G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Chesterton sees culture as inextricably connected with religion. Christian culture, like the mysteries of Christianity, was ‘woven of many strands, of many fabrics and colours, and twisted into the single knot, the knot that holds the world together, but the knot that is of all knots the most difficult to trace out or untie’. Compared with that, there was ‘something simple and smooth and all of a piece about the ancient silks of China or the peasant weaving of India’, where Hinduism sought ‘to unite all things’, as opposed to Christianity, which sought ‘not merely to unite all things, but to unite union with disunion’. Like Hindu India, the modern world seemed to have ‘no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture’. It had ‘no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything’:

  I myself value very highly the great nineteenth-century illumination of romantic love, just as I value the great eighteenth-century ideal of right reason and human dignity, or the seventeenth-century intensity, or the sixteenth-century expansion, or the divine logic and dedicated valour of the Middle Ages. I do not see why any of these cultural conquests should be lost or despised, or why it is necessary for every fashion to wash away all that is best in every other.

  What had certainly also been washed away was the Christian basis of culture. The ‘gods’, for instance, of the republican romantics were love and liberty, which were ‘both simply fragments of Christian mysticism, and even of Christian theology, torn out of their proper place, flung loosely about and finally hurled forward into an age of hard materialism which instantly destroyed them’. As soon as they ceased being ‘religious ideas’ they ceased being ‘rational ideas’: ‘One of them was a hazy human exaggeration of the sacramental idea of marriage. The other was a hazy human exaggeration of the brotherhood of men in God.’ The romantic lover ultimately both drew on ‘the Christian capital of the old ideas of immortality and sanctity’ and appealed to ‘the old tradition of the martyr and ascetic, who lost the world to save his soul’. But unfortunately the Romantics held up romance in ‘a sort of indeterminate pre-eminence; a dizzy and toppling idolatry’ without ‘making it secure’ on the ‘solid pedestal’ of ‘a religious idea’. Similarly, when ‘the divine ground from under Democracy’ was cut away, then ‘Democracy was left to stand by itself’, or, in other words, to ‘fall by itself’.25

  Chesterton’s cultural criticism in these selected articles includes some striking literary criticism. The ‘fragments’ of Stevenson’s unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston, are likened to ‘the fragments of a colossal god lying broken in the desert’. And Stevenson’s ‘sharpness of focus’ (what elsewhere Chesterton called his ‘deadly precision’26), especially in depicting the ‘ugly figures’ that he ‘most’ enjoyed, ensured that, even they had ‘a definite form’, so that he turned ‘everything to beauty, even to the terrible beauty that is made out of a harmony of ugly things’. But an ‘odd style’, such as that of Carlyle, Browning, or Meredith, was not of any ‘advantage’ to the author’s future reputation. On the other hand, it was when a poet was ‘moving most smoothly on the butter-slide of praise and progress and the prevailing fashion’ that he ‘generally came a cropper’. In poetry, sense and sound were inseparable: ‘the sense depends on the sound and the sound depends on the sense.’ The trouble with contemporary satirists like Aldous Huxley was that, while they saw ‘with extraordinary vividness the humbug or the impudence or intellectual cruelty of this or that social type, in this or that social situation’, they really thought that things were ‘too complex for anybody to do the right thing’, with the result that there was ‘a hollow in the heart of their whirlwind of destructive criticism, as there is a hollow in the heart of the whirlpool’. Chaucer was ‘our one medieval poet’, and yet he flatly contradicted all that people meant by ‘medieval’. He belonged to ‘that fairly large and very happy band of artists’—like Chesterton himself, we might add—‘who are not troubled with the artistic temperament’. The ‘extreme antithesis of the aesthete’, Chaucer was blessed with an ‘essentially merry’ mood. Paradoxically, he was ‘wide enough to be narrow; that is, he could bring a broad experience of life to the enjoyment of local or even accidental things’, because he had ‘a scheme of spiritual values in their right order’ and because he had ‘seen the great world of human beings’. Walter Scott is considered a Romantic writer, but it was not for nothing that he was born in the eighteenth century: ‘He was, almost as much as he was anything, a great orator.’ So much so that Chesterton thought that it would be ‘well worth while to make an anthology’ of his speeches. While Scott romanticized the Middle Ages, he ‘knew nothing’ of its religion: ‘But he had extracted from his feudal traditions something on which his spirit freely fed; something without which the modern world is starving. He found the idea of Honour, which is the true energy in all militant eloquence.’27

  2

  In July 1933 Chesterton attended a lunch at Claridge’s Hotel in London given by the Royal Society of Literature for the Canadian Authors’ Association. Kipling proposed the toast and Chesterton seconded him. He began by acknowledging that his listeners would be ‘much puzzled at my occupying any space—so much space—in this august assembly’, and must be wondering what he could add to what Kipling, a ‘great literary genius’, had already said. He could hardly ‘pose as a newspaperman’—‘one reads of newspaper men slipping in through half-closed doors’—and ‘no one could possibly think of me as slipping through a half-closed door’! He had travelled in Canada ‘in the miserable capacity of one giving lectures’—but he hesitated to call himself a lecturer for ‘fear some of you may have attended my lectures’. In fact, he had twice visited Canada and enjoyed the ‘overwhelming’ hospitality of the Canadian Authors’ Association: ‘The Canadian Literature Society rushed out to welcome any stray traveller, and in the confusion I was mistaken for a literary man. I tried to explain I was merely a lecturer, and one of the first things for a lecturer to do is talk about things he does not understand, such as Canada.’28

  In September Chesterton published the last of his half-dozen or so major works, St Thomas Aquinas. Even Shaw was enthusiastic about the project. ‘Great news this’, he wrote to Frances, ‘about the Divine Doctor. I have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have cherished Thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my forerunner on this point.’29 The previous year he had sent Chesterton a copy of his irreverent, not to say blasphemous, latest book, The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, with the flippant message: ‘Tell the Vatican that something must be done about the Bible. It is like the burden on [Pilgrim’s Progress’s] Christian’s back at present; only it won’t come off.’30 After rapidly dictating about half the book to Dorothy Collins, and without consulting any authorities, Chesterton suddenly asked her to go to London and buy some books about the Divine Doctor. When she asked what books, he replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Father O’Connor came to the rescue, supplying her with the names of standard and recent works on the subject. Chesterton ‘flipped them rapidly through’, the only way Dorothy Collins had ever see him read a book. He then dictated the rest of the book to her, without consulting any of the secondary works, which remained unmarked except for one little sketch of Thomas in the margin of one of the books. However, Étienne Gilson, the French Thomist philosopher and historian of medieval philosophy, and the pioneer of the twentieth-century Thomist revival along with Jacques Maritain, said ruefully on its publication, ‘Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.’31 After Chesterton’s death, he wrote that he considered the book as being ‘without possible comparison the best book ever written on St Thomas’: ‘Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement.’ Chesterton’s ‘so-called “wit”’ had put the scholars to ‘sha
me’. He had ‘guessed’ all that they had ‘tried to demonstrate’ and that they had tried ‘more or less clumsily … to express in academic formulas’. In Gilson’s view he was ‘one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed’.32 To Father Kevin Scannell, who had been O’Connor’s curate and who inherited his Chesterton collection, Gilson wrote: ‘My reason for admiring his “Thomas Aquinas” as I do, precisely is that I find him always right in his conclusions about the man and the doctrine even though in fact, he knew so little about him.’ He always felt that Chesterton was ‘nearer the real Thomas’ than he was even ‘after reading and teaching the Angelic Doctor for sixty years’.33 Of course, Chesterton’s knowledge was very limited compared to Gilson’s, but it would be a mistake to conclude that his portrait of Thomas was some kind of purely inspired stroke of genius. For, Dorothy Collins tells us, ‘he had read the Summa in his youth’.34

  S. Thomas Aquinas begins with an extended contrast between Thomas and Francis of Assisi. Physically, they were opposites. Francis was ‘a lean and lively little man; thin as a thread and vibrant as a bow-string; and in his motions like an arrow from the bow’: ‘In appearance he must have been like a thin brown skeleton autumn leaf dancing eternally before the wind; but in truth it was he that was the wind.’ Thomas, on the other hand, was ‘a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet’. Unlike the ‘fiery and even fidgety’ Francis, Thomas was ‘so solid that the scholars, in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce’. As the son of a middle-class shopkeeper, Francis spent his ‘whole life’ in ‘revolt against the mercantile life of his father’: ‘he retained none the less, something of the quickness … which makes the market hum like a hive. In the common phrase, fond as he was of green fields, he did not let the grass grow under his feet.’ In American slang, Francis was ‘a live wire’—or rather, since ‘there is no such thing as a live wire’ (a typically modern ‘mechanical metaphor from a dead thing’), he was ‘a live worm’, indeed ‘a very live worm’: ‘Greatest of all foes to the go-getting ideal, he had certainly abandoned getting, but he was still going.’ By contrast, Thomas came from the leisured class, and his work always had ‘something of the placidity of leisure’: ‘He was a hard worker, but nobody could possibly mistake him for a hustler.’ Chesterton had to admit that, ‘while the romantic glory of St Francis has lost nothing of its glamour for me’, he had ‘in later years grown to feel almost as much affection, or in some aspects even more, for this man who unconsciously inhabited a large heart and a large head, like one inheriting a large house, and exercised there an equally generous if rather more absent-minded hospitality’: ‘There are moments when St Francis, the most unworldly man who ever walked the world, is almost too efficient for me. ‘Just as Chesterton had assaulted the post-Christian imagination with images of a startlingly unfamiliar Christ, so too he makes sure that we understand what Thomas did when he ‘calmly announced’ to his aristocratic family that he was becoming a Dominican friar, a ‘new order founded by Dominic the Spaniard’—‘much as the eldest son of the squire might go home and airily inform the family that he had married a gypsy; or the heir of a Tory Duke state that he was walking tomorrow with the Hunger Marchers organised by alleged Communists’. There was no objection to his becoming a monk—monasticism had become established and respectable—but when he said ‘he wished to be a Friar … his brothers flew at him like wild beasts’. The paradox was that Thomas, unlike Francis, had nothing of the beggar or vagabond about him—and yet he insisted on being ‘established and appointed to be a Beggar’.35

  But, ‘while the two men were thus a contrast in almost every feature, they were really doing the same thing. One of them was doing it in the world of the mind and the other in the world of the worldly.’ Yet it was ‘the same great medieval movement … it was more important than the Reformation …. it was the Reformation’. For, Chesterton explains, the Protestant Reformation was merely ‘a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality.’ But neither Francis nor Thomas was ‘a backwash’. Both were uniquely suited for a new age: ‘The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed, that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.’ Each generation instinctively sought its saint: ‘not what the people want, but rather what the people need.’ Thus it was ‘the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most’. The ‘popular poetry of St Francis and the almost rationalistic prose of St Thomas’ both contributed to ‘the development of the supreme doctrine, which was also the dogma of all dogmas’. They were ‘both great growths of Catholic development, depending upon external things only as every living and growing thing depends on them; that is, it digests and transforms them, but continues in its own image and not in theirs’. Both saints were ‘doing the same great work; one in the study and the other in the street’:

  They were not bringing something new into Christianity, in the sense of something heathen or heretical into Christianity; on the contrary, they were bringing Christianity into Christendom. But they were bringing it back against the pressure of certain historic tendencies, which had hardened into habits in many great schools and authorities in the Christian Church; and they were using tools and weapons which seemed to many people to be associated with heresy or heathenry. St Francis used Nature much as St Thomas used Aristotle; and to some they seemed to be using a Pagan goddess and a Pagan sage …. Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth.

  For ‘the historical Catholic Church began by being Platonist; by being rather too Platonist’, with the result that unfortunately ‘the purely spiritual or mystical side of Catholicism had very much got the upper hand in the first Catholic centuries’, with the consequence that various ‘things weighed down what we should now roughly call the Western element; though it has as good a right to be called the Christian element; since its common sense is but the holy familiarity of the word made flesh’. After all, a Christian, as opposed to a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, ‘means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses’. Francis’s ‘readiness … to learn from the flowers of the birds’, far from anticipating ‘the Pagan renaissance’, instead pointed back to the New Testament and forward to ‘the Aristotelian realism of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas’. By ‘humanising divinity’, Francis was not ‘paganising divinity’, since ‘the humanising of divinity is actually the strongest and starkest and most incredible dogma in the Creed’:

  St Francis was becoming more like Christ, and not merely more like Buddha, when he considered the lilies of the field or the fowls of the air; and St Thomas was becoming more of a Christian, and not merely more of an Aristotelian, when he insisted that God and the image of God had come in contact through matter with a material world.

  These two saints were ‘in the most exact sense of the term, Humanists; because they were insisting on the immense importance of the human being’, because they were ‘strengthening that staggering doctrine of Incarnation’. The more ‘rational or natural’ they became, the more ‘orthodox’ they became. Both ‘the Thomist movement in metaphysics’—with its recovery, thanks to Aristotle, whom Thomas had ‘baptised’ and miraculously ‘raised … from the dead’, of ‘the most defiant of all dogmas, the wedding of God with Man and therefore with Matter’—and also ‘the Franciscan movement in morals and manners’ were ‘an e
nlargement and a liberation’, both were ‘emphatically a growth of Christian theology from within’ and ‘emphatically not a shrinking of Christian theology under heathen or even human influences’. Both Francis and Thomas ‘felt subconsciously’ that the ‘hold’ of Christians was ‘slipping on the solid Catholic doctrine and discipline, worn smooth by more than a thousand years of routine; and that the Faith needed to be shown under a new light and dealt with from another angle’. It had become ‘too Platonist to be popular. It needed something like the shrewd and homely touch of Aristotle to turn it again into a religion of common sense.’ Christian theology ‘tended more and more to be a sort of dried up Platonism; a thing of diagrams and abstractions … not sufficiently touched by that great thing that is by definition almost the opposite of abstraction: Incarnation’. The Platonic influence was definitely tending towards a Manichaean philosophy, which existed outside the Church in the ‘fiercer’ form of the Albigensian heresy and inside the Church in the ‘subtler’ form of an Augustinianism that ‘derived partly from Plato’.36