial regulations of the kind being championed by the early supporters of communism. “It is the very men who say that nothing can be classified, who say that everything must be codified. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. He prefers an iron rule; as in Russia.”

Whence arises this confusion? How did authority come to figure so prominently in the impression the Catholic Church has made upon the modern mind? Chesterton has a theory. It is for the same reason that the monastic life of renunciation and austerity (which does exist in Catholicism “as a way of asserting the will against the power of nature, of thanking the Redeemer by partially sharing his sufferings, [and] of making a man ready for anything as a missionary or martyr”) also came to figure prominently in the picture held by a non-Catholic about Catholicism: “These happen to be rare in the modern industrial society of the West, outside his communion; and it is therefore assumed that they are the whole meaning of that communion. Because it is uncommon for an alderman to fast forty days, or a politician to take a Trappist vow of silence, or a man about town to live a life of strict celibacy, the average outsider is convinced, not only that Catholicism is nothing except asceticism, but that asceticism is nothing but pessimism.” The latter statement (that asceticism is pessimistic) is not true and the former statement (that Catholicism is nothing but asceticism) is not accurate. Defining Catholicism as asceticism is like naming the peacock tail blue; there is blue in it. But when the modern critic sees this unusual ascetic ideal in an authoritative Church, he is apt to say

“This is the result of Authority; it would be better to have Religion without Authority.” But in truth, a wider experience outside Brixton or Brighton would reveal the mistake. It is rare to find a fasting alderman or a Trappist politician, but it is still more rare to see nuns suspended in the air on hooks or spikes; it is unusual for a Catholic Evidence Guild orator in Hyde Park to begin his speech by gashing himself all over with knives; a stranger calling at an ordinary presbytery will seldom find the parish priest lying on the floor with a fire lighted on his chest and scorching him while he utters spiritual ejaculations…in short, a real knowledge of mankind will tell anybody that Religion is a very terrible thing; that it is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism, or the war with the appetites, is itself an appetite. It can never be eliminated from among the strange ambitions of Man. But it can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority than in Pagan or Puritan anarchy.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Perhaps the reason our day fails to appreciate the service which authority renders in providing reasonable control and sane proportion is due to the fact that we are in very little danger of being overcome by religion as by a raging fire. But the day may come again when authority will have to protect us from ourselves.

Chesterton’s theory is that an outsider necessarily finds the most alien practices the most striking, and because they are the most striking they seem the most important, when in point of fact they may be either unimportant or moderate when balanced within the whole. The theory accounts for many common mistakes. A Catholic doctrine can only be accurately understood when comprehended within the community of doctrines, like Catholic discipline can be comprehended only when it is understood within the whole practice of the religion. “It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious list of things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or non-essentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or the Pope.” It is like hearing the words, but not knowing the grammar which holds the words together, and confusing adjectives for nouns, prepositions for verbs. How important any given practice is to the whole can only be grasped by knowing the whole. Unfortunately, people who “fly into a rage with the Catholic Church” always use an extraordinary diction in which “all sorts of incommensurate things are jumbled up together, so that the very order of the words is a joke.” Chesterton holds that he “never read an attack on Catholicism without finding this ignorant gabble of terms all topsy-turvy There is always some such medley of misused words, in which mitres, misereres, nones, aibs, croziers, virgins and viaticums tumble over each other without the wildest hope that anybody could possibly know what any of them mean.” Thus on one occasion he read a description of the Catholic religion as if the author thought it to consist primarily of rosaries or beads, or crucifixes, or paying for candles or masses. ‘Apparently the first object of a Catholic is to get a candle. If once he can get hold of a candle, and walk about everywhere clasping his candle, he is all right. But if he cannot get a candle, he has the alternative of purchasing a mass; an instrument that is a sort of substitute for a candle.”

On another occasion, Chesterton read a critic’s report that in Rome’s relation with the Russian Uniats (Eastern Christian churches that are in union with the Roman Catholic Church) Rome tolerates “strange heresies and even bearded and wedded clergy.” Chesterton does not go on to tell what strange heresies the author was referring to; perhaps the author did not himself go on to say; but it does not matter because Chesterton’s attention is arrested by the emphasis in those eight words. ‘As somebody tumbling down the stairs bumps upon every step, the writer comes a crash upon every word.” Each word is strange enough when juxtaposed with the other, “but by far the funniest and most fantastic thing in all that fantastic sentence is the word ‘even” because it is by that word that one grasps, finally, what this critic must think Catholicism is if he finds it surprising that Rome would “even” allow aberrant bearded clergy.

There is in the world, they would tell us, a powerful and persecuting superstition, intoxicated with the impious idea of having a monopoly of divine truth, and therefore cruelly crushing and exterminating everything else as error. It burns thinkers for thinking, discoverers for discovering, philosophers and theologians who differ by a hair’s breadth from its dogmas; it will tolerate no tiny change or shadow of variety even among its friends and followers; it sweeps the whole world with one encyclical cyclone of uniformity; it would destroy nations and empires for a word, so wedded is it to its fixed idea that its own word is the Word of God. When it is thus sweeping the world, it comes to a remote and rather barbarous region somewhere on the borders of Russia; where it stops suddenly; smiles broadly; and tells the people there that they can have the strangest heresies they like. . . We might well suppose; therefore, that the Church says benevolently to these fortunate Slays, “By all means worship Baphomet and Beelzebub; say the Lord’s Prayer backwards; continue to drink the blood of infants—nay, even,” and here her voice falters, till she rallies with an effort of generous resolution, “yes, even, if you really must, grow a beard.”
The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic

Chesterton solicits the sympathy of the reader to understand what despair falls upon “the hapless Catholic journalist at such moments.” How can he begin to explain the importance of authority, the hierarchy of truths, the fact “that a married clergy is a matter of discipline and not doctrine, that it can therefore be allowed locally without heresy — when all the time the man thinks a beard is as important as a wife and more important than a false religion?”

The title of the essay in which this appears is “What Do They Think?” and one of Chesterton’s answers to this self-directed question appears in the essay, “What We Think About.” There are critics who do not think, who refuse to think, and so it is easier for them to name all Catholicism by the one feature which they themselves cannot understand, in this case authority. Thus they conclude that Catholics are forbidden to think. Chesterton’s recommended cure: “Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all these people, somehow is that a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, but not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism. We have got to make them see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect. For that is the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe.” How it happened that authority seems antithetical to thought is a riddle, when every child grows up knowing that what authorizes thought is a parent’s authoritative assurance that reality is a reasonable and trustworthy mystery, yet still the impression persists that Catholics have only half a brain because the clergy has shut down the other half. Chesterton himself had held this view of Catholicism until he began comparing what the theosophist said with what the theologian said. Then “dreadful seeds of doubt began to be sown in my mind. I was almost tempted to question the accuracy of the anti-clerical legend;…it seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects.”

How can there be less thought upon becoming a believer when the believer arrives at the conviction that life is worth thinking about because it is not absurd, and when revelation assures the believer of a reasonable hope of understanding the world because the same Creator made both mind and matter? How can there be less thought when the believer has so much more to think about and so many more people to think with? ‘A Catholic has fifty times more feeling of being free than a man caught in the net of the nervous compromises of Anglicanism. . . . He has the range of two thousand years full of twelve-hundred thousand controversies, thrashed out by thinker against thinker, school against school, guild against guild, nation against nation, with no limit except the fundamental logical fact that the things were worth arguing, because they could be ultimately solved and settled.” Could this impression be caused by the perpetually placid and eternally tranquil state of the Catholic Church, we ask, tongue-in-cheek. Then perhaps Chesterton could let the non-Catholic in upon a small secret. “If any one doubts that there is such a thing as Catholic liberty, I think it can do no harm to let him realize that there is such a thing as Catholic controversy; I mean controversy between Catholics.” Mr. Belloc may voice his opinion on matters as a Catholic, and because he is a Catholic, but this does not mean that other Catholics will agree. “On the contrary, each would say something quite different. It is not that they need agree with him; but that he need not agree with them…Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they do agree; and take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else.” Nevertheless, these differences do not rend the house or throw the family into denominational diaspora because of the consanguine understanding that nobody is trying to be an original individual, everybody is trying to express individually what the common fundaments mean. The family is confident that as different theologians with differing theologies draw nearer the beatific unity, they will draw nearer to each other. “The theology of a saint is simply the theism of a saint; or rather the theism of all saints. It is less individual, but it is much more intense. It is concerned with the common origin; but it is hardly an occasion for originality…Anyhow it is but natural that Augustine and Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, all the doctors and the saints, should draw nearer to each other as they approach the divine unity in things.” If, as has been insisted all along, grace perfects nature and does not nullify it, then the Church, as sacrament, does not nullify thought but perfects it. Reason may stand in need of healing every bit as much as the bodies of those who cried out from the roadside as Jesus passed by, but upon being healed reason will not sit still.

In some muddled way people have confused the natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction. They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his health, after an attack of palsy . . . signalizes his healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move.
The Catholic Church and Conversion

Chesterton knows some will ask: “But even supposing that those doctrines do include those truths, why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines? . . . 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?” Furthermore, we might wonder why one cannot take catholic teachings and leave the Roman Catholic Church? After all, Rome is a very tough nut to crack. The third objective in this chapter, then, is to explain why Chesterton thinks one must take the Church with the doctrines.

Part of Chesterton’s apology for why an authoritative institution is required in order to house abstract truths has already been presented: a religion of feeling does not hold the same way a religion of creed and doctrine does; the truths which we take are the ones we recognize but may not be the ones we need; and the truths which we find attractive may require other, less attractive truths in order to work. But the determinative reason why one can neither take truth without doctrine, nor doctrine without the Church, lies in Chesterton’s image of vitality. One can tell where a thing has been after it is dead, but one cannot know where a thing is going to go unless it is alive. By investigating the history of doctrine one can discover where Catholicism has been, but from that data one cannot know where the Catholic Church will go. The Church will know the answer as soon as the question is put, but for that a Catholic imagination is required, and an imagination is not contained in books and creeds; to learn it requires a living teacher. Vital doctrines breed and develop and are capable of protecting from specious outlooks only insofar as they dwell in a living Church which is a startling Church. “Any number of philosophies will repeat the platitudes of Christianity. But it is the ancient Church that can again startle the world with the paradoxes of Christianity.”

Chesterton describes the Church as an armory and treasure house, which is home to the Catholic imagination and which has never thrown any (good) thing away. Like some of our relative’s homes, this house of faith has a packed attic. “For the Catholic commentary on life has gone on so much longer, it has covered so many different social conditions, has dealt so carefully with countless fine shades of metaphysics or casuistry, that it really has a relation to almost any class of speculation that may arise.” Chesterton does not acclaim the Church’s treasure vaults because they are full of history; he is not interested in the past like a museum director (or worse yet, a mausoleum director) who lines the halls with dioramas of Catholicism’s bygone glory days. The treasure vaults are interesting the way the theory of hydraulics is interesting to someone whose city is burning down: from that historic treasury efficient doctrines can be produced — he means doctrines that can produce something, namely, human happiness. And since no one knows in advance under what conditions our quest for our happiness will have to be taken, the full resources of a living, imaginative Church are needed. It is, he confesses, the reason why he finally became Catholic. “The only way really to meet all the human needs of the future is to pass into the possession of all the Catholic thoughts of the past; and the only way to do that is really to become a Catholic…I was converted by the positive attractions of the things I had not yet got, and not by negative disparagements of such things as I had managed to get already.” His move to truth was not from false teaching, but from fractional teachings.

We have heard him say in The Autobiography that he believes other philosophies, in fact, each philosophy, contains a truth, so why isn’t it adequate to stack them together? For the reason a living body is not a stack of cells but an organism, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The collective mind looks all directions at once, in addition to looking in a particular direction at the moment. “Now there is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. . . And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth; and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once. The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future.” Chesterton ungrudgingly admits that catholic truths have taken root outside the Roman Church. He does not think that only Catholicism contains universal truths; but he does think Catholicism contains only universal truths — i.e., truths which are intended for the whole of humanity and the whole of a human life. His reason for becoming Catholic is not that he thinks truths can only be found here, but because they can all be found here. “When the convert has once seen the world like that . . . [he] is not worried by being told that there is something in Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact that he finds everything in something…There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because he is well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual estate that is now open to him.” There are truths yet to be grown on the Catholic estate, and they will be grown when they are needed, because the Catholic possesses the field as well as the fruits. And the field is more important for the future than the fruits, because while this movement or that trend may share the field’s produce, it cannot know what the field is capable of producing next season when the wind will blow from another direction. “The men of the Oxford Movement….did discover the need of Catholic things, but they did discover the need of one thing at a time. They took their pick in the fields of Christendom, but they did not possess the fields; and, above all, they did not possess the fallow fields. They could not have all the riches, because they could not have all the reserves of the religion.”

In order to grow a doctrine from this estate a state of obedience is required, and this for two reasons. First, obedience in the sense of patience is required because if one continually plucks up the developing doctrine to transplant it, it will be killed. Chesterton was convinced of this even before his conversion.

A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree to grow you must plant it finally under some definite spot. It may be (I do not know and I do not care) that Catholic Christianity is just now passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and silence. But I do know this, that when the great flowers break forth again, the new epics and the new arts, they will break out on the ancient and living tree. They cannot break out upon the little shrubs that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are growing.
From an Essay in the Nation

Second, obedience in the sense of faithfulness is required because the truth grown on the Catholic estate is an inherited truth. What makes the Catholic Church unique is not that it has a message to proclaim. “Huxley has a message; Haeckel has a message; Bernard Shaw has a message. It is only necessary to ask the logical question, ‘From whom to raise a thousand things that the writers have never thought of. And it is typical of the confusion, that the same person who says that Haeckel has a message probably goes on to say that he is an entirely original thinker. It may be doubted, in any case, whether the professor desires to be regarded as a messenger boy. But, anyhow, we, none of us, desire a messenger boy who originates his own message.” Grant, then, that this attempt at accuracy in conveying the message requires a certain faithfulness, and this faithfulness requires a certain tenacity, a tenacity which the world interprets as stubbornness. “What puzzles the world, and its wise philosophers and fanciful pagan poets, about the priests and people of the Catholic Church is that they still behave as if they were messengers. A messenger does not dream about what his message might be, or argue about what it probably would be; he delivers it as it is. It is not a theory or a fancy but a fact. . . . All that is condemned in Catholic tradition, authority, and dogmatism and the refusal to retract and modify, are but the natural human attributes of a man with a message relating to a fact.” If understood correctly, the obstinacy signs a humbleness the Church feels about the amount of control it has over the message. Therefore the Church is serious about receiving, preserving, and passing on the whole message, in its entirety.

At this point we can see Chesterton’s sympathy with the democratic life expressed not only in space, but also in time. He makes apology not only for the vulgar Christmas celebration in the street, but for the reception of antique customs handed down by our ancestors. Actually, handing on any tradition is a stirring responsibility, part of “the awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”53 Handing on the faith tradition is a religious species of this very human process. Unless one believes that the Church is reconstituted in every generation by original pentecosts, it is a very necessary process. The Church is the body of Christ, a temple made of human stones, founded at a historical moment and historically maintained by people who have found the tradition true enough to tell it to their children and other sinners. The haughty heretic obtrudes his services, unbidden, and stands at the gateway to the past, sifting out what he considers unbelievable or unacceptable (too religious in the pagan sense or too irreligious in the Puritan sense) and excludes all other doctrines or practices he judges unfit for religious aristocracy, and this strikes Chesterton as distinctly undemocratic.

I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. .. . Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. . . . We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

Tradition means “to hand on,” and the word might better reveal itself as a verb: the faith has been “traditioned.” And the deposit of faith accrues interest; the Church is made roomier by tradition; the more traditional the Church, the greater its amplitude. This is not to say the message changes, if by that one means it changes into a different message; but the rolling stone established upon Peter does gather moss: the unchanged and unchanging message does agglomerate the truths through which it rolls. As the Church moves through history, the faith deposited in it accumulates and preserves the wisdom of the ages. It becomes the rock of ages, for the Church is “not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.” Traditioning does not idolize the past, or fear the future, or cling to the present. The task incumbent on the Church is neither to quick-freeze a bygone era nor bemoan the fate of being cast into a brave new world. The tradition is alive, after all.

Tradition is lived, and doctrines are living things, and therefore the Church is flexible and adaptable to hitherto unknown circumstances and forever young. “The Church had any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being respectfully interred. But the younger generation always began once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when it was knocking at the lid of the coffin, in which it had been prematurely buried.”56 Chesterton identifies five moments in the history of Western civilization when it appeared as though Catholicism was dead. “With the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Human skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. But in each of the five cases it was the dog that died.” Christianity rose after each death because “it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” One cannot take the doctrine without the Church because doctrines or pieties or spiritual movements tend to fossilize as soon as they die, and they die as soon as they are cut off from the living body. One cannot have the teaching without the teacher except as a dead thing.

The Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre.

Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The person who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a person always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to, morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth he has not seen before. .

When your father told you, walking about in the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelled sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say “My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining the deep delicate truths that flowers smell.” No; you believed your father, because you found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth tomorrow as well as today.

I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity…It takes all kinds to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. Celibacy is one flower in my father’s garden, of which I have not yet been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day.

This, then, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it be’ cause the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.

The teachings and the teacher are connected; one cannot take one and leave the other.