G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grownup people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon…’. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

  Since the world seemed magical to Chesterton rather than determined by some law, there might be a magician behind it. And if there was ‘a purpose’ there must be ‘a person’. He had always ‘felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller’. Again, modern intellectuals were very opposed to Chesterton’s second conviction that this world involved ‘strict limits and conditions’ and preferred to talk about ‘expansion and largeness’. But, as well as fairy tales, Chesterton had read as a boy Robinson Crusoe, ‘which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits’: ‘Crusoe is man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck’. And so Chesterton, lastly, had a sense not only of the magic of the world, that it ‘must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it’, and that ‘the proper form of thanks’ for the ‘pleasure’ and ‘privilege’ of the world was ‘some form of humility and restraint’—but ‘last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin’. ‘And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.’46

  One ‘belongs to this world’ before one ‘begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it’. But Chesterton’s own ‘acceptance of the universe’ was not ‘optimism’ but ‘more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it’. And in order to make it less miserable we need to have taken ‘a cosmic oath of allegiance’: ‘We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening’. We need to ‘hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing’. This idea that there was a ‘need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things’ was the point at which Chesterton felt an affinity to Christianity, for it was ‘accused at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world’. The reason was that Christianity was ‘the answer to a riddle’. It taught that God in ‘making’ the world ‘set it free. God had written not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it’. The ‘riddle’ was how could one ‘somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it’. The answer was ‘the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from him’. Christian optimism was ‘based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world’ and ‘dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural’. Having understood that he was ‘in the wrong place’, Chesterton’s ‘soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring’.47

  Having attacked the ‘imbecile habit… of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another’, Chesterton proceeds to qualify this by arguing that ‘a creed … can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one’. Christianity is a complicated creed, which is why its truth can be seen more clearly in a complicated society. Far from being ashamed of the ‘complexity’ of Christianity, Christians should be as proud of it as scientists are ‘proud of the complexity of science’. Keys and locks are ‘complex’ things, which is why, ‘if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key’. But the more reasons there are for believing something, the harder it is to explain this ‘accumulation of truth’:

  It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man on the spur of the moment, ‘Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?’ he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely… The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex.

  There is, then, ‘a kind of huge helplessness’ regarding ‘all complete conviction’: ‘The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action’. One does not know ‘where one should begin’. And then Chesterton adds, almost as if the words applied to himself—he was after all fourteen years away from becoming a Roman Catholic: ‘All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there’.48

  There is, however, in Chesterton’s view one very big objection to Christianity, and his admission is particularly significant a hundred years later in an age of globalization and religious pluralism: ‘The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion’. After all, the world is a very large place, ‘full of very different kinds of people’. However, Chesterton’s next admission was hardly valid even a century ago: ‘Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe’. At any rate the objection had once impressed Chesterton, as it came to impress pluralist theologians later in the twentieth century. He too had been attracted by the idea of ‘one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience’. But what next struck Chesterton was that the ethical pluralists of his day ‘were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another’. And yet the same people who reproached Christianity for preaching a distinctive revelation to a particular people at a particular time were the same people who believed that ‘science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark’. But this was not their only inconsistency: they also reproached Christianity both for its asceticism and for its ‘pomp’ and ‘ritualism’. But if their contradictory charges were correct, then Christianity, which they claimed was ‘only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals’, was guilty of ‘exceptional corruption’ that required an explanation. And it occurred to Chesterton that, ‘if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist’. It also struck him that these critics were guilty in their own lives of an extraordinary self-contradiction in combining ‘extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp’, and in being themselves ‘really exceptional in history’, for ‘no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes’.49

  Chesterton came to see that the problem was how ‘to keep a balance’, a problem that Christianity ‘solved and solved in a very strange way’. Instead of saying like Greek philosophy that ‘virtue was in a balance’, Christianity ‘declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite’. There was in fact no real inconsistency, only the difficulty of holding both ‘simultaneously’. Courage, for example, ‘is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die’. The Christian precept that in order to save one’s life it was necessary to lose it might have been
‘a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers’. The paradox was ‘the whole principle of courage’. And indeed paradox was ‘the Christian key to ethics everywhere’. The Christian virtue of charity says that we must forgive the sinner, whom we must love very much, but not the sin, which we must hate very much: ‘There was room for wrath and love to run wild.’ Not surprisingly, with the decay of Christianity the ‘heroic and monumental manner in ethics’ had vanished. Unlike paganism, which was ‘like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry’.

  Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress.

  This explained the Christian care over exact theological definitions that so baffled its modern critics: ‘The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium.’ And it was ‘the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy’ that the Church had avoided the traps that beset her on every side:

  People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy…. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. …She [the Church] swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles…. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. …It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.50

  And so Chesterton concludes this chapter on ‘The Paradoxes of Christianity’ with the ultimate paradox that the very word orthodoxy is the exact opposite of what the word normally suggests.

  If ‘some faith in our life is required even to improve it’, as well as a ‘necessary discontent with things as they are’, it is not sufficient to have the ‘equilibrium’ of ‘mere resignation’. Anyway, it is impossible to follow the Stoical advice ‘to grin and bear’ an unsatisfactory state of affairs, since, ‘if you merely bear it, you do not grin’.

  Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do—because they are Christian. And when a Christian is pleased, he is (in the most exact sense) frightfully pleased; his pleasure is frightful. Christ prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such people as now object to barrel organs) objected to the shouting of the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, ‘If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.’ Under the impulse of His spirit arose like a clamorous chorus, the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.

  The grin of a Christian is alarming because, while the Christian is ready to ‘bear’, the Christian is not prepared to do so with ‘mere resignation’. For the Christian who is sufficiently ‘fond of this world, even in order to change it’, is also ‘fond of another world … to change it to’. But for modern intellectuals, ‘the vision of heaven is always changing’, which means that ‘the vision of earth will be exactly the same’. For progress means ‘changing the world to suit the vision’, not ‘always changing the vision’, in which case the reality will remain the same. There will be no possibility of a revolution; whereas, to the Christian, ‘there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan’. But the Christian vision is not only ‘fixed’, it is ‘composite’—that is, it is ‘a definite picture composed of… elements in their best proportion and relation’. But such a picture ‘must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness’. And, thirdly, ‘watchfulness’ is also needed for progress, which means that one must be revolutionary not conservative. Practically echoing Newman’s theory of development, namely, that there has to be change precisely to preserve identity, Chesterton writes:

  all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.

  Chesterton’s ‘theory of progress’ demands, then, a constant vigilance, for it has to deal with original sin, which means that the constant danger is ‘not in man’s environment, but in man’. This is why the only political system Chesterton can trust is democracy, which agrees with Christianity that ‘the man should rule who does not think he can rule’. Democracy is also

  profoundly Christian in this practical sense—that it is an attempt to get at the opinion of those who would be too modest to offer it. It is a mystical adventure; it is specially trusting those who do not trust themselves. That enigma is strictly peculiar to Christendom…. there is something psychologically Christian about the idea of seeking for the opinion of the obscure rather than taking the obvious course of accepting the opinion of the prominent. To say that voting is Christian may seem somewhat curious. To say that canvassing is Christian may seem quite crazy. But canvassing is very Christian in its primary idea. It is encouraging the humble; it is saying to the modest man, ‘Friend, go up higher.’

  Unlike the humility of democracy, the pride of aristocracy means ‘the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful’. The ‘natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self seriously’ comes naturally to fallen men: ‘For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.’ As Chesterton constructed his Utopia, he found ‘as usual’ that Christianity had anticipated him. But there was one final requirement that again he found in Christianity, ‘the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself’. Limitation, like paradox and humour, is an essential element in Chesterton’s philosophy: ‘Complete anarchy would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious example, it would not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding.’ This, then, is the last of his requirements of his ‘social paradise’: ‘I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously’—above all in marriage, which ‘is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing’.51

  Orthodoxy is under threat from so-called liberal theologians, whose ideas are in fact ‘definitely illiberal’ and would ‘bring tyranny into the world’. A liberal clergyman

  always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number. It always means a man who is free to disbelieve that Christ came out of His grave; it never means a man who is free to believe that his own aunt came out of her grave.

  It is not liberalism that permits disbelief in the Resurrection, but ‘strict materialism’ that forbids belief. Tennyson’s dictum that there was faith in doubt was true in ‘a profound and even a horrible’ way: the refusal to believe in miracles represented ‘faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incur
able routine of the cosmos’. To deny ‘the liberty of God’ to work miracles is hardly ‘a triumph of the liberal idea’ but rather ‘leaves nothing free in the universe’. Again, liberal theologians believe that religions teach the same things, albeit in different ‘rites and forms’. The favourite example of ‘this alleged identity of all human religions is the alleged spiritual identity of Buddhism and Christianity’. (It was noticeable that these liberals were ‘cautious in their praises’ of Islam, ‘generally confining themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes’, and even ‘cold’ in their attitude to its view of marriage.) In fact, the Christian saint was the diametrical opposite of the Buddhist saint who ‘always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive.’ The reason is that the Buddhist ‘is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.’ For the Buddhist, ‘personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea’. The significance of the ‘almost insane happiness in the eyes’ of the Christian saint, as opposed to ‘the sealed eyes’ of the Buddhist, is that the Christian is happy because he has been ‘cut off from the world; he is separate from things and is staring at them in astonishment. But why should the Buddhist saint be astonished at things?—since there is really only one thing, and that being impersonal can hardly be astonished at itself.’ In Buddhism ‘God is inside man’, and consequently ‘man is always inside himself’; but because Christianity insists that ‘God transcends man, man has transcended himself’. Again, there is nothing liberal in substituting monotheism for Trinitarian Christianity which sees God as ‘a society’: