Gilbert
Keith Chesterton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
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Chesterton Works on the Web
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/index.html
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Chesterton Works on the Web
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/index.html
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"Orthodoxy"
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy
(Orthodoxy is probably my favorite book although the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" is so disappointing that if it is read at all, it should only be be read as a sort of anachronistic "postscript." Chesterton missed the mark in this chapter because he made certain "assumptions" about the nascent science of genetics which simply did not correspond to what we now know.)
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy
(Orthodoxy is probably my favorite book although the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" is so disappointing that if it is read at all, it should only be be read as a sort of anachronistic "postscript." Chesterton missed the mark in this chapter because he made certain "assumptions" about the nascent science of genetics which simply did not correspond to what we now know.)
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Chesterton Quotations
The following quotations comprise my own compendium, assembled over the course of a lifetime.
As is always the case, my "quotation collections" include a certain number of citations that I don't approve but include because they are "startling," "exceptional," "outrageous" or "food for further thought."
Chesterton Quotations
The following quotations comprise my own compendium, assembled over the course of a lifetime.
As is always the case, my "quotation collections" include a certain number of citations that I don't approve but include because they are "startling," "exceptional," "outrageous" or "food for further thought."
"We are convinced
that theories do not matter... Never has there been so little discussion about
the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, anyone can discuss
it... Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has
succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it
was bad taste to be an avowed atheist... now it is equally bad taste to be an
avowed Christian. But there are some people nevertheless - and I am one of them
- who think that the most important thing about man is still his view of the
universe... We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos
affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects
them."
The work of heaven
alone is material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely
spiritual.
'When we stop
believing in God, we do not then believe in nothing, we believe in
anything.'
(Chesterton
paraphrase)
The typical modern man
is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he
cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently
and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces.
He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to
play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental
agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny
those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the
sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone
make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.
***
But the Christian
Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word,
the most absurd thing that could be said of the
Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?
The Church was the only thing
that ever brought us out of them.
(Alan: I'm reminded of a quotation by Carl Jung: "At a time when a
large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worthwhile to
understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to
escape at last from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it,
licentiousness returns, as is impressively exemplified by life in modern
cities.)
***
It isn’t that they
can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
There is but an inch
of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.
Mysticism keeps men
sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you
create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary
man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had
one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free
to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in
them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two
truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and
the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like
his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees
all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a
thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children
were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the
kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was
not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the
whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that
man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand... The
mystic allows one thing to be mysterious and everything else becomes lucid... A
symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of
mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the
one thing in the light of which we look at everything. G. K.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The
things that change modern history, the big national and international loans,
the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless
newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred
in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the
men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly
aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said
about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the
chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser
aristocracies. The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good
people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes
heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not
by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the
Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may
give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are
egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money
you must be dull enough to want it. G. K. Chesterton
The coming peril is
the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction,
which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of
contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and
mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them
no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. G. K.
Chesterton Toronto, 1930
"History is not a
toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced This book
("What's Wrong with the World") deals with what is wrong, wrong in
our root of argument and effort. This wrong is, I say, that we will go forward
because we dare not go Back. Thus the Socialist says that property is already
concentrated into Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further
in the State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent
and return; the only step forward is the step backward."
Tradition means giving
votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of
the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely
happen to be walking around.
For at present we all
tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget
how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under
Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a
never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers
must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the
end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt
against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone
make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled
to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we
have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but
work.
When we were children
we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are
we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?
You say grace before
meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace
before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before
sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and
grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
The trouble with
always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to
do without destroying the health of the mind.
The way to love
anything is to realize that it may be lost.
"You can only
find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it." .
The true object of all
human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
The poor have
sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to
being governed at all.
"Man seems to be
capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his
torturer but not of keeping his temper."
"The chief object
of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things."
"It isn't that
they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the
problem."
The purpose of
Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Education is simply
the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Education is the
period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about
something you do not want to know.
Happy is he who still
loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time;
he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Do not free a camel of
the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
The simplification of
anything is always sensational.
The traveler sees what
he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
The Bible tells us to
love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally
they are the same people.
The Christian ideal
has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left
untried.
Aquinas does lift
Faith above Reason; but does not lower reason. He does put the supernatural
higher than the natural; but does not lower the natural. He says that the lower
thing is in every sense worthy except that compared with the higher it is
worthless. This led to a habit of thinking on two levels, or even on three. It
was like a medieval theatre...
The object of opening
the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
People generally
quarrel because they cannot argue.
'My country, right or
wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate
case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
No man who worships
education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for
education no man's education is complete.
Men feel that cruelty
to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an
injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades. GKC
Let your religion be
less of a theory and more of a love affair. (This quotation reminds me
of Maryknoler Mary Beth Gallagher.)
It is the test of a
good religion whether you can joke about it. (No one jokes about
communism, Fidelismo or Danielismo. True Believers just gather statistics to
"prove" their superiority.).
I would maintain that
thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled
by wonder.
Never invoke the gods unless
you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Coincidences are
spiritual puns.
A puritan is a person
who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
A room without books
is like a body without a soul.
A stiff apology is a
second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he
has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
All conservatism is
based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.
But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
GKC (Bruce Cockburn paraphrase: 'I used to think I could ignore politics.
Now I realize the more you leave it alone, the more it bites you in the ass.')
There are others whose
state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the
landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the landscape
contradicts their history If the map marks the place as a waterless desert,
they will declare it as dry as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the
rushing river. A whole huge rock will be invisible if a little book on geology
says it is impossible. This is the opposite extreme to the irrational credulity
of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational This great delusion of the
prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable
of contradicting it, is the main weakness of modern urban society. The chief
mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his
eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he
could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up form the
book and see things for himself: he was a man of too impatient a temper, and
later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book
away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of
faith. He could believe his eyes. "William Cobbett," by G. K.
Chesterton
Democracy means
government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly
educated.
Art, like morality,
consists in drawing the line somewhere.
An inconvenience is an
adventure wrongly considered.
Journalism is popular,
but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the
newspapers is another.
(Chesterton's very
good friend George Bernard Shaw said: "Newspapers seem unable to
distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."
Chesterton wrote a biography of Shaw which began with this dedicatory note:
"Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or hat they do
not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not
agree with him." For me, this statement represents the moral apogee of people
who have learned to argue well because they realize the degradation of
quarreling.)
(And here's what we're
arguing about. Or should be...) "Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and
silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays
of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not
being a heretic. It was kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who
were heretics. He was orthodox... All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells
could not make him admit that he was heretical... The word "heresy"
not only means no longer "being wrong"; it practically means being
clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer
means being right, it practically means being wrong... (This) means that people
care less for whether they are philosophically right... The dynamiter, laying a
bomb, ought to insist that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox...
General theories are everywhere contemned... We will have no generalizations...
We are more and more to discuss art, politics, literature. A man's opinon on
tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinon on all things
does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must
not find that strange object, the universe, for if he does, he will have a
religion and be lost. Everything matters, except everything." G. K.
Chesterton
Journalism largely
consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that
Lord Jones was alive.
I believe in getting into
hot water; it keeps you clean.
I regard golf as an
expensive way of playing marbles.
The poets have been
mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
I tell you naught for
your comfort,
Yea, naught for your
desire,
Save the sky grows
darker yet
And the sea rises
higher.
G. K. ChestertonBallad of the White
Horse, 1911 What's Wrong with the World: Part 5: The Home of Man
In the following
essay, Chesteron insists we “set fire to all modern civilization” in order to guarantee living conditions that insure
clean hair for every poor girl. (I have highlighted Chesterton’s conclusion
in purple.)
A
little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to
dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little
girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls
whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among rich
little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly with
them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor
are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of
squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their
case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish
the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it
could be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable
thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian
man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a
cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister's
daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact apply
their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not ask, because I know.
They do not because they dare not. But what is the excuse they would urge,
what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping
poor children and not rich? Their argument would be that the disease is more
likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the
poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic
working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient
system of public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children
there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the
great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as
well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the children, therefore
one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has these two persons
on top of him, the landlord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the
schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman must allow his
little girl's hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned
by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was
proud of his little girl's hair. But he does not count.
Upon
this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor drives
gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the dirt, so that
their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear. It would be long
and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants; it is easier to cut off
the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if it should ever happen that poor
children, screaming with toothache, disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic
gentleman, it would be easy to pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their
nails were disgustingly dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their
noses were indecently blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of
our humbler fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had
done with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a
doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's hair may be as
clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never seems to
strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of
slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least of it, a rooted
thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental armies of whom we have
spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it is only by eternal
institutions like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires. If
a house is so built as to knock a man's head off when he enters it, it is
built wrong.
The
mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to have
conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought in all our
anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom would not be
struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the clean, popular
customs from which they came. The insult that brought down the hammer of Wat
Tyler might now be called a medical examination. That which Virginius loathed
and avenged as foul slavery might now be praised as free love. The cruel
taunt of Foulon, "Let them eat grass," might now be represented as
the dying cry of an idealistic vegetarian. Those great scissors of science
that would snip off the curls of the poor little school children are
ceaselessly snapping closer and closer to cut off all the corners and fringes
of the arts and honors of the poor. Soon they will be twisting necks to suit
clean collars, and hacking feet to fit new boots. It never seems to strike
them that the body is more than raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man;
that all institutions shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted
the normal flesh and spirit. It is the test of political sanity to keep your
head. It is the test of artistic sanity to keep your hair on.
Now
the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these
pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and
begin at the other end. I begin with a
little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is
evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is
one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age
and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If
landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and
sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I
will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long
hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she
should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home,
she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free
mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be
an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because
there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.
That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling
past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall
not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be
hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image;
all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars
of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not
one hair of her head shall be harmed.
***
|
CHESTERTON:
Speaking about the
instinct that makes people rich, Chesterton remarks--
In the olden days its
existence was fully understood. The Greeks enshrined it in the story of Midas,
of the 'Golden Touch.' Here was a man who turned everything he laid his hands
upon into gold. His life was a progress amidst riches. Out of everything that
came in his way he created the precious metal. 'A foolish legend,' said the wiseacres
if the Victorian age. 'A truth,' say we of to-day. We all know of such men. We
are ever meeting or reading about such persons who turn everything they touch
into gold. Success dogs their very footsteps. Their life's pathway leads
unerringly upwards. They cannot fail.
Unfortunately,
however, Midas could fail; he did. His path did not lead unerringly upward. He
starved because whenever he touched a biscuit or a ham sandwich it turned to
gold. That was the whole point of the story, though the writer has to suppress
it delicately, writing so near to a portrait of Lord Rothschild. The old fables
of mankind are, indeed, unfathomably wise; but we must not have them expurgated
in the interests of Mr. Vanderbilt. We must not have King Midas represented as
an example of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he
had the ears of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons) he
endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember right) who
had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to this peculiarity;
and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead person of the
Succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King Midas, went away and
whispered this splendid piece of society scandal to the reeds, who enjoyed it
enormously. It is said that they also whispered it as the winds swayed them to
and fro. I look reverently at the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read
reverently about the exploits of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn
everything I touch to gold; but then I also know that I have never tried,
having a preference for other substances, such as grass, and good wine. I know
that these people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have
certainly overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no men
were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride continents. Yet
it always seems to me that there is some small domestic fact that they are
hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon the wind the laughter and
whisper of the reeds.
At least, let us hope
that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a
proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but
they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of
worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what
shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride?
Democracy and
Industrialism
"Unfortunately,
humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time. And by inhumanity I do
not mean merely cruelty; I mean the condition in which even cruelty ceases to
be human. I mean the condition in which the rich man, instead of hanging six or
seven of his enemies because he hates them, merely beggars and starves to death
six or seven thousand people whom he does not hate, and has never seen, because
they live at the other side of the world. I mean the condition in which the
courtier or pander of the rich man, instead of excitedly mixing a rare,
original poison for the Borgias, or carving exquisite ornamental poignard for
the political purposes of the Medici, works monotonously in a factory turning
out a small type of screw, which will fit into a plate he will never see; to
form part of a gun he will never see; to be used in a battle he will never see,
and about the merits of which he knows far less than the Renaissance rascal
knew about the purposes of the poison and the dagger. In short, what is the
matter with industrialism is indirection; the fact that nothing is
straightforward; that all its ways are crooked even when they are meant to be
straight. Into this most indirect of all systems we tried to fit the most
direct of all ideas. Democracy, an ideal which is simple to excess, was vainly
applied to a society which was complex to the point of craziness. It is not so
very surprising that such a vision has faded in such an environment.
Personally, I like the vision; but it takes all sorts to make a world, and
there actually are human beings, walking about quite calmly in the daylight,
who appear to like the environment." from All I Survey. The original
essay appeared as a column in the Illustrated London News, July 16th 1932. (The
last sentence requires that you read "vision" with emphasis and
"environment" as the thoughtless philosophical milieu that pertains.)
What's Right with the World
I do not think the
world is getting much better in very many vital respects. In some of them, I
think, the fact could hardly be disputed. The one perfectly satisfactory
element at the present crisis is that all the prophecies have failed. At least
the people who have been clearly proved to be wrong are the people who were
quite sure they were right. That is always a gratifying circumstance. Now why is
it that all these prophecies of the wise have been confounded and why has the
destiny of men taken so decisive and different a course? It is because of the
very simple fact that the human race consists of many millions of two-legged
and tolerably cheerful, reasonably unhappy beings who never read any books at
all and certainly never hear of any scientific predictions. If they act in
opposition to the scheme which science has foreseen for them, they must be
excused. They sin in ignorance. They have no notion that they are avoiding what
was really unavoidable. But, indeed, the phrases loosely used of that obscure
mass of mankind are a little misleading. To say of the bulk of human beings
that they are uneducated is like saying of a Red Indian hunter that he has not
yet taken his degree. He has taken many other things. And so, sincerely
speaking, there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial
examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence
of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman and the fear of death
-- these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the
cultivation of the mind. It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being
trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. He has
learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.
We therefore come back
to the primary truth, that what is right with the world has nothing to do with
future changes, but is rooted in original realities. If groups or peoples show
an unexpected independence or creative power; if they do things no one had
dreamed of their doing; if they prove more ferocious or more self-sacrificing
than the wisdom of the world had ever given them credit for, then such
inexplicable outbursts can always be referred back to some elementary and
absolute doctrine about the nature of men. No traditions in this world are so
ancient as the traditions that lead to modern upheaval and innovation. Nothing
nowadays is so conservative as a revolution. The men who call themselves
Republicans are men walking the streets of deserted and tiny city-states, and
digging up the great bones of pagans. And when we ask on what republicanism
really rests, we come back to that great indemonstrable dogma of the native dignity
of man. And when we come back to the lord of creation, we come back of
necessity to creation; and we ask ourselves that ultimate question which St
Thomas Aquinas (an extreme optimist) answered in the affirmative: Are these
things ultimately of value at all?
What is right with the
world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is
that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people
must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not
(as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things --
existence, energy, fruition -- are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil
life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good
things, though men and women are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies
to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, stone to make an idol, or corn to
make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done
anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent
speciality and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees
growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord,
even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a
world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen
the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more
certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we
are that it will succeed. These evolutionary optimists who called themselves
Meliorists (a patient and poor-spirited lot they are) always talk as if we were
certain of the end, though not of the beginning. In other words, they don't
know what life is aiming at, but they are quire sure it will get there. Why
anybody who has avowedly forgotten where he came from should be quite so
certain of where he is going to I have never been able to make out; but
Meliorists are like that. They are ready to talk of existence itself as the
product of purely evil forces. They never mention animals except as perpetually
tearing each other to pieces; but a month in the country would cure that. They
have a real giddy horror of stars and seas, as a man has on the edge of a hopelessly
high precipice. They sometimes instinctively shrink from clay, fungoids, and
the fresh young of animals with a quivering gesture that reveals the
fundamental pessimist. Life itself, crude, uncultivated life, is horrible to
them. They belong very largely to the same social class and creed as the lady
who objected that the milk came to her from a dirty cow, and not from a nice
clean shop. But they are sure how everything will end.
I am in precisely the
opposite position. I am much more sure that everything is good at the beginning
than I am that everything will be good at the end. That all this frame of
things, this flesh, these stones, are good things, of that I am more brutally
certain than I can say. But as for what will happen to them, that is to take a
step into dogma and prophecy. I speak here, of course, solely of my personal
feelings, not even of my reasoned creed. But on my instincts alone I should
have no notion what would ultimately happen to this material world I think so
magnificent. For all I know it may be literally and not figuratively true that
the tares are tied into bundles for burning, and that as the tree falleth so
shall it lie. I am an agnostic, like most people with a positive theology. But
I do affirm, with the full weight of sincerity, that trees and flowers are good
at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end; that human lives were
good at the beginning, whatever happens to them in the end. The ordinary modern
progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get
better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse. I say
that these trees and flowers, stars and sexes, are primarily, not merely
ultimately, good. In the Beginning the power beyond words created heaven and
earth. In the Beginning He looked on them and saw that they were good.
All this unavoidable
theory (for theory is always unavoidable) may be popularly pulled together
thus. We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be
judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it
follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world
is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks
from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. The
pessimist of the ordinary type, the pessimist who thinks he would be better
dead, is blasted with the crime of Iscariot. Spiritually speaking, we should be
justified in punishing him with death. Only, out of polite deference to his own
philosophy, we punish him with life.
But this faith (that
existence was fundamentally and purposely good) is not attacked only by the
black, consistent pessimist. The man who says that he would sooner die is best
answered by a sudden blow with the poker, for the reply is rightly logical, as
well as physically very effective. But there has crept through the culture of
modern Europe another notion that is equally in its own way an attack on the
essential rightness of the world. It is not avowedly pessimistic, though the
source from which it comes (which is Buddhism) is pessimistic for those who
really understand it. It can offer itself -- as it does among some of the
high-minded and distinguished Theosophists -- with an air of something highly
optimistic. But this disguised pessimism is what is really wrong with the world
-- at least, especially with the modern world. It is essential to arrest and to
examine it.
There has crept into
our thoughts, through a thousand small openings, a curious and unnatural idea.
I mean the idea that unity is itself a good thing; that there is something high
and spiritual about things being blended and absorbed into each other. That all
rivers should run into one river, that all vegetables should go into one pot --
that is spoken of as the last and best fulfilment of being. Boys are to be 'at
one' with girls; all sects are to be 'at one' in the New Theology; beasts fade
into men and men fade into God; union in itself is a noble thing. Now union in
itself is not a noble thing. Love is a noble thing; but love is not union. Nay,
it is rather a vivid sense of separation and identity. Maudlin, inferior love
poetry does, indeed, talk of lovers being 'one soul', just as maudlin, inferior
religious poetry talks of being lost in God; but the best poetry does not. When
Dante meets Beatrice, he feels his distance from her, not his proximity; and
all the greatest saints have felt their lowness, not their highness, in the
moment of ecstasy. And what is true of these grave and heroic matters (I do not
say, of course, that saints and lovers have never used the language of union
too, true enough in its own place and proper limitation of meaning) -- what is
true of these is equally true of all the lighter and less essential forms of
appreciation of surprise. Division and variety are essential to praise;
division and variety are what is right with the world. There is nothing
specially right about mere contact and coalescence.
In short, this vast,
vague idea of unity is the one 'reactionary' thing in the world. It is perhaps
the only connection in which that foolish word 'reactionary' can be used with
significance and truth. For this blending of men and women, nations and
nations, is truly a return to the chaos and unconsciousness that were before
the world was made. There is of course, another kind of unity of which I do not
speak here; unity in the possession of truth and the perception of the need for
these varieties. But the varieties themselves; the reflection of man and woman
in each other, as in two distinct mirrors; the wonder of man at nature as a
strange thing at once above and below him; the quaint and solitary kingdom of
childhood; the local affections and the colour of certain landscapes -- these
actually are the things that are the grace and honour of the earth; these are
the things that make life worth living and the whole framework of things well
worthy to be sustained. And the best thing remains; that this view, whether
conscious or not, always has been and still is the view of the living and
labouring millions. While a few prigs on platforms are talking about 'oneness'
and absorption in 'The All', the folk that dwell in all the valleys of this
ancient earth are renewing the varieties for ever. With them a woman is loved
for being unmanly, and a man loved for being un-womanly. With them the church
and the home are both beautiful, because they are both different; with them
fields are personal and flags are sacred; they are the virtue of existence, for
they are not mankind but men.
The rooted hope of the
modern world is that all these dim democracies do still believe in that romance
of life, that variation of man, woman and child upon which all poetry has
hitherto been built. The danger of the modern world is that these dim democracies
are so very dim, and that they are especially dim where they are right. The
danger is that the world may fall under a new oligarchy -- the oligarchy of
prigs. And if anyone should promptly ask (in the manner of the debating clubs)
for the definition of a prig, I can only reply that a prig is an oligarch who
does not even know he is an oligarch. A circle of small pedants sit on an upper
platform, and pass unanimously (in a meeting of none) that there is no
difference between the social duties of men and of women, the social
instruction of men or of children. Below them boils that multitudinous sea of
millions that think differently, that have always thought differently, that
will always think differently. In spite of the overwhelming majority that maintains
the old theory of life, I am in some real doubt about which will win. Owing to
the decay of theology and all the other clear systems of thought, men have been
thrown back very much upon their instincts, as with animals. As with animals,
their instincts are right; but, as with animals, they can be cowed. Between the
agile scholars and the stagnant mob, I am really doubtful about which will be
triumphant. I have no doubt at all about which ought to be.
Europe at present
exhibits a concentration upon politics which is partly the unfortunate result
of our loss of religion, partly the just and needful result of our loss of our
social inequality and iniquity. These causes, however, will not remain in
operation for ever. Religion is returning from her exile; it is more likely
that the future will be crazily and corruptly superstitious than that it will
be merely rationalist.
On the other hand, our
attempts to right the extreme ill-balance of wealth must soon have some issue;
something will be done to lessen the perpetual torture of incompetent
compassion; some scheme will be substituted for our malevolent anarchy, if it
be only one of benevolent servitude. And as these two special unrests about the
universe and the State settle down into more silent and enduring system, there
will emerge more and more those primary and archaic truths which the dust of
these two conflicts has veiled. The secondary questions relatively solved, we
shall find ourselves all the more in the presence of the primary questions of
Man.
For at present we all
tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget
how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under
Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a
never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers
must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the
end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt
against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone
make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled
to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we
have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The
typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and
then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer
may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom
he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but
forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate
his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he
may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the
divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the
earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half
a man.
There is danger in
that modern phrase 'divine discontent'. There is truth in it also, of course;
but it is only truth of a special and secondary kind. Much of the quarrel
between Christianity and the world has been due to this fact; that there are
generally two truths, as it were, at any given moment of revolt or reaction,
and the ancient underlying truism which is nevertheless true all the time. It
is sometimes worth while to point out that black is not so black as it is
painted; but black is still black, and not white. So with the merits of content
and discontent. It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of
oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a
trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of
discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked
relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the
grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black
lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small
house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards
not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending
discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a
trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending, contentment,
should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
He comes to scoff and
does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate A man is perfectly
entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible.
What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then
criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and
mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so
different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be
inferior to himselfIt would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has
introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty
unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there
will be something to be said later; but superficially it is true that this
degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only
the year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which
many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and
assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a
rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered
what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to
subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest
curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority.
These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an
anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The
Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy
were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did
not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the
limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be
easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern
despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that,
as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a
thing like the Spanish Inquisition
What is America
(from What I Saw in America)
A good novel tells us
the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
An adventure is only
an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly
considered.
Art, like morality,
consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Don't ever take a
fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
Fallacies do not cease
to be fallacies because they become fashions.
It is not bigotry to
be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might
possibly have gone wrong.
Journalism largely
consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord
Jones was alive.
Music with dinner is
an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
The thing I hate about
an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
To have a right to do
a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
There is no such thing
on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an
uninterested person.
G. K.
Chesterton, Heretics (1905)
Tradition means giving
votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of
the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of
those who merely happen to be walking about.
G. K.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The men who really
believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
G. K.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy; p. 14
It isn't that they
can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
G. K.
Chesterton, Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
He may be mad, but
there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's
what drives men mad, being methodical.
G. K.
Chesterton, The Fad of the Fisherman (1922)
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will
suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows,
the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously
direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or
understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this
sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in
wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
Source: the biography Robert Browning. (1903)
The
truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with
his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty
and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to
go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by
mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the
beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them
mad was logic. ...The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad
extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal
chamber, has been mysticism— the belief that logic is misleading, and that
things are not what they seem.
Tolstoy (1903)
Reason
is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the
heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of
'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
Twelve Types (1903) Charles II
The word
'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being
wrong.
Heretics (1905)
Carlyle
said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent
realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the
doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the
equality of men.
Heretics (1905)
Man can
hardly be defined ... as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many
other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be
defined as an animal that makes dogmas.
Heretics (1905)
There is
a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man
who makes every man feel great.
Charles Dickens (1906)
Moderate
strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
The Man Who was Thursday (1908)
And it
is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too
closely.
The Man Who was Thursday (1908)
What
fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of
bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an
imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the
dragon. Tremendous Trifles (1909)
The
Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and left untried.
What's Wrong With The World (1910)
It is
the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that
it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring
posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring
posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is
fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and
mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off
a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times
more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon
the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their
posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.”
They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all
the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously
dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity
fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they
may be, they are only concerned with the minority. The Ball and the Cross
(1910)
The rich are the scum of the earth in every
country.
The Flying Inn (1914)
To have
a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
A Short History of England (1917)
All
government is an ugly necessity.
A Short History of England (1917)
It is terrible
to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
The Cleveland Press (3/1/21)
A dead
thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Everlasting Man (1925)
These
are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his
own.
Illustrated London News (8-11-28)
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Illustrated London News (4/19/30)
The modern world seems to have no notion of
preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and
proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It
has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly
everything.
On Love
It isn't
that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
The Point of a Pin
Orthodoxy (1909)
The materialist philosophy (whether true or
not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one
sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than
themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is
restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian;
and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist.
There is
a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than
spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe
in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe
in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really
much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable
amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the
materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest
speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to
retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel.
The sane
man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of
the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a
touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid,
just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials.
Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve
in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open
and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut.
Orthodoxy
The "Father Brown" Mystery Series
An
artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926) The Dagger with Wings
If you
convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful
danger that she will suddenly do it.
The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Song of the Flying Fish
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
'You do
believe it,' he said. ‘You do believe everything. We all believe everything,
even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe.
Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict:
that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel
of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many
shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive
for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an
eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many.
Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs,
that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are
but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?’
‘No,’ said Father Brown.
All
things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts
of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget
their origin even in their perversion.
‘I’m
afraid I’m a practical man,’ said the doctor with gruff humour, ‘and I don’t
bother much about religion and philosophy.’
‘You’ll never be a practical man till you do,’ said Father Brown. ‘Look here,
doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I’m not a bigot. You know I
know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in
good ones.
A Song of Defeat
Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
Attributed:
Hope is the
power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
Don't
ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.
Happiness
is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalised.
He is a
very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a
conservative.
Honour is
a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.
If a
thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Many clever men like you have trusted
to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever
men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the
failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
Science
in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long
words to cover the errors of the rich. The word 'kleptomania' is a vulgar
example of what I mean.
The
oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like
many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest
on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and
unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.
The
reason angels can fly is that they take themselves so lightly.
There is
no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can
exist is an uninterested person.
There is
something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the
most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.
Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more
romantic than extravagance...thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is
unpoetic because it is waste...If a man could undertake to make use of all the
things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than than Shakespeare.
Without education, we
are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Fairy tales are more
than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us
dragons can be beaten.
From time to time, as
we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very
soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it
is the sect that comes to an end. 9/24/1927
Is one religion as
good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?
There is something odd
in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough
and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce . . . Why is it that we
mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? . . . Few modern people know
what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and
dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval
times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish
elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are
delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be
ignorant about its knowledge. When we talk of something mediaeval, we mean
something quaint. We remember that alchemy was mediaeval, or that heraldry was
mediaeval. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities
are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and
printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which
we look for progress, are mediaeval."
{"The True Middle
Ages," The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906}
Unfortunately,
19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any
guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump
to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation .
. . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was
known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
{Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, p. 88}
Creeds must disagree:
it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and
you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue
politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit; but,
obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a
tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's
faith is to say I must not discuss it . . . It is absurd to have a discussion
on Comparative Religions if you don't compare them.
{"The History of
Religions," The Illustrated London News, 10 October 1908}
Very nearly everybody,
in the ordinary literary and journalistic world, began by taking it for granted
that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical
supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly
maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the
full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really
thought the thing was true. And I have found, as I say, that this represents a
real transition or border-line in the life of apologists. Critics were almost
entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant
paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said. Since then
they have been more combative; and I do not blame them.
{Autobiography, NY:
Sheed & Ward, 1936, p. 180; referring to the period in which Orthodoxy was
written (1908) }
Nobody can understand
the greatness of the 13th century, who does not realise that it was a great
growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really
bolder and freer than what we call the Renaissance, which was a resurrection of
old things discovered in a dead thing.
{Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, p. 41}
Any number of people
assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed
by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the
former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and
in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of
the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical . . . The
things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than
the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been
left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep,
nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to
turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and
journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not
read the Bible.
{"The Bible and
the Sceptics," The Illustrated London News, 20 April 1929}
It is absurd for the
Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable
God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more
thinkable that nothing should turn itself into anything.
{Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, p. 174}
Impartiality is a
pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." -
The Speaker, 12/15/00
To have a right to do
a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - A Short
History of England, Ch.10
A thing may be too sad
to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it
cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of
crocodiles and cuttle-fish." - Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox
Men invent new ideals
because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm,
because they are afraid to look back." - What's Wrong With The World, 1910
A detective story
generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A
modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any
man can possible be alive." - A Miscellany of Men
"[Marxism will]
in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it
will have poisoned the Russian Revolution." - ILN, 7/19/19
War is not 'the best
way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being
settled for you." - ILN, 7/24/15
There is a corollary
to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do
most of the fighting." - Everlasting Man, 1925
"The only defensible war is a war of defence." Autobiography, 1937
"The true soldier
fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what
is behind him." - ILN, 1/14/11
If you attempt an
actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no
answer except slanging or silence." - Chapter 3, What's Wrong With The
World, 1910
When a politician is
in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in
office he is an expert on the obstacles to it." - ILN, 4/6/18
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and
Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The
business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being
corrected." - ILN, 4/19/24
I never could see
anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more
from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations." - ILN, 10/4/19
Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their
realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism
of men." - A Handful of Authors
It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes
the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that
religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." -
Charles Dickens (the biography)
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an
evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary,
of its liberality and humanity. 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." - ILN 1-3-20
"These are the
days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own."
- ILN 8-11-28
Any one thinking of
the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it;
that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for
the unfortunate." - The New Jerusalem, Ch. 5
The great majority of
people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep
Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will
continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why." -
"On Christmas," Generally Speaking
The whole truth is
generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some
vice." - ILN, 6/11/10
All men thirst to
confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they
naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed
the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them." - ILN 3/14/08
The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent,
should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the
voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound
unceasingly, like the sea." - T.P.'s Weekly, Christmas Number, 1910
There are some desires that are not desirable." - Orthodoxy
The artistic
temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." - Chapter 16, Heretics,
1905
"Properly
speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because
there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the
slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares
firmly that he must be getting home." - Chesterton Review, August, 1993
Only poor men get hanged." - ILN, 7/17/09
"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free
to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to
mention it." - Autobiography, 1937
"Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I
can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings." Ð ILN 3-17-06
***
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May,
1874. Though he considered himself a mere "rollicking journalist," he
was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of
literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them,
his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships
with people--such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells--with whom he
vehemently disagreed.
Chesterton had no difficulty standing up for what he believed. He was one
of the few journalists to oppose the Boer War. His 1922 "Eugenics and
Other Evils" attacked what was at that time the most progressive of all
ideas, the idea that the human race could and should breed a superior version
of itself. In the Nazi experience, history demonstrated the wisdom of his once
"reactionary" views.
His poetry runs the gamut from the comic 1908 "On Running After
One's Hat" to dark and serious ballads. During the dark days of 1940, when
Britain stood virtually alone against the armed might of Nazi Germany, these
lines from his 1911 Ballad of the White Horse were often quoted:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Though not written for a scholarly audience, his biographies of authors
and historical figures like Charles Dickens and St. Francis of Assisi often
contain brilliant insights into their subjects. His Father Brown mystery
stories, written between 1911 and 1936, are still being read and adapted for
television.
His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and
power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books like the
1910 "What's Wrong with the World" he advocated a view called
"Distributionism" that was best summed up by his expression that
every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though
not know as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world.
Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a
newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a
"genuine" nationalism for India rather than one that imitated the
British.
Heretics belongs to yet another area of literature at which Chesterton
excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his
adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity he found the answers to the
dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other books in that same series include
his 1908 Orthodoxy (written in response to attacks on this book) and his 1925
The Everlasting Man. Orthodoxy is also available as electronic text.
Chesterton died on the 14th of June, 1936 in Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, England. During his life he published 69 books and at least
another ten based on his writings have been published after his death. Many of
those books are still in print. Ignatius Press is systematically publishing his
collected writings.
***
Chesterton Quotations from "Good Reads"
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