G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

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G. K. Chesterton:A Biography Page 70

by Ian Ker


  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 civilisation’. 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 understand 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.65

  Chesterton had in fact dared to speak of this terrible paradox in Orthodoxy.66

  When giving Peter authority over his Church, Christ used the two symbols of rock and keys. What he meant by saying that on the rock of 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 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: ‘First, 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 not 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 ‘the 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 colourless 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 civilisation’. For Islam was ‘a product of Christianity; even if it was a byproduct; even if it was a bad product’.67

  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. Modern 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’.68

  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 is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy’. It is both ‘a true story’ and ‘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 dramatic’ ‘story-telling instinct’ that ‘is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies’, whether fatalistic or detached or sceptical or materialistic or 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 philosophers 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’.69

  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’.70

  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 witnesses.’ And ‘the last proof of the miracle’ is that ‘something so supernatural should have become so natural’. But he, Chesterton, has not ‘minimised 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 be ‘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 a ‘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 its hopes, 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 soul of 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 religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it’.71

  5

  In October 1925 Chesterton was persuaded by a number of the students at Glasgow University to put himself forward as a candidate at the triennial election of a new Rector.72 Candidates were normally prominent politicians put forward by the University’s political societies, and the elections were therefore a political test. The outgoing Rector was none other than F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead. E. C. Bentley spoke on behalf of his old friend at one of the election meetings, and was followed by ‘Keith’ Chesterton, who, expecting to be derided as a woman, had taken the precaution of bringing in her bag an apple, which she began to eat in the face of the expected howls and whistles of derision, the sight of which gradually quelled the noise until a boyish voice called out: ‘Carry on, Eve—we’ve fallen.’73 Ronald Knox also spoke on Chesterton’s behalf and was repaid for his pains by having bags of flour hurled at him. But Chesterton’s chief supporter was Hilaire Belloc, who spoke twice on his behalf in the Men’s Union and once in the Women’s Union, as well as contributing to G.K.C., the daily newssheet produced by Chesterton’s student supporters. In his first speech he told the students that all the causes he had ever supported had failed, which was why he was now urging them not to vote for Chesterton. Chesterton was a great poet and his poetry demanded thought to be understood. He was not a party politician like the other two candidates, the Conservative Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary, and the Socialist Sidney Webb. If, moreover, he were elected, his Rectorial address would compel them to think, a most uncomfortable practice. Normally, they were simply invited to vote for one party or another, but if there were to be candidates li
ke Chesterton, then again they would be forced to think. Next day Belloc gave six reasons for voting for Chesterton. If they failed to vote for such a great man, they would look foolish in years to come. If Chesterton were elected, then not only the students but the people of Glasgow would begin to read his books, which would do Chesterton good but also them. It would be a novelty, a change from the usual drab politician. It would add to the prestige of literature, and that would be good for his, Belloc’s, sales. Finally, victory for Chesterton would strike fear into the hearts of politicians. Belloc told the women students that it was as silly to vote for a candidate because of his party label as it would be to vote for him because of his initial. In the G.K.C. newssheet, Belloc added that, while Chesterton stood for what universities should stand for, the other two candidates merely stood for the absurdity of the parliamentary party system. In the event, Chesterton lost to Chamberlain. According to ‘Keith’, he lost because his well-known views on the question of feminism lost him the women’s vote.74 But, according to J. S. Phillimore, himself a professor at the University, Chesterton lost because of the ‘simple snobbery’ of the women students, unable to ‘get past the top hat and frock coat and Right Honourable…’. Certainly, of the 374 votes by which Chesterton was beaten by Chamberlain, only 20 were cast by men. As for Webb, he received less than a quarter of the votes cast for Chesterton.75

 

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