G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Unkindly, Chesterton suggests that perhaps ‘the most successful’ of the Reformers were the founders of the Church of England, ‘who really had no ideas to offer at all’: ‘They at least did not exasperate human nature; but even they showed the same blindness, in binding themselves instantly to the Divine Right of Kings, which was almost immediately to break down.’ The ‘heresy’ of Islam had not died, but then its founder was ‘a far shrewder person’. After ‘the theological and theoretical part’ of the reformers’ ‘work withered with extraordinary rapidity … the void that was left was almost as rapidly filled with other things’—such as ‘the Race Religion of the Germans’. Islam had stood by being stagnant’: But Protestantism could not stand in the staggering rush of the West; it could only maintain itself by ceasing to be itself, and announcing its readiness to turn into anything else.’ But Chesterton could only shudder to imagine into what sort of epileptic convulsion’ Luther would have fallen if anybody had told him to tear out the Epistles of St Paul, because St Paul was not an Aryan’—not that he, Luther, had hesitated to tear out, in one of his irrational convulsions of rage’, the Epistle of St James from the Bible, because St James exalts the importance of good works’. Luther’s insistence on justification by faith alone was an example of Chesterton’s definition of heresy: ‘A heresy is a truth that hides all the other truths.’71

  Nor was it possible for a church to remain Catholic, like the Church of England under Henry VIII, without Rome:

  the moment when Religion lost touch with Rome, it changed instantly and internally, from top to bottom, in its very substance and the stuff of which it was made. It changed in substance; it did not necessarily change in form or features or externals. It might do the same things; but it was not the same thing that was saying them.

  At the beginning of the English Reformation Henry VIII was ‘a Catholic in everything except that he was not a Catholic … And in that instant of refusal, his religion became a different religion … In that instant it began to change; and it has not stopped changing yet.’ True, ‘Modern Churchmen’ called such continuous change ‘progress’—but it was only progress in the sense that ‘a corpse crawling with worms has an increased vitality; or … a snow-man, slowly turning into a puddle, is purifying itself of its accretions’.72

  It was the Prayer Book controversy of 1927 and 1928, when the House of Commons led by the Home Secretary, the ultra-Protestant William Joynson-Hicks, rejected two versions of a revised Prayer Book for the Church of England, which introduced some moderate Catholic elements, that had revealed to Chesterton ‘a reality’ he had not hitherto realized:

  There really was a Church of England; or rather there really was an England which largely imagined that it possessed and controlled the Church. But this Church was not the Church I thought I had belonged to; the keen, cultivated and sincere group of men who claimed to be Catholic. It was a much vaster and vaguer background of men; who did not believe in anything in particular, but who claimed to be Protestant.

  Whether or not they were Protestant, ‘they all seemed to have this fixed idea; that they owned the Church of England; and could turn it into a Mormon temple if they wished’. After ‘a mob of politicians, atheists, agnostics, dissenters, Parsees; avowed enemies of the Church or of any Church’ had rejected the revised Prayer Book, a Protestant body

  presented all the atheists, etc., who had voted Protestant, with a big black Bible or Prayer-Book, or both, decorated outside with a picture of the Houses of Parliament. … It would be very idolatrous to put a cross or crucifix outside a book; but a picture of Parliament where the Party Funds are kept, and the peerages sold—. That is the temple where dwell the gods of Israel.

  Actually, the Prayer Book or Book of Common Prayer was the masterpiece of Protestantism’, its ‘one positive possession and attraction’. And ‘the only thing that can produce any sort of nostalgia or romantic regret, any shadow of homesickness in one who has in truth come home, is the rhythm of Cranmer’s prose’. After all, it was written by ‘apostate Catholics’: ‘It is strong, not in so far as it is the first Protestant book, but in so far as it was the last Catholic book.’ Its most moving passages’ were ‘moving, or indeed thrilling, precisely because they say the things which Protestants have long left off saying; and which only Catholics still say’. The ‘very finest passages’ were ‘concerned specially with spiritual thoughts and themes that now seem strange and terrible’, such as the hour of death and the day of judgment: But did you ever hear the curate fresh from the cricket-field, or the vicar smiling under the Union Jacks of the Conservative Rally, dwell upon that penultimate peril; of the danger of falling from God amid the pains of death? Very morbid. Just like those Dago devotional books. So very Roman.’73

  Chesterton had never attacked Anglo-Catholicism—which he knew could be ‘honestly held; for I held it myself for many years’—as there were many things much more in need of being disputed’, and, as he himself knew from experience, it often did more harm than good. But the Church of England was a different matter. It was a state church, in which illogically ‘God holds his authority from Caesar; instead of Caesar holding it from God’. If Chesterton had not already left it, he would have done so after ‘the shilly-shallying and sham liberality’ of the 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, which approved artificial contraception under certain circumstances: But this particular case was only the culmination of a long process of compromise and cowardice about the problem of sex; the final surrender after a continuous retreat.’ He was thankful now to be free of ‘the nervous compromises of Anglicanism’, which, having accepted the possibility of divorce in exceptional circumstances, had now come out with a ‘weak and inconclusive pronouncement upon Birth-Prevention’, which was ‘only the culmination’ of a long intellectual corruption’. The acceptance of divorce as an exception to the normal rule of marriage had inevitably led to a change in the whole social substance of marriage’, since people were now getting married, ‘thinking already that they may be divorced’, as though marriage was a question of Mood’ rather than a ‘contract’. The exception had become the rule, and the same would happen with so-called Birth-Control’, which in fact did not control but prevented birth and which was a ‘hypocritical’ euphemism for ‘Birth-Prevention’. That anyway was a ‘stale and timid compromise’ compared with infanticide, which was ‘real and even reasonable Eugenics’, as it would ensure that only the ‘healthiest’ babies survived, whereas contraception only discouraged ‘the early parentage of young and vigorous people’ who would produce the healthiest and best babies. The ‘unnatural separation’ of sex from fruitfulness would have been regarded even by pre-Christian pagans as ‘a perversion’. It was analogous to thinking of property only in the sense of money, ‘in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears’.74

  Chesterton was clear that he could not abandon Catholicism without ‘falling back on something more shallow’, without ‘becoming something more narrow than a Catholic’. Hence the title of the book: ‘We have come out of the shallows and the dry places to the one deep well; and the Truth is at the bottom of it.’ It was ironic, considering that Darwinism in the nineteenth century was supposed to herald the end of religion, that the modern revival of Catholicism was a perfect example of what Darwin meant by the Survival of ‘the Fittest’: ‘It is surviving because nothing else can survive.’ Popular Darwinism had understood the survival of the fittest to mean that ‘the Struggle for Existence was of necessity an actual struggle between the candidates for survival’, in which ‘the strongest creature violently crushed the others’, an idea that ‘came everywhere as good news to bad men’. Science, ‘that nameless being’, now apparently ‘declared that the weakest must go to the wall’, with the result that there was ‘a rapid decline and degradation in the sense of responsibility in the rich’: ‘The profiteer … was satisfied with himself; knowing that nature is unjust.’
But, far from going to the wall, the Catholic Church was only said ‘to be behind the times’ because it was ‘always in advance of the world’. What was called ‘free thought’ had finally come ‘to threaten everything that is free’, whether it was ‘personal freedom’ by denying free will’ or ‘civic freedom’ by spreading ‘a plague of hygienic and psychological quackeries’. Indeed, it was ‘quite likely’ to remove religious freedom.75

  The Englishman’s fear of Catholicism was usually thought of as ‘a sort of claustrophobia’, a fear of being ‘walled up’ in a confessional box, which in his Protestant ‘nightmare’ seemed to be a sort of mantrap’, or in a monastic ‘cell’, which suggested a prison cell. But actually it was ‘a sort of agoraphobia’—that is, ‘a fear of something larger than himself and his tribal traditions’, of an international as opposed to national Church. Chesterton himself had been brought up in a liberal Protestant atmosphere, where the Virgin Mary was referred to as the Madonna, not of course because she was literally seen as ‘my Lady’, but partly because of that ‘queer Victorian evasion’ of ‘translating dangerous or improper words into foreign languages’ and partly because of ‘a certain sincere though vague respect for the part that Madonnas had played in the actual cultural and artistic history of our civilisation’. But Chesterton had never experienced that ‘strange mania against Mariology; that mad vigilance that watches for the first signs of the cult of Mary as for the spots of a plague’. On the contrary, he had ‘always had a curious longing for the remains of this particular tradition, even in a world where it was regarded as a legend’. Not only had he been ‘haunted by the idea while stuck in the ordinary stage of schoolboy scepticism’, but he had been affected by it before that’, before he had ‘shed the ordinary nursery religion in which the Mother of God had no fit or adequate place’:

  I found not long ago, scrawled in very bad handwriting, screeds of an exceedingly bad imitation of Swinburne, which was, nevertheless, apparently addressed to what I should have called a picture of the Madonna. And I can distinctly remember reciting the lines of the ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ … but deliberately directing them away from Swinburne’s intention, and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of Life, rather than to the fallen Pagan Queen of death.76

  But, while England was solidly Protestant’ in the nineteenth century in its hatred of Mariolatry, in its belief in justification by faith and the inerrancy of Scripture, all that now remained was anti-Catholicism: Protestantism was simply a name now for an anti-Catholicism that was ‘even more against Calvinism than against Catholicism … even more insistent on works than were the Catholics …’. It attacked Protestantism to attack Catholicism. And a hundred years later, Chesterton prophetically remarked, the Church would ‘look to her enemies something utterly different from what she looked like a hundred years ago’: ‘She will look different because she will be the same.’ She would be ‘facing once more her first and most formidable enemy’, paganism, ‘a thing more attractive because more human than any of the heresies’. For Pagans looked for their ‘pleasures to the ‘natural forces of this world’, but these natural forces, when they are turned into gods, betray mankind by something that is in the very nature of nature-worship’: ‘We can already see men becoming unhealthy by the worship of health; becoming hateful by the worship of love; becoming paradoxically solemn and overstrained by the idolatry of sport; and in some cases strangely morbid and infected with horrors by the perversion of a just sympathy with animals.’ The ‘emergence of new issues’ would ‘reveal … aspects of Catholic doctrine and tradition, hidden by historical accident and the special quarrels of recent times … to the world when it begins to address new questions to the Church’. Chesterton’s words are extraordinarily prophetic when one considers the contemporary world’s hostility to the Catholic Church because of its protection of human life from the womb to the grave, a hostility that would have astonished nineteenth-century Protestants. Chesterton’s non-Catholic contemporaries would have been hardly less astonished at the emergence of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century as the champion of human rights and freedom. His fellow Liberals, when he began to write, had ‘inherited a huge legend that all persecution had come from the Church’, and some still mumbled ‘old memories about the Spanish Inquisition (a thing started strictly by the state)’. But the idea that ‘superstition was somehow the mother of persecution’ was flatly contradicted by the contemporary tyrannies of secular Communism and Fascism. In Protestant countries ancient universal popular liberties’, taken for granted in Catholic countries, were prohibited, Protestantism or Puritanism being ‘in its nature prone to what may be called Prohibitionism’—that is, ‘to prohibit, rather than to curtail or control’ and to apply an ‘absolute idea of amputation to all parts of problematical human nature’. Thus there was ‘a fanatical quality, sweeping, final, almost suicidal, in Protestant reforms’. But the modern secular—literally from the Latin saeculi or ‘of the age’, in other words ‘dated’—mind also generally favoured prohibition, whether it was pacifists prohibiting war or Communists prohibiting private property, since having to decide whether it was a just war or lawful property was too much of ‘a strain on the Modern Mind’, not being at all accustomed to making up its mind’.77

  Communism, Chesterton thought, was a very Victorian phenomenon in its ‘mad optimism about the advantages of machinery’. Marx indeed had ‘launched his world religion from something more British than the British Empire: the British Museum’. The late Victorian period was a time when Jews, especially German Jews, were ‘at the very top of their power and influence’, both ‘imperial and immune’. Now the situation was very different, with Jews being ‘jumped on very unjustly in Germany itself’. Chesterton and Belloc, ‘who began in the days of Jewish omnipotence by attacking the Jews, will now probably die defending them’. Capitalism had destroyed the family, had ‘broken up households, and encourages divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt’, had ‘forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes’, had ‘destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer’, had ‘driven men from their homes to look for jobs’, had ‘forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families’, and above all had ‘encouraged for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers’. Communism did exactly the same, but Chesterton thought that if he had to choose between the two he would choose Communism: ‘Better Bolshevist battles and the Brave New World than the ancient house of man rotted away silently by such worms of secret sensuality and individual appetite.’78

  But even worse than ‘the Communist attacking the family or the Capitalist betraying the family’ was the spectacle of ‘the Hitlerite defending the family’ by making ‘every family dependent’ on Hitler and his ‘semi-Socialist state’. And, if contraception and sterilization led ‘the march of human progress through abortion to infanticide’, then Chesterton could see the Nazis hailing infanticide ‘with howls of barbaric joy, as one of the sacred commands of the Race Religion; the proceedings very probably terminating (by that time) with a little human sacrifice’. However, Chesterton, prophetic though he was, certainly underrated Hitler and the Nazis when he described them as ‘simply the tail-end, we might say the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the nineteenth-century Prussianism; the camp followers of the far better disciplined army of Bismarck’—although he did qualify that rather dismissive description by adding, ‘in its present practical form’. Its ‘rowdy revivalism’ had to be understood as ‘merely a revival’:

  The movement that has actually abolished Bavaria, and left no State alive except the Bismarckian Empire, is but the last phase of the Bismarckian plan to Prussianise Germany, by crushing and outnumbering the Catholics of the Rhine; and stealing the old Imperial Crown from the other Catholics of the Danube. In short, he set up
a new Protestant Empire, to dwarf and depose the old Catholic Empire; and Hitler is his heir and his executor.

  What Chesterton does not add is that the Hitler who was soon to annexe Austria into a Greater Germany was himself an Austrian Catholic by birth. Instead, he insists that ‘Prussianism came from Protestantism’, was its ‘historical fruit’.

  The racial pride of Hitlerism is of the Reformation by twenty tests; because it divides Christendom and makes all such divisions deeper; because it is fatalistic, like Calvinism, and makes superiority depend not upon choice but only on being of the chosen; because it is Caesaro-Papist, putting the State above the Church, as in the claim of Henry VIII; because it is immoral, being an innovator of morals touching things like Eugenics and Sterility; because it is subjective, in suiting the primal fact to the personal fancy, as in asking for a German God, or saying that the Catholic revelation does not suit the German temper; as if I were to say that the Solar System does not suit the Chestertonian taste. I do not apologise, therefore, for saying that this catastrophe in history has been due to heresy …79

  6

  On 19 September 1935 Chesterton wrote to Maurice Reckitt, a leading Distributist and a member of the board of G.K.’s Weekly, begging him not to resign from the board. Reckitt had written to Chesterton to say that he thought he must leave the board in protest at the failure of the paper sufficiently to condemn the aggressive Italian military build-up that had begun in February in the Italian colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland on the border with Abyssinia, a build-up that would eventually lead to full-scale invasion in October. Chesterton asked him to defer his decision until he saw what the editor would be saying in the next number. He, Chesterton, had been away on holiday and privately agreed with Reckitt that there ‘ought to have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia’. The truth was that the staff and readers of G.K.’s Weekly were even more divided over the Abyssinian crisis than over Distributism itself.80