by Dale Ahlquist
"Mary, Sign of Salvation" by Fr. Brian Daley, S.J.
October 2004
"Catholic Social Teaching and the Law" by Michael Scaperlanda
"The Catholic Church: Defender of Freedom?" by H.W. Crocker III
November 2004
"Prayer" by Bishop Thomas J. Welsh
"What is 'Church Authority'?" by Peter Kreeft
December 2004
"How Tradition Gave us the Bible" by Mark P. Shea
"God Speaks to Us: The Liturgy of the Word" by Rev. Peter Stravinskas
January 2005
"Angels and Demons" by Alfred Freddoso
"The Da Vinci Code" by Bishop Robert Morlino
"The Year of the Eucharist" by Bishop Robert Morlino
G.K. Chesterton and The Perils of Being a Complete Thinker
By Dale Ahlquist
When
you have an answer for everything, it seems that no
one wants to talk to you anymore. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a
nice guy. When the prevailing philosophy is that truth is relative or
largely irrelevant or basically unknowable or strictly personal, in
other words, when our only certainty is our uncertainty, there is
nothing more irritating than some one who comes along and smashes such
non-conclusive conclusions. There is nothing more unsettling than
someone who has settled things. The most unwelcome person on a college
campus today is someone who can argue persuasively that there is a
truth that is absolute, all-important, accessible, and universal. Which
explains why G.K. Chesterton is not taught or studied in our
universities.Of course, it is also because he violates almost every maxim of political correctness. Go right down the list: he criticizes feminism, vegetarianism, modern art (starting from Impressionism), free verse, pornography, immorality, birth control, compulsory education, jazz and the rest. He defies the gods: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. He even criticizes James Joyce. And worse.
But these are details. It is not what he attacks but what he defends that leaves him persona non gratis. He defends the traditional family. He defends Western Civilization. He defends the Crusades. He defends the Catholic Church. If that isn’t bad enough, he even defends smoking.
And his balanced attacks throw everyone off-balance: he criticizes both socialism and capitalism, both big government and big business, both liberals and conservatives. He also criticizes Paganism and Puritanism, optimists and pessimists. And so on.
Yet he has an advantage over all his adversaries. He is not only bigger than they are, yeah, he is also more…well-rounded. You may think we’re referring to the 300-pounder who called himself the politest man in England because he could stand up on a bus and offer his seat to three women at once. No, we’re taking about the fact that he created something even bigger than himself, an incredible and incalculable body of writing that covers everything and reveals G.K. Chesterton as that rarest of all human birds: a complete thinker. His opponents suffer from the problem of being not merely small but narrow. They may disagree with Chesterton on the point that affects them, but they all they can offer is that one point; they have never given enough thought to any thing else. Feminists can’t get past their feminism. Socialists can’t get past their socialism. Evolutionists can’t get past their cells. Psychologists can’t get past their pasts. They are comically obsessed with the small thing that defines them. Chesterton cannot even be defined. He cannot be pigeon-holed. One of the reasons he is not taught in our universities is because he is simply too big to fit into any one department.
The problem, of course, is not with Chesterton, but with our compartmentalized way of thinking and our departmentalized way of teaching. In the modern world, everything is separated from everything else. And that is because it is detached from the central truth, which is religious truth. As Chesterton writes in What’s Wrong with the World:
Religion, the immortal maiden, has
been a maid-of-all-work as well as a
servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of
the cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the thrilling game of
morality. She taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the
children; it was her business to confront our nameless fears, and also
to see…that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing
bells. The large uses of religion have been broken up into lesser
specialties… The romance of ritual and colored emblem has been taken
over by that narrowest of all trades, modern art (the sort called art
for art's sake), and men are in modern practice informed that they may
use all symbols so long as they mean nothing by them. The romance of
conscience has been dried up into the science of ethics; which may well
be called decency for decency's sake. The romance of the soul, cut off
from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psych[ology]. Everything has
been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon
we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a
song, on the ground that they spoil each other; and I even once meet a
man who openly advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This
world is all one wild divorce court.
Chesterton deserves to be taught if only for his individual contributions to literature. His Ballad of the White Horse is the last great epic poem in the English language. His poem “Lepanto” is a stunning accomplishment of rhyme and meter and alliteration. His Orthodoxy is a masterpiece of rhetoric and sustained argument and utterly original apologetics. His Everlasting Man is a densely-packed counterpoint to modern theories of science, history, and religion. His novels are indeed novel; there are no other works of fiction to compare with The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ball and the Cross, and Manalive. His innumerable essays are a treasure chest with such gems as “On Lying in Bed,” “What I Found in My Pocket,” “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” and “On Running After One’s Hat.” His literary criticism, especially his book on Charles Dickens, is stunning. Even if you have never read a word of Dickens, you will simply be swept away by it. The great drama critic Alexander Woolcott said he read that book a dozen times.
But the real reason Chesterton deserves to be taught is because he is, as I have said, a complete thinker. And that, as I have also said, is precisely why he is not taught.
When Jesus says, “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me,” he seems to offer a pretty strong indication that truth is an offensive thing. It attacks. It attacks error. So, too, Chesterton is offensive. He is constantly attacking error. But it is not a series of random missives – terrorist attacks, as it were – it is a consistent and sustained assault that comes from a truly unified front. It is ready to take on anything and everything. That is what makes it so dangerous. The most successful strategy against Chesterton has been to retreat: to avoid him altogether. This is truly the running policy of those hotbeds of error and confusion: our colleges and universities.
But just as Chesterton says that a soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him, Chesterton’s attacks are a form of defense. First, he defends religion against purely secular and materialist philosophies, then he defends Christianity against other religions, and then, he defends the Catholic Church against everything else. And it is in his defense of these truths that he reveals himself as a complete thinker as he exposes the fragmented philosophies that prowl the earth.
Everything is a big subject, and so we can only provide a glimpse here of that one-man army that is Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
We begin at the beginning. Creation. When we acknowledge God as the Creator, it puts everything else properly into perspective. Chesterton realizes that existence itself is a gift, something we did not deserve. The only logical response to a gift is gratitude. Chesterton says “Thanks are the highest form of thought.” If let thankfulness fill our day, it will eliminate most of the anger and frustration and distraction that contributes to the world’s overall confusion.
The next point is that God made us in his own image. We, too, are creators. This is the basis of all art. Just as we are mirrors of God, and so should what we create further reflect God’s glory. Creation is a giant, brilliant, multi-faceted diamond.
But it’s broken. There is a major disconnect between God and us. Chesterton is an “original” thinker because he emphasizes Original Sin. He says it is the only Christian doctrine that we can prove. Just look around. Find your own examples.
There is a created order, and in keeping that order, we are happy, and we are free. In upsetting that order, we inflict a disorder which makes us miserable. Chesterton says, “When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom. You do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”
It is the little laws that enslave us. It is the big laws that keep us free. Chesterton advises: “Break the conventions, keep the commandments.” This is another reason why Chesterton is not welcome on campus. We prefer to break the commandments and keep the conventions. It is easy to break the commandments. It is outrageous to break the conventions. We can outlaw smoking, but we cannot manage to outlaw the slaughter of the unborn. We do not dare insist on sexual morality, but we cannot resist a regimen of condom distribution.
Chesterton says, “Right is right, even if no one does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.” The world is not interested in using those once useful categories of right and wrong. It does not want even to admit that sin is sin. It looks for new ways not to admit it. It regards “progress” as a guide and “tradition” as an impediment. But, as Chesterton says, “A new philosophy is generally the praise of some old vice.”
Each new movement is usually a rebellion against something that preceded it. Every corrective is an over-reaction. There is only one thing that properly keeps its balance. It is the Church, which Chesterton says rides through history, never leaning too far in one direction or the other, “the wild truth, reeling but erect.”
The centerpiece, the fulcrum, which keeps this amazing balance, which prevents extreme ideas and also simplistic ideas, is Jesus Christ. Christ is the ultimate paradox: fully God and fully Man. For Chesterton, paradox is the key to everything. It is has at its heart a contradiction (“love and wrath both burning”), just as the Cross has a contradiction at its center a contradiction, the vertical contradicting the horizontal, the eternal contradicting the temporal, life contradicting death.
The story of God sacrificing Himself to Himself, of turning His back on Himself, is what Chesterton calls “The Strangest Story in the World.” There is nothing else like it anywhere. It is either the fundamental truth of existence or else it is the most fabulous lie in history. But if it is true, it affects everything else: “Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”
When Christ came, he did not found a new religion, he did not start an ethical society, he established something else completely different: a Church. That Church built our civilization, it brought us the sacraments, it took care of the poor and chastised the rich and celebrated the marriages and blessed the babies and buried the dead, and the world has turned around and robbed it, ridiculed it, and reduced its role in society. But the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.
“The world is living off its Catholic capital,” says Chesterton. The university itself is a Catholic invention. So are hospitals. So are Psychiatrists (Chesterton describes Psychiatry as “confession without absolution.”). It was the Church that gave the Western world its greatest art, and then the artists went off on their own, and generally went off their heads. It was the Church that gave us the Canon of Scripture, which the Protestants then used to reject the authority of the Church which had authorized it. And so on. You will find bits and pieces of the Creed scattered everywhere throughout the modern world, fragments of the truth separated from the whole truth, and even doing war against it as well against each other.
Chesterton says, “There is the Catholic Church and there are its enemies.” This is a challenging statement. It pretty much sets the tone for the battle.
In spite of the schools failing in their duty to teach Chesterton, he has survived. He has been discovered by a new generation, and over 60 of his books are back in print, and the interest continues to grow. There is definitely a Chesterton revival underway. It may even reach our colleges. Even the Catholic ones.
Dale Ahlquist is President of the American Chesterton Society.
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