CHESTERTON AS SUBJECT

The first three chapters of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, brilliant as they are,

merit critical study even today. They make up Chesterton's "rough review
of recent thought"1, before in the rest of the book he attempts

to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will

not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and
humanity made it; and it made me.

This is what he calls orthodoxy. The parallel with Hegel, I would like to
point out here, is exact, but generally unnoticed. Both identify their own
thinking with thinking itself, with spirit, with God and humanity. Like Hegel
too Chesterton states that what seems to him to be the main problem of
philosophy is "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world
and yet at home in it?" Hegel speaks of thinking as being at home with the
other as other, i.e. everywhere. It is just in the other that one finds oneself.
This, Hegel thinks, is the secret of the Trinity, of Trinitarianism, specifically,
as it is the meaning of love, self in other, identity in difference.
What we do not find much in Chesterton is advertence to the mystery of
subjectivity. How is it that just I…? We might try to remedy the deficiency
by ourselves asking, how is it that just he…? The spirit of the age would
certainly have produced someone like him, but, why, or how, just he? Who
was he? I might answer, surely he was "God from heaven to earth come
down", like all and each of us, i.e. he was and is necessary, not born and
not dead. Few would take this answer seriously, however.
The mystery of the subject is extremely difficult to focus. It is like an
intuition that is dropped, that drops itself even, in the moment that we
begin to be aware of it. This is what happens in Descartes' Meditations.
With indecent haste he passes from the dreamlike perplexity of the
beginning to the solution we now find simplistic. What is your name? N.M.
Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? He made me to
know him and love him in this world and to be happy with him forever in
heaven. The catechism, which I am quoting, adds to this that God made
me to his image and likeness, asking if this quality is to be found in my
"soul" or in my "body". It is to be found in my soul, and here we have
religion's reference to the absoluteness of reason, not to be questioned.
"In so far as religion is gone, reason is going," states Chesterton, and one
can suspect that it is horror merely disguised as contempt when he speaks
of "decadent ages" where such as H.G. Wells can "question the brain
itself".
Chesterton avers that the creeds and persecutions

were not organised, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of

reason. They were organised for the difficult defence of reason.
(p.33)

1
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), Doubleday Image, New York, 1959, p.43. References
are to this text when it is not stated otherwise.
This might seem though a non-point, making of reason something, like a
dogmatic faith, to be externally defended only. Reason is not itself without
the reflexivity that constitutes it, however, which is why Aristotle, one of
Chesterton's heroes, struggled to vindicate the principle of contradiction in
Metaphysics IV. Nonetheless Chesterton's polemic recalls, in its
resemblance, that of Hegel against Kant, who had also had "Doubts of the
Instrument":

The examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act

of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same
thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as
absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture
into the water until he had learned to swim.2

It is hard to forgive Chesterton how he goes on to write with near-personal

animus of the tragic and so recent death (1900) of "poor Nietzsche":

The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was

not a physical accident… Thinking in isolation and with pride
ends in being an idiot. (p.42)

There is certainly a measure of ignorance here, whatever else, and

Chesterton would surely with time have revised his estimate, as we have
all learned to do. Nietzsche too, that is to say, is in the tradition Chesterton
would defend, a tradition of prophecy and of a Jerusalem that slays and
stones the prophets, thereby witnessing, it was said with bitter sarcasm,
that she is their child. For just so do the prophets on occasion prepare to
stone one another, as Paul the Christians, and Nietzsche too used in the
end to sign himself "the crucified".

For Descartes the truth of God would guarantee physical or rather finite
reality. Thus we find Newman writing that he is more sure of God's
existence than that he has hands and feet. This though leaves these
extremities in a kind of limbo. They were meant to be shored up by God's
truth, as it were causally, and this is all Newman might means. What the
truth of God ought to mean, however, is that nothing else is true in the
same sense, not merely that its truth, like its being, depends causally on
the first truth. Everything finite is untruth, declares Hegel, at one here with
the prophetic and mystical tradition. Else we have contradiction between
St. Catherine's hearing God say "You are she who is not" and the
catechism's "God made me".
The philosophy Chesterton calls orthodoxy has in fact to be God's own
truth, possessed in man's tradition and this is why, or how, man is God's
image and likeness. For Hegel it is the work of spirit and the subject, in
thinking, becomes just subject, subjectivity itself, or "one closer to me
than I am to myself", in Augustine's immortal phrase. Thus far the two
later thinkers coincide, and it is indeed not that man becomes God but the
2
G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §10. I quote from The
Logic of Hegel, the so-called "little logic", translated William Wallace, Oxford University
Press (1873) 1965, p.17.
other way round, as the Athanasian Creed states. The thinker is absorbed
into God. That is what thinking is, nous, that has "set all in order"
(Anaxagoras). "The principle of personality is the universal", Hegel states.
It is what we have in common that is important. This is Hegel's philosophy
of reconciliation as it is Chesterton's "democracy" (pp.46-47).
"I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing
traditions of civilized religion", Chesterton tells us (p.12). Here they might
seem to differ, since Hegel considers that religious knowledge is in form
inferior to philosophical. Nonetheless Hegel does not intend to invent a
heresy, as Chesterton tells us he for his part wanted to do. Here, however,
I am not in the first place discussing Hegel, reference to whom helps to
situate Chesterton's work philosophically merely. Thus it is not necessary
to determine here how far Hegel agreed with Chesterton's claim of the
self-evidence of the fact of sin, "the only part of Christian theology which
can really be proved" (p.15). Sin here remains undefined, as to whether it
connotes an infinite offence, for example, which is the religious view of
wrong-doing. And this is not self-evident.

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite

happiness in skinning a cat then the religious philosopher…
must either deny the existence of God… or he must deny the
present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
(p.15)

Well, I deny the point about happiness, except in the sense that people at
times, but always unsuccessfully, seek it in this way. The new theologian,
says Chesterton, denies the cat. He gets a laugh here, but new theologians
are not just there to be ridiculed. The seeing of present evil as part of a
dialectic, an incomplete or self-contradictory thought marking our ascent
to eternal truth, the "notion", beatitude, where we really sit eternally, is
deeply mystical and not unknown in the tradition, present or past. Things
are not what they seem. Sins will not be remembered in this ideal future,
we read in the Old Testament. So "deny the present union", yes, but what
do we know about this present? For the Lord one day is as a thousand and
time, as an a priori form of sense-cognition (Kant) involving self-
contradiction, even though we may see it as "common sense", is not a
proven reality at all.
"If you forgive one another your sins then your heavenly Father will forgive
you," we read in the Gospel. The straight equivalence here suggests
coincidence, identity even. It either reduces sin's infinity or raises man to
an infinite height. Why not say it does both? We are growing up together
and every child offends and learns through his mistakes, his sins, his
"missing the mark" (hamartia). For our super-ego, psychology has taught
us, this is hard to accept. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" and, as is
most clear in the case of murder, the impulse not merely to vengeance but
to just punishment is very strong. But justice is perfected in mercy and
forgiveness, as it is in epieicheia or equity. They are not alternatives to it.
Shylock was not just, simply because he was merciless. Wilfrid Owen
shows us the way in his poem about the two dead soldiers, without even
mentioning forgiveness by name. "Let us sleep now" says the dead victim
merely, thus concluding his reproaches. Experience of murderous hate
("you looked so fierce… yesterday") is a trouble and burden, whether in
ourselves or in others. "Forgive them, they know not what they do." That
was clearly not an appeal to some particular contingent ignorance, such as
afflicted Oedipus, but to the truth that the happiness necessarily sought in
any action is yet found only through love and, again, forgiveness. So if you
seek it in skinning cats you don't know what you are doing. You are more
to be pitied than the cat or any victim, as Socrates taught long ago.
Chesterton makes a valid point about "the democracy of the dead". A first
principle of democracy, which as an ideal he rightly identifies with
liberalism, is "that the things common to all men are more important than
the things peculiar to any men," even to the Son of Man, I would want to
add. This is the mystic significance of Pilate's Ecce homo. Chesterton
anyhow points out that on this principle immemorial tradition is
immediately validated. The basic things are the most miraculous or
wonderful, beginning with "man on two legs" or, for that matter, "being",
or, if it be found anterior, consciousness. "It is obvious that tradition is only
democracy extended through time." (p.47)
This principle has often been used to justify the brutish conservatism of
the sort that killed Jesus Christ and many other revolutionaries. In fact
revolution belongs to tradition, as Chesterton himself makes plain (p.41).
"For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms and the Jacobin has more
tradition than the Jacobite" (p.50). The tradition is of life and
discrimination. It is not "the traditions of the elders" where they
themselves fell back from an earlier tradition. One might come to feel,
therefore, that the principle of tradition is quite useless. It is rather that it
is of too great value to be used for this or that limited and maybe
fraudulent purpose. It enshrines rather the philosophia perennis which a
Hegel claims to bring to a fuller consciousness of itself and which a Huxley
or a Gilson feel themselves called to interpret. Gilson, Chesterton and
some others inexplicably want to stop at Thomas Aquinas or thereabouts,
not seeing that what they call the "modern" development is integral to
tradition's unfolding, on pain of reducing it to a particular conservative,
even archaistic philosophy. On the other hand it is not true, as is often
said, that Hegel saw himself, absurdly, as bringing the development to a
close for all time to come. "Greater things than I have done shall you do"
said Jesus to his pupils (discipuli) and Hegel would have echoed that.
What is peculiar to Chesterton is his diagnosis of where we stand today, or
in his day. Of the rebellion called or which led to the Reformation he will
have nothing, though the tendency becomes more and more in our day
one of seeing it as a necessary step within the historic life of Christianity, a
differentiation now being slowly reintegrated as, I would claim, is even the
case with "modern" atheism.
Chesterton speaks, however, of a "religious scheme" (p.30) that is
"shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation)". Well, here
he seems either to identify Christianity with its specifically medieval form
or to dub the Reformation itself anti-Christian, anti-Christ even. Even as
enlightened a theologian as the late Herbert McCabe O.P., however, once
spoke of the shattering of the "Christian movement" at the Reformation.
These judgements, however, seem too absolute. Thus the conservative
Maritain, though presenting us with a totally negative, indeed slanderous
verdict on Luther and his movement, along with Descartes and Rousseau,
in his Three Reformers, will yet argue forcefully that the French Revolution
of 1789 resulted from the ferment of the Gospel and itself incarnates
Christian ideals, rather as the abolition of slavery was a slow, very slow,
result of the apostolic preaching. Yet it is quite clear that the French
Revolution, in part inspired by the earlier and clearly Protestant American
one, somehow grew out of the latter, as their parallel documents illustrate
so well. More remotely, therefore, it grew out of the Protestant Reformation
itself.
Chesterton's position therefore might seem special in the sense of a
special pleading. He speaks of the destruction in modern thinking of the
idea of divine authority. But there are many ways to approach this theme;
one might well claim that an axe was laid to the root of this idea by Jesus
Christ himself (the relevant Scriptural passages are abundant), this idea
which Nicholas Berdyaev often characterised as sociomorphic, on analogy
with "anthropomorphic".
The medieval religious scheme was, among other things, realist. Its
symbol is the Crusades, glorified by Chesterton, but which Hegel charges
with seeking Christ, mistakenly, at the sepulchre in Jerusalem. "He is not
here." This is the root of "the unhappy consciousness" in religion. Not only
Chesterton but the Hegel-interpreter J.N. Findlay will retort that the Middle
Ages, whenever they were exactly, were joyous, in a measure, the
measure of Carmina Burana, say:

Much of what Hegel here says (in The Phenomenology of Mind)

would assort better with Kierkegaard's morbid Protestant
Christianity than with the positive, often joyous attitude of
Medieval Christendom… Surely a strange characterization of
the age that produced Aquinas.3

But Hegel wants to show the failure, the insufficiency, of a realist (in the
epistemological sense) interpretation of the Gospel, and this surely is what
today's theology and even the documents of the latest (orthodox)
ecumenical council are telling us too. One might even hazard that
Christianity inaugurated, within or away from Judaism, an "idealist" era,
where "the kingdom of heaven" is not only among but even within you,
after all (i.e. after all the dust has settled on that particular quarrel about
textual interpretation).
Georges van Riet, for example, writes that

For Hegel realist consciousness (the "natural attitude") fails to

recognize itself, it only attaches importance to the object… For
it, only the object is, it is absolutely, it is transcendent.4

3
J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-examination, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp.98-99.
4
Georges Van Riet, "The Problem of God in Hegel, Parts II-III", Philosophy Today, Vol. XI,
Number 2/4, Summer 1967, pp.75-105 (p.94), French original, Revue philosophique de
Louvain, Tome 63, August 1965, pp.353-418.
The "unhappy consciousness" is thus not so much a medieval as a realist
consciousness in religion. Christian realists

want to show that conscience is satisfied, that man is free, in

face of an Other and even thanks to him.

Yet we have seen how also within the tradition of Christian realism one
speaks of an Other yet more immanent than self to self. Anyhow,

what is at stake in this debate (between and atheists) is not the

nature of Christianity, but the value of realism. Both sides
refuse to re-examine the realist presupposition and transcend it
in the Hegelian manner.

This one could certainly say of Chesterton. All the same, as we have
already seen, his notion of "the suicide of thought"5 closely parallels
Hegel's own critique of Kant (rather as, even more surprisingly, his critique
of the reasonings of natural scientists in the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland"
might have been penned by a devotee of Hume!).
"The human intellect is free to destroy itself," writes Chesterton (p.33),
conducting the discussion, however, in total divorce from the ancient and
endemic option of scepticism, as if this had appeared for the first time with
modernity, as a special form of decadence. Rather like Hans Küng he says
that "Reason is itself a matter of faith", as if wanting to forbid that
reflexive enquiry or critique with which not only modern philosophy has
been occupied. Indeed it almost defines philosophy and Hegel and others
were right to class that type of metaphysics which ignored epistemology
as thus far dogmatic or, as is sometimes said, naive. Now Plato and
Aristotle were certainly not naive and hatred or mistrust of reason,
misologia, was a peril identified by name in the Socratic death-cell as
described in Phaedo.
The idea that religious authority was aimed at stopping the thought that
stops thought (p.33), as it were exclusively, is clearly disingenuous.
Quietism, as a supposed corruption of mysticism, suffered under this
authority, it is true, but one does not stop thought by questioning its
bases, the bases for example of our predication system as explored in
logica docens, or by getting to grips with the famous and undoubted
paradoxes and "the antinomies", and any authority interfering here would
be merely obscurantist or darkening intelligence.
Questioning the brain, again6, is just the way to combat materialism.
Aristotle argued long ago that a material organ of thought was self-
contradictory as it would get in the way of knowledge, which is becoming
the other as other, an activity of which just immateriality is the root (as
even Sartre saw after his negative fashion). Chesterton misses this point
(pp.33-34), speaking uncritically of the brain, and in general performs
rather badly here, talking of things being "wildly questioned". The wild are
those who do not question.

5
Chapter III of Orthodoxy.
6
Chesterton refers to H.G. Wells' "Doubts of the Instrument".
"In so far as religion is gone, reason is going." This is a point often made,
e.g. by Joseph Pieper in his writings on tradition or on the Platonic myths
and their function in the dialogues. Reason, all the same, offers a more
perfect form of knowledge than does religion, which refers us to faith. That
is why it is mischievous to speak of reason as a faith, while the justification
for religion would rest on the claim that in the areas concerned nothing
better than faith is to be had. Reason, however, does not depend upon
religion fideistically and in many cases can bring religion's gropings into
the full light of day, though this may well be with the help of a sound
religious tradition, as Hegel, for example, does not hesitate to
acknowledge. He regards it as the philosopher's duty to think the Trinity,
now that we have it.

Hegelian philosophy plays practically the same role in relation

to the faith of believers that Christian tradition assigns to
theology…. Philosophy accomplishes Christianity according to
Hegel. It does not replace it or make it useless. From the fact
that the Christian religion has true reality as its content, it is
already rooted in the speculative sphere and is infinitely close
to philosophy.7

As Chesterton himself says, religion and reason "are both of the same
primary and authoritative kind". But the authority of reason is not external
to it, otherwise we could not argue towards an Absolute as its source
without reasoning in a circle. This means, however, that the notion of
authority is itself not apposite here, except by analogy. Thus there is no
authority within logic. One has to see for oneself that the logical principles
apply since it is impossible to reason honestly by external prescription.
Thinking, that is, as simply being reflection of self in other, simply cannot
require guarantee from anything other than self, itself. All that it thinks
becomes itself, where it is "at home". It is, one might say, the other as
presence.

*****************************************

There follows a curious passage in which Chesterton claims that modern

liberal man, let us say, cannot act, cannot even revolt against anything,
that there is not only a pragmatic necessity to believe what is necessary
for life but that "one of those necessities is precisely a belief in objective
truth" and this men in the West have lost long since (pp.36-37). Suicidal
mania therefore is characteristic of "current philosophies" and "wild
scepticism… has run its course". "You cannot fancy a more sceptical world
than that in which men doubt if there is a world."
Well, it has never been so much a question of doubting if there is a world
as it is one of wondering what or how the world is and, for that matter,
what God is. On this question Chesterton simply substitutes religion, a
realist religious consciousness, for philosophy and this was not the way of
Augustine and Aquinas. They are rather in the same line both with Plato

7
Van Riet, p.85.
and Aristotle and with Kant and Hegel and their successors. At least that is
what Chesterton seemed to do when he wrote Orthodoxy (1908). The later
book on Aquinas therefore will have to present him as almost the only
right-thinking man of learning, clean contrary to St. Thomas's own
approach, one might think.
There is perhaps a sociological aspect here. The democracy Chesterton
extolled was just in this time having the effect of a spilling over of higher
culture into the consciousness of the wider society, of "the man in the
street". This is the phenomenon Ortega y Gasset objected to so incisively
in his La rebelion de las masas of 1930. In a sense it was a repeat of the
scenario produced by the advent of printing just prior to the Reformation
but, as always, a repeat with a difference. Then it was a question of all, or
many more, having access to the Bible primarily. Now, instead of just
printing, what had arrived was compulsory education for all and
consequent near-universal literacy, producing in turn the culture of the
daily newspaper and of journals. Thus Chesterton himself worked as a
Fleet Street journalist and those he argued with were often journalists or
literary men taking their ideas from the give and take of journalistic
debate, like Shaw and Wells and others whose names we mainly know only
from Chesterton's own pages, such as Robert Blatchford or G.S. Street. The
immediate origin of the ideas canvassed, however, naturally lay in more
"modern" science and philosophy, the pragmatism of William James,
evolutionism, of Darwin or Spencer, materialism from Comte and others or
its dialectical variant in Marx and, over all, the enormous influence of Kant
already remarked on in the introduction to Hegel's Science of Logic more
than eighty years earlier.
Whoever, all the same, inspects the form of Thomas Aquinas's Summa
theologica can see that even there, equally, the author engages himself in
frank debate with those putting forward any and every type of opinion and
the same is true a fortiori of his other Summa, styled contra gentes. It
follows that these opinions and such so to say "wild" questioning or
speculation was as rife then as it was in Chesterton's time, the difference
being that it came to expression, I mean as recorded, only among the
professional clerks. There is no reason to doubt, however, that it was not
still wilder among the illiterate, as the vile urge to burn "witches" and the
like testifies. For that matter there is as much radical testimony in
Shakespeare's dramas to the mentality called by Belloc, with Chesterton's
approval, "the modern mind", as we find later. We have only think of the
"To be or not to be" soliloquy. There is then a certain error of perspective.
But it is merely the general error of finiteness or limitedness which makes
all our thought dialectical or "on the move".
Regarding the burning of witches, Chesterton clearly sees this and
associated behaviour as a less radical evil, one of reason's "dark
defences", and Torquemada's torture he reduces to a variant upon Zola's
appeal to people's moral sense (p.31). Here there is surely a lack of
realism, a kind of historical romanticism leading one to countenance or as
it were begin to countenance great injustices and, certainly, unkindnesses.
I come back to the notion of the modern rebel losing the right to rebel
because lacking all convictions of his own (unlike the Jacobins). Chesterton
is here merely singling out those individuals without conviction or
principles such as one can find in any age as, again, Shakespeare's villains
or moral weaklings such as Macbeth testify. To assert that they
predominate more in our time is merely gratuitous. Agnosticism, after all,
is or can well be at least as honest a stance as that of those who, often,
will to believe. Faith is indeed reckoned a virtue but the will to hang on to
truth once glimpsed can be distinguished from the desire to have an
ideology, which can indeed be a will to power over others.
It is surely though that same virtue of faith which gives so much life and
distinction to Chesterton's literary production, as it gives vigour and
infectious conviction to the arguments of Orthodoxy. Faith, however, is
easily confused with "the Faith", an expression covering, for Roman
Catholics, any number of excrescences, let us call them. An obvious
expression of faith is the dogmatic formula, to which one holds through
thick and thin and, what is worse, in the strength of which one proclaims
those dissenting or even demurring to be anathema or accursed.
With the realisation, however, of the difference between the gold of the
dogma and the silver words expressing it, to borrow John of the Cross's
language, or of the dialectical character of reason itself this menacing
aspect of "right belief" (sc. orthodoxy) is getting into better perspective.
The whole question had already been launched, and even then not for the
first time, by Newman's elaboration of the thesis of the development of
Christian doctrine (in his 1845 book of that title). He omitted there to treat
of the development of the doctrine of development, clearly entailed if it
was indeed a Christian doctrine, as for him it certainly needed to be. This
meta-theme was taken up by the philosophers of dialectic and many
theologians today, such as Hans Küng, show clear awareness of the
dialectical character of our thinking, never standing still, whatever the
dogmatic formulas. Thomas Aquinas observed that the sinner can always
become more evil, more sinful, and similarly one can always penetrate
more deeply into the mysteries of salvation. Theology, as a life of
contemplation, does not come to a stop.
The guardians of orthodoxy, however, sitting in the seat, the cathedra, of
Moses, fear to be found asking one generation to believe what contradicts
or even seems to contradict what their predecessors imposed in earlier
times. For this, it has been variously remarked, is as impudent as it is
ridiculous. Not so, however, if one consider the Hegelian thesis that
eventual contradiction, at least an appearance thereof, is a natural
consequence of the finite character of any proposition whatever, for, in the
last analysis, "everything finite is false". "I am he who is; you are she who
is not." Catherine of Siena, doctor of the Church, shows the way here. Or,
as Newman more moderately put it, certain forms of expression are
opportune at one time but not at another. This, however, seems to open
the way to viewing credal statements ideologically in the sense of a praxis
for the sake of an end.

**************************************************

Faith is indeed a kind of victory. Nonetheless Aquinas raises the question of

the quality of belief, one can withhold belief too long but one can also
believe too lightly, leviter, as, he claims, did those who believed
Mohammed.8 Once introduce this notion, however, and one cannot forbid
applying this test to the various things believed in one's own religion on a
basis of passive adherence to a tradition. We have in fact no doubt at all
that many of the orthodox of previous generations believed lightly any
number of things as, we probably think, do many today. So in the end
everyone is responsible for his own interpretation of what is handed down
(traditum) to him.
I mentioned above how literary inspiration can be born from possession of
a faith, a conviction, whatever it is. This, in fact, is a truism of
historiography, that a readable historian must have a point of view. It is
even true of music, as part of what we mean by having a form, that the
piece is going somewhere, as the subject of a painting gives it unity,
makes it something we can look at. This is, in a way, an extension of a
prior need for a frame, a marking off from the surroundings. Mere paint-
smears haphazardly daubed around the gallery's wall's and floors, or on
the grass outside, would not be recognised as art, not even as rebellious
or nonsensical art. They are just nonsensical.
Thus Chesterton's own literary inspiration blossomed in proportion as he
reached his characteristic convictions, even if at the same time there is
generally thought to have been a degree of falling-off in so far as he then
declined to "move on", so to say, enamoured as he was of the dogmatic
principle. Orthodoxy seems to many more incisive than The Everlasting
Man, which however had such a decisive influence upon C.S. Lewis's
coming to Christian belief, he tells us in his Surprised by Joy. Similarly,
Chesterton surely never equalled in his novels and stories the narrative
power of The Man who was Thursday (1900), for example in the later
Manalive where he is still exploring the same idea of the apparently new
and strange turning out to be, in all its wonder, identical with the normal
and everyday, as we find mutatis mutandis in the figure of Sunday in the
earlier book. Dominated by this fixed idea, as he tells us even in
Orthodoxy that he had wanted to write of a man, himself, who discovered
England thinking it was a Utopic realm in the South Seas (as answer,
clearly, to Butler's Erewhon), he was unable later to let his characters
develop freely. One could not ask of Chesterton, as a music critic asked in
wonder of the nothing if not orthodox composer Bruckner, discussing the
sketches for his last music, "Where was Bruckner going?" He was, it might
seem, simply not moving, not developing. This criticism one might make
also of the poet Wordsworth, great as he was, though not of William Blake,
who, like Nietzsche, passed on into madness (as it seems at least to us
others). This however need not be viewed as negatively as we found
Chesterton viewing it and Heidegger and others have found much to
ponder in Nietzsche's last jottings, his Nachlass. In some Old Testament
prophets, Hosea, Ezekiel, there is a definite fusion of notions of divine
inspiration and of madness, as there is in Plato's Phaedrus discussing the
divine madness of love and Socrates' general position that the lover is to
be respected above the non-lover.
Aquinas, we noted, introduced the idea of believing lightly. There is, in
short, an enthusiasm of faith which departs from the virtue, as, for

8
Cf. Aquinas, Summa contra gentes I, 6.
example, foolhardiness departs by excess from courage or, on the
traditional scheme, presumption from hope. This was the point of Ronald
Knox’s study, Enthusiasm, a phenomenon he treated negatively (to the
amusement of Continentals who mistook his attitude for phlegmatic
Britishness merely). He had a point. One might recall the Victorian convert
who longed to hear of a miracle every day before breakfast.
This is what enraged humanists such as Kathleen Knott, in her The
Emperor's Clothes, when considering the then contemporary post-war
coterie of literary converts to or enthusiasts for Christianity, C.S. Lewis,
Charles Williams, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers or, by association,
Chesterton. They seemed to the critics to have a “light” attitude to truth,
when they dallied with medieval traditions of fairies, armed men in the
sky, or individual miracles, the more gratuitous the better. One might here
recall Newman’s apparently sober judgement that it would be better if
modern men were not vastly more superstitious or ready to believe the
miraculous or, presumably, fear walking under ladders. There is a certain
poetic wistfulness here for a bygone time when, it is imagined, God walked
more closely with men and women. God or the gods? In the Romantic
period it was often the old Greek scheme, with the gods of nature, which
was longed for, and medievalism seems in some ways of a piece with that,
in danger of being only accidentally Christian in other words.
The attitude, the vision, in any case, was productive of great literary
inspiration. Thus C.S. Lewis in his conversion-narrative tells how he arrived
for a time at the maxim “The Christians are wrong, but all the rest are
bores.” This soon became for him an argument to the effect, that all the
others are bores so the Christians are right, and this is really the soul of
Chesterton’s argumentation too. It is really, though Lewis does not
acknowledge this, the key element in Hegel’s position in regard to
Christianity in particular, which he calls the absolute religion, the point, in
other words, at which religion as it were supersedes itself.
Hegel claims that it is the strength and beauty of the idea that is its own
argument. This is his point against realism. “He is not here”, he quotes,
and this for him is one with “He is risen”. Faith and revelation, as we can
read in The Phenomenology of Mind and not only in his later lectures on
religion, are all a matter of first conceiving a way, the best way, of
thinking. It is in this sense that revelation comes “at the appointed time”
which is also “the fullness of time”. The final conviction of Christianity, one
might say, is in this way ethical. Even the practical postulates of Kant, thus
viewed, can lose their sceptical edge, particularly if there is no "thing-in-
itself" or final unknowable which, in Kant at least, they choose to ignore.
The tradition which ends in the Christian triumph as it is celebrated on
Easter night, at the vigil, begins with the deliverance of Israel at the Red
Sea, after the seven plagues of Egypt. Those events, it is accepted among
the most “conservative” believers today, whether Christians or Jews (or
both together), easily find a natural or non-miraculous explanation. Yet, as
Newman again remarked, it is easier to believe in many miracles than in
just one or two. If, that is, the great and so to say normative or tone-
setting deliverance of his people by God, Yahweh, is at one and the same
time a great act of Spirit, of providence, and a natural event, just as, we
hear suggested on all sides, is the birth of Jesus, then the case for an
idealist interpretation of Christianity, rather than relying on the brute force
of miracle, becomes rather strong. “He is not here.” The miraculous, like
the symbolic, would remain with that in religion which is, for Hegel, a
defect in the form of religious knowledge as such, which philosophy
therefore has a duty to “think”, not as producing a “Christian philosophy”
defining itself as passive and subservient to the pronouncement of
hierarchs but as striving to bring out the true sense and meaning of these
magical and mysterious things.
For Chesterton the world loses if we banish the magical and mysterious.
This though is not the intention. It is rather to overcome the state of
finding the magical and mysterious outside of and indeed alien to us, that
final inescapable misery of the realist consciousness. We have ourselves to
become, or discover ourselves as, magical and mysterious, as any number
of Christian sayings and writings, generally reckoned “mystical”, proclaim.
Certain doctrines of grace, of the lumen gloriae, often seem to attempt to
have the cake and eat it here, projecting a divine transcendence with
which the creation is “ontologically discontinuous”, a phrase finally
denying all possibility of analogy, if indeed it means anything at all. To
speak of the being of creatures really means they have no being at all in
the sense that the Absolute, the last trans-category of the dialectic, is the
ultimate reality. That they have being analogously, i.e. in the way we
speak (and from out of which we speak analogously of the divine being),
just means that they are not discontinuously with the Infinite, since this
would be the very denial of infinity. In its setting a limit to them they would
be setting a limit to it. In him, rather, we "live and move and have our
being".
One might here, speaking of analogy, wish to explore a likeness between
this production of brilliant and even enchanting writing in post-war "post-
Christian" England, yet another abortive “second spring”, and the original
cluster of writings from which the New Testament was later made up. For
these too were based upon a vision, the original vision of a man who
convinced the community from which these writers came, and himself,
that he was, let us say, extra-terrestrial. In Abbot B.C. Butler's (as he then
was) Why Christ? this literary excellence is claimed as strong argument for
truth of the Christian claims as the writers conceived them. They were
possessed by an ecstatic consciousness of fulfilled Messianic expectation.
"This is he." If one considers, incidentally, one can scarcely miss, in the
exchange between Peter and Jesus about who Jesus is, who Peter says he
is, a kind of two-way pressure, as if the questioner reaches his final
certitude in the answer of the one questioned, whom he then blesses
profusely. Later, of course, he has to go it alone, "as it is written" adds the
Evangelist, citing an old and sacred text. Text inspires text, in other words.
For this is his inspiration, viz. his will to see the scriptures of his people
fulfilled. His contemporary, Paul, sets out to win the whole human race to
the new Christ in order to shame his own people into final submission, thus
bringing on the end.9 That is his inspiration, his will, moving his pen, rather
as Augustine later will advocate wholesale celibacy as a means of
hastening the end of the present order. In Anglo-Saxon England this

9
Paul the Apostle, Romans 9-11.
attitude merely brought defeat at the hands of the Vikings, for better or
worse, Chesterton's "Ballad of the White Horse" notwithstanding.
Conviction, anyhow, produces literary excellence. I have not read Mein
Kampf, but no doubt the author's dark but strong convictions lent that
work its reputed persuasive power.
This is not to slur the extraordinary beauty and power of so much in the
Gospels and associated writings. But there is "question of the relation
between the form and the content of our religious affirmations." Perfection
and beauty or power of content elicits inspired literary forms, but such
forms are particular, not of the essence:

…if one has recourse to a sacred history, understood as a

succession of God's interventions which would only have God's
unfathomable wisdom and absolute freedom as its sole reason,
and consequently could only be manifested to man as
contingent data, is this by virtue of the very "content" of
revelation or of the "form" which it actually has? Is it the
essence of the Christian message or only a mode of expression?
Thus, Hegelianism, taken seriously, is an invitation to rethink
anew the very delicate relations of reason and faith, natural and
supernatural, freedom and truth, meaning and positivity of
history, philosophy of religion and theology.10

10
Georges Van Riet, op. cit. p.102.