G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Thomas’s ‘Optimism’ was in direct opposition to all this pessimism about the body and the material: ‘He did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life …’. Against ‘the morbid Renaissance intellectual’ who wondered ‘To be or not to be—that is the question’, the ‘massive medieval doctor’ would ‘most certainly have replied ‘in a voice of thunder’: ‘To be—that is the answer.’ He was ‘vitally and vividly alone in declaring that life is a living story, with a great beginning and a great end’. The whole Thomist system rested on ‘one huge and simple idea’, that of what Thomas called in Latin Ens, unfortunately translated by the English word ‘being’, which, Chesterton complained, ‘has a wild and woolly sort of sound’, whereas Ens ‘has a sound like the English word End’: ‘It is final and even abrupt; it is nothing except itself.’ And it was upon ‘this sharp pin-point of reality’ that ‘There is an is’, that Thomas had reared ‘the whole cosmic system of Christendom’.37

  Thomas was not ‘ashamed’ to say that his reason was ‘fed’ by his senses, and that as far as his reason was concerned he felt ‘obliged to treat all this reality as real’. For him there was ‘this primary idea of a central common sense that is nourished by the five senses’. As ‘one of the great liberators of the human intellect’, he ‘reconciled religion with reason … expanded it towards experimental science … insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies’. It was Thomas who was the real ‘Reformer’, while the later Protestants like Luther, for whom the reason was ‘utterly untrustworthy’, were ‘by comparison reactionaries’. Now because Thomas ‘stood up stoutly for the fact that a man’s body is his body as his mind is his mind; and that he can only be a balance and union of the two’, this did not in the least mean he was a materialist in the modern sense, for this conviction was ‘specially connected with the most startling sort of dogma, which the Modernist can least accept; the Resurrection of the Body’. But, although Thomas’s argument for revelation was ‘quite rationalistic’, it was also ‘decidedly democratic and popular’: for he thought that ‘the souls of all the ordinary hard-working and simple-minded people’ were ‘quite as important as the souls of thinkers and truth-seekers’, and he wondered how the masses as opposed to the intellectuals could ‘find time for the amount of reasoning that is needed to find truth’. He believed in ‘scientific enquiry’ but he also had ‘a strong sympathy with the average man’, concluding that Revelation was necessary, since ‘men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all’. In a similar way, because he had a ‘strong sense of human dignity and liberty’, he insisted on free will: ‘Upon this sublime and perilous liberty hang heaven and hell, and all the mysterious drama of the soul.’38

  The ‘materialism’ of Aquinas was nothing other than ‘Christian humility’, for he was ‘willing to begin by recording the facts and sensations of the material world, just as he would have been willing to begin by washing up the plates and dishes in the monastery’. Anyway, Christianity had brought about a revolution in the human attitude towards the senses, towards ‘the sensations of the body and the experiences of the common man’, which could now be regarded ‘with a reverence at which great Aristotle would have stared, and no man in the ancient world could have begun to understand’:

  The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it.

  Since ‘there was in Plato a sort of idea that people would be better without their bodies; that their heads might fly off and meet in the sky in merely intellectual marriage, like cherubs in a picture’, it was not surprising that there was in the pre-Thomist Augustinian world ‘an emotional mood to abandon the body in despair’. Yet, once ‘the Incarnation had become the idea that is central in our civilisation, it was inevitable that there should be a return to materialism, in the sense of the serious value of matter and the making of the body’. And indeed there was in Thomas an unmistakably ‘positive’ attitude to creation, a mind ‘which is filled and soaked as with sunshine with the warmth of the wonder of created things’. He was positively ‘avid in his acceptance of Things; in his hunger and thirst for Things’:

  It was his special spiritual thesis that there really are things; and not only the Thing; that the Many existed as well as the One. I do not mean things to eat or drink or wear, though he never denied to these their place in the noble hierarchy of Being; but rather things to think about, and especially things to prove, to experience and to know.

  Aquinas passionately believed in the reason, but he also thought that ‘everything that is in the intellect has been in the senses’. And he was a philosopher who remained ‘faithful to his first love’, which was ‘love at first sight’: ‘I mean that he immediately recognised a real quality in things; and afterwards resisted all the disintegrating doubts arising from the nature of those things.’ Underlying this philosophical realism was ‘a sort of purely Christian humility and fidelity’, which ensured that he remained ‘true to the first truth’ and refused ‘the first treason’, unlike the many philosophers who ‘dissolve the stick or the stone in chemical solutions of scepticism; either in the medium of mere time and change; or in the difficulties of classification of unique units; or in the difficulty of recognising variety while admitting unity’. But Thomas remained ‘stubborn in the same obstinate objective fidelity. He has seen grass and gravel; and he is not disobedient to the heavenly vision.’ Even ‘the doubts and difficulties about reality’ drove him ‘to believe in more reality rather than less’: ‘If things deceive us, it is by being more real than they seem.’ If things seemed ‘to have a relative unreality’, it was because they were ‘potential and not actual’, ‘unfulfilled, like packets of seeds or boxes of fireworks’. No other thinker, Chesterton asserts, was ‘so unmistakably thinking about things and not being misled by the indirect influence of words’. There was an ‘elemental and primitive poetry that shines through all his thoughts; and especially through the thought with which all his thinking begins. It is the intense rightness of his sense of the relation between the mind and the real thing outside the mind.’ The ‘light in all poetry, and indeed in all art’ was the ‘strangeness of things’—that is, their ‘otherness; or what is called their objectivity’. For Aquinas, ‘the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards’ not ‘inwards’, because ‘the images it seeks are real things’. Their ‘romance and glamour’ lay in the fact that they were ‘real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind’. Far from the mind being ‘sufficient to itself’, it was ‘insufficient for itself’: ‘For this feeding upon fact is itself; as an organ it has an object which is objective; this eating of the strange strong meat of reality.’ Aquinas understood that the mind was ‘not merely receptive, in the sense that it absorbs sensations like so much blotting-paper; on that sort of softness has been based all that cowardly materialism, which conceives man as wholly servile to his environment’. But neither did he think that the mind was ‘purely creative, in the sense that it paints pictures on the windows and then mistakes them for a landscape outside’: ‘In other words, the essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage.’39

  It was in fact ‘a matter of common sense’ that Thomism was ‘the philosophy of common sense’. For Thomas did not ‘deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real’. And that was because he ‘recognised instantly … that a man must either answer tha
t question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask’. It was true in a sense that one could be ‘a fundamental sceptic’—but then one could not be ‘anything else’, and certainly not ‘a defender of fundamental scepticism’. In his robust rejection of scepticism, Chesterton is anxious to emphasize, Aquinas supported ‘the ordinary man’s acceptance of ordinary truisms’. Unlike contemporary intellectuals who despised the masses, Thomas, ‘the one real Rationalist’ who was given to ‘the unusual hobby of thinking’, was ‘arguing for a common sense which would … commend itself to most of the common people’.40

  Chesterton concludes his remarkable evocation of the mind of St Thomas Aquinas—a mind, as perceived by him, so highly congenial to his own in its insistence on the fact of being, in its commitment not only to reason but also to common sense (with its consequent affinity to the common man), in its love of the limitation of definitions—on a dark and sinister note. For there came a day when, ‘in one sense, perhaps, the Augustinian tradition was avenged after all’—not that either Augustine or the medieval Augustinians ‘would have desired’ to see that day. Nevertheless it was an Augustinian friar who took his revenge on Thomism three centuries after Thomas: ‘For there was one particular monk in that Augustinian monastery in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake.’ And that emphasis was on the Augustinian emphasis on ‘the impotence of man before God, the omniscience of God about the destiny of man, the need for holy fear and the humiliation of intellectual pride, more than the opposite and corresponding truths of free will or human dignity or good works’. It was this tradition that

  came out of its cell again, in the day of storm and ruin, and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies. It had a peculiar horror and loathing of the great Greek philosophies, and of the scholasticism that had been founded on these philosophies. It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth of heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain.

  Chesterton’s searing indictment of Martin Luther is as striking as Newman’s own great, extended denunciation in the last of his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838) of Luther’s alleged religion of feelings. Chesterton insists that nothing ‘trivial’ had ‘transformed the world’. One of the ‘huge, hinges of history’, Luther’s ‘broad and burly figure’ was ‘big enough to blot out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas’. Not that Luther’s pessimistic theology of ‘the hopelessness of all human virtue’ was a theology that modern Protestants would be ‘seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole’. All that Lutheranism was ‘now quite unreal’—yet ‘Luther was not unreal’: ‘He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world.’ Although, on ‘a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible’, it was ‘not altogether untrue to say … that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world’. It was said that Luther ‘publicly burned the Summa Theologica and the works of Aquinas’:

  All the close-packed definitions that excluded so many errors and extremes; all the broad and balanced judgments upon the clash of loyalties or the choice of evils; all the liberal speculations upon the limits of government or the proper conditions of justice; all the distinctions between the use and abuse of private property; all the rules and exceptions about the great evil of war; all the allowances for human weakness and all the provisions for human health; all this mass of medieval humanism shrivelled and curled up in smoke before the eyes of its enemy; and that great passionate peasant rejoiced darkly, because the day of the intellect was over.41

  3

  After recovering from an attack of jaundice, Chesterton set off on 20 March 1934 for a lengthy holiday with Frances and Dorothy Collins.42 They crossed the Channel at Calais and arrived in Rome by train three days later. They left Rome for Naples, from where they sailed two days later for Sicily, which they reached on the 7th. Arriving at Taormina on the 9th, they spent the night there before leaving next afternoon for Syracuse. There Chesterton became ill with inflammation of the nerves in the neck and shoulders. By the 22nd the inflammation was so bad that he had to spend two weeks in bed. Plans to revisit Egypt and Palestine had to be abandoned. On 13 May they sailed for Malta, where they arrived late that night. Chesterton still felt too ill to take up an invitation to dinner at Admiralty House. His would-be hostess visited him in his hotel, where she found him sitting on a rickety basket chair, suffering from the cold, and evidently in pain, for all his attempts to talk as if there was nothing wrong. When she expressed her sympathy, he replied: ‘You must never pity me, for I can always turn every chair into a story.’43 The Archbishop of Malta called on the evening of 21 May. Two days later the English travellers took a boat for Marseilles. The French novelist Andre Maurois was also on board with his wife. And Dorothy Collins noted that on the 24th they spent ‘a very pleasant evening’ with them. Next day they arrived early in the morning at Marseilles, leaving early next morning for Gibraltar, which the boat reached two days later early in the morning. They then sailed on at midday to Tangier, where they arrived two and a half hours later. On the morning of 1 June they arrived back in England at Tilbury.

  Unless letters had been forwarded, they would have found awaiting them a letter dated 27 March from Cardinal Francis Bourne, the Archbishop of Westminster, informing Chesterton that Pope Pius XI had conferred on him and Belloc ‘the Knight Commandership with star of the Order of St Gregory the Great in recognition of the services which you have rendered to the Church by your writings’. As soon as ‘the briefs’ arrived he would ‘have much pleasure in presenting them to you both’. Accordingly, the Cardinal’s secretary had written on 22 May to invite Chesterton to come to Archbishop’s House with Belloc to receive the ‘document which has just arrived from Rome conferring upon [him] the honour’.44

  At the end of August Chesterton wrote somewhat late in the day to congratulate Annie Firmin’s daughter Molly on her engagement. Mollie had looked after him when he visited Vancouver and her mother had been ill. Now he apologized for not writing earlier:

  I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations—and yet I do assure you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything.

  Eventually in such a lengthy letter he would ‘come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the pages are never written’. But ‘bad correspondents’ like Chesterton, ‘vile non-writers of letters’, had ‘a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will have to listen to so much’, and that was that it was because they thought so much about their friends that they did not write to them: ‘the letters would be too long.’ Again, ‘wretched writing men’ like Chesterton felt that to have to write ‘in their spare time’ was ‘loathsome’, as opposed to the pleasure of ‘thinking about
our friends’.

  In the course of turning out about ten articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on Determinism, on Distributism, on Dolfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth, though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone involved.45

  4

  Among the subjects mentioned by Chesterton as demanding articles from him, two names stand out: Hitler and Dolfuss. Perhaps Chesterton chose not to spoil a happy occasion by emphasizing them. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany in January 1933. In July 1934 the Austrian chancellor Dolfuss, who had banned the Austrian National Socialist or Nazi party in June the year before, was murdered by a group of Austrian Nazis who burst into the chancellery building in an unsuccessful coup d’état. Hitler’s ambition to create a ‘Greater Germany’ consisting of all the German-speaking peoples, however, began to be realized four years later when Germany invaded Austria in March 1938 and the so-called Anschluss incorporated Austria into Nazi Germany. Dolfuss’s hapless successor, Chancellor Schuschnigg, was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.

  Ever since the armistice at the end of the First World War, Chesterton had been warning of the threat posed to Europe by a resentful Germany, which had been wounded but not fatally wounded, and he would continue to do so until his death in 1936. Since 1925 he had had his own platform in the form of G.K.’s Weekly to sound the alarm and to try to arouse his isolationist, pacifist countrymen, who thought they could stand aside from the developing tragedy in Europe. In 1940 Maisie Ward’s husband Frank Sheed edited a selection of articles, mostly taken from G.K.’s Weekly but also from elsewhere, in a book called The End of the Armistice, with the intention of showing just how prophetic a voice Chesterton’s had been. It was, Sheed pointed out, ‘scarcely too much’ to say that Chesterton had taken the Second World War ‘for granted as a simple fact of future history’: ‘That is to say he saw it not as possible, nor as probable, but as a thing already on the way and humanly speaking certain to arrive. He saw how it would arrive—Germany would attack Poland; he saw closer still, that Germany would do so in agreement with Russia.’46