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Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man 4 – Ian Ker

March 1, 2013
If the Christian claim seemed mad, `a tall story', still the `madhouse' of Christianity was 'a home to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home.’ The `riddle' remained: that `anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing'.

If the Christian claim seemed mad, `a tall story’, still the `madhouse’ of Christianity was ‘a home to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home.’ The `riddle’ remained: that `anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing’.

Christianity is a revelation, “a vision received by faith; but it is a vision of reality.” That is why it is not a mythology. But nor is it a philosophy “because, being a vision, it is not a pattern but a picture.” In that sense, “it is exactly, as the phrase goes, ‘like life’.”

It does not offer, for example, ‘an abstract explanation’ of the problem of evil. It optimistically says that existence is good, but it also at the same time pessimistically says that there is something wrong with the world.

But, if Christianity is neither a mythology nor a philosophy, it is their “reconciliation because it realization both of mythology and philosophy.” It is both “a true story, a philosophy that is like life.” But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. It provides a philosophical justification for the “normal narrative instinct.”

For, just as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. It is the ‘ordeal of the free man’, and “it is this deep and democratic and story-telling instinct” that “is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies,” whether fatalistic or detached or skeptical or material mechanical or relative.

And this, Chesterton insists, is “why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ came.” The philosophers were the “more rational” certainly, but the priests were more popular because they” told the people stories, the philosophy of which the philosopher did not understand.” This only “came into the world with the story of Christ,” which met the mythological search for romance by “being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story, in which the ideal figure became the historical figure.” 

Chesterton now turns to the history of Christianity, which “has had a series of revolutions and in each of them Christianity has died.”  But because Christianity has “a God who knew the way out of the grave,” it “has died many times” but “risen again.” At the end of all the European revolutions, “the same religion has again been found on top.” The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.  It has “returned again and again in this western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing.”  So often “the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs,” but always “it was the dog that died.”

Both the Oxford Movement, for example, and the French Catholic revival in the nineteenth century were “a surprise, a puzzle.”  Always there have been attempts to dilute Christian doctrine, but “again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.”  Christianity  “has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death through old age.” Nevertheless “it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender.”

Indeed, it seems, “the Church grows younger as the world grows old.”  The Church refuses to go along with “the tide of apparent progress” because it is alive:  “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” On the other hand, “there was many a demagogue or sophist whose wild gestures were in truth as lifeless as the movement of a dead dog’s limbs wavering in the eddying water; and many a philosophy uncommonly like a paper boat, of the sort that it is not difficult to knock into a cocked hat.”

In his conclusion, Chesterton makes us see Christianity afresh as though for the first time, not through making it grotesque, but through invoking the image of the popular newspaper, so despised by the intellectuals, and therefore apparently so ill-suited to his theme. The Gospel, he says, “is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person.”

It was “a piece of good news; or news that seemed too good to be true: It declares that really… there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths: the Man Who Made the World.”

Muslims were simply monotheists “with the old average assumption of men — that the invisible ruler remains invisible,” “along with the customs of a certain culture.” It is “a necessary and noble truth” but not “a new truth.” Confucians and Buddhists again are simply “pagans whose prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal.”  Their “temples and idols and priests and periodical festivals … simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales,” having more sense than Puritans.

But their priests have no sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. “Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.” Ages after the first announcement of the good news, the runners are still running: “They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witness the last proof of the miracle is that `something so supernatural should have become so natural.” But he, Chesterton, has not “minimized the scale of the miracle, as some of our milder theologians think it wise to do.”

On the contrary, he has “deliberately dwelt on that incredible interruption, as a blow that broke the very backbone of history.” He sympathized with Jews and Muslims who considered this to blasphemy: a blasphemy that might shake the world. But it did not shake the world; it steadied the world.’

But the mystery remained: “how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural.”  What seemed at first “so outrageous” was really “so solid and sane.” If the Christian claim seemed mad, “a tall story,” still the “madhouse” of Christianity was “a home to which, age after age, men are continually coming back as to a home.” The “riddle” remained: that “anything so abrupt and abnormal should still be found a habitable and hospitable thing.”

If the whole thing was this `tall story’, then how could it `have endured for nearly two thousand years’? But it has endured, and, as a result, `the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in it, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, then all the world outside. For it was the Christendom that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense.’ And, as Chesterton had argued earlier in the book, “Christianity is at one with common sense; but all history shows that this common sense perishes except where Christianity is there to preserve it.”

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Chesterton‘s The Everlasting Man 3 – Ian Ker

February 28, 2013
Chesterton and wife Frances in 1922

Chesterton and wife Frances in 1922

Instead of the platitudes one associates with moralists, a person reading the Gospels for the first time “would find a number of strange claims…a number of very startling pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful stories.” Instead of platitudes, for instance, about peace, such a reader would find several ideals of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific for any pacifist.

But, on the other hand, our reader would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books. There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ’s attitude towards organized warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers.

Indeed it is another perplexity… that he seems to have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jew: truth is, Chesterton concludes, the Jesus of popular conception is ‘‘a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man’‘and impossible to reconcile with the real Jesus of the Gospels, ‘‘ a strolling carpenter’s apprentice’‘who ‘‘ said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: “Before Abraham was, I am.”

Chesterton gives examples of how it is the Church that explains the riddles of the Gospel. The assertion, for instance, that the meek inherit the earth was not at all “a meek statement’‘, but rather ‘‘a very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability.” But as a prophecy it would one day be fulfilled in monasticism: ‘‘The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates and experiments in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit the earth.”

Again, the story of Martha and Mary found its fulfillment in ‘‘the mystics of the Christian contemplative life.” If the Gospels could be read as though they were ‘‘ as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle and perhaps terrify us as much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity:  “For instance, Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of the eastern courts, said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. If this does not mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made to mean something much more unnatural or uncouth.”

As an example of  “the originality of the Gospel.” Chesterton takes the “exaltation of childhood”, as strong and as startling as any. But the literary style itself of Jesus was also highly original: “It had among other things a singular air of piling tower upon tower by the use of the a, fortiori …”.  And above all, his speaking as though he were divine was absolutely unique: ‘‘ of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made such a claim.

The case of Jesus Christ was unique: only a “monomaniac” could make such a claim, but no one thought that ‘‘ the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile’‘. However, in spite of the Sermon on the Mount, there was a “quality running through all his teachings” that seemed to Chesterton  “to be neglected in most modern talk about them as teachings; and that is the persistent suggestion that he has not really to come to teach’‘– but rather “to die”.

And, when the moment came for him to die, it was “the supremely supernatural act, of all his miraculous life, that he did not vanish,” that he did not miraculously disappear. On that Good Friday, Chesterton notes that it is ‘‘the best things in the world that are at their worst, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization.”

Although ‘‘ Rome was almost another name for responsibility’‘, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate “stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible:  “He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, “What is truth?”

And the Jewish priests who were “proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity… did not know that they themselves had gone blind.” Of the crucifixion itself Chesterton refuses to speak — for

if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never undertand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.

Chesterton had in fact dared to speak of this terrible paradox in Orthodoxy.

When giving Peter authority over his Church, Christ used the two symbols of rock and keys. What he meant by saying that on the Peter he would build his Church was another example of something that  could only fully expand and explain itself afterwards, and even long afterwards.”. But the other image of the keys, Chesterton suggests, “has an exactitude that has hardly been exactly noticed.”

Its “peculiar aptness” lay in the fact that the early “Christian movement” claimed to possess that a key that could unlock the prison of the whole world; and let in the white daylight of liberty.” The Christian creed was like a key in three ways: a key is above all things a thing with a shape. It is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape. The Christian creed is above all things the philosophy of shapes and the enemy of shapelessness.”

Chesterton presses home the analogy:  “A man told that his solitary latchkey had been melted down with a million others into a Buddhist unity would be annoyed. But a man told that his key was gradually growing and sprouting in his pocket and branching into new wards or complications, would not be more gratified.”

Secondly, the point about a key is that it either fits or does fit the lock. If it fits the lock, then it is pointless to ask for ‘‘ a simpler key that has a less ‘‘ fantastic shape’‘. And, thirdly, to complain about the key having the ‘‘elaborate pattern” that is necessary to open the lock is like complaining about Christianity ‘‘being so early complicated with theology’‘.

If Christianity had “faced the world only with the platitudes about peace and simplicity some moralists would confine it to, it would not have had the faintest effect on that luxurious and labyrinthine lunatic asylum’‘.  The creed was complicated, because the problem with the world was “a complicated problem.”

Although it did seem ‘‘ complex” like the key, there was ‘‘ one thing about it that was simple. It opened the door. “The truth was that the “purity” of the creed was “preserved by dogmatic definitions and exclusions.” “It could not possibly have been preserved by anything else.”

The enlightened modern liberals who deride the Athanasian dogma of Co-Eternity of the Divine Son’‘as “a dreadful example of barren dogma” are the same people who like to ‘‘ offer us as a piece of pure and simple Christianity, untroubled by doctrinal disputes … the single sentence, “God is Love”. “But the dogma is there to protect that very sentence.” The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment. Never has the vital importance of defined doctrine been more compellingly expressed:

For if there be a being without beginning, existing before all things, was He loving when there was nothing to be loved? If through that unthinkable eternity He is lonely, what is the meaning of saying He is love? The only justification of such a mystery is the mystical conception that in His own nature there was something analogous to self-expression; something of what begets and beholds what it has begotten. Without some such idea, it is really illogical to complicate the ultimate essence of deity with an idea like love.

It was “the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians that was the trumpet of true Christianity.”

It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colorless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics…. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.

Islam, on the other hand, was ‘‘ a barbaric reaction against that very humane complexity… that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that creed a sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilization.” For Islam was “a product of Christianity; even if it was a byproduct; even if it was a bad product.”

There was one thing that pagan mythology and philosophy had in common: “both were really sad. “Christianity brought hope into the world. And it was a dogmatic Christianity that did this because of its very liberality. Modem theological liberals cannot understand that “the only liberal part of their theology is really the dogmatic part.”

If dogma is incredible, it is because it is incredibly liberal. If it is irrational, it can only be in giving us more assurance of freedom than is justified by reason. “The doctrine of free will may seem irrational, but it is hardly liberality to deny personal freedom. Without the dogmas of dogmatic Christianity, monotheism turns into monism and consequently into despotism:

It is precisely the unknown God of the scientist, with his impenetrable purpose and his inevitable and unalterable law that reminds us of a Prussian autocrat making rigid plans in a remote tent and moving mankind like machinery. It is precisely the God of miracles and of answered prayers who reminds us of a liberal and popular prince, receiving petitions …

It is the Catholic, who has the feeling that his prayers do make a difference, when offered for the living and the dead, who also has the feeling of living like a free citizen in something almost like a constitutional commonwealth. It is the monist who lives under a single iron law who must have the feeling of living like a slave under a sultan.

Indeed I believe that the original use of the word suffragium, which we now use in politics for a vote was that employed in theology about a prayer. The dead in Purgatory were said to have the suffrages of the living. And in this sense, of a sort of right of petition to the supreme ruler, we may truly say that the whole of the Communion of Saints as well as the whole of the Church Militant, is founded on universal suffrage.

What theological liberals really mean is that “dogma is too good to be true ‘‘too liberal to be likely.”

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Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man 2 – Ian Ker

February 27, 2013
Chesterton explained that pagan mythology was “a search” that combined “a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt”. And yet there remained “an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localizing his god”. It was all right to call these pagan myths “foreshadowings” so long as one remembered that “foreshadowings are shadows”: “And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.”

Chesterton explained that pagan mythology was “a search” that combined “a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt”. And yet there remained “an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localizing his god”. It was all right to call these pagan myths “foreshadowings” so long as one remembered that “foreshadowings are shadows”: “And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.”

The pagan was not an unbeliever like an atheist, but neither was he a believer like a Christian. He felt “the presence of powers” about which he could only guess. His myths were never “a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion”. Certainly, they satisfied “some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality”. But, although myths provided the pagan with “a calendar”, they did not “provide him with a creed”.

When St Paul was in Athens, he discovered that the Greeks had “one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods.” It was only when St Paul told them who it was “they had ignorantly worshipped” that “the real break in history” came. Paganism, then, was “an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone” and without the restraints of reason. For reason was “something separate from religion, even in the most rational of these civilizations”. Mythology and philosophy ran “parallel” and did not “mingle till they met in the sea of Christendom”.

But nevertheless the pagan “found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things”. The pagan knew that when he worshipped he was “doing a worthy and virile thing”: he was “doing one of the things for which a man was made”. But the fact remained that it was an “imaginative experiment” that “began with imagination”, and therefore there was “something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it”. This mockery became “the almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy”.

It was not surprising that one “feels throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust.” For pagan mythology was “a search” that combined “a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt.” And yet there remained “an indestructible instinct, in the poet as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localizing his god.”

It was all right to call these pagan myths “foreshadowings” so long as one remembered that “foreshadowings are shadows”: “And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces shape but not texture. These things were something like the real thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were different.”

For polytheism was “never a view of the universe satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I think it is truer to call it the imaginative side.” Precisely, then, because “mythology only satisfied one mood”, the pagan “turned in other moods to something totally different”.

But the mythology and the philosophy never collided and “really destroyed the other”, nor was there ever “any combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a rival of the priest.”

Chesterton now begins his task of trying to make us see Christianity afresh as though for the first time, however grotesquely he has to depict it. And first of all he points out that the whole of Christianity rests on this “single paradox” — “that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.” Every Christmas proclaims an “association … between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars”.

And “this combination of ideas has emphatically… altered human nature.” “It would, be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast.”

Again, Christmas, that feast so important to Chesterton, “is in one sense simple thing”, but, like all the truths of Christianity, “it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and drama.”

Christmas celebrates “the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills”, when “the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicing in a fortress or an outlaw”s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out”. The “subterranean chamber” where Jesus was born was literally “a hiding-place from enemies”, enemies who “were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky”:

It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance in enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world, of  shaking the towers and palaces from below…

Jesus’ followers, too, were paradoxically both “despised and … feared”:

Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrand slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical  society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.

What Chesterton calls “the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea” was “already crystallized in the first Christmas story”. The “three distinct and commonly contrasted things.. . are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one.”

The first is the human instinct for a heaven that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest… The second element is a philosophy larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modern agnostic only looks through one.. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error.

This “trinity of truths” was “symbolized … by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children”.

Chesterton now turns to the figure of Christ himself. And he begins by pointing out that there is the obvious difficulty that the New Testament is no longer the New Testament: “It is not at all easy to realize the good news as new.” Challenging the usual stereotypes, Chesterton insists on us looking at the actual person we read about in the Gospels:

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character.

This, Chesterton insists, “is … very nearly the reverse of the truth”.

The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts.

But they are very far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery ever represents him as uttering. The popular imagery is inspired by a perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God…. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath.

But if we turn to the Gospels themselves, what do we find? Somebody reading them for the first time, suggests Chesterton, would find that “part of the interest” of the story “would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained”: “It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own.”

Nor is there anything “meek and mild” about Jesus the exorcist: “It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac.” Indeed, the real Christ of the Gospels is “actually more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church”. Then there are the “puzzles” in “a very strange story”, like “that long stretch of silent life of Christ up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively impressive”.

How is it that “he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have had most”? The truth is that the Gospel story is not “easy to get to the bottom of”. It is anything but the “simple Gospel” that people like to contrast with the Church: “Relatively speaking, it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism. As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as it stands is almost a book of riddles.”

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Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man 1 – Ian Ker

February 26, 2013
Chesterton begins The Everlasting Man, one of the two or three greatest of his half-dozen or so major works, by pointing out that in a post-Christian age it is very difficult to see Christianity for what it is: post-Christians `still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

Chesterton begins The Everlasting Man, one of the two or three greatest of his half-dozen or so major works, by pointing out that in a post-Christian age it is very difficult to see Christianity for what it is: post-Christians `still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

H. G. Wells’s best-selling The Outline of History had been published in serial paperback form in 1919 and then as a hardback in 1920. Wells’s `outline’ was quite simple: through the centuries man had evolved from a primitive animal form to the civilized man of the twentieth century who would finally establish world peace and prosperity. The book was a best-seller — although its view of history was certainly rather remarkable, given its publication only one year after the end of the horrors of the First World War and ten years before the Great Depression began with the Wall Street crash of 1929, only to be followed ten years later by the Second World War. Wells had naturally been dismissive of Christianity, attacking the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, published in September 1925, was at least in part a response to Wells.

Chesterton begins The Everlasting Man, one of the two or three greatest of his half-dozen or so major works, by pointing out that in a post-Christian age it is very difficult to see Christianity for what it is: post-Christians `still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. They are in a state of `reaction’: ‘They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. They are not `far enough away not to hate ‘Christianity, nor are they `near enough to love it’. And so, `while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian’.

But the `worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic … ‘. The `anti-clericalism’ of post-Christians `has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet.’ It is only when one is `impartial’ that one can `know why people are partial to it’. And Chesterton `seriously’ recommends `those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession’ to imagine the Apostles as if they were pagans, `to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages’.

Living in a country full of churches, post-Christians need `to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda’ rather than `to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside … or to go outside and forget’. Chesterton is quite candid about his apologetic method: to `invoke … the imagination that can see what is there’. For Christianity makes very serious claims that it would be absurd to dismiss with contempt. Consequently, `when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence’.

If that is not possible, then `we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.’ The `heavy bias of fatigue’ made it `almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar’.

If, for example, one has lost `the sane vision’ of who man is, then one `can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realizing how strange an animal he is’. In short, `it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal’. Only then can we recover our sense of `wonder’ at the nature of man. And so, Chesterton’s avowed purpose is `to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful’.

For his aim is `to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things’. When both Christianity and humanity are `seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things’.

After this introduction, Chesterton does indeed begin with man himself, about whom the `simplest truth. is that he is a very strange being; almost thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or from something larger than itself.’ In the case of religion, it was much more likely that monotheism preceded polytheism, that `religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced’: `Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed.

There is very good reason to suppose many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a secret dissipation.’ In paganism God `is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident’. He is `the higher deity’ who `is remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery’.

What seemed clear to Chesterton was that `there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.’ Polytheism itself seems often to have consisted of `the combination of several monotheisms’, while Confucianism seems to be `a rather vague theism’ in which `a simple truth’ seems to have `receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true’.

The fact that there was `a strange silence’ about God certainly suggested `the absence of God’ — but not necessarily the `non-existence’ of God: there was `a void’ but not `a negation’. There was `an empty chair’ or rather `an empty throne’. And Chesterton invokes his favorite image of the back: `it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on the world.’ There was `in a very real sense the presence of the absence of God’, which one could feel, for example, `in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry’.

There was the implication that the gods of the pagans were `ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has faded into a Fate’. For `what was truly divine’ seemed `very distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their minds’. But what was quite clear was that they knew there was something wrong with the world: `These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else…’. Still, God `really’ had been `sacrificed to the Gods; in a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for him’.

Chesterton rejects any glib notion of religious pluralism: `We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are really parallel.’ But these so-called religions — which `we choose to lump together’ — `do not really show any common character’. True, Islam followed Christianity and `was largely an imitation of Christianity.

But the other eastern religions; or what we call religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each other.’ Indeed, Confucianism was not even a religion, and could no more be compared with Christianity than `a theist with an English squire’. Christianity was bound up with the idea of a Church, while Confucianism and Buddhism were `great things’ but could not be called ‘Churches’ – any more than the English and French peoples could be called `nomads’ although they were `great peoples’.

The truth was that, `humanly speaking’, `the world owes God to the Jews’. And the world also owed it to the Jews that they refused `to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions’: `It is obvious indeed that his [God's] followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin.’

While the rest of the world `melted’ into a `mass of confused mythology,’ this God of the Jews, `who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind’. It was the Jews who had enabled the world, which `would have been lost’ otherwise, `to return to that great original simplicity of a single  authority in all things’.

It was to this `secretive and restless nomadic people’ that the world owed `the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God’. An example of the secretiveness of the Jews, who `stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared’, was the way they had `kept a thing like the Book ofJob out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid.’ And Chesterton cannot resist the ultimate paradox: `He [the God of the Jews] was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe.’

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Psalm 8: The Greatness Of God, The Dignity Of Man

February 1, 2013

How great is your name, Lord, through all the earth.

How great is your name, O Lord our God,

through all the earth!

Your majesty is praised above the heavens;

on the lips of children and of babes

you have found praise to foil your enemy,

to silence the foe and the rebel.

When I see the heavens, the work of your hands,

the moon and the stars which you arranged,

what is man that you should keep him in mind,

mortal man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him little less than a god;

with glory and honour you crowned him,

gave him power over the works of your hand,

put all things under his feet.

All of them, sheep and cattle,

yes, even the savage beasts,

birds of the air, and fish

that make their way through the waters.

How great is your name, O Lord our God

through all the earth!

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,

as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

world without end.

Amen.

How great is your name, Lord, through all the earth.

The Impulse Of Art And The Uniqueness Of Man
Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature.

In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man.

But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle….The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts.

He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.

Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

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Christopher Hitchens’ Dying Days With G. K. Chesterton 4 – Ralph C. Wood

January 28, 2013
Chesterton's understanding of human existence is as unsentimental as it is profound. He envisions the invisible and unknowable God as having assumed human form in Jesus Christ -- the Lord who drank the cup of suffering in order to heal our sinful desire to reject it our wish to avoid the paradoxical nearness of good and evil. Most sin results from our refusal, like Gregory's, to travel this troublous path, seeking easier and more obvious ways, whether as individuals or communities. Martyrdom, Chesterton suggests, is the glad and joyful willingness to die by participating in God's own affliction.

Chesterton’s understanding of human existence is as unsentimental as it is profound. He envisions the invisible and unknowable God as having assumed human form in Jesus Christ — the Lord who drank the cup of suffering in order to heal our sinful desire to reject it our wish to avoid the paradoxical nearness of good and evil. Most sin results from our refusal, like Chesterton’s character Gregory’s, to travel this troublous path, seeking easier and more obvious ways, whether as individuals or communities. Martyrdom, Chesterton suggests, is the glad and joyful willingness to die by participating in God’s own affliction.

Despite Chesterton’s slaughter of perhaps the most sacred of all Enlightenment bovines, Hitchens might have found a strange point of contact in Chesterton’s idea of divine presence in the world. In God Is Not Great and elsewhere, Hitchens heaps scorn on the “God” whom William Blake ridiculed as Old Nobodaddy — namely, the Big Guy in the Sky who jumps in and out of his creation like a heavenly factotum, answering the imperatives of those whose pleas are sufficiently abject, managing the universe like a divine designer, and thus appearing all too akin to Feuerbach’s divinity, the deity invented all too much in our own image.

Hitchens fails to discern that thoughtful Christians also abominate such a heavenly projection of human desire. For him, however, it is ludicrous to believe in either a Creator or Redeemer when the world is so evidently a botched job: “Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.”

“Unhappiness and disorder,” especially as they derive from the natural world, are Chesterton’s own native ground. “Nightmare” is the single most frequently occurring trope in the whole of his work. It occurs most notably in his only novel that can be likened to a masterpiece. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). It’s subtitle, “A struggle with Nightmare,” refers to Chesterton’s own struggle with nihilism during the Mauve Decade of the 1890s, when such decadents as Beerbohm, and Lytton Strachey dominated British literary culture. Chesterton was driven almost to suicide by their mockery of all morality. He also feared that the Impressionists may have been right — that everything is merely an affair of veils and shadows, mirages and chimeras. His lifelong spiritual horror is expressed most memorably by the novel’s protagonist:

Was there anything apart from what it seemed? …. Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood … that final skepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Syme’s fear that the cosmos constitutes a huge Void, an infinite Nada that comes from Nada and returns to it, is actually worsened by the novel’s resolution. Syme had thought himself to be a double agent in the employ of Sunday, the master of six so-called “philosophical policemen.” Sunday has recruited these six detectives so that they might pose as anarchists and thus subvert a cell of bomb-throwers by unmasking their nihilist notions no less than their terrorist plots. Each of the six thought-sleuths has been given a secret code name matching the days of the week; Syme is thus “the man who was Thursday.” Yet in the end Syme discovers that the other alleged anarchists are, like him, counterspies of ideas!

The macabre quality of the novel derives from our not knowing who is good and who is evil, or even how we might distinguish between them. At the same time, we are made to enjoy the many hilarious undeceptions of these would-be deceivers. Mime and slapstick are piled atop the farcical and the grotesque, in a veritable farrago of nonsensical incidents whose implausibility is their essence. Most outrageous of all is the revelation that the Prime Detective is also the Presiding Anarch — a single figure named Sunday. The one who seemed to be the embodiment of good is the same as one who seemed to be the quintessence of evil.

In a mock-epic chase, Sunday mocks his pursuers as if he were an unfeeling prankster, a cat playing with the mouse that it will soon devour. Chesterton makes clear that here Sunday is wearing the mask of Nature, the visor of the brutal Darwinian realm that, as Tennyson famously said. remains “red in tooth and clan, Far from being a distant Newtonian divinity, he is utterly near, too close to identify with anything created, yet invisibly present in the roughshod and quite impersonal actions of Nature.

Hence the novel’s real terror, a fright that might have attracted a more patient atheist than Christopher Hitchens. Like the ancient patristic theologians, Chesterton instinctively understood that our first knowledge of God must always remain apophatic (vocab: apophatic – of or relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not (such as `God is unknowable’): we know who God is by knowing who he is not. He transcends and negates every human category, even being itself:

“I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some wave about to arch above them and break. “You want to know what I am, do you? …. I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the topmost cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall still be a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf — kings and sages, and poets and law-givers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay.”

Ker comes close to discerning the significance of this most controversial scene, and yet he finally fails to see that, when Sunday at last cataphatically reveals himself, he no longer appears as the mask of darkness but as the visage of light.

“His face frightened me,” Gabriel Syme confesses, “as it did everyone; but not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful, because it was so good.” The face of divine goodness is terrible in its beauty because it also frightening in its truth. Syme thus admits that evil often produces unintended good, just as good often becomes the occasion for inadvertent evil.

Such contradictions inhere in God’s good creation, Syme shouts, not in lament but praise. The world’s endemic suffering is not the mark of its godlessness; such affliction is indeed the will of God — paradoxical and exceedingly difficult though this claim must surely remain. Only “by tears and torture,” only in being “broken upon the wheel,” only in “descend[ing] into hell,” Syme affirms, can we both discern and embrace the deepest and truest things — bravery and goodness and glory. To reject this dark admixture of good and evil prompts us to pluck the tares from the wheat, to winnow evil from good according to our own measure, to seek perfection but wreak destruction.

A single character refuses to acknowledge the paradox that only in anguish do we encounter life in its otherwise unfathomable goodness. Julian Gregory, the true nihilist and sole terrorist who never took a code name, alleges that Sunday has permitted his speciously appointed detectives to suffer this contradiction while remaining immune from their misery and distress. “’Have you’ [this true anarch] cried in a dreadful voice, ‘have you ever suffered?’” Demanding a theodicy from Sunday, Gregory is given something at once far better and far worse – a verbal theophany amidst darkness such as occurred at Mt. Sinai and again at Mt. Golgotha:

As [Gregory] gaze, the great face [of Sunday] grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain [Julian] seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?”

Chesterton prepares readers for this stunning climax when, early in the novel, the disguised Sunday recruits Syme as a double agent. Syme complains that he is both inexperienced and unfit for such a difficult calling. Sunday replies that Syme’s willingness to serve is quite sufficient. “I don’t know any profession,” Syme again objects, “of which merely willingness is the final test.” “I do,” Sunday replied — “martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”

Such jaunty exchanges lie at the heart of Chesterton’s darkly comic novel. His understanding of human existence is as unsentimental as it is profound. He envisions the invisible and unknowable God as having assumed human form in Jesus Christ — the Lord who drank the cup of suffering in order to heal our sinful desire to reject it our wish to avoid the paradoxical nearness of good and evil. Most sin results from our refusal, like Gregory’s, to travel this troublous path, seeking easier and more obvious ways, whether as individuals or communities. Martyrdom, Chesterton suggests, is the glad and joyful willingness to die by participating in God’s own affliction.

This is no ventriloquizing of Newman at his most `dogmatic.” This is dogma plumbed to its ultimate depths. To rob Hitchens of his claim that “Jesus is Santa Claus for adults” is like stealing candy from babies. It is dangerous for Christians to have such unworthy opponents, lest a smug self-righteousness result. Even though he sometimes falters, as when he glorifies allegedly Christian warfare, Chesterton will endure because he engages not with atheistic midgets but with the equivalents of what Paul Ricoeur called the giant “masters of suspicion”: Nietzsche and Marx and Freud.

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Christopher Hitchens’ Dying Days With G. K. Chesterton 3 – Ralph C. Wood

January 25, 2013
The church's living tradition insures that its doctrines do not become fixed and static. For Chesterton as for Newman, Christian doctrine stays the same by changing. It remains true to itself precisely by way of its organic growth. The acorn of Christian revelation continues perpetually to ramify into the great oak tree of dogma.

The church’s living tradition insures that its doctrines do not become fixed and static. For Chesterton as for Newman, Christian doctrine stays the same by changing. It remains true to itself precisely by way of its organic growth. The acorn of Christian revelation continues perpetually to ramify into the great oak tree of dogma.

The most malignant of Hitchens’ charges is that Chesterton’s theology is at once unoriginal and triumphalist. It is true that Ker places Chesterton in a theological trajectory that begins with John Henry Newman. Yet Hitchens misses — as does Ker himself at times — the significance of this link to the great Victorian convert to Catholicism. For it makes Chesterton more of a Catholic modernist than a reactionary.

Newman revived modern Catholicism in a variety of ways, not least of all in his conviction that Christian doctrine is constantly and coherently developing. In the historical realities of Christ and his church, the utterly unknowable God definitively reveals himself. Far from being desiccated intellectual propositions, the church’s dogmas are the very source of its life.

So was Chesterton also convinced that the church’s living tradition insures that its doctrines do not become fixed and static. For Chesterton as for Newman, Christian doctrine stays the same by changing. It remains true to itself precisely by way of its organic growth. The acorn of Christian revelation continues perpetually to ramify into the great oak tree of dogma.

What is originally embryonic undergoes constant maturation, as the mind is freed, not fixed, by exploring the unfathomable depths of dogma. The church does at large, therefore, what every person does in small — it thinks dogmatically, as Chesterton declared in one of his earliest books, Heretics (1905)

Man may be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating them all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backward into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

Chesterton’s high estimate of dogma gives him a low regard for tolerance. Lest this seem to make him a troglodyte, it must be noted that he anticipates what Michael Walzer, Stephen Carter, and many others have identified as the hidden agenda underlying the chief Enlightenment ideal. Tolerance keeps an allegedly neutral peace when it is in fact an exercise of force: “The language of tolerance,” declared Carter in 1994, “is the language of power.” The tolerator grants liberty to the tolerated only when the latter behaves tolerantly, i.e., in accord with the tolerator’s notion of what is safe and appropriate and acceptable.

Virtually from the outset of his writing career in the first decade of the 20th century, Chesterton scorned this kind of tolerance, for it usually means that the tolerated is never taken seriously. Hence his tart aphorism against emptying the public square of both thought and belief. Ker curiously cites none of these, and Hitchens would surely have gagged on all of them: “Modem toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent’s faith is to say I must not discuss it.” Tolerance is thus “the virtue of a man without convictions.” It ignores the most basic truth of all ingestion, whether in thinking or masticating: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

“To `choose’ dogma and faith over doubt and experience,” Hitchens replied, “is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.”

As a lover of knight errantry, Chesterton sought entrance to what the late James Wm. McClendon called “the tournament of narratives” — i.e., an open arena where no traditions are automatically excluded but all are seriously engaged. Our story-borne convictions must persuasively confront each other, even to the point of conversion.

The Ball and the Cross, though Ker gives it short shrift, is far and away Chesterton’s finest fictional embodiment of such lively engagement, as well as a hugely amusing send-up of the tolerance that would become even more oppressive during the intervening century.

The novel features James Turnbull, an atheist journalist (Hitchens avant la lettre!), who is set in quite deadly opposition to Evan McIan, a devout Christian. For Turnbull the physicalist, the causal laws of nature can refute all miracles. For McIan the believer, by contrast, miracles are built into the very fabric of the cosmos. To demonstrate that their disagreement has huge moral no less than religious consequence, they vow to fight until someone finally wins, if only in a fatal sword-duel.

Yet the police and the press and the judiciary of hyper-tolerant England are appalled by the prospect of such a barbaric contest, and are thus bent on stopping it. Hence the riotous irony of two intellectual pugilists having to befriend each other as they flee the thought-police while seeking to have their decent debate. In the course of their contretemps, they discover the truth of Chesterton’s crisp dictum: “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” Having learned how dreadfully they might have gone wrong, MacIan and Trumbul at last abandon their rivalistic desire to win, whether by sword or by argument. To avoid plot spoiling, let it be said that in the end these dread enemies learn not to tolerate each other but to become the most hospitable of friends.

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Christopher Hitchens’ Dying Days With G. K. Chesterton 2 – Ralph C. Wood

January 24, 2013
Many leading literary figures of the day, from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, acknowledged that this so-called Great War constituted a tectonic cataclysm in Western moral and religious life. It inaugurated the Age of Ashes and the Culture of Death. Both Chesterton and Hitchens unabashedly supported wars in their time (Chesterton WWI, Hitchens The Iraq War)

Many leading literary figures of the day, from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, acknowledged that the so-called “Great War” constituted a tectonic cataclysm in Western moral and religious life. It inaugurated the Age of Ashes and the Culture of Death. Both Chesterton and Hitchens unabashedly supported wars in their time (Chesterton WWI, Hitchens The Iraq War)

Chesterton’s Politics
The allegation that Chesterton’s politics is sinister is far more worrisome. Hitchens labels Chesterton as a “reactionary” for proposing a political program called Distributism — a name he derived from Catholic teaching on distributive justice. This is ludicrous. Chesterton was in fact a radical in his economics.

Together with Hilaire Belloc and others, he worked during the 1920s to establish a drastic alternative to socialism and capitalism alike. They spurned privatistic and individualist capitalism as built on a profoundly anti-communal devotion to profit making at the neighbor’s expense. They also rejected wealth-sharing socialism as surrendering the most important personal and local endeavors — family, health, education — to the state. Hence their revolutionary idea of redistributing property — including joint ownership of factories and companies — rather than money.

Though in many respects unfeasible, Distributism is hardly a reactionary notion. On the contrary, it is being considered in contemporary China, where the government is seeking to aid illiterate and impoverished peasants, not by training them to do factory work in huge impersonal cities but urging them to remain on lands which they will now own, to use their agricultural earnings for developing better farming methods and for educating their children, and thus to lift the grinding burden of mindless work (the only virtue of which, as Marx famously declared, is to make one stoop-shouldered).

By far the most disturbing of Hitchens’ charges against Chesterton’s politics is that “his Catholicism made him morally frivolous about Hitlerism.” Hitchens rightly seizes on Chesterton’s failure to question the concordat that the future Pope Pius XII signed with Hitler in 1933. He is also correct to denounce Chesterton’s attempt to trace the rise of Hitlerism to the Protestant Reformation, specifically to Bismarckian Prussia — when of course Hitler was a lapsed Austrian Catholic who sought to suborn Protestantism and Catholicism alike to his own nefarious purposes.

It is true as well that Chesterton momentarily flirted with the Fascism of Benito Mussolini. But about Hitler himself, Chesterton never had any doubt. To make his polemical point, Hitchers ignores Ker’s clear evidence that Chesterton had nothing but scorn for the Nazis and all their pomps: the proud paganism of Aryan race-religion, the petty tribalism of modern Teutonic myth-making, and the vicious nationalism of Germany Ober alles.

Chesterton’s Fight Against Eugenics
In his selective and tendentious reading of Chesterton’s politics, Hitchens never even mentions the moral test that Chesterton most nobly met. Long before he became a Catholic, Chesterton dealt with the ghoulish peril that still threatens late-modern life: eugenics and the elimination of unwanted life.

Already in 1913, Winston Churchill and others had proposed a Mental Deficiency Bill. Churchill had been “inspired” by the example of Indiana in forcibly sterilizing its “mentally unfit.” Though he too sought such compulsory sterilizations, Churchill finally had to settle for the legal confinement of those under twenty-one.

Even so, such “unworthy sorts” would be deterred from propagating their retrograde kind. Without such measures, Churchill added, their rapid increase results in “a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, [and thus] constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”

Eugenics was embraced by many progressive church officials, writers, and thinkers of Chesterton’s day. Among the British advocates of the idea that the human species can be improved by selective breeding, like race horses, were G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, not to mention William Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. American enthusiasts included Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, and, most notoriously, Oliver Wendell Holmes with his infamous protest that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Though he died in 1936, Chesterton prophesied that Hitler would soon employ eugenics for his own race-cleansing regime. Once the state acquires the power to spay and geld those deemed as “inadequately” intelligent, then a holocaust can be generated for others regarded as equally “unproductive”: the congenitally defective, the incurably ill, the elderly infirm, as well as the innocent unborn, the socially recalcitrant, the gypsy vagabonds, the Jewish “parasites.”

Chesterton saw it all coming, and he named the canker at the core of our dread disease. It was not that civil rights were being violated. As Alasdair Maclntyre would make clear a half-century later, the notion of rights is an Enlightenment chimera built on a power-based contractual understanding of human relations — not on any transcendently ordered community grounded in mutual trust and obligation.

The real evil of eugenics springs, as Chesterton discerned, from our increasingly regnant belief that human life has no intrinsic worth, no inviolable divine dignity. When it is thus diminished to mere utility and function, it can also be made into the malleable clay of social experiment and human convenience. A purely physicalist pseudo-science thus becomes the religion of the omnicompetent state. Hence the immense currency of Chesterton’s prophecy from 1922, announced in Eugenics and Other Evils:

The creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not only by pilgrims but by policemen – that creed is the great and disputed system of thought which…has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.

This is hardly to say that Chesterton’s politics were beyond reproach. Both Hitchens and Ker fail to remark what is exceedingly troubling about his unrelenting defense of World War I as Britain’s finest hour. In recounting the details of Chesterton’s life during the years 1914-18, Ker attends mostly to minor concerns, without mentioning that many leading literary figures of the day, from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, acknowledged that this so-called Great War constituted a tectonic cataclysm in Western moral and religious life. It inaugurated the Age of Ashes and the Culture of Death. Chesterton, by contrast, remained an unrepentant English nationalist, virtually purblind to the horrors of that most sanguinary of European-American wars: 10 million killed outright, 20 million seriously wounded, 5 million widowed, 9 million orphaned, 20 million left as refugees.

Having fought at Verdun and having nearly died of trench fever, J. R. R. Tolkien came to discern that der totale Krieg is the scourge of modem life. The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s epic repudiation of total war, whereas Chesterton remained content with his rather callous jest when asked why this 38-year old patriot wasn’t “out at the Front.” “If you’ll view me from the side,” he smartly replied, “you’ll see that I am indeed `out at the front.” Three years earlier he had published his rollicking celebration of the Catholic victory over the Ottoman Turks in The Battle of Lepanto. It was for him a holy war, a modern crusade that saved European Christendom from the Muslim menace.

The power of Chesterton’s poem cannot be denied. Only the most ardent pacifist can fail to be stirred by the four-beat palpitations of Chesterton’s couplets, with their alliterative anapests and thumping dactyls. Here the Holy League of the Catholic maritime states led by the Spanish knight of Austria sink the Turkish galleys and set free their enslaved Christian oarsmen:

Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labor under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free.

Yet while Chesterton jubilantly celebrates the Catholic victory as resulting in large part from the intercession of the Virgin Mary, he at least does not have the Blessed Lady wield a weapon.

Eleven years later, in The Ballad of St. Barbara, Chesterton would celebrate the Allied victory at the Battle of the Marne by praising the patron saint of artillerymen as she blasts holes in the German palisades: “St. Barbara of the Gunners, with her hand upon the gun.” One can only wonder why Hitchens doesn’t attack Chesterton’s war-mongering. Perhaps it was that Chesterton had been an early opponent of the British incursion into South Africa during the Boer War. Perhaps Hitchens was also embarrassed to call out Chesterton on war when he himself had so vehemently supported the U.S. incursion into Iraq.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, Jousting, Ralph C. Wood | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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Faith: A Perspective From Hebrews 11 – Derek Jeter

September 17, 2012

David is a life-size marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The sculpture was part of a commission to decorate the villa of Bernini’s patron Cardinal Scipione Borghese – the Galleria Borghese – where it still resides today. It was completed in the course of seven months from 1623 to 1624. The subject of the work is the biblical David, about to throw the stone that will bring down Goliath, which will allow David to behead him. Relating to earlier works on the same theme, it is also revolutionary in its implied movement and its psychological depth.

Hebrews 11 is a discussion of faith with citations from the Old Testament of those who served as exemplars of the faith.

The opening statement of Hebrews 11:1 is used often as a definition of faith “Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.” “Assurance” elsewhere translated as the “substance” of things hoped for, connotes that the faith in a believer’s soul, a gift of God’s grace, actually brings this reality into his existence for him. The things hoped for are all of those blessings, temporal and eternal, that make up the inheritance of the faithful, the deposit of faith that rests with the Church: fides quae creditor, the objective content of faith.

The “conviction of things not seen” is one of the recurring themes of Hebrews 11 as “the invisible.” The creation was made of things “invisible”; Noah was warned of “things not seen as yet”; Abraham’s inheritance was invisible at the time he went out; the eternal city is invisible. So it was also for the blessings of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, as conveyed in succession to their sons, and always with regard to things invisible; and here it is recorded that Moses’ epic adventures of faith were achieved by means of a faith in the invisible God.

Thus, this roll-call of faith is presented for the primary purpose of showing the means of their triumph, faith in the invisible, which is but another way of saying faith in the supernatural. The modern Christian too is confronted with exactly the same challenge: Christ is invisible The result of Moses’ faith in the invisible God was that the king of Egypt no longer inspired him with fear, thus proving that the more people fear God the less they fear any man, however powerful.

The “conviction of things not seen” are also echoed in these words from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:6-13 about the wisdom of eternal life:

“The true wisdom of eternal life is the contemplation of the profundities of God, which the Spirit of God alone knows and of which, through faith and in faith, God causes a mysterious knowledge to come down upon us when we have reached the perfect age of the Christian.

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:

‘No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him’
But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.”

John Paul II in Fides et Ratio comments on a twofold order of knowledge that the gift of faith creates within us, this “mysterious knowledge” that Paul was speaking of previously:

“The First Vatican Council teaches then, that the truth attained by philosophy and the truth of revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object.

With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God, which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known. Based on God’s testimony and enjoying the supernatural assistance of grace, faith is of an order other than philosophical knowledge which depends upon sense perceptions and experience and which advances by the light of the intellect alone.

Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the “fullness of grace and truth” that echoes from John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

There follows in Hebrews 11 a number of citations beginning with a reference to creation and then moving in verse four to a consideration of Abel. In this and all subsequent references to the Old Testament exemplars the words are intoned “By faith…” I read a commentary on Hebrews 11 that reviewed not only what was in Hebrews 11 but on what was left out, “the glaring omission of the name of Adam, the mighty progenitor of the human race.”

God walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and called, “Adam, where art thou?” And where is he? He is lost, disinherited, sentenced to eternal death, tortured by the knowledge of what he should be haunting his pitiful consciousness of what he is. It is not of Adam that we speak, but of his race. “Where art thou?” The words live forever, calling people to consider, to view their hopeless estate, and to move toward that reconciliation that is possible through Christ.”

Our peril, and the peril of our race, is that the human intellect is free to either destroy itself or to reject God’s grace as the pitiful Adam did by trying to hide.  There is a great deal written about the relationship of faith to reason. My favorite, G.K. Chesterton, begins by telling us that

“Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.” I would submit that we are part of several generations now that does precisely that; witness how our current secular orthodoxy embraces the relativism of the age.

Chesterton saw this happening, too, in his time. He pointed out that “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? Aren’t they both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

In Verse 6 the author of Hebrews 11 states “And without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him; for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that seek after Him.” In Pensées 781, Pascal notes that in Isaiah 45:15, the prophet speaks of a hidden God: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel.” Pascal explains the Hidden God concept in Pensées 149:

“If God had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day with such thunder and lightning and such convulsions of nature that the dead will rise up and the blindest will see him. This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness.

Because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, he wished to deprive them of the good they did not desire. It was therefore not right that he should appear in a manner manifestly divine and absolutely capable of convincing all men, but neither was it right that his coming should be so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sincerely sought him. He wished to make himself perfectly recognizable to them.

Thus wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”

Peter Kreeft in his commentary on Pascal elicits three answers as to why God is not more obvious:

  1. He wants to give us time to repent. Scripture says this in several places, Luke Chapter 13: 6-9: “Then he told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He (the gardener) replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
  2. He wants to effect a true relationship with us, not one merely of intellectual belief but of personal faith, hope, love and trust. Dulles’ says that the principal act of Faith is to believe. Here is a thought from Kreeft that I love: “The propositions of lovers are different from the propositions of syllogisms.” So, you see it’s not all Reason in some sort of scientific, philosophical or logical sense. Romano Guardini tells a story of a friend to whom he would turn for help when being challenged by a scriptural passage or caught up in trying to understand his faith. The friend would tell him: “But Love does such things!” and they would both laugh, because they knew they were back to the truth.
  3. God is both love and justice; if he manifests himself truly it cannot be without love or without justice. His love led Him to save all who will have Him, and his justice led him to punish those who will not have Him. Thus He respects our free choice. He deprives the damned only of the good they do not desire. Hell is contained in God’s claim that “you will find me when you seek me with all your heart” [Jeremiah 29:13] This claim is not refuted or fairly tested if we do not fulfill our part of the experiment by seeking.”

    More than anything else, God wants us to care. It may be even more important than to know, “For it is the only way to know the most important things: yourself, your soul, your identity, your purpose, your destiny and your immortality. If we are indifferent instead of seeking we simply will not find, that is, we will not be saved.” I submit to you with all my heart an observation I just absolutely know to be true: Hell is not populated by passionate rebels but by very nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people wearing tasseled loafers and pants suits who simply never gave a damn.

Posted in Apologetics, Faith, G. K. Chesterton, Peter Kreeft, Pope John Paul II | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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J.R.R. Tolkien On Entering Faerie — Bradley J. Birzer

May 8, 2012

Edward Robert Hughes “Midsummer Eve” ca. 1908

To enter faerie — that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation — is to open oneself to the gradual discovery of beauty, truth, and excellence. One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one’s peril. The truths to be found within faerie are greater than those that can be obtained through mere human understanding; and one finds within faerie that even the greatest works of man are as nothing compared with the majesty of creation. To enter faerie is, paradoxically, both a humbling and exhilarating experience. This is what the Oxford don and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien firmly believed.

The last story Tolkien published prior to his death, “Smith of Wootton Major,” follows a normal but charitably inclined man who has been graced with the ability to make extraordinarily beautiful things while metal smithing. Smith, as he is known, discovered the gift of grace on his tenth birthday, when the dawn engulfed him and “passed on like a wave of music into the West, as the sun rose above the rim of the world.”2 Like the earth at the end of Eliot’s “Wasteland,”

Tolkien’s Smith had been baptized, and through this gift he receives an invitation to faerie. While visiting that world, he discovers that in it he is the least of beings. Its beauty, however, entices him, and he spends entire days “looking only at one tree or one flower.” The depth of each thing astounds him. “Wonders and mysteries,” many of them terrifying in their overwhelming beauty and truth, abound in faerie, Smith discovers, and he dwells on such wonders even when he is no longer in faerie. Nevertheless, some encounters terrify him:

He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eye. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith of Wooten major and Farmer Giles of Ham

And yet, despite the fact that he portrayed the man Smith in prostration before such grand visions, the rest of the story reveals that it was not Tolkien’s intention to denigrate Smith’s importance, but only to emphasize his place — and therefore the place of humanity in general — in the economy of creation. The English Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton, who served as a significant source of inspiration to Tolkien when he was a young man, once wrote that “[h]e not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.” Likewise, Tolkien shows in “Smith of Wootton Major” that it is an understanding of the transcendent that allows Smith to fully become a man. This was a teaching to which Tolkien ascribed his entire life.

For Tolkien, one of the best ways to understand the gift of grace was through faerie, which offered a glimpse of the way in which sacrament and liturgy infuse the natural law and the natural order. Faerie connects a person to his past and helps order his understanding of the moral universe. In an essay describing the greatness of the medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Tolkien wrote:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it received part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories — of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale, and not a thinly disguised moral allegory).’
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

Not only does faerie teach us higher truths; it also bonds us together in communities, of which there are two kinds: the one which is of this time and place, and the one which transcends all time and all places. As Chesterton wrote, “[B]eauty and terror are very real things,” but they are also “related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul.”

Certainly myth, of which faerie is one kind, holds an estranged place in the modern world, as Tolkien well knew But, he believed, so much the worse for the modern world. Indeed, myth might just be the thing needed to save the modern world from itself, as Tolkien suggested in his famous poem, “Mythopoeia,” which echoes the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).’°

Myth, Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that was intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures, and is therefore a more powerful weapon for cultural renewal than is modern rationalist science and technology.” Myth can emphasize the beauty of God’s creation as well as the sacramental nature of life. “Our time, sick nigh unto death of utilitarianism and literalness, cries out for myth and parable,” American novelist and political philosopher Russell Kirk explained. “Great myths are not merely susceptible of rational interpretation: they are truth, transcendent truth.” Tolkien believed that myth can teach men and women how to be fully and truly men and women, not mere cogs in the vast machine of modern technological society.

In his inimitable way, Chesterton once wrote that

Imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does not know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Besides offering an essential path to the highest truths, myth plays a vital role in any culture because it binds together members of communities. “It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad,” Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy. Communities “share symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order,” political theorist Donald Lutz explains. “The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people.” The man “who has no sympathy with myths,” Chesterton concluded, “has no sympathy with men.”" One cannot, it seems, separate men from their myths.

Yet many of our contemporaries — a bizarre combination of those who have embraced secular modernity as well as those who abhor it, the Christian fundamentalists — have rejected the importance of myth. For the modernist, imbued with the doctrines of Jamesian and Deweyite pragmatism, myth is a lie. One cannot, after all, see, feel, smell, taste, or hear myth. Myth remains just beyond our material and physical senses, and we most certainly cannot scientifically verify it. Though myth is essential to man qua man, as Chesterton rightly contended, one of modernity’s chief characteristics is the watering down of richly felt and imagined reality, and the substitution of cheap counterfeits and thin shadows for the mythic vision.

“In this new sphere,” wrote theologian Romano Guardini in the mid-1920s, “things are no longer directly detected, seen, grasped, formed, or enjoyed; rather, they are mediated by signs and substitutes.”‘ To the modernist, “myth,” like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance.

For religious fundamentalists, myths also represent lies. Myths, the argument runs, constitute dangerous rivals to Christian truth and may lead the unwary astray, even into the very grip of hell. Why study The Volsunga or Homer, for example, when the Christian Gospels tell us all we need for salvation? It is likely, the fundamentalist concludes, that all myth comes from the devil and is an attempt to distract us from the truth of Christ. The ancient gods and demigods of Greece, Rome, and northern Europe, after all, must have been nothing more than demons in disguise.

For Tolkien, however, even pagan myths attempted to express God’s greater truths. True myth has the power to revive us, to serve as an anamnesis, or way of bringing to conscious experience ancient experiences with transcendence. But, Tolkien admitted, myth could be dangerous, or “perilous,” as he usually stated it, if it remained pagan. Therefore, Tolkien thought, one must sanctify it, that is, make it Christian and put it in God’s service. Medieval believers had the same idea, and the story told of the early-medieval saint Boniface of Crediton exemplifies one such attempt.

The story (a non-factual myth, certainly!) of Boniface claims that while evangelizing the pagan Germanic tribes in north-central Europe, he encountered a tribe that worshiped a large oak tree. To demonstrate the power of Christ as the True God, Boniface cut down the tree, much to the dismay of the tribe. But rather than seeing Boniface struck down by their gods, the pagan tribe saw an evergreen instantaneously spring up on the same spot. So that Boniface could continue preaching to the astounded pagans, the story continues, his followers placed candles on the newly grown evergreen, which eventually became the first Christmas tree. This motif of “sanctifying the pagan” has been repeated throughout history by Christians in a multitude of ways, and was instrumental in contributing to the wildly successful spread of the faith.

Christmas and Easter, for example, were placed on high pagan holidays; St. Paul attempted to convert the Athenians with reference to their statue of the “Unknown God”; St. Augustine re-read the works of Plato and Cicero in a Christian light in his City of God; St. Aquinas uncovered the synchronies between Aristotelian and Christian thought; and on our own continent, we see that Catholic monks built a monastery on top of the highest mound-temple in Cahokia, Illinois, former site of the priest-king of a vast Native American empire. Indeed, churches throughout Europe and North America sit on formerly sacred pagan sites. In building churches in such places Christians sought, in essence, to baptize the corrupt ground, just as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas baptized pagan ideas.

It was Tolkien’s understanding that man’s role in the sanctification of the world is a cooperative and limited one. Given the constraints of his materiality, man ultimately only catches a glimpse of the highest things, and his attempts to emulate them in their truth, beauty, and excellence are but meager. When Smith of Wootton Major discovers to his embarrassment that a doll of a beautiful woman his village has revered is horribly shabby and trite when compared to its transcendent model, the Faery Lady, whom he has just met, she calms his fears: “Do not be grieved for me… Nor too much ashamed of your own folk. Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awakening.” As an artist, a scholar, and a mythmaker, Tolkien gave us a glimpse of the truth, beauty, and excellence that lies beyond and behind our tangible world. That glimpse, which leads to real joy, Tolkien labeled the euchatastrophe.

Throughout his entire mythology — The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and the other works on Middle-earth — Tolkien stubbornly affirmed that the hope of the modern world lay in a return to some form of the Christiana Res Publica. “Someday Christendom may come/Westward/Evening sun recedent/Set my resting vow/Hold in open heart,” cries the poet Mark Hollis. What form such a transfigured world would take, of course, is unclear. After all, Tolkien believed, man’s job is not to plan the universe, but to use the gifts God has given him for the betterment of all.

“The awful Author of our being,” one of Tolkien’s favorite thinkers, Edmund Burke, wrote, “is the author of our place in the order of existence.” He, “having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the part assigned to us.”

In his thinking about truth, reason, science, art, and myth, and in his hope for a renewal of Christendom and an end to the ideologically inspired terror of the twentieth century, Tolkien fits in nicely with a group of twentieth-century scholars and artists which we might collectively label as “The Christian humanists.” The Christian humanist asks two fundamental questions:

(1)  What is the role of the human person within God’s creation? And

(2)  How does man order himself within God’s creation? Christian, or theocentric, humanism, as opposed to anthropocentric, secular, Renaissance, or Enlightenment humanism, argues that one cannot understand man’s position in the world until one first acknowledges that man is created in the image of God and lives under the natural law as well as the divine law

The ranks of the Christian humanists include such poets and scholars as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Romano Guardini. (You will find examples of their writings under our Categories) Tolkien should be counted as one of their foremost thinkers and spokesmen.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Understanding Mythopoeia | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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