by Ian Ker
To him a man was always a man and did not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honoured all men; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this; that from the Pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him; in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously, and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy or the names in some clerical document.
This ‘courtesy’ of St Francis towards all, not least the common man, made him the one courtier in a court of kings: ‘For he treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings.’ The ‘impetuous politeness’ of Francis gave back to ‘a broken man’ what neither alms (for ‘any reveller may fling largesse in mere scorn’) nor even ‘time and attention’ (‘for any number of philanthropists and benevolent bureaucrats do such work with a scorn far more cold and horrible in their hearts’), what no ‘plans or proposals or efficient rearrangements will give back’: ‘his self-respect and sense of speaking with an equal’. Francis’s ‘democratic optimism’ helps to explain his asceticism, which ‘was in one sense the height of optimism. He demanded a great deal of human nature not because he despised it but rather because he trusted it.’ It is not just that Francis respected the common man, as Chesterton did, but he also, like Chesterton, loved the ordinary things that the common man loves: ‘He really did love and honour ordinary men and ordinary things; indeed we may say that he only sent out the extraordinary men [his friars] to encourage men to be ordinary.’33
Chesterton understood quite clearly the novelty of the Franciscan spirit or charism, so different from that of monasticism. For Francis’s ‘revolution’ was ‘of the nature of an earthquake or a volcano, an explosion that drove outwards with dynamic energy the forces stored up by ten centuries in the monastic fortress or arsenal and scatted all its riches recklessly to the ends of the earth’. Indeed, ‘what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world as seed. The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing…’ Franciscanism was the opposite of monasticism ‘with its idea that the monks were to become migratory and almost nomadic instead of stationary’. By insisting that the friars were to own no possessions, Francis ensured that his friars should ‘not become like ordinary men’: the friar was to be different from the ordinary man in the sense that he was to be ‘freer than an ordinary man’: ‘It was necessary that he should be free from the cloister; but it was even more important that he should be free from the world.’ In a contemporary world that was ‘a network of feudal and family and other forms of dependence’, the friars were to be ‘like little fishes who could go freely in and out of that net. They could do so precisely because they were small fishes and in that sense even slippery fishes. There was nothing that the world could hold them by; for the world catches us mostly by the fringes of our garments, the futile externals of our lives.’
A man had to be thin to pass always through the bars and out of the cage; he had to travel light in order to ride so fast and so far. It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning, that the world was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce him to beggary, for he was already a beggar. There was a very lukewarm satisfaction even in beating him with a stick, when he only indulged in little leaps and cries of joy because indignity was his only dignity. You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in a halo.
For Chesterton, the Franciscan life was the diametric opposite of the monastic life: its keynote was mobility as opposed to stability, motion as opposed to stationariness. The monastic life offered ‘not only an ethical but an economic repose’:
The whole point of a monk was that his economic affairs were settled for good; he knew where he would get his supper, though it was a very plain supper. But the whole point of a friar was that he did not know where he would get his supper. There was always the possibility that he might get no supper. There was an element of what would be called romance, as of the gipsy or adventurer. But there was also an element of potential tragedy, as of the tramp or casual labourer.34
This spiritual revolution or volcano presented the Church, or more particularly the Pope, with the question as to whether it was to be
the beginning of a conflagration in which the old Christian civilisation was to be consumed. That was the point the Pope had to settle; whether Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided rightly… [that] the Church could include all that was good in the Franciscans and the Franciscans could not include all that was good in the Church.
Had the Franciscan movement ‘turned into a new religion, it would… have been a narrow religion’, since, just as for Chesterton unbelief means the narrowing of the mind (‘Men will not believe because they will not broaden their minds’), so too every heresy ‘has been an effort to narrow the Church’. When a sect called the Fraticelli did set ‘the good and glorious mood of the great St Francis’ against ‘the whole mind of God’ and ‘broke away from the compromises of Rome in favour of what they would have called the complete programme of Assisi’, then the upshot was more paradoxical than the most Chestertonian of paradoxes: ‘In the name of the most human of saints they declared war upon humanity.’ These heretics were ‘mystics and nothing else but mystics; and not Catholics; mystics and not Christians; mystics and not men. They rotted away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen to reason.’ By contrast, Francis himself, ‘however wild and romantic his gyrations might appear to many, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair’. At least as important for Chesterton was that Francis, as well as being rational and sane, possessed a ‘sense of humour which salts all the stories of his escapades alone’ and which ‘alone prevented him from ever hardening into the solemnity of sectarian self-righteousness’.35
If Chesterton sees movement as the distinguishing mark of Franciscans as opposed to monks, it is not least because he sees Francis’s whole life as one of dramatic movement: ‘As he saw all things dramatically, so he himself was always dramatic.’ He was the poet ‘whose whole life was a poem’:
He was not so much a minstrel merely singing his own songs as a dramatist capable of acting the whole of his own play. The things he said were more imaginative than the things he wrote. The things he did were more imaginative than the things he said. His whole course through life was a series of scenes in which he had a sort of perpetual luck in bringing things to a beautiful crisis. To talk about the art of living has come to sound rather artificial than artistic. But St Francis did in a definite sense make the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste.…From the moment when he rent his robes and flung them at his father’s feet to the moment when he stretched himself in death on the bare earth in the pattern of the cross, his life was made up of these unconscious attitudes and unhesitating gestures.
When Francis was going blind, the only known but uncertain remedy was to apply red-hot iron to the eyeballs: ‘When they took the brand from the furnace, he rose as with an urbane gesture and spoke as to an invisible presence: “Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous with me.”’ Here Chesterton reaches the high point in his life: ‘If there be any such thing as the art of life, it seems to me that such a moment was one of its masterpieces. Not to many poets has it been given to
remember their own poetry at such a moment, still less to live one of their own poems.’ But Chesterton does not hesitate even at this most dramatic and moving moment to introduce humour, for to him the serious and the humorous, tragedy and comedy, are but two sides of the same coin:
Even William Blake would have been disconcerted if, while he was re-reading the noble lines ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’, a real large live Bengal tiger had put his head in at the window of his cottage in Felpham, evidently with every intention of biting his head off. He might have wavered before politely saluting it, above all by calmly completing the recitation of the poem to the quadruped to whom it was dedicated. Shelley, when he wished to be a cloud or a leaf carried before the wind, might have been mildly surprised to find himself turning slowly head over heels in mid air a thousand feet above the sea. Even Keats, knowing that his hold on life was a frail one, might have been disturbed to discover that the true, the blushful Hippocrene of which he has just partaken freely had indeed contained a drug, which really ensured that he should cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Being funny for Chesterton did not mean not being serious; on the contrary, being funny was a, perhaps the, way of being serious. And when he returns us to the pathos of the extraordinary scene of Francis addressing the fire just before enduring a torture that could not have been less than ‘the tortures of martyrdom, which he envied in martyrology’, the pathos has surely been sharpened not blunted:
For Francis there was no drug; and for Francis there was plenty of pain. But his first thought was one of his first fancies from the songs of his youth. He remembered the time when a flame was a flower, only the most glorious and gaily coloured of the flowers in the garden of God; and when that shining thing returned to him in the shape of an instrument of torture, he hailed it from afar like an old friend, calling it by the nickname which might most truly be called its Christian name.36
The most original and penetrating pages in the book are in the chapter called ‘The Mirror of Christ’. Chesterton quotes (correctly) from Newman’s satirical masterpiece, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, which he calls Newman’s ‘liveliest controversial work’, a sentence that he describes as ‘a model’ of the ‘lucidity and logical courage’ that is characteristic of Catholicism: ‘In speaking of the ease with which truth may be made to look like its own shadow or sham, he said, “And if Antichrist is like Christ, Christ I suppose is like Antichrist.”’ Analogously, Chesterton suggests that, ‘if St Francis was like Christ, Christ was to that extent like St Francis’. The point, Chesterton thought, was ‘really very enlightening’, because, if people found ‘certain riddles and hard sayings in the story of Galilee’ and if they found ‘the answers to those riddles in the story of Assisi’, then this ‘really’ did ‘show that a secret’ had been ‘handed down in one tradition and no other’. For it showed that ‘the casket that was locked in Palestine’ could be ‘unlocked in Umbria’, which was not surprising if ‘the Church is the keeper of the keys’. It was ‘natural to explain St Francis in the light of Christ’, but it was less obvious ‘to explain Christ in the light of St Francis’. But the image of the mirror seemed a more appropriate metaphor:
St Francis is the mirror of Christ rather as the moon is the mirror of the sun. The moon is much smaller than the sun, but it is also much nearer to us; and being less vivid it is more visible. Exactly in the same sense St Francis is nearer to us, and being a mere man like ourselves is in that sense more imaginable. Being necessarily less of a mystery, he does not, for us, so much open his mouth in mysteries. Yet as a matter of fact, many minor things that seem mysteries in the mouth of Christ would seem merely characteristic paradoxes in the mouth of St Francis.
Chesterton then makes a very interesting point that he modestly calls a ‘truism’ but that actually throws a lot of light on the interpretation of the Bible:
It is a truism to say that Christ lived before Christianity; and it follows that as an historical figure He is a figure in heathen history. I mean that the medium in which He moved was not the medium of Christendom but of the old pagan empire; and from that alone, not to mention the distance of time, it follows that His circumstances are more alien to us than those of an Italian monk such as we might meet even to-day.…This archaic setting has left many of the sayings standing like hieroglyphics and subject to many and peculiar individual interpretations. Yet it is true of almost any of them that if we simply translate them into the Umbrian dialect of the first Franciscans, they would seem like any other part of the Franciscan story; doubtless in one sense fantastic, but quite familiar.37
Newman, Chesterton might have pointed out, had again anticipated him by making the same point about the meaning and significance of Christ becoming clearer in the history of the Church in a much more general kind of way in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. There in the first chapter he had written that a religion like Christianity ‘necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary…’.38
3
Unusually, although Chesterton was no longer engaged in editorial work, no book was published in 1924. He did, however, contribute an essay on George McDonald as an introduction to his son Greville McDonald’s book, George McDonald and his Wife, published in May 1924. As we have already seen, he was to mention George McDonald in the Autobiography as having taught him in childhood more or less the same kind of ‘optimistic theism’ that he was to imbibe from the sermons of the Revd Stopford Brooke.39 In this introductory essay, he explained that McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published a couple of years before Chesterton was born, was a book that
has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read…it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life.
The story of a little princess in a castle in the mountains where subterranean demons come up through the cellar, forcing the princess to climb up to rooms she had never seen before and where she is consoled by a fairy godmother, ‘suggests how near both the best and the worst things are to us from the first’. It also made ‘all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things’. And it showed how ‘the evil things besieging us…do not appear outside but inside’. That
simple image of a house that is our home…but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other, has always remained in my mind as something singularly solid and unanswerable; and was more corroborated than corrected when I came to give a more definite name to the lady [Chesterton means that of the Blessed Virgin Mary] watching over us from the turret, and perhaps to take a more practical view of the goblins under the floor.40
Early in November, Chesterton addressed the I.D.K. Club at Cambridge on ‘The Superstitions of the Sceptic’. A shorthand verbatim report was published as a booklet in March 1925 by the club, together with the correspondence in the Cambridge Review between the speaker and a Cambridge don, G. G. Coulton, the controversialist and anti-Catholic medieval historian.41 Chesterton argued that scepticism led to intellectual servitude, whether it was Puritanism in the sixteenth century or Utilitarianism in the nineteenth or Marxism in the twentieth century: on each occasion the sceptical mind proceeds to build an intellectual prison of iron dogmas that were much narrower than the rejected creeds and traditions. On the other hand, such of the old traditional ideas that were retained were now held without reason, the rationale for them having been lost. Coulton replied that the Catholic Church preached Puritanism long before the Reformation, forbidding dancing, for example. Chesterton’s response was that, if Coulton could not distinguish Catholicism from Puritanism, then that just showed that scholars could s
ee the details, but not the obvious things. Coulton did not understand that the balance of Catholicism consisted of teachings that corrected each other but that might appear contradictory to the outside observer. St Thomas Aquinas had certainly condemned certain kinds of dancing, but not dancing in itself like the Puritans. A medieval historian, who did not understand the nature of Catholicism, was bound to run into difficulties when writing about the Catholic Middle Ages.
In May Chesterton had told Maurice Baring that the delay in starting up the new paper was due to the fact that the ‘preliminary expenses’ that would have to be met were beyond anything he had ‘imagined’ and beyond his ‘means’. He had therefore had to ask the family solicitor to raise some money on his share in the family estate. But, again, he had had no idea of the length of the legal proceedings involved. But once they were completed he would ‘send out a proper prospectus’ and ‘see if we can get the money subscribed’.42 Before the end of 1924 an advance specimen number of the new G.K.’s Weekly, dated 8 November, had been produced ‘with the machinery of the [London] Mercury and the kind assistance of Jack [Sir John] Squire [the editor]. It is to serve as a sort of advertisement.’43 In the editorial Chesterton explained that he had viewed the proposal that the new paper should bear his name with a ‘horror which has since softened into loathing’. He had wanted a name that would convey what the paper stood for. But if he called it ‘“The Distributist Review” (as has been suggested) it would produce exactly the impression’ that he wanted to avoid: ‘It would suggest that a Distributist is something like a Socialist; a crank, a pedant, a person with a new theory of human nature’—whereas he wanted the paper ‘to stand for certain very normal and human ideas’, which, however, would ‘not be printed in any other paper except this one’. The problem of using any title ‘defining’ the paper’s ‘doctrine’ was that it would make ‘it look doctrinaire’. He wanted a title that would be ‘recognized as a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous’, that would ‘be in some sense a challenge even if the challenge be received only with genial derision’. He did not want ‘a colourless name; and the nearest I can get to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours’. The ‘natural social ideal’ that the paper would stand for had been so ‘ignored in England’ that he thought that this ‘normal ideal’ was ‘less known’ than his own name: ‘I am therefore driven to use the name as the only familiar introduction to the ideal.’44