George Bull discusses the spirituality of Chesterton, the great English convert who became a witty and genial apologist of the Catholic faith.
Dorothy Sayers, a brave translator of Dante, once commented that as a philosopher he was greater than Aquinas, the master he acknowledged, because of the poetic dimension to what he wrote. As a philosopher (simply defined as someone using reasoned argument in the search for true knowledge), Chesterton similarly added a painterly dimension to what he wrote. Moreover, his descriptions, as well as brilliantly conveying particular combinations of light and colour, like those of Dante expressed a profound apprehension of the wonderful and joyous singularity of all created things. In his life of Aquinas, famously praised by Gilson for its perception, Chesterton explaining the realism of St Thomas’s philosophy (his clear view of the world of different and varied beings which is especially the world of the Christian Creator) exclaims that things as ends in themselves always deceive us, but ‘as things tending to a greater end, they are even more real than we think them.’ In Orthodoxy, the ebullient, rueful account of an innocent young man’s quest for and excited discovery of the great Christian truths already discovered centuries before, Chesterton exulted that, ‘Joy, which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian’.
Suffering and pain
Chesterton’s joyful life was also one of suffering and pain. A Londoner born in the Victorian age of Britain’s Imperial glory of incipient artistic decadence and growing philosophical scepticism, Chesterton having studied art and become a talented draughtsman, worked as a professional writer in his twenties and after. Pugnacious and prolific he wrote in a wide variety of literary genres: essays for newspapers and magazines, assembled as books with titles such as Tremendous Trifles; literary biographies (of Chaucer, for example, and of Dickens); idiosyncratic novels (most notably The Man Who was Thursday); sociological tracts and histories (The Outline of Sanity, A Short History of England) and a respectable body of verse, including comic poems not one of which (according to the masterly poet W.H. Auden) ‘is not a triumphant success’.
His general fame and his financial income were generated chiefly by his Father Brown detective stories which have enjoyed continuous popularity. Reprints of very many of his works have recently reflected a surge of international interest in his forceful ideas and the vitality or his imagination. Not surprisingly (in terms of the convenient abstractions or political and economic discourse) with the collapse of communism and the many perceived flaws in the working of the ‘free market’, the campaign for a wider distribution of productive property (as sustained in England by Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the late 1920s and 1930s) has been marginally influencing the general discussion in many democratic societies about ‘third way’ choices in economic policies.
Chesterton died in 1936, aged 62. He had come into the Roman Catholic Church, after a long period of spiritual and intellectual struggle, in 1922. The quality and precision of his writing had deteriorated during the 1930s, but he then proved to be an appealing and persuasive broadcaster, a fervent, simplifying expositor of essential truths and a formidable, genial apologist for Christian values. Specifically, countering the culture of despair, he expounded the urgency of the need to return to study and contemplation of the true meaning of the Book of Genesis, the account of a ‘week’ of Creation, ‘a wonderful and mystical thing in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest’.
Trials and sufferings
The pain and suffering which Chesterton experienced included no exceptional trials or tribulations, but his anguish was real. Loving children, he grieved that his marriage was childless. He was dismayed and hurt by the petty feuds and dissensions within the socalled ‘Distributist’ movement. He took to heart the wars and wickedness of the world, from the crushing of the Boers in South Africa to what he saw as the perfidious barbarism of Prussia (which he thought caused the World War in which his brother died as a soldier and, after which as he saw it, his beloved England returned to the corrupt government by the rich) and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Chesterton’s own health was always precarious and liable to deteriorate suddenly through over-weight, over-work or foreboding hidden by high spirits. A little sister of his died when he was still a child. His best biographer, Maisie Ward, writing about Chesterton’s last days on earth reflected that, ‘Intense vitality, joy in living, vigour of creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness and acute suffering’.
Chesterton’s spirituality, however, had more to it than the serenity and good humour or a naturally happy disposition. The crucial decision of his spiritual life was taken in his teens when he realised he was experiencing a sighting of, and a fascination with, a starkly evil phenomenon. Its precise nature remains rather mysterious. In his Autobiography Chesterton recalled the time when under severe mental stress he had been imagining ‘the maddest,’ when he had never committed the ‘mildest’ crime:
I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that “Atys with the blood-stained knife were a better thing than I am…” I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of the more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination… I had an overwhelming impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images…
Dark temptations
In a newspaper essay written about a conversation with a fellow student, Chesterton, nearer to the event, wrote that the man ‘had a horrible fairness of intellect that made me despair of his soul.’ The student had agreed that religion produced humility, and humility a simple joy; yet he had asserted ‘But shall I not find in evil a life of its own?’ He had talked of the ‘expanding pleasure’ of ruining a woman. The essay, ‘The Diabolist,’ ends with Chesterton’s recording that he had subsequently overheard the same student responding to the words of ‘one of the vilest of his associates – “Nobody can possibly know” with the admission [never forgotten by Chesterton] ‘I have done everything else. If I do that, I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.’ The temptation about which Chesterton hardly dared think seems to have been near enough to his own darkly enticing temptations to make him recoil with horror; his glimpse of its nature and implications decisively affected the direction of his life. When quoting Wilde, he hastened to say that he had never ‘felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde.’ His ‘madness’ (the often solitary child Chesterton, a doctor once told his mother, would be either a genius or mad) may have encouraged fantasies expressed in hideous imaginings and depictions of violence.
The almost obsessive concern with the nature of evil, the existence of the devil, and the sinfulness of mankind which he was wretchedly sure he shared, are continuing threads in Chesterton’s creative life. Another of his perceptive biographers, Dudley Barker, observing also Chesterton’s dabbling in spiritualism and his sudden realisation of the accessibility of willing, evil spirits, points to this concern in one of Chesterton’s plays (called Magic) too; and the reality and lure of evil as powerful and personal is portrayed on one way or another in most of his books, not least the Father Brown stories. Barker draws all this together in recording Chesterton’s reflections after visiting the Holy Land, in the silence of Sod om and Gomorrah, that ‘it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death of abominable things. Such things are hideous not because they are distant but because they are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine, were buried things as bitter as anything buried under that bitter sea.’
The ‘whole man’ who was Chesterton, and his reason for accepting as true the beliefs of orthodox Christianity, Barker concludes, are evident in his exclamation that if Christ has not come to do battle with these hideous, buried things which were present even in the darkness of the brain of man, ‘I know not why He came’.
Roots of spirituality
The roots of Chesterton’s spirituality are in his early grasp of his own propensity to evil which intensified the exuberance of his delight in the actuality, beauty and beneficence of God’s Creation. His endless paradoxes and insistent rhetoric attest to the intensity of his thoughts and feelings in reaction to what he increasingly saw (nearly a century ago) as an age of spreading disbelief, the repudiation of traditional values and traditions, the acceptance and encouragement of, and the connivance with, all kinds of self-indulgence. In his writings and drawings, his naive relishing of swordsticks and revolvers and martial glory, the fascination with violence lingered on.
Sensitised and alert to the fact of sin, Chesterton by all accounts was very simply a good man. He was not always sensitive to the feelings of others. Often unwittingly harsh in argument he was of his time and place in his apparent lack of awareness (to say the least) of the hurt caused by generalised racial labelling, of Jews, blacks and Orientals, for instance. Bur it was not in him to show contempt for another person. He is not compellingly through radiant, intense spirituality a candidate for canonisation (though this is being proposed). There was perhaps some affectation about his notorious forgetfulness. He was genial, forgiving, privately prayerful and devout. His spirituality sustained and regularly surfaced in his writings, in most of which he engaged with immediate political and educational purposes, effortlessly, it seemed, absorbing what he read in Aquinas or Dickens or Johnson or the Bible, what he saw in the works of Watts or the painters of the High Renaissance, and conveying its essential content simplified bur not distorted to his very wide audience. At the service of great thinkers and artists, of saints like St Francis and mystics like Blake, as Hugh Kenner suggests at the end of his shrewd study of Chesterton, he day by day placed the ‘vast vision’ of a practical mystic. His philosophic genius was dispersed through his eager determination to communicate and convince.
Best books
Among Chesterton’s books, my choice for someone coming fresh to his ever-fresh arguments and wishing to assess the penetration of and the development of his spiritual vision would be: Orthodoxy, with all its ingenuity (‘The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit into the world’); The Everlasting Man (‘As soon as I had in my mind [the] conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it; because that story also had a root that was divine’); the Autobiography (‘What was wonderful about childhood was that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world’); his biography of St Thomas Aquinas (He ‘immediately recognised a real quality in things; and afterwards resisted all the disintegrating doubts arising from the nature of things… there is a sort of purely Christian humility and fidelity underlying his philosophic realism’); ‘The Book of Job’, an essay reprinted in G.K.C. as MC edited by J. P. de Fonseca, London, 1929 (‘Job is not told that his misfortunes were due to his sins or a part of any plan for his improvement… in the Prologue we see Job tormented not because he was the worst of men but because he was the best’).
Among Chesterton’s innovatory, teasing and influential works of fiction, The Man Who was Thursday (‘It was intended to describe the world of old doubt and despair which the pessimists were general describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt’). From his verse, his near perfect translation of Du Bellay’s poem on the bliss of returning to one’s own homeplace. In the original French, Du Bellay’s poem begins: Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage, Chesterton saw fretful journeys as means to an end in joyful homecomings – to Ithaca, to Anjou, to the Catholic Church… to Paradise. It ends as follows:
More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,
Than Palatine my little Lyre there;
And more than all the winds of all the sea
The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.
NOTE: Very many of Chesterton’s books are in print again. For insights into his life and works see, inter alia, Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward (London 1944), Paradox in Chesterton by Hugh Kenner (London 1948), G. K Chesterton by Dudley Barker (London 1973), Chesterton – a Half Century of Views edited by D. J. Conlon (Oxford 1987), G. K Chesterton – a Centenary Appraisal edited by John Sullivan (London 1974), Chesterton by Ian Crowther (London 1991). Prophet of Orthodoxy by Russell Sparkes, London 1997.
This article first appeared in Spirituality ((July-August 2000), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.
