Published in The Chesterton Review, XXVIII (Winter, 2002), 503-19.
James V. Schall, S. J.
Georgetown University, DC, 20057-1200
The Newness of The New Jerusalem
I.
The
Sixtieth Chapter of Isaiah begins, “Arise, Jerusalem, rise clothed in light;
your light had come and the glory of the Lord shines over you.” The “Old Jerusalem,” as it were,
portends something beyond itself, something in light and glory. The New Jerusalem is the title of a book that G. K. Chesterton, as an
English journalist, wrote of a visit he made to the Holy Land in 1920. “On the back of this book,” he wrote,
“is the name of the New Jerusalem and on the first page of it a phrase about
the necessity of going back to the old even to find the new...” (238). To find the new, going back to the old
is a necessity.
To
acquire some idea of the remarkable “newness” to which this Chesterton book can
still alert us, a newness that includes the ancient meanings of this most
famous of cities, let me, in the beginning, cite for your consideration three
passages. Each passage, I think,
will serve to pique the interest of those who, as Chesterton himself remarked,
are not “bored” by the higher things.
We will understand the significance of what he meant here if we recall
Chesterton’s startlingly true words from elsewhere: “There are no boring
subjects, only bored people.” Let
us then be among those who are bored neither in the Old nor in the New
Jerusalem.
The
first citation is from Chesterton himself, from this very book, The New
Jerusalem. “The truth is,” Chesterton wrote,
that the things that meet today in
Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen. If they are not important, nothing on
this earth is important, and certainly not the impressions of those who happen
to be bored by them. But to
understand them it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in
Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston; that sort of living history which we call
tradition.1
Notice the deliberate solemnity of Chesterton’s
words – “the greatest things in
the world” meet here in this Holy City.
If these things are not important, “nothing in this world is important.” The bored are those who live in their
self-chosen, self-contained world but find nothing surprising in it, nothing of
the newness of the “New Jerusalem.”
We can evidently live in Oxford or Boston and lose contact with what we
are.
The
second not dissimilar citation is taken from the great Jewish philosopher Leo
Strauss, from a lecture that was originally given in Jerusalem itself in
1955. With great gravity, Strauss
began, “It is a great honor, and at the same time a challenge, to accept a task
of particular difficulty, to be asked to speak about political philosophy in
Jerusalem. In this city, and in
this land, the theme of political philosophy – ‘the city of righteousness, the faithful city’ – has been
taken more seriously than anywhere else on earth.”2 Strauss is in agreement with
Chesterton’s words about the “tradition” that is more common, more real in
Jerusalem than in Oxford, Boston, or other university cities. The “theme” of political philosophy,
Strauss affirms, is precisely “the city of righteousness,” “the faithful city,”
in its various names, one of which is “Jerusalem” itself..
My
third introductory citation, again designed to recall something of this city,
though this time from a greater distance, comes from the famous American
Puritan divine, Cotton Mather, from his Magnalia Christi Americana. Listen
for its rather quaint words that recall Jerusalem, “the city of
righteousness.” “But behold, ye European Churches,” Mather wrote in 1702, “There are Golden
Candlesticks ... in the midst of this
Outer Darkness; Unto the upright Children of Abraham, here hath arisen Light in Darkness. And let
us humbly speak it, it shall be Profitable for you to consider the Light, which from the midst of this Outer Darkness, is now to be Darted over unto the other side of the Atlantick
Ocean.”3 The “Children of Abraham,” it seems,
are vicariously present in the landing at Plymouth Rock, on the other side of
the “Atlantick Ocean,” far from the “Outer Darkness,” where there is no light
from the Golden Candlesticks.
II.
In
Gilbert! (March, 2000), Frances
Farrell recounted her recent trip to the Holy Land. She entitled it, significantly, “The Newer Jerusalem.” She is talking about the Jerusalem of
today that she saw. She compares
it with the Jerusalem that Chesterton saw on his visit there some eighty years
previously. The title of my present
consideration, “The Newness of The New Jerusalem,” refers, however, not so much to Jerusalem as a
contemporary city, now or eighty years ago, but to “Jerusalem” as the end of
our longing, not that our longing should not be real, and, hopefully, not that
it should end except in its attainment.
It is the “Jerusalem” of Augustine’s “City of God,” a Jerusalem that
does not forget either the end of Isaiah -- “I will take delight in Jerusalem” (65:19) -- or the end of the Apocalypse – “I saw
the holy city, the new Jerusalem” (21:2). But it is not that more dubious “New Jerusalem” of Enlightenment or modern ideology,
however it be called, that wants, with “lowered sights,” to set up the kingdom
of God on this very Earth, a rather more dangerous idea, as it turns out.
What
is at first striking about Farrell’s account is the sheer numbers. When Chesterton went to Palestine in
1920, she tells us, the population was 700,000, “of which 574,000 were Muslims,
74,000 were Christians and 54,000 were Jews.” When she went in 1999, the
figures, which would have, no doubt, changed Chesterton’s perspective of the
place, were startlingly different.
The total population today is five and a half million, of which 81.5%
are Jews, 17% Arabs, and only 1.5% Christian ‘and others.’” These figures, of course, leave out the
controverted questions of just what lands and which peoples belong to what
political entity in this historic area.
While Christians are leaving Muslim lands as rapidly as convenient or
possible, Muslims, with much higher birth rates, become an ever more numerous
presence in Europe and America.
Compared to the total
population of over a billion each in the Muslim, Chinese, and Indian
worlds, the relative size of the European nations and even of the United States
is rather modest.
The
Jews show impressive increases in Palestine, due mainly to immigration, but
their world wide birthrates are significantly down, as are those of the
“Christian” nations in Europe. The
Economist recently reported (August
24, 2002) that the lowest birthrates in the world, rates well below
relpacement) are in Spain and Italy, traditionally Catholic countries. As Farrell reports it, Muslims want to
build mosques in Nazareth, the Christian town, while Jews object to traditional
Christmas decorations in the large hotels in Jerusalem. Chesterton hoped eighty years ago for an increased Christian presence
in the Holy Land . “It is now
(1920) more certain than it ever was before,” he wrote, “that Europe must
rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces”
(262). This hope seems quite
improbable today.
Yet,
at the same time, from Rome itself, now with its own mosque, the Holy Father,
in the Year 2000, fulfilled his long-desired ambition of visiting this Land of
Jesus’ birth and death. “Following
the path of salvation history, as narrated in the Apostles’ Creed,” the Pope
said in his Homily (26 March 2000) at the Holy Sepulchre ... “I have reached
Jerusalem .... Here, as in no
other place on earth, we hear the Lord say once again to his disciples: ‘Do not
fear; I have overcome the world!’” Chesterton’s words, Strauss’s words, Karol
Wojtyla’s words about the importance of Jerusalem are striking and strikingly
similar.
The
American Pilgrim Fathers who came to these shores in the seventeenth century
belonged to that Calvinist branch of Protestantism that was closest to the Old
Testament. They consciously
thought of themselves as “children of Abraham” following the path of the Exodus
into the wilderness. They were,
once across the “Atlantick Ocean,” to establish a “New Jerusalem,” a “City on
the Hill,” a “faithful City.” No
doubt without this tradition of the Hebrew experience, both our own
understanding of what these early Americans had in mind and of the whole
history of mankind’s meaning in the world would be largely unintelligible to
us.
Let
me cite here how Chesterton, the quintessential Englishman, on his 1920 trip,
described, on first seeing it, the Holy City. Notice that the words he uses are mindful of the early
American imagery:
For when the train stopped at last
in the rain, and there was no other vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a
very courteous officer, an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon;
and it was under the shield of the Red Cross that I entered Jerusalem. For suddenly, between the post of the
wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the
arching heavens of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy,
the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid (41).
This city mirrors that Zion that Cotton Mather hoped
to set up in the wilderness, beyond the “outer darkness” of European decadence,
on the other side of the “Atlantick.”
Even
the sophisticated attempts to demythologize what the Pilgrims did, to explain
it rather in terms of a rationalist political philosophy, are themselves often
but secularized versions of the same imagery that we can read more fruitfully
in Scripture itself. John Locke,
in his famous Second Treatise on Civil Government, itself one of those efforts used by later American
thinkers to explain themselves to themselves in less than biblical terms,
observed that “in the beginning the world was America” (I, c. 5, #49). Who can really suppose that the great
Locke himself did not know of the “in-the-beginning” words found in the Genesis
account of Creation or of the “in-the-beginning-was-the-Word” phrase found in
the Prologue of St. John?
III.
Gilbert
Chesterton and his wife Frances, who had been ill and in need of a change of
climate -- even though she
encountered unusual and heavy snows when she got there -- departed by train from London on
December 29, 1919, for a journalistic trip to the Holy Land. Travel accounts were to be published
regularly in the Daily Telegraph
as Chesterton reported them.
Later, he would modestly call his chronicle of this trip “an
uncomfortably large notebook,” but it turned out to be something rather more
profound, as Chesterton’s trips were wont to be (v). “The modern man,” Chesterton explained, “is more like a
traveller who has forgotten the name of his destination, and has to go back to
whence he came, even to find out where he is going.... I ... saw for a moment in my mind the
true map of the modern wanderings” (1).
Modern man has forgotten the name of his destination. But Chesterton journeyed to the very
destination that, more than any other, defined where we were going, or better,
because we had at least spiritually been there, to where we ought to go. The couple traveled to Paris and Rome,
on to Brindisi, by boat to Alexandria in Egypt, then to Cairo, and finally by
train and car to Old Jerusalem.
Palestine had recently been freed from long Turkish rule by the famous Colonel
Allenby, to whom Chesterton had an introduction from his diplomatic friend
Maurice Baring.
Chesterton
was, to his own way of thinking, an impractical man. “I am so constituted,” he confessed, “as to be capable of
losing my very way in my own village and almost in my own house” (21). In his Autobiography (1936), in a chapter entitled appropriately, “The Incomplete
Traveller,” Chesterton gave a retrospective account of his various trips to
America, Canada, Poland, Ireland, but he began with his earliest trip to the Holy Land. “I can proudly claim,” he wrote, “that
I do know the date of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem; partly because it was a year
after the close of the Great War, and partly because, when my publishers
suggested my going to the Holy Land, it sounded to me like going to the moon.”4 Going through the desert to get
there in a Ford, no less, he later
remarked, was in fact something like being on the moon.
Yet, his journey, as an intellectual
experience, was orderly. He was
not lost. It led him backwards to beginnings. “We must begin at the beginning; we
must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first
principles in philosophy,” he wrote (6-7). Chesterton was, in effect, “walking backwards through
history” on this journey to discover where we now were by again finding first
origins and first principles, without which no human journey can reach its
ultimate destination.
One
hesitates, at this point, to sort out the various meanings of Jerusalem, the
New Jerusalem, the Newer Jerusalem, the City on the Hill, the Faithful City,
the wilderness, and the moon.
Perhaps the one thing to keep in mind when dealing with Chesterton is
that, for him, neither the moon nor the New Jerusalem had any meaning unless,
as he told us in the first chapter of The New Jerusalem, it passed through that power of will that grounds
all things in what is. “For it is the sign of a truly
Christian thing,” he wrote, “that sharp combination of liberty and limitation
which we call choice. A man is
entirely free to choose between right and left, or between right and wrong”
(4). “Entirely free” and “entirely
responsible” for the choice he wills
– such is the implication of Chesterton’s “sharp combination.”
The
fate of any “New” Jerusalem, of which our civilization has known not a
few, is always decided by this
choice that its inhabitants must make “between right and wrong.” Indeed, the “Chosen People” themselves,
in an incident mindful of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” of the
Fall, were given, in the
wilderness, those famous Tablets that made this separation between right and
wrong to be the defining purpose of their chosen-ness. The striking combination of “liberty
and limitation” is called precisely “choice.” That is to say, a liberty without limitation is a liberty,
as Nietzsche said, to go “beyond good and evil,” itself, once beyond, still
just another choice between the same good and evil. It is said to be a modern “liberty” for ourselves to
proclaim, by our own powers, the very meaning of right and wrong, even of left
and right, even in contradistinction to the words written on the Tablets. Here is the human claim to surpass the
divine liberty that somehow overshadows our whole sacred and profane
history. We claim here a liberty
without limitation, that is to say, a liberty that is not liberty. It consists in man’s free rejection of
the order of what is, something
always possible to finite beings for whom choice is a given power of their
souls to be used for God’s, not simply for their own, glory.
IV.
Chesterton’s
“methodology,” if I might call it that, in this “uncomfortably large notebook,”
is almost phenomenological. That
is, he begins his reflections by describing how things appear to him, how they
disclose themselves to him in his traveling. He is willing to make metaphysical points of passing
incidents because he sees something of permanent reality in them, in their
passingness. And he sees this
permanence of the changing scene because he recalls the long “tradition” out of
which our understanding of ourselves originally came. He notices, for instance, something that few others would
pick up in quite the same way. He
observes that dogs seem to be present in the West, while donkeys are everywhere
in the near East. “Who could make
anything of that?” we ask.
Chesterton reflects on them both as symbols.
“But
in truth they (the dog and the donkey) were in some sense symbols of the West
and the East after all. The dog’s
very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with you
three times on the same day, at going out for a walk down the same road,”
Chesterton reflected.
The modern world is full of
fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human
sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely
little of the real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocense
of all boredom. Perhaps such
simplicity is the absence of sin.
I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of
seeing the old road as a new road (2).
Already here we have noticed the juxtaposing of animal
“rights” over against human sacrifice that has come to be so characteristic of
our time if we would just see it.
We protect the whales but not the babies.
Chesterton,
moreover, calls the sense of “surprise” precisely a “sacred duty” – as if it is actually possible to
think of surprise in terms of duty, let alone in terms of the sacred, which is,
in the end, the greatest surprise of all.
We are to be astonished that anything at all exists, for the actual existence of anything is not of our making or of our own
choosing. Chesterton then
proceeds to remind us that we can fail to see an old road as also a new road
because we have forgotten to where the old road led, to the Jerusalem of the
Promised Land, to the Jerusalem of the Crusaders, to the Jerusalem of the
Pilgrims. To see what is there we also must see what is absent, what was once there.
V.
If
Chesterton had any prejudices, though he was not a socialist, the first
prejudice was no doubt against “capitalism,” which he thought at the time
largely dead. The second was
against the Germans, or the Teutons, or the Prussians, the allies of the Turks,
the enemies of the English, in the Great War just completed. For him, they symbolized, even caused,
much of what was wrong with modern science and with the modern world. He did not in fact dislike the Germans
because they were Germans but because of certain particular ideas, dangerous
philosophic and theological ideas that came from German thinkers in the
previous two centuries.
While
in Jerusalem, to continue his phenomenological analysis, Chesterton recalls
seeing the various gates of the city, the Damascus Gate, the Joffa Gate, the
Gate of Humility. Suddenly,
reflecting on the nobility of the walled city, he came across a gate beside
which there was blasted a large hole in the wall “with a wide road running
through it” (56). Evidently, this
annoying hole had been constructed by the “great Prussian Imperial
system.” “We shall now probably
weary the world with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently
wearied the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific,”
he wrote. We have indeed, be it
noted, wearied the world by calling the German precisely “barbaric.” “The Christians made the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the
most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole” (58). There is something amusingly typical of
Chesterton in finding the end purpose of something very scientific and very
political to be found in what is in effect nothing, in, what else, “a
hole.” He is not in the least
surprised by the nihilism of the German philosophers when he comes across, in
the historic wall of Jerusalem, a hole dug through it by the Imperial Prussian
engineers.
VI.
The
immediate center of Chesterton’s interest in The New Jerusalem is, if anything, Islam. He recognized the facticity of their long presence
there. He has much to say, no
doubt, about the Jews and Zionism, about homeland, and about the British
politics that first proclaimed the need and desirability of such a homeland in
modern times, beginning with the Balfour Declaration (1917). Chesterton admired the simplicity of
Muslim theology, yet found it unable to confront the complexity of
reality. “Islam was not originally
a movement directed against Christianity at all. It did not ‘face westwards,’ so to speak; it faced eastwards
towards the idolatries of Asia.
But Mohomet believed that these idols could be fought more successfully
with a simpler kind of creed; one might almost say with a simpler kind of
Christianity” (257). Islam
contains many Christian things –
Purgatory, devotion to Mary, for instance. The problem, as Chesterton saw it, was the notion that
Christianity could be made “simpler” without making it something other than
what it was. (C. S. Lewis noted
the same problem in Mere Christianity). “Those who complain of our creeds as
elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the
elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate because they are
emancipated” (258). The
constitutions limit the liberty, so that it can be liberty. They do not pretend that reality is
simple when it is in fact full of variety and complexity due in large part to
this same liberty.
Chesterton
did not, moreover, think that the historic relation between Islam and
Christianity was mostly the fault of Christians. “When people talk, for instance, as if the Crusades were
nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam,” he observed, “they seem to
forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid
against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to
the religion of Mohammed; ... I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in
it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was
the thing invaded” (23).
Chesterton
is aware of the slender thread of history that is signified by Lepanto, Spain,
Austria, and France by which the whole of Europe might easily have been
conquered by Islam. He meant no
disrespect to a mighty conqueror to be glad that he did not finally succeed
everywhere. Moreover, as our times
show, a time that now includes Jewish armies as well as secularized western
ones, this historic relationship is by no means settled. The war in Serbia, the war in Sudan,
the war in Cyprus, the war in
Iraq, the war in Timor, the wars on the former Russian Empire still, among
other things, have a Muslim-Christian component. The bombings of September 11, 2001 and their long aftermath
have almost reinvented this history that was lost to our consciousness.
VII.
But
if he saw Islam, he also saw something older than Islam, which was Rome
itself. If we see Rome, we also
must recall that Israel predated Islam and behind Israel in these lands were
the Jebusites and the Canaanite, Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt.
The sorrow of all Palestine is
that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in
geology. The dividing line is
horizontal instead of vertical.
The frontier does not run between states but between stratified
layers. The Jew did not appear
beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanites; the Greek not beside the Jew
but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not beside the Christian but on top of the
Christian (108).
And there are not merely “Christians,” but Armenian
Christians, Greek Christians, Russian Christians, Coptic Christians, Chaldean Christians, Roman Christians,
Protestant Christians, all of whom have different stakes in the Holy Land that
few of them any longer inhabit.
The
title of Chesterton’s book, The New Jerusalem, does not directly prepare us, perhaps, to realize
that this book is also an essay on the end of the Middle Ages. And it is perhaps the poignancy of this
end that gives rise to modern secularized efforts to establish some secularized
“New Jerusalem” in lands far away from Jerusalem. “The first Crusaders had really had some notion of Jerusalem
as a New Jerusalem,” he wrote. “I
mean they had really had a vision of the place being not only a promised land
but a Utopia or even an Earthly Paradise.
The outstanding fact and feature which is seldom seized is this: that
the social experiment in Palestine was rather in advance of the social
experiments in the rest of Christendom” (251).
In
these travels in the Holy Land, Chesterton wonders why the Middle Ages did not
so much die but come to a halt in the midst of its very flourishing? He concluded that it was a thing of the
spirit, that military defeats, which, contrary to popular modern opinion, can
preserve as well as destroy, did in this case destroy something. After the famous battle at the Horns of
Hattin (July 4, 1187), when the Templars and the great knights were defeated by
Saladin, Chesterton wrote,
In that hour fell, as I have
fancied, more hopes than they themselves could number, and the glory departed
from the Middle Ages. There fell
with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbol of a new world, all those
great and growing promises and possibilities of Christendom of which this
vision was the center, ... all the hopes of a happier transformation of the
Roman Law wedded to charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the great swerving of our fate;
and in that wilderness we lost all the things we should have loved, and shall
need so long a labour to find again (254).
These are poignant words. Chesterton is quite prepared to grant that the loss of a
battle can constitute the loss of a spirit. The loss of a spirit can change a civilization, and turn it
back in on itself.
VIII.
The
last chapter of this book is entitled “The Problem of Zionism.” When he wrote it for the Daily
Telegraph part of it was not
published. Two reasons are
given. One that the editors
thought it “anti-Semitic” somehow, the other that it went contrary to British
policy at the time which was more concerned about pacifying the Muslims than in
fostering Jewish settlement in the British mandate. We are in the habit today of reading what comes after in
time in necessitarian terms of what went before. In retrospect we tend not to see the “free” element in
historic facts. We read 1920
as if we are reading 1945. History
does not have to happen the way that it does happen. Of all the European writers, including Jewish writers,
Chesterton was one of the first to point out the dangers of the Nazi
position. Chesterton, as I noted,
wasted no love on the Germans so he probably was not overly surprised by the
Nazis. Yet, as quickly as he
understood what they were about, he did see the Nazis as something quite
different and quite dangerous.
Chesterton
died in on June 14,1936, some years before the worst of the Nazi atrocities
were carried out and long before the general American and European public
clearly understood what was going on.
Yet, he wrote, in 1934:
In our early days Hilaire Belloc
and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is
a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic
behind them. It is quite obviously
the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has
found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish
people. I am quite ready to
believe now that Belloc and I will be defending the last Jew in Europe.5
How many men who lived in the middle of the twentieth
century or at the beginning of the twenty-first wish they might have written
similar words as early as 1934.
What
was Chesterton’s position on the Jews and Zionism as he presented it in
1920? Chesterton was
the mildest of men. As far as I
can judge, he wanted what he thought any good Jew would want if he could have
it. He believed good Jews took
their faith seriously and that very faith was premised on a homeland, a
homeland that was the Holy Land.
He knew this same land had been occupied by Alexander, by the Romans, by
Islam for centuries. His view
about the good of the Jews was not intended to be to the detriment of either
Christians or Muslims. He knew the
population of Palestine in terms of numbers of Jews was small in 1920. He did surmise, perhaps erroneously,
that if the Jews received an official homeland, most would want to go
there. They would not decide to
remain nationals of the lands in which they had settled. England had, in fact, received several
hundred thousand Jews from Eastern Europe from persecutions there in the early
part of the twentieth century.
Indeed, many thought that the British enthusiasm for a Jewish homeland
in Palestine was, at bottom, to deflect more Eastern European Jews from coming
to Britain. However this may be,
Chesterton held that the so-called “Jewish problem” was caused by these
talented and energetic people not having a civil state of their own in which
they could merge their faith, their nation, their loyalties.
“If
I were violently opposed to anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of
remark about Jews; or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark
about Jews,” Chesterton wrote in “The Problem of Zionism.”
But my friends and I had in some
general sense a policy in the matter; and it was in substance the desire to give
Jews the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible,
Jews should be represented by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be
judged by Jews and ruled by Jews.
I am an anti-Semite if that is anti-Semitism (265).
This policy was by no means conceived as
“segregationist” in contemporary terms, nor as putting Jews in another
ghetto. Nor was it a foreshadowing
of an infamous Nazi proposal to place all Jews in someplace like
Madagascar. It was simply
Chesterton’s interpretation of what good Jews, after conversing with many of
them, including Dr. Weizmann,
meant by Zionism.
Chesterton
probably would have been perplexed, as things turned out, by the vast majority
of Jews who wanted to remain in some other land, keep citizenship there, and
not immigrate to the Holy Land.
Chesterton did think that, not unlike certain accusations against
Catholics because of the Vatican, Jews had a kind of double loyalty that
prevented them from being totally at home in any land but Israel. In this, many contemporary Jews would
disagree with him, having made the proper accommodations between religion and
citizenship. But others would take
the identification of Judaism and Israel for granted, whatever the legal
distinctions that needed to be kept.
IX.
Recently,
I was reading in class the chapter in Allan Bloom’s Shakespeare’s Politics on the “Merchant of Venice.” One of my students was, at first, quite
bothered by Bloom’s treatment of Shylock.
He could not understand how Bloom, a Jew, could treat Shylock, another
Jew, so unsympathetically. The
young man had been reading modern critics of Shakespeare who maintained that
the great bard’s picture of the Jewish money-lender was merely a
stereotype. As it turns out, of
course, Bloom’s Shylock is really a most sympathetic understanding of a pious
Jew who wants to obey the Law, but whose life circumstances, especially with
his daughter, Jessica, lead him to extremes of hatred. Bloom’s point was that in fact
Shakespeare, far from dealing with Shylock as a stereotype, saw him as a real
human being overwhelmed with grief and love.
Chesterton’s
treatment of Shylock in this same chapter on Zionism is surprisingly like that
of Bloom. A controversy in the
London papers at the time revealed that some thought Shakespeare was an
“anti-Semite,” while others thought him to be “pro-Semite.” No one seemed to understand what the
play was about. The play is “a
medieval satire on usury” (274).
It was a good story for the moral it sought to teach. Modern men, especially if rich, could
not understand the problems that usury caused. This is fair enough.
But there is another side of the story, its more profound side. Shakespeare “attempted to understand
Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he
sympathised with Macbeth the murderer.
It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assert that the
usurer was a man ... Shakespeare
not only makes him a man but a perfectly sincere and self-respecting man”
(275). In its own way, this is
almost a paraphrase of what Bloom had to say about Shylock some half a century
later.6
The Zionist position that there should
be a Jewish nation ruled and inhabited by Jews, Chesterton thought, was
“perfectly reasonable” (282). If
Jews seemed “abnormal” to many people, it was because of “the abnormal position
of the Jews. They are traders
rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to
produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no
country of their own for which to be patriotic” (282-83). If Jews had a true homeland, there
would not be just famous Jewish industrialists, scholars, lawyers, doctors, or
pianists, but also “Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many
active Jewish hedgers and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and
fishermen” (284). No doubt, if the
modern Israeli experience means anything, it means that this wish of Chesterton
has come about, though its details he could not have foreseen in 1920.. Moreover, with their own homeland, he
thought, Jews could die for their own country, the ultimate sign of true
patriotism. “The Jews did die for
Jerusalem. That is the first and
last great truth in Zionism” (285).
X.
Chesterton
understood in 1920, that, however much we might desire the Jews to return to
their historic homeland, to set up their own nation, whatever its political
configuration or the size of its future population, that it would necessarily
encounter the hostility of those already there for whom the same place is also
a homeland. “The greatest of the
real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion,” he wrote
(298). Chesterton, likewise,
brought up the delicate topic of the Temple, whose original location is where
the present Dome of the Rock is constructed. He thought that the Jewish religion required a center of
proper worship.
The nature of that religious
center it must be for Jews to decide; but I think if I were a Jew I would build
the Temple without bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should have the old site, of
course, is not to be thought of; it might raise a Holy War from Morocco to the
marches of China.... That the Jews
should have some high place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great
building like the Mosque of Oman, is certainly right and reasonable; for upon
no theory can their historic connection be dismissed (298).
Chesterton from eighty years ago was concerned with
the spiritual and historic side of Israel.
We
cannot know what Chesterton might have made of what has eventually transpired
to form the Israel that we know today and the particular circumstances of its
coming to be happening some decade after his death. He thought that if there was indeed a “Jewish problem,” it
could only be settled by a “Jewish solution” (301). He would not have been surprised at the continuing hostility
of Jew, Muslim, and Christian, for he saw that all claimed to occupy the same
land, that the justice of one appeared to be the injustice of the other. The fact that given a homeland in Palestine that all Jews did not want to
return there would have perhaps surprised him both practically and
theologically. But he would have
understood the intense loyalty towards Israel that is commonly displayed by
Jews who remain in the diaspora, even Jews who claim not to “believe” in the
tenets of the faith.
XI.
On
the completion of his visit in 1920, Chesterton returned home, to England, to
Beaconsfield, his home. He thought
it possible that midst the shifting sands and wandering tribes of the East that
perhaps “the genii of the East might well build the palace or the paradise of a
day.” But on seeing the “low and
solid English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets under
rainy skies, I felt that, in a deeper sense, it is rather we who build for
permanence or at least for a sort of peace. It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable
contentment” (303). Surely these
were also the words of Chesterton’s friend Tolkien at the end of The Lord of
the Rings, another book of travels
about the Promised Land.
And,
finally, in comparison to the modern ideology, often German, that he so
distrusted, Chesterton even preferred the pagan idols. “I have far more sympathy with the
enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads,
than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his
tail; the awful skeptical argument in a circle by which everything begins and
ends in the mind” (303). If modern
philosophy, modern epistemology, has been anything, it has been precisely this
struggle to get out of its own mind into what is.
As
his train took him back home from the landing slips at Dover, Chesterton wanted
to linger there, to tell the folks in cottages along the way of the Holy Land. “It seemed to me that all my fellow
countrymen must be my friends; all these English places had come much closer
together after travels that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between
the stars” (304). All the
hop-fields of Kent and even London, there just beyond the “End” of
Beaconsfield, now seemed like home to him.
In seeing the “New Jerusalem,” Chesterton discovered that, in the end, it had something to do with his home. “The most important things in the world crossed in Jerusalem.” Symbolically, the homeland of the Jews, Jerusalem, the City on a Hill, is also reached via his “solid and comfortable” home in Beaconsfield. The Holy City also portends our home. It passes through the churchyard in Beaconsfield where, some sixteen years later, Chesterton himself was buried. He knew the light of the Golden Candlesticks; he thought of the Temple of the Jews in Zion, the City set upon the Hill that could not be hid; he knew of Islam’s mighty victory at the Horns of Hattin, of the Imperial Rome that once ruled all these lands. Strauss was right, the “theme of political philosophy, ‘the city of righteousness,’ ‘the faithful city,’ has been taken more seriously here than anywhere else on earth.” The last words are Chesterton’s, “if the things that meet in Jerusalem, the greatest things that the world has yet seen,” are not important, then “nothing on this earth is important.”
2Leo Strauss, “What Is Political
Philosophy?” What Is Political Philosophy and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1959), 9.
3Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi
Americana in Colonial American
Writing, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), 139.