The Midwest Chesterton News is a newsletter published by John Petersosn of Barrington, Illinois, and some very devoted Chesterton admirers. Their society has an annual conference in Milwaukee. This is a very lively newsletter, the inspiration for another newsletter from St. Paul, Minnesota, called Generally Speaking, as well as of The Defendant from Western Australia and All Things Considered from Ottawa, Canada. In the Fall of 1997, the Midwest Chesterton News, Generally Speaking, and All Things Considered combined to form a new journal entitled, Gilbert! (1377 Goodrich Ave., St. Paul, MN., 55105).

Since 1989, I have contributed a monthly column called naturally, Schall on Chesterton, to this newsletter. I remain a great admirer of the British journalist G. K. Chesterton, one of the wisest men I know. I have been more than struck by the sanity and insight, even foresight, that he displayed ever since he began writing early in the 1900's. Though he died in 1936, he remains one of the most quoted writers in the English language even today. He seems to have been a man whom everyone loved, yet also a man who had an uncanny knack of seeing reality, of putting things just right. He wrote more things than most of us could ever read, all of which are interesting, amusing, profound.

Here, I will include twenty Chesterton columns by way of introduction both to Chesterton. I find him to be one of my own greatest teachers. After these columns, I want to include two longer essays, one entitled "G. K. Chesterton: Journalist," that, in a shortened form, appeared in the Chesterton Review from Canada (itself one of the best on-going efforts to account for Chesterton); the second appeared in Dossier and is entitled, "Orthodoxy: Chesterton on the 'Delight of Truth.'".

These columns are: 1) "The Purpose of Intellect," 2) "Theses and Essays," 3) "On Creeds," 4) "Babies," 5) "The First Day of a New Creation," 6) "On the Best Book Never Written," 7) "The Horror," 8) "The Campaign against the Ten Commandments," 9) "The First Day of a New Creation," 10) "The Dullness of Chaos."

11) "On Not Wrecking Divine and Secular Things," 12) "Belloc on Chesterton," 13) "The Only Virtue," 14) "The Coming of Christ," 15) "The Divine Vulgarity of the Christian Religion," 16) The Great Temptation of the Catholic in the Modern World," 17) "At Christmas Dinner," 18) "The Natural Home of the Human Spirit," 19) "Wilde and Wilder," 20) "What Science Cannot Comprehend,"

21) "G. K. Chesterton -- Journalist," 22) "Orthodoxy: Chesterton on the 'Delight of Truth.'"

Other essays on Chesterton: "On Things Worth Doing Badly," Introduction to Vol. IV, G.K. Chesterton: Collected Works (Ignatius Press); "The Sanity of Gilbert Chesterton," Social Survey, Melbourne, October, 1977); "The Rarest of All Revolutions: G. K. Chesterton on the Relation of Human Life to Christian Doctrine," The American Benedictine Review, December, 1981; "The Last Medieval Monarchy: Chesterton and Belloc on the Philosophical Import of the American Experience," Faith & Reason, Summer, 1988; "The Inexpressible Value of Existence," in What Is God Like? (Liturgical Press/Michael Glazer); "On Doctrine and Dignity: From Heretics to Orthodoxy," in Another Sort of Learning (Ignatius).

1) From Gilbert! I (November, 1997).

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE PURPOSE OF INTELLECT

On April 26, 1924, in the Illustrated London News, Chesterton began a column with this question from Mr. H. G. Wells, to wit: "Why is there not more esprit de corps among intellectuals, especially of the academic and scientific sort?" (CW, XXXIII, 316-20). Anyone who has read Chesterton as long as I have will have no difficulty in imagining the potential humor implicit in this apparently earnest question. Chesterton will examine just what might follow if the status of being an "intellectual" is to be decided by intellectuals' own sense of their belonging together. He will, of course, hint that anyone who even asks this question about sticking together will, ipso facto, in his own very question indicate that he does not understand what intellect might be. Briefly, the cry "we intellectuals have to stick together" means "we intellectuals do not understand intellect."

It seems that Wells was up in arms over Mr. William Jennings Bryan's attempt to deal with Darwinists. Chesterton hints that if indeed the American Fundamentalists succeed in ridding our academic institutions of Darwinism, by that very fact alone, Darwinism's major premise will be defeated, since, to recall another famous Chesterton quip, "the survival of the fittest means the survival of those who have survived."

Thus, if fundamentalism wins over the Darwinian professors, fundamentalism is by that fact alone fitter than the professors, a proposition that few Darwinists would dare to contemplate. But this is not all, what is even worse is that the major objection to Darwin comes not from religion, which can manage to finesse it a bit, but from science itself. The theory as it was originally proposed is full of flaws. So the fundamentalists, in Chesterton's view, do not need to overthrow the Darwinian professors but just look up their critics in science itself.

Chesterton's way of putting the problem is this: "It seems a pity that the poor old skeleton of the Missing Link should be laboriously burnt by theologians, when so very little of it has been left by biologists." Chesterton always loved talking about the skeleton of the missing link, since he could not see what he could possibly "link" if he was in fact missing. Thus, Chesterton did not understand why Wells, an academic, would feel so much in need of calling academics to the barricades when the theologians had no need of refuting a theory that was well on its way to refutation by the very people who brought it up in the first place.

Chesterton does point out, however, that academics are always quite selective about which fellow academics they call to support them. He noted that one of the most famous poets, or academics, of Wells' time was an Italian by the name of Gabriel D'Annunzio, who also just happened to have lead a notorious bombing raid on the City of Fiume in a dispute about Italian possession of the area. Chesterton wondered why Wells, on the basis of his own principles, did not call other academics to the barricades to defend D'Annunzio. Could it be, Chesterton wondered, that academics were very selective in what causes they embraced and only called for help for the ones they themselves advocated?

Now, while Chesterton had great fun with Bryan and the Fundamentalists, with Wells and the Darwinists, he took just a brief moment to explain why it was not a good idea -- the implicit assumption of Wells -- for all academics to stick together. If we have a world in which all academics are busy sticking together, we can be pretty sure we live in an ideological world in which there is very little intellectual activity and very much coercion and peer pressure.

"There cannot be a real combination of intellectuals because of the purpose of the intellect," Chesterton observed. Clearly, it would seem obvious that to be an intellectual, so-called, would presuppose some clarity on what the intellect was. Only if we did not quite understand that purpose, could we propose for it a purpose -- that is, to gather together all intellectuals under some cause or other -- that was alien to the very nature of intellect.

What then is this "purpose of intellect?" "The purpose of the intellect is to come to conclusions, or rather to convictions." The fact is that we all have "intellects." What it means to be a rational animal is that one has an intellect. We do not in fact go around hawking and harping the notion that we are great just because we have intellects as a power given to us by nature. Everyone has such a power, and it does no good to hype that fact against those creatures that do not. The only person who might understand what it means to have an intellect is one who has one.

We are concerned rather with what the intellect, when it acts, does. And what it does is come to conclusions. It is the instrument of making dogmas, as Chesterton said elsewhere. An intellect that refuses to come to a conclusion is one that refuses to be an intellect. We are aware that in this multicultural, relativist world, one of the off-shoots of this theory is that no conclusions are conclusions, but only variable opinions, restricted to time and place. This is but another way of saying that the modern world is against intellect.

What we care about, even if we are relativist multiculturalists, is not whether we have an intellect, but whether what our intellect concludes to is true. We passionately care about that, or we at least should. Obviously, the picture of a rabid multiculturalist holding the truth of a multiculturalism in which nothing is true but this theory that maintains nothing is true is amusing. "I know," Chesterton admits, "there is a very solemn and impressive school of intellectuals who appear to have no intellects. They worship the intellect like an idol; and all the more because it is to them an unknown god." The "unknown god," of course, recalls St. Paul in Athens, speaking to the descendants of the original, and worthy, intellectuals.

The fact is that we do not "worship" intellect as such. We might thank God that we exist and exist as beings with intellects. Lord knows, we did not give ourselves our own intellects, let alone give to ourselves our very being what we are. What the intellect is, is not the product of our own making. But once we realize that it is given as part, the defining part, of what we are, we begin to realize that it has a purpose or function that we are responsible for using and using properly. "But those who use the intellect like a tool will always prefer the product to the process." What is more important in practice is what conclusions we come to when we use our minds.

This being the case, Chesterton concludes, when people group themselves together, it is because of agreement or disagreement about what they hold to be true. The fact that they are "intellectuals" as such means nothing. The intellectuals' "corporate enthusiasm will be for those with whom they agree, and not those with whom they differ." This means then that the great divides among us are not between those who have some title of "intellectual" and those who do not, but over what this or that group of intellectuals or ordinary folks holds to be true. The fact that academics are "intellectuals" does not, by itself, prevent them from holding the silliest of things, the logic of which will simply not hold up.

We have intellects. The purpose of the intellect is to know. The purpose of the intellect is to know whether what we know is true or not, whether it does or does not conform with reality, a reality that our intellect did not itself make. The purpose of human fellowship is to join together in those things that we know, in our own minds, are true. The purpose of intellectual dispute is calmly to examine things held to be true and to resolve, by means of principle, essentially that of contradiction, what whether what we hold is or is not true. The only title any human being, intellectual or otherwise, has for respect, once we know the respect due to each simply for what he is, is whether what we hold is true. A kingdom divided against itself cannot hold. That is, intellectuals as a group can and have conspired against the truth. Chesterton was aware of all of this in 1924 when he reminded us of "the purpose of intellect."

2) From Midwest Chesterton News, October, 1996.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

ON THESES AND ESSAYS

Just when I thought that I had the importance and delight of the essay pretty well figured out, I ran across an essay of Chesterton that made me doubt the line of thought I have often used to praise Chesterton himself. The occasion for these reflections was a very nice book review of my Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays, by Professor James Finn Cotter at Mt. St. Mary's College, in Maryland. Cotter remarked, with much eloquence, that "the personal essay is a most creative form of human expression when it comes to reaching out to the reader. It is natural, authentic, and unique, and it cannot be easily faked, like a poem or a story. When read aloud, an essay touches our emotions directly and makes us think more clearly."

My Idylls and Rambles (Ignatius Press, 1994) itself contained a defense of the essay and argued that it was quite the most delightful of all forms of writing. I rejoiced that Belloc and Chesterton wrote essays with such humor and insight. I even cited Stevenson and Hazlett as favorite essayists. Now, I know that some people prefer poetry or the novel or the solid book to the short essay. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot enjoy every form that comes along, if it is good. I knew that the early essay in French was an "effort", an "attempt" or a "try" at explaining or accounting for something. Its genius is that it is open to every topic and mood, whimsical or solemn.

The day after I read Cotter's review, I decided to do a column for the Midwest Chesterton News. About a year ago, as I mentioned in an earlier column, I bought several volumes of the Collected Works, but I had noticed that I had not read any of Volume XXXV, 1929-31. So I opened up the book rather arbitrarily to the column of March 2, 1929, on "Buddhism and Christianity", a most pertinent topic considering John Paul II's remark on Buddhism in Crossing the Threshold of Hope and his Ut Unum Sint. Just as I was about to begin my essay on Buddhism (hold your breath), however, I thumbed backward to the Chesterton column of February 16, 1929. Its title was, I could hardly believe it, "On the Essay"! I, being only fourteen months old when it was written, had never seen this essay before; it was like discovering gold in your own backyard. I thought maybe Professor Cotter might like a copy of it, so I xeroxed it. I figured I knew exactly what Chesterton would say in his essay.

Then I read Chesterton's essay "On the Essay" only to discover that he did not at all say what I assumed he would say. He did say, much to my consolation, that he himself indulged in the essay all his life and loved it as a form of writing. Chesterton began his essay, however, with this quite upsetting sentence for someone, like me, prepared to exalt the essay at all costs: "There are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays." "Wow!" I thought to myself, that is quite a surprising remark -- evil re-enters the world in the form of essays! Here I had been thinking that the essay could save the world and I discover the Devil as its author!

It has been my experience, as devoted readers of the Midwest Chesterton News well know by now, however, that whenever Chesterton talks about evil, I had better pay attention; something momentous is about to happen. The plot thickens when Chesterton remarked that the essay came into English letters from the French via Francis Bacon. Chesterton added, "I can only believe it. I always thought he (Bacon) was the villain of English history." It was Bacon who taught the English that knowledge is purely positive, purely useful.

So what's up with the essay, the form of literature Schall likes most? Is the truth now out, that, as many of his best friends have darkly hinted for years, Schall himself is a cooperator in the Evil that re-enters history, no small problem as even Schall recognizes?

Chesterton admitted that "I take my greatest literary pleasure in reading them (essays); after such really serious necessities of the intellect as detective stories and tracts written by madmen." Well, you just have to laugh at such a remark. We readers of Father Brown know about Chesterton and detective stories; we readers of Orthodoxy know of Chesterton and madmen; we readers if a hundred of his books know about Chesterton and essays. So here Chesterton is telling us that essays are something of a serious intellectual problem through which evil re-entered the modern world. Why so?

Chesterton maintained that the essay is a modern invention -- though it was known to the Romans, I think, say to Horace and Cicero. Most readers know that I also do a monthly column in Crisis entitled "Sense and Nonsense". Needless to say, I have always understood that this title comes from Chesterton. Let us see how it works into our present plot:

There is any amount of sense and nonsense talked both for and against what is called medievalism. There is also any amount of sense and nonsense talked for and against what is called modernism. ... But if a man wanted the one real and rational test, which really does distinguish the medieval from the modern mood, it might be stated thus: The medieval man thought in terms of the Thesis, where the modern man thinks in terms of the Essay.

The man who wrote a Thesis, stated what he held and then proceeded to prove it by known, orderly, logical rules. The man who writes the essay holds nothing so definite.

Chesterton said that he enjoys Stevenson, but he worried about the man who preferred, as Stevenson said in a famous essay, the travel to the arrival at the end of the road. Chesterton always preferred the flagons at the Inn at the End of the World. In logic, Chesterton pointed out that if the end of travel were not more important, no one would ever set forth. The travel itself may well be diverting enough, but it cannot be the end or purpose of the journey. The essayist, not the thesis maker, has unfortunately become our moral philosopher. He, like the traveller, has nothing definite in mind when he sets out or when he concludes. "After a certain amount of wandering the mind wants either to get there or to go home," Chesterton observed. "It is one thing to travel hopefully, and say half in jest that that it is better than to arrive. It is another thing to travel hopelessly, because you know you will never arrive." Needless to say, the medievals travelled hopefully, knowing by their theses to where they would arrive, while the moderns travel hopelessly, not having anywhere to go.

Chesterton thus was able to take that which he himself wrote thousands of times, the very essay, and subject it to critical examination about what it did and what he was doing. Chesterton found an element in modern letters that is, because of its inconclusiveness, "indefinite and dangerous." For he understood that it is dangerous for the mind not to do what the mind does of its nature, that is, come to conclusions, on the basis of a thesis, of an open argument. In this sense, Chesterton understood that the "article", the unit of argument in St. Thomas' Summae, was a far different proposition from the essay that only rambled on about one's own feelings.

Now I do not think there is anything particularly wrong with feelings or rambling, but it is not to be done for its own sake. Chesterton saw that evil re-enters in the world when the world is so proposed to us that all there is in it is travel, no goal. The evil is fuzziness, the inability to make a decision or to live by one when made, the certainty of uncertainty that paralyzes the mind and the culture.

In writing an essay, we can deal with theoretical or practical matters. This is the liberty of the essay. But properly to present theoretical matters we must put forth a theory and arrive at a conclusion based on that theory. If we substitute the looseness of the essay for the rigor of the thesis and the argument, we will end up simply roaming and wandering about the intellectual landscape.

After I read this essay of Chesterton on the essay, I asked myself, is Chesterton, in his essays, guilty of the fault that he attributes to the heritage of Bacon, of letting evil into the world because the essayist could not make up his mind about what he was arguing? I thought of the many times in these pages that I have reflected on, analyzed, commented on, one or another Chesterton essay. I realized that what was to me always unique and striking about Chesterton's essays, what made them different, was that his essays, while always revealing a good amount of wonderment and delight, were always theses. He always knew what the mind was for. Even in his playful essays, in his "attempt" to wander about within an experience or an event, Chesterton came to a clear conclusion based on principled argument. Chesterton managed to combine the virtue of the medieval thesis with the modern essay. He was so delightful, so perceptive that he taught the truth, in both sense and nonsense, under the guise of evil re-entering the world.

3) From Midwest Chesterton News, May, 1995.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

We have heard the complaint, no doubt, that religion, particularly the Christian religion, is so negative. It seems always to be telling us what we cannot do, not what we can do. We want a "positive" religion; we do not want to worry about "don'ts". Just give us the "do's". Having propounded this well-known thesis, we proudly content ourselves with our liberality, our progressivism in things to be done.

Such is a very common complaint, and yet, when examined, a very superficial one. When we sort it out, when we think of why the Ten Commandments "forbid", at least those that apply to us human beings and our relations to each other, we will realize that these negative dicta are the most positive things we could imagine. In the one positive Commandment, besides that of "keeping holy the Sabbath", we are told to "honor" our father and our mother. Now this positive command is rather more demanding than if we were simply told "Not to Dishonor Them". It is as if we were told -- and the Greek philosophers do tell us this -- that there is no way we can repay our parents for what they have given to us, that to honor them is an obligation that really never ends. The positive Commandment to "honor" our Father and our Mother is, in fact, the most difficult of things to do.

On the other hand, take the law of driving. The basic law of the State of California is simply, "Drive Safely." This command is stated positively, but, as it stands, it is not really of much help. The negative laws -- "STOP", "DRIVE SLOWLY", "SPEED LIMIT, 25 MPH" -- give us the freedom and knowledge of what actually to do. Even these negative commands always have to be interpreted in the light of "Drive Safely". The negative commands tell us what actually to do when we drive safely.

Now I bring this consideration of law and Commandment up because I purchased, at a reduced price, Volume XXXII, of Ignatius Press' Collected Works of Chesterton (1989). These are the columns from The Illustrated London News from 1920-22. The very first essay in this volume is dated January 3, 1920. Like so many of Chesterton's essays that I had never read before, on reading it, I just wanted to cheer, it is so well put.

This particular essay was given the title, "Negative and Positive Morality". As the essay was written just after the Great War and during the time of New Year's resolutions, Chesterton noted that a "resolution" was a formal statement of hope. A resolution specifies what specifically we have to do to change ourselves, year after year. Thus, finding ourselves rather difficult suddenly to change, we will probably have to deal with our recurrent sins -- "for the soul and its sins are in every sense a problem of eternity."

Chesterton, referring to World War I, furthermore, remarked that in being relieved and grateful for the end of the War, we should notice that our gratitude is greatest when our escape from evil is very narrow. Likewise, our resolutions of hope that we change ourselves, that we recognize our sins, indicate to us the narrowness of the gap that stands between ourselves and the evil we could do if we would, if we did not observe the Commandments.

We must further recognize that when we say "yes" to something, we at the same time say "no" to something else. Every "yes" is a "no". If we say "yes" to this, we say "no" to that; it cannot be otherwise. "The silliest sort of progressive complains of negative things," Chesterton continued. But the fact is that what we say "no" to defines in the simplest and more graphic way to what it is that we say "yes". When this "silly" progressivism becomes a "campaign against the Ten Commandments", it indicates that it does not understand what is going on when things are commanded not to be done. "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity." Why is this so?

Why, in other words, are the Ten Commandments, mostly negative statements to be sure, rather signs of humanity and liberality than signs of gloom and narrowness as they are commonly thought to be? This is the reason Chesterton gives us, in one of his finest sentences: "It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted, precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." The Lord did not list all the positive things that we should be doing because the list would never end and, besides, we are supposed to find out the positive things for ourselves. We are supposed to be surprised by the myriad of good things that are.

Thus, if we were to be commanded simply, "Do good", instead of "Thou shalt not", we would never end with the good things that we should or could do, the most things that are permitted to us because the whole world is given to us. The natural law, in fact, already tells us "Do Good and Avoid Evil," so revelation adds what we need to know so that we will not be confused about the most essential things that we ought not to do.

Chesterton, by way of example, offered a marvelous list of good things we might possibly be commanded to do if, because we could not get the point otherwise, we insisted on having our commandments stated positively: Thou shalt first "pick dandelions on the common". Then the list would go on for a month with other things we might do before we come to, Thou shalt "throw pebbles into the sea, ... sneeze, ... make snowballs, blow bubbles, play marbles, make toy airplanes, travel on Tooting trains." The list would simply never come to an end before we come to consider the things we ought not to do, things that might make finding any ordered good in things impossible.

In comparison with what we might do and are permitted to do, then, the Ten Commandments display "that brevity that is the soul of wit". Thus, "it is better to tell a man not to steal than to try to tell him the thousand things that he can enjoy without stealing." And if we insist that there are some things that we cannot enjoy unless we steal them, we at the same time deprive someone else of enjoying what we have stolen from him. Our "yes" is someone else's "no". By not observing the commandment, we insist that what is not ours is ours. We give the same right to someone else to steal from us; we end up in a war of all against all because we do not observe the negative commandment which lets everyone enjoy what is his.

Chesterton next, to clarify the point more graphically, takes up the problem of the positive side of the Fifth Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Now the commandment simply tells us not to kill anyone, including the mythical "Mr. Robinson" of Chesterton's example. What happens positively when we do not kill this Robinson? Well, basically, Robinson continues to live and do all those things for which Robinson is noted, things that we cannot imagine. Mrs. Robinson, no doubt, is delighted to have old Robinson still around. Robinson himself is delighted to be around, though he does not know the narrow escape he had by our observing the "Thou Shalt Not" of the Commandment.

Chesterton thought of the Great War in the same way as he did of Robinson, that, however destructive, it saved Western Civilization, Christendom, from something worse, from nothingness. It was still around though it might have been destroyed by Prussianism. "Nothing is negative except nothing; and it is not our rescue that was negative, but only the nothingness and annihilation from which we were rescued." Thus, if the civilization is not destroyed, if Robinson is not killed, what results is civilization and Robinson, which, in both instances, is positive not negative.

Thus, if someone obeys the Commandment and does not get rid of Robinson, the negative prohibition means that Robinson positively lives. "And to say it is not a positive good and glory to have saved him from strangling is to miss the whole meaning of human life. It is to forget every good as soon as we have saved it...." The point about the good we save is precisely the activities, the life, that continue in being. The important thing about not killing Robinson is not killing him, but the things that good old Robinson does of which we probably have no idea.

Consequently, we are really to fear that good things can be lost or destroyed. The things that are, all that is good, we are permitted, provided in our pursuit and choice of them, we obey the commandments, for these are the limits and guidelines by which we can really have, really enjoy what is good. We can only have Robinson, if we do not kill him. We can only have our property, if someone does not steal it. We can only have our wife if someone else does not covet her. All these "Shalt Not's" are resolutions by which we are free to enjoy the thousands of things that we are permitted to do, the end of which we shall never reach. This very experience indicates to us why we are, in the same revelation that gives us the Ten Commandments, given also the promise of eternal life.

But what is the most penetrating reflection that Chesterton gives to all these considerations of the positiveness of negative morality, of the reasons why the "campaign against the Ten Commandments" is so "silly"? It is because we can appreciate most what we nearly lost. We do not realize the wonder of an existing thing until we recognize that it might not exist, indeed, that it might not exist at our hands. The Ten Commandments are the other side of our realization of the wonder of existing things, the good things we let be and we choose because they are good. And this is Chesterton's great line: "We adorn things most when we love them most; and we love them most when we have nearly lost them." This is what the Ten Commandments are really about.

The Commandments prevent us from losing things that we love most. We love them but we do not really see them as the goods they are until we nearly lose them. We can lose everything that is good if we do not observe the Commandments that are specifically designed to keep in being what is good. When we see that what we love is almost lost, we adorn it in thanksgiving; we respond to the beauty of what is with the added beauty of our own recognition of what is given to us, of what we almost lost because we did not observe the Commandments.

4) From Midwest Chesterton News, March, 1996

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

ON THE BEST BOOK NEVER WRITTEN

In the "Introduction" to The Everlasting Man (Collected Works, Vol. II), Chesterton begins with the famous sentence about two ways of getting home. The most efficient way is never to leave home in the first place. But if someone stays home all the while, he may never realize just how unique his home is. The other way to get home is for someone to go around the world, seeing how different everything is, until he comes back to where he started, finally to recognize its utter uncommonness. Chesterton then confesses that he once tried to write a book on this very theme about going around the world to reach home, but that he never managed to finish it. This is the book he called "the best book he never wrote."

Needless to say, this image of the two ways of "getting home" serves as the analogy by which Chesterton discusses the uniqueness in the universe of both man and the Church. Neither man nor the Church are noticed for what they are because they are said, on too superficial examination, to be just like something else. That is, man is "just like" the animals and the Church is just like "religion". But how very different each is within these categories is minimized or overlooked or not noticed. And what is disregarded is, as Chesterton explains, the most striking things about them.

Chesterton remarked in a "Preliminary Note" to this book that there comes a time when ordinary people need to talk about whether popular or scientific positions, like evolution or comparative religion theories, really make sense as explained. Chesterton insisted on what he called "the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists produce." Chesterton implies, naturally, that science is not exempt from logic and religion is not exempt from consistency, lack of either of which Chesterton happens to be a genius in noticing in either scientists or parsons.

I realize that I have not read The Everlasting Man in a long time. Somehow, it has never been one of my favorite Chesterton books, but the more I look at it now, the more I begin to like it. By chance, I had been rereading C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity on an airplane to Phoenix. In the first part of this still amazing book, Lewis brings up the fact that our initial human experience in, say, listening to people argue, is that first there is some law or rule that they expect others to obey -- "I's not fair", "I was here first." Secondly, human beings, even while knowing this law, often do not observe it. And when questioned about why they did not observe it, they will always have a "reason" of some sort to which they appeal.

Lewis remarks in this context that in fact Christianity has nothing to say to people who are not aware in their reason or in their experience that they themselves have done something wrong. What to do about this sense of having done something wrong, something personally wrong, however, provides the very entry of Christianity into the moral world. Christianity comes as a remedy for something that we ought to be aware of, something the perplexes and unsettles us. Thus, we are told to "repent" at the very beginning of the Gospel, as if it presumed that everyone has something to be sorry for and they are looking for a way to do something about it.. The Pharisees are scandalized because Christ forgives sins, sins they blindly do not see in themselves.

The memory of his remark of Lewis made me pay particular attention to the following sentence of Chesterton in the "Introduction" to The Everlasting Man: "When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do." The Church is unique among the religions because it proposes to do something about the sin we already recognize to be such an enigmatic part of our experience.

The Church is even more unique because it does not propose to eradicate sin from the world but to be there all along to forgive when sins are committed. The Church cannot provide a method to infallibly get rid of sin because it cannot get of free will, which lies at the origin of all sin, and, for that matter, of all repentance.

Thus, the Church does not say that sin is determined to happen from all eternity. It does not say that it is an illusion. It does not say that it can simply be ignored or forgotten without repentance and the sacrament. Moreover, the Church does not affirm that there is nothing wrong. Nor does it call evil good. And it does not locate the source of this something wrong outside the human will, in property configurations or in matter or in the fact of sex, none of which in itself is evil or sinful..

Chesterton suggests that if we are Christians we will know these things about human life, about sin and forgiveness. They will be familiar to us because they constitute part of the home we live in, but often do not recognize in its extraordinariness. He also remarks that someone totally from outside of Christianity, some Chinese gentleman perhaps, might also see that Christianity's particular doctrines are quite unique, not really posed in any other tradition.

The man least likely to recognize the importance and wonder of his spiritual home, however, will be "the man who now (is) most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into an ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginnings, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard." As the Holy Father intimates in his teaching on the Third Millennium, we are a civilization filled with people precisely "weary of hearing what it has never heard."

We live in a time in which many, many Christians cannot recognize their own home. This is why something like the General Catechism of the Catholic Church or Crossing the Threshold of Hope are such amazing books because they describe home so well to those who never left it and so clearly to those who had never heard of it before. But the utter uniqueness of either man or Christianity cannot be seen by Christians who have slipped into a kind of practical skepticism or personal sinfulness that prevents them from seeing what they really in fact need as human beings in the world -- a teaching that recognizes a law, that recognizes that we break the law, that we need forgiveness, that a source of this forgiveness has been revealed to us. The boredom of the world is caused by not being able to see the newness of what is already at home. The world is full of those unable or unwilling to see what they already have. The Good News has already arrived and many of us are too weary to notice.

5) From Midwest Chesterton News, February, 1996.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

BABIES

A memorable essay in The Well and the Shallows (1935) is entitled "Babies and Distributism" (Collected Works, III, pp. 439-41). It may well be the most defiantly counter-cultural essay of our times, to be matched only by Flannery O'Connor's remark that birth control is the most spiritual doctrine of the Church. Neither Chesterton nor Flannery O'Connor had children of their own. Both wrote in disdain of the intellectuals, secular and ecclesiastical, of their era who advocated this practice. Both wrote knowing that their position would be rejected. Both understood that the Church's position had something profoundly right about it, something at the heart of human reality. Pius XI's Encyclical Casti Connubii ("On Christian Marriage") had appeared on the last day of December, 1930, some four years before Chesterton wrote this essay.

Knowing the bitterness of opposition to what he maintained, and having seen this opposition develop mostly as he knew it would, Chesterton's essay today reads almost like reading direct revelation. The whole of our time, so it thought, "knew" the Church was wrong. Chesterton knew the Church was right, even before the issue really developed in the convoluted manner we know it today. Intellectual reputations were made, much publicity was gained, by openly opposing what the Church taught. All sorts of devious theories have had to be invented in order to justify this opposition. Almost every day, even yet, theologians and professors will be quoted to the effect that the Church will, must, ought to change its views.

In the meantime, the present Holy Father, as did his predecessors before him, repeats, clarifies, and demonstrates both why it will not change this position and what it is defending -- human life and human love. Moreover, our times live out in the lives of those who will not accept the Church's teaching what it means to defy what is the truth in these matters. The destruction of the family is in the news every day but we choose not to make too many connections. It is too much to bear to think the Church, even on empirical grounds, has been right all along, as it has been.

What is remarkable about Chesterton's short essay, I think, is not only his clear insight into what would happen if we denied the truth of the Church's position, which is the position of reason, but also his own personal reaction to the public policy of birth control. Chesterton was a mild and gentle man. He rarely was annoyed. Indeed, in this essay, he recounted this very serene quality of his own soul. Atheists did not particularly annoy him as he could understand the narrow logic by which they limited themselves. Even Bolsheviks were people with the same narrow minds but who at least were against something that needed to be corrected. But for the proponents of birth control, Chesterton only had, as he tells us, "contempt."

When Chesterton had "contempt" for something, we can be sure that something was radically wrong with the position. He was one of those men who could both explain what was wrong and even sense it, feel it. A good man can often uncannily recognize the face of something that is really evil; he can see its evil because he can see where it leads and what it prevents, something close to the heart of God. We should never forget that human babies, from the moment of their conceptions, are very near the heart of God. Their angels look on His very face.

Chesterton gave three reasons for his "personal contempt" about this issue. He lived before the days in which those who proposed eliminating babies in wombs called themselves advocates of "choice" instead of killers of human lives, which is what they objectively are. Choice is a verb and must have an object. "To choose" cannot be understood without its object. To be "pro-choice" does not mean in practice to be "for free will" as if it referred to some sort of theoretical dissertation on the human faculty. It means in context always choosing to kill an already incipient human life at some stage of its already begun development. This current abuse of the language would have driven this gentle man into a rage, I am sure.

But Chesterton had something of the same language problem already in 1935. His first reason for opposing it had to do with the very phrase "Birth Control". Chesterton could not stand lying with words. He would not have minded it so much had its advocates called it "Birth Prevention", for that is what it was; but to call it "birth control" was simply a gross abuse of language. "I despise Birth-Control," he wrote,

first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word, and is used so as to curry favor even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that that there shall never be any birth to control. ... Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth.

What "Birth Control" means, to use the language precisely, is "Birth Prevention". Chesterton thought the very word was a lie and intended to be a lie.

The second reason Chesterton had personal contempt for "Birth Control" was because of the thing itself. Chesterton is very blunt and frank here. He saw "Birth Control" to lack the courage of its convictions which even the Eugenicists have. At least the consistent Eugenicist would follow the example of dealing with animals where we let all the off-spring be born then choose which ones we want to keep. This would be a better position, Chesterton thought, than the "Birth Prevention" system which prevents or kills all birth.

In a reflection that may have something to do with the reason why many western countries have to rely on foreign labor, Chesterton wrote,

By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and the most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly for mercenary motives.

Chesterton thought that the "Birth Prevention" and Eugenic movements were hiding their real program. They treat human beings in principle as we treat the animals, that is, we keep or kill only what we want for our own ideological or mercenary motives.

The most important reason the Birth-Control mentality bothered Chesterton was as follows: "my contempt boils over into bad behavior when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be 'free' to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like door-mats in that they use the word 'free'." When human babies are not preferred to material possessions, this preference is not a sign of freedom but of servitude. Material possessions are not signs of freedom; children are.

Chesterton put the issue with much eloquence, by establishing what it first and what is second, what is important and what is its cause. "A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom," Chesterton wrote.

He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation.

Chesterton here clearly reminded us of our priorities, of what is essential, of what is merely a means.

Chesterton already saw back in the 1930's how words and ideas would be abused to further anti-human priorities and realities. At the heart of reality is the child, the baby. This is the sign of freedom. The child is a new will in the world. What we have forgotten is precisely the wonder of this will when it is protected and wanted by its parents against the world, if necessary. No state or authority can interfere with this parental freedom to establish its own family in which its babies are to be born.

The child is the parents' contribution to creation. The new free will and mind in the world represent that potential innovative force by which the material possessions needed to support us can be invented and come into being in the first place. The ultimate wealth is the human mind and will as it refreshingly comes to be in each new human birth. Human beings do not want to be free from children, their children. Babies teach us what stands at the heart of reality -- "the sign and sacrament of personal freedom."

6) From Midwest Chesterton News, November, 1994.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

ON CREEDS

Chesterton very often returned to the idea that man is, by nature, a creed-making animal. Needless to say, this position is provocative, since we moderns often pride ourselves about not having any "creed" to restrict our style. What is peculiar about man, among other things, however, is that he smokes in spite of warnings of the Surgeon General that it is bad for his health -- although the scientific status of the present Surgeon-General (Elders) admittedly makes one suspect that if she is against it, it must be vital for one's continued well-being. It is thus one thing to have a creed and deliberately break its provisions and another thing to maintain that there is nothing to break, that there is nothing we can establish as a standard, whether we keep it or not.

The mind has its own peculiar function, however, a function that is its own proper activity. This function is, in Chesterton's view, that of making dogmas. Creeds are organized and coordinated lists of dogmas or doctrines. They state as clearly and as accurately as is possible just what it is we understand about some subject -- be it God, man, earth, or society. To forbid a mind to make a dogma or establish a doctrine that is true is to forbid it to be a mind. The mind seeks to know the truth. When it knows a truth, the mind seeks to formulate and state it, as if stating what the dogma is, is itself vital both to the creed's integrity and to our lives. We seek accurately to translate creeds into differing languages so that the same idea or understanding of a doctrine or a dogma will be accurately comprehended against the background of legitimately differing languages.

Chesterton wrote two columns about creeds in the Illustrated London News in November of 1927 (XXXIV, pp. 408-12; 421-24). In both essays, he was amused that the popular ideas about creeds -- namely, that they are "crumbling" and that men are becoming "weary" of them -- are both quite wrong. Chesterton maintained that if you asked the next ten, fifty, or a thousand people you met whether the "creeds" were crumbling, they would admit that they are because that is what they have heard repeated over and over. But these same people would not really be examining what is going on all around them. The fact is that people want to hear about dogmas and are eager to listen to disputes about them. Though we probably at first sight think exactly the opposite, people are "entirely interested in doctrinal matters and not in merely moral matters."

Thus people are not particularly interested in whether "Tommy is a good boy," but they are intrigued about rumors of whether the Dean of St. Paul's is "a Christian or a Platonist or a Pyrrho-Buddhist." What is, no doubt, amusing about that last remark is that we must today also examine whether bishops and deans profess, that is, agree with, the dogmas they are committed to hold by virtue of their office or whether they have gone off on some or other outlandish or dangerous tangent. Everyone sees that the importance of creeds is clearly manifest by the thoughts and actions of those who profess to uphold them but do not in practice.

"People are not merely interested in morality, or even merely in religion. They are intensely interested in theology -- if possible even more than in religion." What does this mean that people are more interested in theology than in morality or religion? Obviously, it means that people want to know, not merely to follow as in ritual or to act as in morality. What we do and what we think are intimately related. The most interesting and important thing we can know about someone, Chesterton said in his famous essay on "Why I Am Not a Socialist", is what he thinks, how does he see the world? Only when we know someone's "creed" will we be prepared to know how he might act in the world.

This is not to deny, of course, as E. Michael Jones in his Degenerate Moderns and Paul Johnson in his The Intellectuals put it, that we can also tell much about why people hold the theories they do by looking at how they live their lives. What appears at first sight to be an extraordinarily convoluted theory often becomes quite intelligible when we look at the kind of life that is being justified. Lives reveal theories; theories influence lives. Those who demonstrate in practice no relation between mind and act or act and mind are hardly human, again not forgetting that we are beings who can be wildly inconsistent. We have a society filled with people who are against smoking on the grounds that it is injurious to human health, but who are pro-choice when it comes to killing incipient human life.

Chesterton told the story of his friend, Bernard Shaw, who was once asked to be on a discussion panel. The rules of the panel forbad any discussion of religion and politics. Shaw retorted, that "he never discussed anything else except politics and religion." Chesterton added, "I also can claim that I never discuss anything except politics and religion." And Chesterton added,

"There is nothing else to discuss." By this of course, Chesterton meant that there are some things that are "discussable" and some things that are not. As Aristotle said, nobody debates about whether to begin the Trojan War. It is already over. We can only seek the facts of what happened, not whether to begin it.

Chesterton thought that probably people were "intensely interested in theology -- if possible more than in religion." Why would he say this? It is, I think, because theology means precisely word or thought about God, the attempt to unravel and clarify what we mean by or know of the highest Being. The knowledge of whether God exists is one thing, interesting enough as it is. But the real interest comes when, once knowing of the existence of a beginning source or cause, we commence our wondering about what sort of a being or reality this origin or end might be. So we try to formulate what we think, what we conclude, what we articulate.

When we begin to do this articulating, we are in the creed making business, whatever we call it. "A creed means what anybody believes, and generally lends something of its definite character even to what he disbelieves. That the Creator is indifferent to creed is itself a creed. Even that the Creator does not exist at all is in essence a creed." This is why it is important especially for those who claim that they are free of odious creeds to identify their own creed so that we can examine them for their validity. We can in fact state in creedal form any claim to deny the need of a creed. No one is more pitiful or more dangerous than the "creedless" professor or parson. Chesterton had the uncanny ability to perceive and articulate the hidden creeds of those who had no creeds.

What might also sound strange to us on first reading is Chesterton's insistence that morality is not very interesting. We hear a lot about the notion that we should not bother about the differing creeds or statements of what people believe but look to their deeds. Samuel Johnson, I believe, once quipped that if a man denies in theory the validity of private property while he is visiting our house, we should count the silver after he leaves. It is true that by their fruits you shall know them. What is not true is that these fruits come from some sort of mindlessness that has no relation to a thought that might have caused them. If we really only were interested in actions with no perception of the thoughts that caused then, "the result would be a torrent of tedium, a howling wilderness of boredom." We would eliminate "mysticism" and the consciousness of our inner lives. The attention to deeds without to the thought behind them would be only moralising, something men find "the dreariest experience on earth." By eliminating any discussion of creed, creeds of even those who claim not to have any, we would at the same time get rid of what men "find really interesting," namely, "the disputes about dogmas and creeds." That is to say, we would rid ourselves of serious discussions about what is true.

In his second November article on creeds, Chesterton remarked that on having watched the situation from his "first to his second childhood", the fact is that creeds, far from crumbling, seem in fact to be "the hardest and most indestructible material made by man, if they were made by man." Chesterton was not here talking about the truth of creeds, though that is obviously the key question. He simply pointed out that men have been reciting the Nicene Creed, for instance, for almost seventeen centuries now. The new General Catechism still explains the centrality and indeed the truth of the creeds by which Catholicism identifies itself. It identifies itself by stating clearly what it holds to be true. And it does this after the manner in which the mind functions, that is, by making intelligible propositions of what it is that is the point of the doctrine.

What is in fact constantly crumbling, Chesterton thought, was not the creeds but the criticism of the creeds, that is, the grounds upon which this criticism is based. Chesterton had remarked someplace in Orthodoxy, I believe, that any stick is all right to beat the creed-making Church with, even contradictory positions. Thus, if the creed is said to be wrong because science has proved that it is untenable, what happens when the scientific position that was said to be the basis of the refutation of the creed is itself what is changed or untenable? "The first skeptic says something is wrong because something else is right," Chesterton explained. "If the second thing is not right, then there never was any reason to believe that the first thing was wrong. If I say Paul Jones was wicked because he was a pirate, and then go on to prove that piracy is perfectly innocent and respectable -- well, then it follows that there was never any particular objection to Paul Jones, and there is an end to it."

The creeds are the stable things. Indeed, it turns out that even the objections to creeds that claim to be true are themselves claims to be true. They may reappear from time to time in a certain new garb but with essentially the same position. Chesterton found that heresies rather frequently showed up unbeknownst to those who had forgotten the dogma against which a heresy was first directed. "It is not the creed, but the criticism that is always crumbling away, age after age." We live in a world in which we constantly look for something new. We live in a world in which what turns out to be most new and refreshing is something very old, something that states as carefully as it is given to the human intellect and human word to state it, what is true of God, world, man, and society. What angers many in our time is that we did not invent these doctrines that mind discovers and formulates when the mind does what it is supposed to do. That is to say, what angers many is that the creeds give us a criterion by which we can escape from being prisoners of the dominant ideologies and fads of our time. We need the liberty the creeds in order to see that the criticisms of the creeds are what are always crumbling.

7) From Midwest Chesterton News, April, 1995.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE HORROR

We cannot help today but be conscious of the degree to which law or ideological pressure imposes on language, requires us to say certain things in certain ways or forbids us from saying them in other customary or normal ways. We have to utter the boring "happy holidays" because "Merry Christmas" hints that Christ is important. We have to affirm that active homosexuals live noble lifestyles. We have to pretend that we are all morally equal, no matter what we do, a position that puts vice and virtue on the same level and allows no moral discourse about whether there be virtue and vice in the first place. We are more and more dominated by a coerced public language totally out of harmony with what actually goes on in reality and with what we actually think. We all begin to lie about the important distinctions of right and wrong because we are allowed no other way of speaking about them. No public discourse will mean what it says.

Things that are perfectly intelligible and clear are, for political reasons, said to mean something else when they really don't. If I say, for instance, that "man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river," I am said arbitrarily to exclude from this sentence the feminine half of the human race. Therefore, I must not say that "man is a rational animal; he laughs, he cries, he floats on his back in the river." Rather, I must say awkwardly, that "the human being is a rational animal; he/she laughs; she/he cries, he/she floats on her/his back in the river." Preposterous, really.

Of course, in my original sentence, as any fair minded person knows, I have not either in logic, grammar, or intention excluded half of the human race. Nothing exists in that original sentence that would not include each member, male or female, adult or child, of the human race. In order to think that it does, one must have been deprogrammed or educated out of the normal understanding of words and their relation to concepts. Words can have different meanings. We can understand them when they do. The word "man" can and does refer to a concept that prescinds from, without denying, the distinction of male and female. Every language for thousands of years has recognized this multiple meaning for words.

The proper English pronoun that refers to this concept, "man", is "he". It makes the same adjustment that the word "man" does when it means either the generic human being prescinding from the distinction of male and female or the male. Neither word, man or he, when used for the abstract concept, in any meaningful sense to anyone who understands the language, excludes females since it does not talk about males or females as such. Both words, "man" and "he", in context are designed to talk of human nature without averring to the sexual distinction, but without denying it either. We can do this easily and clearly and habitually. Not to have this mechanism at our disposal makes our speech stilted, silly even. University lectures and academic journals have become boring, unending repetitions of unnecessary and confusing hes/shes in all their splendid ideology.

Another variety of this same problem occurs when we use words to cover up what we are really doing or talking about. The most obvious candidate in this category is what is known, with incredible paradox, as the "choice" movement. Today, if I say that I am for "choice", it does not mean that I have some elaborate theory about free will. It means rather, to put it clearly, that I think it all right to kill babies in wombs. The word "choice", by itself, does not tell us what is going on, except when we come to know how it is used. "To choose" never stands by itself. I always have to choose something, this or that. Simply to have the power to choose, which is what all rational creatures have by their nature, tells us nothing at all about what individuals will do with their wills.

The "pro-choice" movement, thus, is not some debating club organized to combat radical determinism. It is rather a theoretical justification for killing certain human beings (euthanasia is also a part of this same movement) on the sole basis that we want to (choose to) do so. There is not the slightest scientific evidence that what we kill is not a human life in its initial form, already complete from the moment of conception.

Likewise, if I am opposed to the "pro-choice" movement", it does not mean that Schall is suddenly to be ranked with those philosophical systems that maintain that we must do what we do, that there is no freedom in the cosmos or in ourselves. In the "pro-choice" movement, choice does have a very particular, individual, tiny object that is impossible to separate from the power of choice itself in the act of its choosing. Every "to choose" of this type is to put an action in the world that kills a begun human life. The language cannot mean anything else in this usage. It cannot simply mean I am for "the power of choice", against which stand only theoretic determinists. If I am "for choice", it means both that I can justify the power of free will and understand that the object of choice, what it chooses, determines whether it is being used for good or evil. When what I choose is to terminate the life of another innocent human being, my choice is evil, even though the fact that I have this power remains good. If I try to hide from myself what I objectively do by some theory of privacy, I am in utter self-deception about myself, about what I do, about choice, about the world itself.

Recently, someone gave me a copy of Loyola University Press sample collection of G. K.'s Weekly. I am not adept enough to figure out who wrote the unsigned editorials and columns in this remarkably quaint and fascinating journal. But Chesterton does write a signed column or essay almost regularly. On October 17, 1931, he did a column called "The Horror". Needless to say, I was curious to find out just what this "horror" was. I thought at first it might be perhaps Hitler, or even some account of an English ghost or politician.

But the column in 1931 turned out in fact to be about this very topic of the proper use of language that has become so convoluted some sixty years later. The very first sentence of this essay reads: "Nearly all newspapers and public speakers are now entirely occupied with finding harmless words for a horrible thing" (325). What else is "pro-choice" but precisely "harmless words" designed to cover up "a horrible thing"? Political and polite society does not allow us to use the real words that give the true picture of what is happening.

Recently, however, I read The Quotable Paul Johnson, which George Marlin, Richard Rabatin, and Heather Richardson Higgins edited. In it, I read these absolutely clear under the heading "Abortion Industry":

The abortion industry has been given a green light to do, in effect, what it wills. A fully formed child can be ripped from its mother's womb, screaming and gasping for breath, and then coldly butchered on the waiting slab by men and women -- "specialists" -- whose sole job in life is performing such lawful operations.

Here the language does not "find harmless words for a horrible thing." Rather, the language finds horrible words for a horrible thing. In other words, the language does what it is supposed to do. It tells the truth about what goes by using appropriate and accurate words.

Chesterton, in his day, was still dealing with prohibition. In 1931, we were prohibiting alcohol. Today we prohibit smoking; just as we also prohibit parents from knowing when their daughters go to an abortion clinic on the grounds of privacy. Thus, when we cannot hide the results of our choices, an impossibility in any case, we cover ourselves with the mantle of privacy, that is, we lie even to ourselves.

Here, then, we are interested in the use of words to lie to us about what is going on. Chesterton himself had a kind of genius for seeing through the veneer of a language that deliberately lies to us about what it means. He could see the ironies to which this deliberately obscuring usage could lead us. "Everybody was taught to use the word 'temperance'," he remarked in the same essay, "to mean refusing to any man even the chance to be temperate. They talked about Birth Control when they meant preventing birth, just as they talked about Liquor Control when they meant forbidding liquor."

"Birth control", that systematic blockage that especially liberal Catholics want to defend unto the death, was itself a most amusing phrase to Chesterton. He had quipped someplace else that "birth control", when examined for the actual meaning of the words, meant precisely "no birth" and "no control". This entertaining remark, no doubt, contains the essence of the papal position, that there should be a relation between our actions and their consequences that is under our control, under our own wills. Contraceptives, abortions, RUD's, and all the myriads of similar paraphernalia simply do what Chesterton said they did; they prevent births without demanding any sort of control in the sexual act itself, which is where human relation and self-rule exist in this case.

The Liquor Control Commission evidently thought to solve a problem not by temperance, by allowing us to rule ourselves, but by forbidding that about which temperance usually exists, that is, food, drink, and sex. Again, we noticed that Chesterton was protecting a philosophy by protecting words. He saw that words were being used to foster a new philosophy, one that retained on the surface words that sounded like the old morality but which were in fact the new determinism disguised as choice or control. Abortion, after all, is itself the result of a failure not only of control but even of the devices or, more often, the will to use them. The minute we place the problem in the wrong place, we will never solve it, or if we do solve it, we will have to use methods all out of proportion to the way human beings ought to rule themselves.

The "horror" that Chesterton already saw in 1931 is today a part of our very culture. We lie to ourselves in order not to have to admit to ourselves what we are actually doing. We then pass laws and enforce customs and language that prevents us from penetrating back to that reality which words are designed to indicate and describe. If we call abortion an "industry" protected by law, with highly paid practitioners who serve the law by their trade, we will begin to think we are dealing with something like General Motors or the Restaurant Industry. What we are doing, as Paul Johnson so graphically said, is butchering human beings for no other reason than because we choose to do so and it is legal. What would Chesterton have called such an "industry". He would have called it what it is, a "horror".

8) From Midwest Chesterton News, September, 1996.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE ONLY REAL HAPPINESS POSSIBLE TO MAN

My friend David Yost in Monterey, California, called to my attention two brief passages from Chesterton, one from Dickens and the other from an essay "On Sentiment", found in John Guest's collection of Chesterton essays. In the meantime, I also came across in the November, 1994, issue of The Chesterton Review, in which is reprinted Chesterton's 1905 column from The Daily News entitled, "The Alphabet of the Liberal". I want to say something about all three of these items.

The title of this particular essay I am writing now is taken from the Dickens book, in which Pickwick's spectacles are described as being fixed in "that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man" (CW, XV, 92, italics added). Yost recalled this passage in Dickens because he had read a sentence in my Idylls and Rambles, that went, "The capacity to be surprised comes close to the very definition of our dignity."

I have often pondered this surprising "surprise", this grave surprise that touches our dignity and constitutes our only true happiness. It is rooted in the fact that we are finite beings called to eternal life, something we could in no way imagine for ourselves but yet which is offered to us through no merit of our own. The grave surprise of the baby is, as Chesterton often noted, caused by the fact that the baby has never seen anything at all before. To the baby the world is fresh with grave and delightful things that come to him from nowhere about whose presence before him he shows in his face, eyes, and voice a "grave surprise"..

In Chesterton, I believe, we can find several sources for his famous remark that if a thing is "worth doing, it is worth doing badly." It occurs for sure in What's Wrong with the World, perhaps the Chesterton book most pertinent to our current familial disorders. I did a class on Thomas Aquinas during the Spring Semester. One day I was somehow reminded of this passage. We had been reading together Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas. I said to the class one day, "Listen to this statement from Chesterton and tell me the example he used to prove its validity." Naturally, the class looks at such a professor as if he were temporarily deranged or suffering from incipient Alzheimer's disease. I read the passage, "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." Again I asked them, "what is the example to illustrate this principle?" The statement is obviously paradoxical and ironic. The class come up with nothing. Then after some pause, I asked them whether they wanted me to tell them? They nod. "Dancing," I announced, somewhat wickedly, to be sure, as this is their field, not mine. I could see their faces brighten when they get the implications of the paradoxical answer.

In 1905, Chesterton remarked that there were some things that we did not want done at all unless they were done well, indeed "exceedingly well". I now recall seeing some of these examples before -- they are things like "playing on the violin, walking on a tight-rope, discovering the North Pole, looping the loop, performing duties of the public analyst, hangman, Astronomer Royal." One can only smile at this remarkable list.

I often remind my classes that Aristotle said that there are two things we should all be able to do but not do well. They are playing the flute and cooking. I then ask them why Aristotle would say such a thing. Usually someone will have it figured out, namely, that if we play the flute very well, or cook exceedingly well, we will not have any time left over to do the thousands of other things that are worth doing. It is the difference between the well-rounded man and the expert.

Chesterton goes on in this very Aristotelian spirit: "There are a number of fundamental things that we desire all sane men to do for themselves, whether they are done superlatively well or no, such as "laughing, playing with toys if immature and with children if adult, talking, blowing one's nose, making love, earning a living, saying one's prayers." Again, this is an equally remarkable list of things we all prefer to do by ourselves. Chesterton then adds the principle involved: "These are normal human functions, and we prefer that they should be done badly by the man himself than well by anybody else." Thus, Chesterton added, that we really do not want to pay some "expert" to write our love letters. "We do not want other people to choose our wives, unless we are sociologists, and thus in our second infancy." No wonder we love Chesterton. Who else tells us what we obviously need and want to know about ourselves?

In Idylls and Rambles, speaking of Belloc's love of The Diary of a Nobody, Yost underscored this passage, "it seems that he (Belloc) saw in it (the hero of The Diary of a Nobody) a kind of Christ figure, of the fallible and failing man who somehow was the object of redemption." This passage reminded Yost, a Professor of International Relations at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, of a passage from "On Sentiment", a copy of which he kindly send me.

Chesterton had remarked that the ending of Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan was unsatisfactory. Peter Pan is an elf who never changes, but he falls in love with a normal little human girl. He is given the choice of becoming mortal to live with her or remaining an immortal without her. Either choice would have been noble, but Peter Pan wants to compromise. So he prefers to remain an elf but wants to come back every year to visit Wendy for a day. Of course, time does not exist for the elf and Wendy rapidly becomes an old woman.

The issue that Chesterton points out, the one that David Yost cited to me, is that Peter Pan, and consequently often we ourselves, do not understand the true implications of our happiness and our human condition. The true alternative that Peter Pan had is this: He could have chosen one or the other, but not both, to become human or remain an immortal -- Chesterton added, "the evil comes when we waver about weighty matters." Chesterton continued:

He (Peter Pan) might have said that he was a god, that he loved all (mortals) but could not live for any; that he belonged not to them but to multitudes of unborn babes. Or he might have chosen love, with the inevitable result of love, which is incarnation, and the inevitable result of incarnation, which is crucifixion; yes, if it were only crucifixion by becoming a clerk in a bank and growing old. But it was a fork in the road and even in fairyland you cannot walk down two roads at once.

These are remarkable words, that if we choose love, we choose incarnation. If we choose incarnation, we choose crucifixion. And finally, that every ordinary, insignificant life, as well as every life of the great, involves the daily job, the growing old, dying.

The only real happiness possible to us comes to us with the surprise that is beyond the crucifixion that each of us must endure in our own lives. If a thing like living our normal lives is worth doing badly, because it means living at all, this is because we are finite, fallible, fallen creatures. We live within a love that leads to incarnation; we live within an incarnation that leads to crucifixion. We live within a crucifixion that leads to resurrection -- not to be gravely surprised at our condition

is to miss understanding the only real happiness possible to man.

9) From Midwest Chesterton News, April, 1996.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE FIRST DAY OF A NEW CREATION

The Ottawa Chesterton Society Newsletter has republished (January, 1996) an essay of Chesterton from December 28, 1935, in the Illustrated London News. Reading this essay, I was particularly struck by the following line, a line, I must say, that is close to the heart of what Chesterton stood for: "Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult." When I cited this sentence to a friend, I at first wondered just why gratitude would the the most difficult of human duties. It seemed to me at the time that it was because gratitude implies that so much of what we are and have does not originate in ourselves. We are reluctant to acknowledge this fact and think that it is better to claim authorship or ownership of as much as we can rather than to acknowledge what we have received.

But as I reread this sentence, however, what I now find most striking is Chesterton's calling gratitude precisely a "duty". We recall Christ's wonderment about the "other nine" who did not return to thank him on being cured. That is, one in nine, on the average, do not give thanks, a ration I have found to be actually about the way it is  We like to think, however, that if we have a "duty" to something, especially to give thanks, that would mean that it is not pure.

A couple of weeks after Christmas Mass at the old Novitiate in Los Gatos, in California, on Christmas Eve this year, my two little grand nieces and grandnephew each wrote me a dear note of thanks for saying the family Christmas Mass. Now, I know that the idea of writing Uncle Jim was not original with the kids themselves. Their mother had a hand in it. She was teaching them something, the duty of thanks. We need to be alerted to things that we ought to acknowledge.

Suddenly, we find, with Chesterton, that the whole world is a place filled not so much with ourselves but with others to whom we "owe" thanks. Somehow, if we do not actually articulate the thanks we "owe", we are missing something fundamental about being human. Our very existence is something for which thanks are due. This is Chesterton's primal insight.

In The Everlasting Man, we find a chapter entitled "The Strangest Story in the World." The end of this Chapter contains Chesterton's own account of the meaning of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. If we look back at Chesterton's Chapter title, we see that the words are carefully chosen. The world had never seen a story like this before. It strikes anyone who hears it for the first time as precisely "strange". It does not conform to our experience, however much it might conform to what we would want if we could have it.

Chesterton speaks in almost apocalyptic terms in this passage. The glorious yet somber humanity of the ancient world came to an end in this very grave wherein Christ, now crucified, was buried. "It was the end of a very great thing called human history, the history that was merely human" (Collected Works, II, p. 345). Chesterton affirms here, of course, that what follows is something that is not "merely human". It is something that bears the character of gift and sacrifice done for us, in our behalf. The ancient heros had lived. They were now dead.

Chesterton then concludes his Chapter with these extraordinary lines:

On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they had hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in the semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.

These poetic lines are revelatory to us -- "the world died that very night." They recall Genesis and something more than Genesis. The empty tomb and the stone rolled away are things seen with eyes of the friends, the witnesses. Chesterton's words are graphic. Mere human history has ended. What is seen is no longer this history; a new heaven and a new earth are already there.

We regard these events. On the third day, the friends come at daybreak. Suddenly, we can look back with new insight on Chesterton's notion of the "duty" of gratitude, of why it is the "greatest" of human duties in a world in which the old human history is dead. We can understand too why this "duty" is so difficult, because it suggests that the terms of what it is we might most want, the truth of what happened to cause the empty tomb and the stone rolled away, are not results of our own planning and organization, of our own accomplishments except in so far as we are invited to accept them as a gift. The end of a history that is "merely" human in fact needed to end. This is not the world for which we are created and destined.

The "Strangest Story in the World" in fact has a happy ending, in the cool of not the evening but of the dawn. When I think of why Chesterton used the term "duty" of gratitude, it was not because he thought gratitude was coerced or ought not to proceed from our freedom and delight. Rather it was because of the very real danger that, unless we are initially taught and guided to do those things for which we will be thankful, we will likely miss them. If the ancient human history has ended, it does not mean that the great events that marked its ending have been accepted in the only way that they can be accepted, after the manner of gifts, for which we give thanks. The "world that died that resurrection night" was a world that led nowhere, that soon lost its ability even to enjoy itself.

Indeed, it is difficult to give thanks, to know gratitude. If the great sign above the gates of Hell are, as Dante said, "abandon all home all ye who enter here", the great banner floating over the Gates of Paradise surely read, "You are first loved, then you are." The Resurrection dawn is the completion of that ultimate truth according to which we can be joyful at all, according to which we can acknowledge that someone else redeemed us, but that we are, none the less, redeemed. The only "duty" we could possibly have before such events and such happenings in the world, old and new, is indeed that of gratitude.

10) From Midwest Chesterton News, October, 1990.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

ON THE DULLNESS OF CHAOS

The other day I received from New York a copy of the 1986 British Penguin edition of The Man Who Was Thursday. A young friend spotted it in a book store and figured I would like it. How do you give thanks for such unexpected gifts?

What interests me here is the first Chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). The book began with a poem dedicated to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Chesterton's lifetime friend. Chesterton explained that out of all the arguments and mysteries of their youth and in spite of the fantastically wrong theories of our intellectuals -- "Science announced nonentity / And art admired decay..." -- it was now possible to talk calmly of ordinary things, their wonder and their mystery. The poem ended:

Yes, there is strength in striking root,

And good in growing old.

We have found common things at last,

And marriage and a creed,

And I may safely write it now,

And you may safely read.

But these are exactly the things that are not safe at last, the common things, marriage and the Creed, though they are the things that we most want and whose wonder most needs explanation to us.

The plot began in an extraordinary ordinary suburb of London called Saffron Park. Already here is Chesterton's theme that the most extraordinary things in existence are the ordinary human beings we meet every day in the ordinary places in which they dwell. We mostly do not notice how extraordinary it is, just to be. "A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy."

The story began with a kind of sunset that was so unusual that everyone remembered it. "It looked like the end of the world." The colors were so fantastic and varied that they covered up the sun "like something too good to be seen." The clouds and light cast a glow over Saffron Park that made it seem mysterious. "It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism." All of this took place in an ordinary suburb on a day that might have been any day.

In this suburb lived a radical anarchist poet who believed, "with a certain impudent freshness" the old cant "of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness." Into this suburb improbably came another poet, a poet of "order." The poet of revolt had a following of "vaguely emancipated women" who had some protest against "the male supremacy." But these were clearly not ordinary women. "These new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking."

The anarchistic poet had a sister, Rosamund, who was much taken with the poet of order, so different he seemed than her brother. "Mr. Syme," she said to the poet of order, "do the people who talk like you and my brother often mean what they say? Do you mean what you say now?" To which Syme responded, "Do you?"

The heart of the initial encounter between the poet of anarchy and the poet of order had to do with Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet's remark that "an artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

The Underground Railway is, of course, the London Subway. And true to form, the poet of order thought that in fact that the London subway was the most poetical thing in the world. Gregory, the anarchist, thought the world would be more romantic if the next stop after Sloane Square would not be Victoria, as it was, but say Baker Street or Baghdad. Whether we know it or not, we are involved here in St. Thomas's proof for God's existence, the one from order, about why things do reach their ends.

Syme, the poet of order, was sure that it was more wondrous if the subway actually went to where it said it was going than if it just went anywhere. "Chaos is dull," he continued,

because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No take your books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride.

The opposite of chaos is order. We do not want to go just anywhere, but to somewhere. Syme felt that coming to Victoria was not unlike that "hairbreadth escape" from a world of chaos in which nothing gets anywhere, in which men have not the will or capacity to order their world because they do not love the smallness that made it the extraordinary place it is.

But Gregory, the anarchist, thought that man would be unhappy to learn that the New Jerusalem looked just like Victoria Station. "The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt." To this, Syme retorted, "Being sick is a revolt." And he explained,

It is things going right, that is poetical! Our digestion, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars -- the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

The anarchist, of course, could hardly comprehend the poetical wonder of the fact that in us things go right and we do not even notice it. It is not merely how the Underground Railway gets from Sloane Square to Victoria, but how our blood gets from our heart to our toes.

Rosamund was watching Syme who was discussing whether he or the anarchist or she was "sincere" in their questions. "She was looking at him (Syme) from under level brows; her face was grave and open, and there had fallen upon it the shadow of that unreasoning responsibility which is at the bottom of the most frivolous woman, the maternal watch which is as old as the world." The maternal unreasoning responsibility protects what is simply because it is, the fierceness for being and life.

To return to Chesterton's poem and his recollection of his endless youthful all night discussions with Bentley and his friends when they, as all young men should, were trying to figure out what dogmas were true, Syme is described walking with Rosamund in the garden. "For he (Syme) was a sincere man, and in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely." The proud man watches himself too closely -- whether this is the ultimate defense of loquaciousness, I do not know. But it is the defense of Chesterton's long conversations to find the truth which required the humility of watching what is, of watching the Underground from Sloane Square actually rumble into Victoria, of knowing that his digestion worked best when he did not notice that it worked at all, of knowing that the New Jerusalem will not be a chaotic thing in which nothing in particular matter, but it will be a particular place to where our aims have always been directed.

Chaos is dull. "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it." This is what St. Thomas said. We will not be bored in the Streets of Heaven if we are delighted when the train from Sloane Square arrives at Victoria and not at Baghdad.

11) From Midwest Chesterton News, September, 1992.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

ON NOT WRECKING DIVINE OR SECULAR THINGS

The Chesterton Review (May, 1992) reprinted a Chesterton essay entitled "The Roots of the World." The essay was originally published in The Daily News in London on August 17, 1907. This would be about the time Chesterton was writing Orthodoxy.

The essay begins with a kind of narrative parable. Father Boyd in his little introduction remarked that this was a very famous essay and that Chesterton used such parables "as a way of teaching moral truths." I suspect that he used it also as a way to teach the metaphysical truths upon which moral truths are based.

Essentially, Chesterton argued that the whole universe is connected, the highest things with the lowest things and the lowest with the highest. What you cannot do is change God, but you may just change yourself or the world if you try to change God into something other than He is. That is to say, the logic of changing one thing will necessarily result in changing something in the world. If you think wrongly about God, you will think wrongly about man.

The story is a sort of re-telling of the Fall in Genesis. There is a garden in which is growing an odd star-shaped flower that a little boy is commanded not to pull up by the roots. He can pick the flowers but not pull the plants up by the roots.

Naturally, the little boy, shades of the young Augustine, wants nothing more in this world than to pull up the flower by its roots. The elders on the scene give him a number of not very good reasons for not pulling up the plant. But the boy has a very "silly" reason for wanting to pull up the plant, whatever the reasons for not doing so are. He explains that "the Truth demanded that he should pull the thing up by the roots to see how it was growing."

The boy's parents and tutors never really gave him the full reason for the prohibition which was that pulling up the plant by its roots "would kill the plant, and that there is no more Truth about a dead plant than about a live one." In other words, it would have been helpful perhaps for the parents to have given the boy an accurate reason for the prohibition, but even if they did not do so, the prohibition stood. Since the dead plant will not reveal the truth about itself, the boy risked the punishment for violating the prohibition and risked losing the truth itself that could not be discovered by his method.

It seems that one dark night the boy slipped into the garden and started pulling up the plant by the roots. Suddenly strange things began to happen. First, the boy could not succeed in pulling up the plant, but as he pulled, the great chimney of his house collapsed. He pulled again and the stables fell down. Cries of agony began to be heard. The castle itself fell down. This chaos seemed to frighten the boy but he managed to say nothing about the strange incident of the flower. He still did not want to obey the prohibition.

The boy grew up and decided to try again to uproot the plant. He was a politician and ruler now. He surrounded himself with a group of strong men and announced, "Let us have done with the riddle of this irrational weed." So they all began to pull it out with great force. Suddenly, the Eiffel Tower fell, the Great Wall of China, the Statue of Liberty. "St. Paul's Cathedral killed all the journalists in Fleet-street." The ruler recalled his earlier experience in the garden.

In their efforts, these strong men had managed to pull down half of the buildings of their country, but they still could not pull up the roots. Finally, the man gave up his project in frustration but he called his pastors and masters. He blamed them for not telling him that he could not root up this plant and that if he tried, he would ruin everything else. All they had told him was not to do it. He now saw the results but would not admit his responsibility.

This parable, of course, is about Christianity and the efforts of secular men to rid themselves of it. In attacking religion, the secularists end up by not eliminating religion but they do manage to pull up the roots "of every man's ordinary vine and fig tree, of every man's garden." Somehow there is a connection between religion and ordinary life.

We are warned about this relationship and we are given some half-baked reason for it. If we think the reasons to be wrong or not what we would do, we go ahead and try to uproot religion, only to end up destroying the very core of civilized life in the effort. We do not intend this result, but this is what happens. "Secularists have not succeeded in wrecking divine things; but Secularists have succeeded in wrecking secular things."

The "enemies of religion," Chesterton concluded, are like the little boy. They cannot leave it alone. It is a kind of forbidden fruit, a challenge to their autonomy. They see all the prohibitions merely as arbitrary, as "something wild," not as something reasonable. They cannot believe that disorder flows from tampering with the solemn prohibitions. "They laboriously attempt to smash religion. They cannot smash religion; but they do smash everything else."

But why cannot they smash religion? The secularists and opponents of religion cannot touch the axioms of religion, which are dogmas and intelligible. They remain as they are no matter what goes on in the world. In not holding the doctrines of the faith, the secularists necessarily are committed to other doctrines. To maintain that man is not made in the image of his Creator is as dogmatic as to maintain he is.

Chesterton gave two examples, the case of the pacifist and of the evolutionist. The pacifist has a doctrine about coercion. This results in the "intolerable and ludicrous" alternative "that I must not blame a bully or praise the man who knocks him down." My theory has strange consequences.

Because of the endless gradations in nature, upon which evolutionary theory is based, we cannot on this basis be forced to "deny the personality of God, for a personal God might as well work by gradations as in any other way." So the theory stands, but what the evolutionist does, if his theory be taken strictly, is not to deny the personality in God but the personality in Jones.

If evolution is true, Jones is within the scope of evolution. That is, he is himself being "rubbed away at the edges." He is at this very moment evolving into something else. If everything is evolving, including ourselves, including Jones, then in strict logic, we are not really ourselves. What must finally be denied is not personality in God but "the existence of a personal Mr. Jones."

If we want Jones to exist as Jones, then he must not even slightly be in the process of becoming Mr. Smith, or some higher species. The old religion wants Jones to remain Jones. If we try to root out this doctrine of religion, we do not end by changing the theory that Jones is Jones and that Jones wants to be Jones, but we do force ourselves to look on him as becoming not-Jones. In this evolutionary case, in its logic, the world is full of things, including Jones, that are not really themselves.

So, we cannot really wreck divine things, but we can certainly wreck human things. If we see human and secular things being wrecked, we must begin to suspect that we are violating some prohibitions, that if we root up a certain flower, we will root up the world. We should not forget too, that the prohibitions were also rooted in the Truth that the boy was seeking. The truth was that he would not know the real truth of the flower if he killed it by uprooting it. The prohibition would have saved the world. Reason would have saved the flower.

At the roots of the world lies disturbingly the will that wants only its own Truth. The prohibitions tell us that there is a world we want, we, Jones, even if it is not the world we make. The flower was already there. Jones was already Jones. The commandments, the prohibitions, are designed to keep them both. Even when we pull down the world, we will not find our truth, but only the truth. There is only one theory, as far as I know, that allows Jones to be Jones. That theory is still called Christianity. This is the meaning, I think, of Chesterton's parable about the roots of the world.

12) From Midwest Chesterton News, October, 1992.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

BELLOC ON CHESTERTON

Frank Petta, on reading of my brother-in-law's troubles in finding Belloc's little book on Chesterton (MCN, March 1992), was kind enough to send me a copy of the Obituary -- it is entitled simply "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" -- that Belloc published in The Saturday Review of Literature, for July 4, 1936. Belloc had written evidently a number of things on Chesterton just after he died, but I had not known of this particular essay. On receiving it, I had put it aside and came across it by chance the other day looking for something else. I re-read it. And I read it a second time, and a third. I suddenly was struck by the profundity of this essay of Belloc, of how he saw the essence of Chesterton.

Belloc began the essay by analyzing why the English aristocracy and press never acknowledged Chesterton's greatness. Even though Chesterton was "the most English of Englishmen," he stood on the Catholic side of culture even as an Englishman. In this sense, Belloc thought Chesterton's fame would increase so that Belloc's children and grandchildren would have a better chance to understand Chesterton than even his generation did.

However, Belloc himself knew Chesterton. "I knew him I think as well as any man ever knew another." This friendship was based on long acquaintance -- "close on forty years" -- but it was especially based on the quality of its intellectual exchange. Belloc wrote:

so thoroughly did my mind jump with his, so fully did his answer meet the question my own soul was always asking, that his conclusions, the things he found and communicated, his solutions of the great riddles, his stamp of certitude, were soon part of myself.

The great riddles of life were asked, answers were forged. This sense of actual answers to riddles, as Chesterton showed in Orthodoxy, is especially characteristic of Christian friendship. Not just the questioning that is perhaps more Platonic, but the realization that answers are there when the proper questions are asked. The nobility of the human condition is not merely that it can ask questions, but that it can know when its questions are answered.

Belloc observed, furthermore, that they both came of the same "stock." Belloc's mother was English.

My mother derived directly from that English middle class of yeomen and liberal stock which in literature and the arts, in law and even in arms, in merchant enterprise, and, most of all, in metaphysical and religious speculation, has determined the character of England from the moment of the Puritan triumph three hundred years ago.

Chesterton's family was in the real estate business in London. Both Belloc's mother and Chesterton came into the Church from "sheer power of brain."

Belloc acknowledged that he had grown in his appreciation of what Chesterton stood for. Belloc next remarked something that puzzled me, something I always thought he denied. I had to look it up. On his "path" from Toul to Rome, Belloc in 1902 or perhaps in 1901, remarked in a passage I have often cited, with considerable consolation, I admit, that "it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."

Here in the Chesterton Obituary, we find Belloc reflecting:

I myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach, to a beginning at least of understanding in the matter (of faith); but it was never my good fortune to bear witness by the crossing of a frontier: a public act. Such good fortune was his (Chesterton's). I was born within the walls of the City of God: he saw it, approached it, knew it, and entered. I know not which is for the run of men the better fate, but his was certainly of our two fates the better.

I suppose these two things can be reconciled. Yet I cannot help but think that Chesterton himself would have been surprised at Belloc here. Chesterton would have thought that Belloc was right in The Path to Rome and wrong in the Obituary. Chesterton the convert would have agreed that it was indeed "a good thing not to have to return to the Faith."

Belloc to be sure was comparing returning to a faith having lost it to a person who never having it and subsequently found it. Belloc suggested that for most men it may be better to have been born in the faith. He himself has had a struggle to see the faith, know it. Chesterton's path was to Belloc more noble and clearer. If the issue were only between Chesterton and Belloc, perhaps Chesterton's was the better path.

Still there is something to be said for the Belloc of The Path to Rome. If we too are born "within the walls of the City of God," as Belloc put it, using a phrase from Augustine, no doubt, we must still bear witness, cross frontiers, make our act public. We must see, approach, know and stay within.

And yet, the best and most profound part of Belloc's reflections on Chesterton were not about his origins, his Englishness, or even his friendship with Belloc. Chesterton's life, in Belloc's mind, was not spent in "search for truth," This understanding is too abstract. Chesterton was "hungry for reality." It is one thing to have a vague or abstract sense of this hunger but quite another to think of satisfying this hunger.

He (Chesterton) was hungry for reality. But what is much more, he could not conceive of himself except as satisfying that hunger; it was not possible to him to hesitate in the acceptation of each new parcel of the truth; it was not possible for him to hold anything worth holding that was not connected with the truth as a whole.

Chesterton's was a "strange consistency" that placed each new reality he hungered for within the satisfaction of the whole. He knew where things belonged.

In a passage reminiscent of St. Thomas famous dictum, "contemplata tradere (to pass on what is first contemplated), Belloc noticed that Chesterton's passion for "what is," a passion that made him reject both confusion and falsehood, was "the driving power moving his spirit to disseminate what he knew." Chesterton was so struck by reality, by what is, in its infinity of forms and shapes, that he wanted to respond to it, explain it, appreciate it. In short, he delighted in it.

Belloc stressed this latter quality as it was easy to miss. Chesterton's love of fun, of jesting, his vitality, made us forget or overlook what Belloc called Chesterton's "power of proof." This power of proof was "not only the central thing, it was the whole meaning of his work." In a passage mindful of Josef Pieper, Belloc continued to explain what Chesterton was about. "The whole meaning of his life was the discovery, the appreciation, of reality." We have, of course, read Chesterton's book St. Thomas Aquinas in which this very quality is so evident. Chesterton's work "was made up of bequeathing to others the treasure of knowledge and certitude upon which he had come."

What follows from this basis, I think, shows that Belloc really did understand Chesterton in the most profound of ways. And through him, if not also through his own experiences, he knew that Chesterton's love of reality was something that was not merely his own, even when it was his own.

Side by side with and a product of that immense exuberance in happiness not only of himself but of all around, of that vital rejoicing not only in man but in every other work of God and in God Himself, the most conspicuous fruit was generosity.

The affirmation of what is that it is, the rejoicing in what is, that it is, the affirmation that all that is is worthy of praise, not excluding oneself -- this in what Belloc called in such a felicitous phrase "that intense exuberance in happiness" -- these qualities lead to generosity, to the realization that what we are and have do not exist of ourselves, but exist because they are given in an abundance, in gift, that we can only receive in wonder and awe.

Chesterton could "write on all things because he was in the spirit of all things and from this central position he could explain, predicate, and give peace." To "give peace," I think, means to know that the riddles have answers.

We often wonder about Chesterton's frequent paradoxes. Some folks do not like them; others wait for them, so illuminating they are. Perhaps this is Belloc's comment on this topic: "He exaggerated in nothing save in emphasis of expression when rhetoric demanded. In statement of truth he did not and could not exaggerate because truth, which was his sole concern, is of its nature absolute." This is right, of course.

Today, anyone who suggests that the truth is "absolute," let alone that he might have discovered and passed it on, is looked on as some sort of danger to the republic. Belloc noted that all conversation today is advocacy. It is rooted in opinion and uncertainty, even in the "certainty" that truth cannot exist at all.

Chesterton, however, was not an "advocate." He was almost the only man in England who was not an advocate. "He does not advocate but tells." What a marvelous thing to say of Chesterton, something that explains the feeling we often get from reading him that he has discovered the truth, but he has not invented it. "In the midst of such a chaos Chesterton's voice and pen proclaimed not selected evidence but the thing that was; the thing that he saw and knew." He simply "told" us what he knew and saw and reflected on. He gave us peace of mind because he believed we did have minds, minds as he often said that are by their very nature made to come to conclusions, to formulate dogmas, to tell the truth.

Belloc saw what was at stake in modern philosophy. He saw it as Chesterton saw it, namely, that the social world can be constructed according to human will, that we can, in some sense, make come to be what we want to be and not only what ought to be. Whether we can reverse our principles and foundations remains to be seen. The challenge of religion and classical philosophy ought to do precisely this reversal, were it not for the fact that both religion and philosophy have often sounded very much like the social world that has come to be from pure will.

Now Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life was on the side of those who at so much risk determined to reverse if reversed it could be the current of the time. All around him was a society which had determined upon the opposite and fatal course -- hiding its weakness -- and of erecting an imaginary world that should satisfy foreign critics and lull its own confidence in security.

Only today are we beginning to understand what that "risk" of restoring order might consist in. The opposite and fatal course seems, at bottom, not to have been communism, but the system that communism shared with modernity.

Would this reversal be possible? Belloc thought that wrong ideas and systems once entered into usually had to bear their own bitter fruit in social reality before they could intellectually be seen for what they were. Belloc thought that this seeing required not merely intelligence and knowing what is, but "repentance." Belloc felt some connection between a failure to repent and the death of Chesterton, the may who "told" the truth, who loved the variety of things, appreciated them, saw them in the light of God who made them. Men can refuse what is. It was Chesterton who could affirm it, who could, as a result, be generous for what he had, what he knew, was not his.

13) From Midwest Chesterton News, November, 1992.

Schall on Chesterton James V. Schall, S. J.

THE ONLY VIRTUE

Volume III of The Collected Works (1990) includes a book known as The Well and the Shallows