Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  “But Athens”, Valentine concluded, with a conundrum that is paradoxical in the Wildean and not the Chestertonian sense, “was the mother of civilization. We owe a great deal to Athens.”

  Evidently bemused by this line of reasoning, Valentine’s friend, Lucien, “beginning to think that genius was to madness near allied”, asked his friend to explain himself. What follows, in Valentine’s reply, is an early flourishing of the true Chestertonian wit that would delight readers a decade later and a clear indication that the nineteen-year-old Chesterton had already seen through the transparent spirit of the Decadents.

  We are a good deal too Athenian in our method with women. The Alruna wives of our teutonic ancestors and the mothers in Israel of Semitic moralism were alike in this that they were great through goodness: and the combination of the two produced the Queen of Love and Beauty of mediaeval chivalry. But the curse of our modern man of the worldism is that we court the women we disapprove and despise the women we respect: we talk of a good woman lightly, like an old household chattel, and forget that her price is above rubies. We are not lowest on our knees before the pure and tender woman, but before two eyes and half a dozen diamonds. I am sick of all this fin de siècle sniggering over wit and culture and the rest of it. Did wit bring us into the world? Did culture bear pain that we might live? Did they love us in our silly fractious childhood and have no thought on earth but us? Can they comfort us, or kindle or sustain?. . . No, indeed: beauty is deceitful, and favour is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord she shall be praised: give her the portion that is due to her, and let her works praise her in the gates!

  Later, a stimulating dialogue between Valentine Amiens and Basil Howe serves as a wonderfully penetrating insight into the conflicting philosophies battling for supremacy in the young Chesterton. The idealized medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, championed by Valentine, is countered by Howe’s championing of Chaucer as being representative of medieval realism. More perplexingly intriguing, in the light of Chesterton’s later traditionalist stance, is the way in which Valentine’s antimodern reaction is met with Howe’s faith in “progress”.

  We see in the characters of Valentine Amiens and Basil Howe the heart and the head of the postadolescent Chesterton; we see, in fact, a heart and a head that were hardly in harmony but that were nonetheless in creative conflict, colliding with the clash of symbols. With youthful precocity, Chesterton was struggling to give his head its head, though his heart was never fully in it. Over the following decade the Basil-Howeism would emerge in Chesterton’s political radicalism and in his brief flirtation with Christian socialism; the spirit of Valentine Amiens would gestate more slowly but would bear fruit more fulsomely in the birth of Chesterton’s Christian spirituality and its fulfillment in his later conversion to Catholicism. Eventually, of course, the two apparent antitheses would unite in the powerful synthesis of dynamic orthodoxy, the indissoluble marriage of the head and the heart, of Rome and romance, with which Chesterton would do battle with the enemies of faith and reason.

  Basil Howe is not a great—or even a good—work of literature. How could it be? Its author was only a teenager. As such, those hoping to be carried away by Basil Howe’s “story of young love” will be disappointed. The novel does, however, offer a priceless insight into a great mind. First and foremost it is a portrait of the author as a young man—and, more specifically, a portrait of a young man trying to make up his own mind. Those who wish to discover more about the mind of Chesterton will be enthralled.

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  FIGHTING THE EURO FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

  The Ghost of Chesterton Haunts Lord Howe

  CHESTERTON, the “jolly journalist” who became one of the finest prose stylists of the twentieth century, is suddenly, it seems, very much en vogue. A century after his paradoxes and his good-natured wit first delighted the reading public, he is once more being praised and lauded by the great and the good. Among the literati, those best-selling fantasists J. K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett have both paid homage to the man who blazed his own fantastic trail across Edwardian and Georgian England with novels such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday and The Ball and the Cross.

  It is, however, among politicians that Chesterton is now considered to be particularly chic. Ken Clark is known to be an aficionado, as is Lord David Alton. William Hague, meanwhile, came out as a closet Chestertonian by declaring during his heady days as Leader of the Opposition that Chesterton was one of the most underrated writers and thinkers of the previous century.

  The latest politician to nail his colors to the Chestertonian mast is Lord Howe, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and present-day champion of European federalism. As the subject of Radio Four’s broadcast of “Great Inspirations”, Lord Howe nominated Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill as the book that had most inspired his early life.

  I was asked to participate in the program, presumably due to my authorship of a recent biography of Chesterton, and thus it was that I sat in the BBC’s Westminster studio, both agape and aghast, as Lord Howe made out a bizarrely incredible case for Chesterton’s posthumous membership of the “Britain in Europe” campaign. Seldom have I witnessed such a brazen display of Orwellian “double-think” or “newspeak”, even from the mouth of a politician, and I recalled with grim irony that Chesterton’s futuristic fantasy had been set, like Orwell’s darker fantasy, in nineteen eighty-four.

  Somehow, Lord Howe managed to weave into his discussion of Chesterton and The Napoleon of Notting Hill some rather rickety logic in support of his own personal hobbyhorse of increased European integration with the implication that Chesterton would have agreed with him. Thus the bizarre statement that “you can’t lose sovereignty like losing virginity—you have it, then you don’t” was uttered in the manner of a Chestertonian epigram. Similarly, Lord Howe accused those who wished to halt the further erosion of sovereignty as wishing to erect “a cardboard curtain” around the United Kingdom, implying, by describing Chesterton explicitly as “a good European”, that Chesterton would have agreed with his own Eurocentrist views.

  Thankfully, Chesterton is able to reply to Lord Howe from beyond the grave, issuing devastating ripostes in the very words of the novel that Howe was holding up as his “inspiration”. Above all, The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a powerful parable on the rights of small nations to preserve their identity in the face of the cosmopolitan encroachments of imperialism. Its principal theme was expounded in the words of “the President of Nicaragua”, a mysterious figure who makes one fleeting but hugely significant appearance before “bowing profoundly” and disappearing into the fog. Before taking his bow, he neatly sets the scene for what is to follow. “Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem”, he exclaims passionately. “The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea.” He continues by delivering a spirited defense of the cultural integrity of small nations, and a damning indictment against the forces of imperialism.

  That is what I complain of in your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, “This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.” You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus?

  The scene thus set, the plot unfolds until Adam Wayne, the “Napoleon” of the novel’s title, declares war in the name of Notting Hill to defend his beloved borough against plans by the central powers to develop parts of it against the wishes of the local people. Adam Wayne’s local patriotism was epitomized by the proclamatio
n that a place, however small, “which is large enough for the rich to covet . . . is large enough for the poor to defend.”

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, The Napoleon of Notting Hill was the favorite book of Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein leader who was largely responsible for negotiating the treaty with Britain in 1921. It is said that Lloyd George, hearing of Michael Collins’ literary taste, presented a copy of The Napoleon of Notting Hill to every member of his cabinet prior to their meeting with the Irish delegation so that they might better understand the Irish leader’s mind.

  There is little doubt that Collins’ interpretation was closer to the spirit of Chesterton’s novel than Lord Howe’s, though it seems a little perverse that the Irish, having fought so dearly for their freedom from England, should subsequently sell it off so cheaply to the European Union. It is also more than a little surreal that the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists should seek to escape from the arms of hated uncle Albion into the grasp of Big Brother Brussels. It is almost as though imperialism is evil if advanced by force of arms but praiseworthy if achieved by sleight of hand.

  As though remembering, perhaps too late, the principles of Michael Collins and other early Nationalists, the recent vote by the Irish to reject the Treaty of Nice had more than a touch of The Napoleon of Notting Hill about it. Significantly, however, the Eurocentrists were not about to allow the one small squeak of a solitary nation to stand in the way of the next giant leap of European expansion. With utter contempt for the right of democratic self-determination, the wishes of the Irish were dismissed as irrelevant.

  “The modern world . . . is on the side of the giants”, complained Chesterton in an attack on H. G. Wells in his book Heretics. Wells was a “heretic”, according to Chesterton, because his novel The Food of the Gods was “the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer told from the point of view of the giant”. In Chesterton’s eyes, “Jack” represented the small nation fighting for its independence against the giants of imperialism, or the small businessman fighting for his existence against the giants of multinational commerce. To side with the giant against Jack was to betray humanity. Surely, if the ghost of Chesterton were to return, it would point an accusing finger at Lord Howe and number the former chancellor among the latter-day “heretics”.

  And as for Howe’s peculiar reading of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, one is reminded of Chesterton’s observation, made in a letter to his friend Maurice Baring, that it was “extraordinary how the outer world can see everything about it except the point. . . . I find that if I make the point of a story stick out like a spike, they carefully go and impale themselves on something else.”

  Lord Howe did at least attribute one thing to Chesterton correctly. In calling him “a good European”, he was stating a sublime truth. Chesterton, like his Anglo-French friend, Hilaire Belloc, loved the “Europe of the Faith” with its noble traditions and its unity with the concept of Christendom. Yes, Chesterton is every inch a “good European”, and, like all good Europeans, he is, and has to be, a Eurosceptic. That’s why his ghost still has the power, through the books he has left as a legacy, to fight the euro from beyond the grave. In taking on Chesterton’s “Napoleon”, Lord Howe has met his Waterloo.

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  CATHOLICISM AND “DEMOCRACY”

  A review of

  Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy

  by Jay P. Corrin+

  THERE IS MORE THAN A LITTLE IRONY—albeit unintentional—in the title of Jay P. Corrin’s study of the volatile relationship of the Catholic intelligentsia with the turbulent politics of the twentieth century. The irony resides in the author’s failure to rise to the challenge he sets himself. Dr. Corrin, indubitably an intellectual and presumably a Catholic, fails to achieve his purported objective because he insists on subjecting the object of his study to his own subjective agenda.

  Dr. Corrin betrays himself in the language of his introduction. In the very first sentence he divides “Catholic intellectuals” into two simplistically convenient categories: the “progressive” and the “reactionary”. Immediately we know that the heroes are those whom the author places in the former category, whereas the villains are condemned to the ignominy of the latter. Thus, from the outset, we are reduced to the dialectic of the stereotype. The “progressives” are enlightened, reasonable, up-to-date, in tune with the times, “with it”. The reactionaries are unenlightened, unreasonable, out-of-date, behind the times and very much “without it”. The former are to be praised, the latter condemned—or, perhaps, if we are feeling charitable, patted patronizingly and platitudinously on the head with self-assured and self-righteous smugness.

  This, of course, is the language of the liberal secularist, the inheritor of the “progressive” philosophy of the superciliously self-named “Enlightenment”. It is the language of those who believe that human society is forever “progressing” from the primitive past to the enlightened future. It is the language of those condemned by G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis as the “chronological snobs” who contemptuously kick down the ladder by which they’ve ascended. Unfortunately, it is also the language employed by Dr. Corrin. Thus he states glibly that the Second Vatican Council “called upon Catholics to broaden their historical perspectives, move beyond a static theology fixed to the past, and embrace the kinds of changes that would allow the Church to be more in step with contemporary society” (1). Really? Did Vatican II call upon the faithful to abandon the faith of their fathers; did it suggest that the anchor of tradition be cut free so that the Church can drift freely with the tides of time, going with the flow of the present rather than being “fixed” to the lessons of the past? Is it the duty of the Church to move “in step with contemporary society”? Certainly G. K. Chesterton didn’t think so. Chesterton, one of the “intellectuals” scrutinized in Corrin’s book, responded to those who made similarly glib statements in his own day with the riposte that we did not need a Church that will move with the world but a Church that will move the world. The Church is called to lead society, not to be led by it.

  In reality, the much-vaunted aggiornamento of Vatican II had nothing to do with surrendering to modernity. On the contrary, it had everything to do with enabling the Church to engage modernity, to respond to it, to react to it. Paradoxically, one of the earliest fruits of aggiornamento was Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae. It was a perfect example of the Church’s response to what Dr. Corrin called the “challenge of resolving the conflicting demands of religion and modernity by aggiornamento” (1).

  The spirit of Vatican II, truly understood, had precious little to do with opening the windows to let in the malodorous scent of modernity. It had everything to do with opening the windows so that the scent of incense within the Household of Faith might waft more freely into the world beyond. Needless to say, the world has often been incensed by the incense.

  Even more incredibly, Dr. Corrin complains that, prior to Vatican II, the intellectual and spiritual life of the Church “had become rigidified by tradition”, whereas “Protestantism, on the other hand, had centuries of experience trying to accommodate itself to the culture of modernity” (1). Is Dr. Corrin seriously asking us to take this seriously? The compromise of Protestantism with the zeitgeist, its unholy marriage with modernity, has merely resulted in a “progressive” theological fragmentation and fading. Today there are thousands of Protestant sects preaching thousands of mutually contradictory views. Those that are most “accommodating” to modernity simply fade away into shades of agnostic gray; those that are least “accommodating” to modernity, and are in fact reacting against it, such as the Fundamentalists, are flourishing. If there is a lesson to be learned from Protestantism’s “centuries of experience”, it is that the zeitgeist devours its suitors.

  Dr. Corrin’s introduction serves as the key to understanding his misunderstanding of the issues upon which he focuses. Quite simply, he is too prejudiced to judge. His obsession with stereotypes and the overly simp
listic labeling of “friends” and “enemies” is irritatingly irrational. One becomes tired of the criticism of “tradition-bound clerics” seeking “a return to a hierarchical age of paternalistic authoritarianism” in defiance of “an imaginative, progressive, and carefully reasoned Catholic response” (2-3).

  At times Dr. Corrin’s labels become almost libelous. His woeful demonizing of Hilaire Belloc betrays a superficial and selective reading of the facts. Anyone who has studied the life of the mercurial and oft-times bellicose Belloc will know that he defies the straitjacket of simplistic categorization with which Dr. Corrin endeavors to constrain him. Belloc is beyond Dr. Corrin’s comprehension of him, or lack thereof.

  Similarly, Dr. Corrin’s inability to see beyond the “liberal” labels of the Spanish civil war results in a distorted and contorted view of historical realities. Catholics who supported the Nationalists in that fratricidal conflict were not, ipso facto, “fascists” or fellow travelers, as Dr. Corrin insinuates. Many despised fascism but felt, nonetheless, that it was their duty to oppose the rabid atheism of the communists and anarchists. We should never forget that during the Spanish civil war 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns were murdered.