by Ian Ker
In the midst of all this ‘scatter-brained thinking’, Chesterton himself ‘began to piece together the fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance’.
And the more I saw of real human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even these it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of morals and metaphysics to support them. Men who believed ardently in altruism were yet troubled by the necessity of believing with even more religious reverence in Darwinism, and even in the deductions from Darwinism about a ruthless struggle as the rule of life. Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly, under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. Their hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and scepticism, crabbed, barren, servile and without any light of liberty or of hope.
And so Chesterton ‘began to examine more exactly the general Christian theology which many execrated and few examined’. He ‘soon found that it did in fact correspond to many of these experiences of life’—and, most importantly for Chesterton, ‘that even its paradoxes corresponded to the paradoxes of life’.35
About the same time that he discovered that ‘the old theological theory seemed more or less to fit into experience, while the new and negative theories did not fit into anything, least of all into each other’, he published Heretics about contemporary writers, ‘each of whom’, he felt, ‘erred through an ultimate or religious error’. One reviewer challenged him to state his own beliefs.
With all the solemnity of youth, I accepted this as a challenge; and wrote an outline of my own reasons for believing that the Christian theory, as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed, would be found to be a better criticism of life than any of those I had criticised. I called it Orthodoxy, but even at the time I was very much dissatisfied with the title. It sounded a thinnish sort of thing to be defending through thick and thin. Even then I fancy I had a dim foreshadowing that I should have to find some better name for it before I died.36
However, there was ‘one rather vague virtue about the title’: ‘it was provocative’. For he began to discover that, ‘in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy’. Nearly everyone in his journalistic and literary world assumed that it was ‘a pose or a paradox’: ‘The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true.’ This first dawned upon him at a dinner party given by the staff of the Clarion not long after his controversy with its editor, Robert Blatchford—‘a landmark’ in his life when he was ‘a comparatively young though relatively rising journalist’. Sitting next to him was ‘one of those very refined and rather academic gentlemen from Cambridge who seemed to form so considerable a section of the rugged stalwarts of Labour’.
There was a cloud on his brow, as if he were beginning to be puzzled about something; and he said suddenly, with abrupt civility, ‘Excuse my asking, Mr Chesterton, of course I shall quite understand if you prefer not to answer, and I shan’t think any the worse of it, you know, even if it’s true. But I suppose I’m right in thinking you don’t really believe in those things you’re defending against Blatchford?’ I informed him with adamantine gravity that I did most definitely believe in those things I was defending against Blatchford. His cold and refined face did not move a visible muscle; and yet I knew in some fashion it had completely altered. ‘Oh’, you’, do, he said, ‘I beg your pardon. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know’. And he went on eating his (probably vegetarian) meal. But I was sure that for the rest of the evening, despite his calm, he felt as if he was sitting next to a fabulous griffin.37
4
Orthodoxy, published in September 1908, is the explanation of what Chesterton believed, in answer to the challenge of the reviewer of Heretics, and how he had come to see that the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed, as traditionally understood, coincided with the philosophy he had come to believe in himself. It was not a theological treatise but ‘a sort of slovenly autobiography’.38 Or, as he explained in his preface to the American edition, the book was ‘meant to be a companion to “Heretics”, and to put the positive side in addition to the negative’. It was ‘unavoidably autobiographical’, because he had been ‘driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia’—that is, he had been ‘forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere’. The book dealt with ‘a riddle and its answer’—‘the Christian theology’, which the author thought was ‘a convincing creed’, and if it was not, it was ‘at least a repeated and surprising coincidence’.39 Chesterton had often thought of writing a story about an English yachtsman who mistook his course and ‘discovered England’ under the illusion that it was an island in the South Seas. He was like that man, for he was ‘the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before’.40 But, significantly, he was not prepared to discuss ‘the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed’.41
Philosophers might be surprised to hear that their ‘main problem’ and ‘the main problem’ to be discussed in Orthodoxy is: ‘How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town … give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?’ The aim of the book is to show how Christianity satisfies ‘this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance’. But all arguments rest on unproven assumption—in this case the ‘desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired’. More prosaically, the assumption is that a life of ‘variety and adventure’ is better than a ‘blank existence’, that there is a human need for ‘the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure’. In other words, Chesterton’s starting point is the need for wonder at the world with which we are familiar, the basis from which he had evolved his own philosophy of life: ‘We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.’42
Apologists for Christianity in the past could begin with the fact of sin, but original sin, ‘the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved’, was now being questioned by liberal theologians. Chesterton decides therefore to begin with the question of sanity rather than sin. And he argues that modern intellectuals show a ‘combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction’ or a ‘combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense’. Thus ‘materialism has a sort of insane simplicity’: one has ‘at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out’. The certainty that ‘history has been simply and solely a chain of causation’ leads to ‘a complete fatalism’, which is the opposite of ‘a liberating force’: ‘It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. But there is another scepticism even ‘more terrible’ than believing that ‘everything began in matter and that is the idealism that rejects any reality external to oneself. However, ‘this panegoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the other extreme of materialism’, being ‘equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice’. Both sceptics have ‘locked themselves up in two boxes’, both the one ‘who c
annot believe his senses and the one ‘who cannot believe anything else’. Both sceptics can claim to be ‘infinitely reasonable’ like a coin that is ‘infinitely circular’, but both have lost their reason. Both have begun from the wrong ‘first principles’, whereas what Chesterton calls ‘mysticism’ keeps people ‘sane’: ‘As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity’. What mysticism understands is that one ‘can understand everything by the help of what’ one ‘does not understand’: ‘The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid’. It is like the sun: ‘The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything’. Christianity allows for ‘apparent contradictions like free will, which it leaves as ‘a sacred mystery ; whereas determinism ‘makes the theory of causation quite clear’ but leaves the determinist unable rationally to say ‘please pass the mustard’ to his predetermined neighbour at the table. The Christian, on the contrary, allows for ‘apparent contradictions’ like free will, which it leaves ‘a sacred mystery’. And here Chesterton employs imagery that he had already used for the title of his forthcoming novel The Ball and the Cross, which had been serialized during 1905 and 1906 in the Anglo-Catholic Commonwealth:
He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.43
Because Christianity was shattered at the Reformation, Chesterton argues, the Christian virtues even more than the vices have been ‘let loose, and they wander and do terrible damage’. One example is the way people now are humble not about themselves but about their convictions: ‘At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. Religious authority was intended to be ‘a barrier’ against ‘a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary’. For—and remarkably Chesterton was writing before the onset of post-modernism—it is possible to ‘prevent further thinking by teaching … that there is no validity in any human thought’. For to believe that there is any point in thinking is a matter of faith not reason: ‘It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all’. Far from religion being opposed to reason, ‘they are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved’. It was not surprising that, insofar as ‘religion is gone, reason is going’. If the theory of evolution is anything more than ‘an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about’, then it is an example of the thought that ‘destroys itself’, ‘an attack upon thought itself’. It is one thing to believe that a personal God chose slowly to evolve man out of an ape, but, if evolution means ‘a flux of everything and anything’, then it is ‘an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought’. Another attack upon thought itself is the common idea that what is right for one age is wrong for another, as ‘this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible’. And, if one makes ‘change itself’ one’s ‘object or ideal’, then ‘change itself becomes unchangeable’. The pragmatist insists that ‘there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind’, but ‘one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth’, and so it is necessary to be ‘more than a pragmatist’. Seeing how ‘reason destroys’, Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy of Will holds that the ‘ultimate authority… is in will, not in reason’. But this philosophy of volition ends in the same cul-de -sac as ‘the mere pursuit of logic’: ‘Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere “willing” really paralyses the will’. For, if will is all that matters, how can one choose to will one thing rather than another? ‘And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising’. To worship the will is effectively to negate the will. The philosophers of will speak of will as ‘something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation’. The ‘anarchic will-worshippers urge people to ‘care for no laws or limits’, but the ‘moment you step into a world of facts, you step into a world of limits’: ‘If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.’44
Chapter IV, ‘The Ethics of Elfland’, begins with an apparent digression, a very characteristic feature of Chesterton’s writing. He explains that he has always been a Liberal (although he no longer believes in Liberal politicians), who believes in democracy in the sense of ‘a self-governing humanity’. There are two principles of democracy: first, that ‘the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men’, that ‘Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things’, in other words, that the ‘sense of the miracle of humanity itself should always be more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization’; and, second, that ‘the political instinct or desire’ is one of the things everyone has in common. Far from democracy being opposed to tradition, ‘tradition is only democracy extended through time’, a ‘trusting to a consensus of common human voices’ rather than the ‘aristocracy’ of talent. As always, Chesterton is on the side of the masses not the intellectuals: ‘I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hardworking people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong’. He prefers to trust to ‘the awful authority of a mob’ than to ‘the authority of one expert’. And the ‘mob’ or masses also include the dead, as Chesterton explains in one of the most memorable passages in the book:
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.45
These prefatory remarks are intended to introduce what Chesterton wants to say about the idea of ‘popular tradition’, the ‘earliest’ of ‘the three or four fundamental ideas’ he has discovered for himself and that make up his ‘personal philosophy or natural religion’, and that he had been startled to discover had already been ‘discovered by Christianity’. What he first came to believe in and what he still believes in are fairy tales. And what they taught him was that, while you cannot ‘imagine two and one not making three’, you ‘can easily imagine trees not bearing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail’. Now in fairy tales ‘this sharp distinction’ was always observed ‘between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions’. But in the world of intellectuals, people talked of ‘the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three.’ In fairy
tales, on the contrary, ‘life was as precious as it was puzzling’. And fairy tales also included the necessity of limitation: ‘The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld.’ Fairy tales gave Chesterton ‘two convictions’: ‘first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness’. However, he was to discover that all the intellectuals were ‘talking scientific fatalism’, although they had ‘really no proof’ of an ‘unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated’. ‘All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind’, Chesterton protests, ‘rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork’. But suppose ‘the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life’. Children typically provide Chesterton with an analogy particularly shocking to the intellectuals: