GK Chesterton 101

[mikokiko]

So they did not let him teach in schools because he was Catholic or what? And they allowed the Atheist? Cause that doesn't really sound like 20th century England to me...Please elaborate on this, thanks

 

[rusmeister]

So they did not let him teach in schools because he was Catholic or what? And they allowed the Atheist? Cause that doesn't really sound like 20th century England to me...Please elaborate on this, thanks

I should clarify that I am speaking more about American public schools, although European school systems, including England, borrowed the Prussian model as well. The changes came into effect slowly over the 20th century, and it probably wasn't until the 70's or so that Chesterton became risky (my best guess).

Chesterton speaks openly about Christianity. He insists that faith is important and that it matters what you believe. This is in ideological opposition to the controlling philosophy of public education. He represents a direct attack on pluralism, religious relativism and political correctness from a rational standpoint. A teacher trying to teach him (as in actually explore his works, as opposed to merely mentioning him in a footnote) would get warnings and ultimately risk losing their job on the basis that the teacher is 'teaching religion'.

Yes, atheist writers are decidedly allowed. I'd say the general rationale is that they are 'not religious'. Writers are rarely officially banned, and teachers are rarely closely monitored, but all it takes is a student complaint, which they'll make for any reason at all - out of simple spite sometimes - to draw an investigation.

 

[rusmeister]

As I said, we live in a world where the philosophy of people like Shaw, who had dreams of a utopia on earth minus God, has actually been enacted, and a tailspin into insanity is the result.

I really didn't know anything about Shaw before reading Chesterton on Shaw. I just thought of him as another 'great writer' of the 20th century.

Probably the single most incisive work on Shaw is Chesterton's.
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/George_Bernard_Shaw.txt

GKC ackowledged and praised Shaw's genius while detesting the conclusions he came to.

When GKC started describing what Shaw believed, I ran to get my books by Shaw and cracked them open, and sure enough, he DID say this and he DID believe that. And the 'this' and 'that' were in places pretty horrific. While his beliefs can be found throughout his works, one of the most succinct statements comes from his "Revolutionist's Handbook", an appendix to the play "Man and Superman" (one of his final plays). Just a tiny sample:

Women in the Home
Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

Here's a longer list of quotes, both witty and awful (from a Christian perspective):
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shaw

There were others at the time like Ibsen and Oscar Wilde, but none had Shaw's impact, especially on Dewey and the other ideologues who formed our modern public schools. Is it any wonder that within a generation or so, we have everybody pretty much believing this stuff and enacting it in public policy?

Back to GKC:

"If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings." - George Bernard Shaw, Ch. 6

"The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms." - Shaw, 1909

"No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon." (George Bernard Shaw)

 

[Lotar]

Recently I read What's Wrong With the World and loved it. I will have to read more of his work when I get the chance.

I think the whole idea of distributism is genious.

 

[rusmeister]

"What's Wrong With the World" is another remarkable book of his.

He formulates it this way: what is wrong is that, while we may agree on what is wrong, we do not agree on what is right. He delineates the attacks on traditional ideals, particularly on the family (sound relevant, anyone?), arguments that were being used back then that led to the widespread thinking we have today.

There is an introduction and conclusion, of course, and three main sections, titled:
"Imperialism, or the Mistake about Man"
"Feminism, or the Mistake about Woman"
"Education, or the Mistake about the Child".

http://www.chesterton.org/discover/lectures/16whatswrong.html

What's Wrong with the World

By Dale Ahlquist


Chesterton's book, What's Wrong with the World, was supposedly written in 1910. But there is good evidence that it was actually written today.
Our society is experiencing exactly the crisis that Chesterton warned us about almost a century ago. There is a greater disparity than ever between the rich and poor. Our families are falling apart, our schools are in utter chaos, our basic freedoms are under assault. It affects every one of us. As Chesterton says, "Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick."
But while we agree about the evil, we no longer agree about the good. The main thing that is wrong with the world is that we do not ask what is right. It is the loss of ideals that makes reform such a difficult task.
Some people say that idealism is impractical. But Chesterton says, "Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence." In other words, idealism is common sense. It is what the common man knows is right, in spite of all the voices telling him it is impractical or unrealistic or out-dated. And when Chesterton says idealism, he means the Christian ideal. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." It would mean the ideal house and the happy family, the holy family of history. It would mean making laws that respect the family as the most important unit of society, and laws which are moral and respect religious principles. It would mean the widespread distribution of property and capital to provide for greater justice and liberty. It would mean not being afraid to teach the truth to our children. But we have left the truth behind us. And instead of turning around and going back and fixing things, we rush madly forward towards we know not what, and call ourselves, "progressive." Instead of the solid family and the church and the republic being held up as ideals, these things are now assailed by those who have never known them, or by those who have failed to fulfill them. "Men invent new ideals because they are afraid to attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back."
Although this book is a work of non-fiction, Chesterton introduces us to two characters: Hudge and Gudge. Well, three characters: he also introduces us to Jones. Hudge and Gudge are the enemies of Jones. Simply put, Hudge is Big Government and Gudge is Big Business. And Jones? Jones is the common man. "This man Jones has always desired ordinary things; he has married for love, he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be great grandfather and a local [hero]." But something has gone wrong. Hudge and Gudge have conspired against Jones to take away his property, his independence, and his dignity.
The home is the only place of liberty. "Property is merely the art of democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image…To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody." But in a society where most people cannot afford their own home, and they cannot properly support themselves but have to be someone else's wage slave, easily sacked, easily replaced and displaced, having to rely on the government to supplement their needs, in other words, when they are totally at the mercy of Hudge and Gudge, it means enormous pressure is put on the family, and it means the society will crumble from the bottom up. The society is especially in danger when the common man, left reeling by the loss of religion, of home, of family, is not even sure what he wants any more.
Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him. . . But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected , he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
One of the most famous lines in all of Chesterton's writings is found in this book: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." For some reason, people puzzle on this. Or else use it to defend their own slovenly ways. But it is a ringing defense of the amateur, the person who does a wide variety of things out of love rather than one specialized thing out of mere professionalism. The person who best understands the "uproarious amateurishness of the universe" is the woman, the mother who has to be the first to explain the entire universe to a child. When the mother is pulled out of the home and made a specialist, working for Hudge and Gudge, the child is left to be raised by "experts." Thus, both the mother and the child become narrower. And so does the whole society as the family of course is ripped apart. And so is every integral element of society torn apart from everything else. The world, says Chesterton, "is one wild divorce court." Religion is banned from the classroom. So are the parents. So is common sense. Each subject is taught in a vacuum. Each profession is increasingly narrow. People more know more and more about less and less. What's wrong with the world? Take a good look around.

And one more thing, for all the 'liberals' and 'conservatives' out there...

The key to Chesterton's politics is that he refused to take part in the debate between Hudge and Gudge, but rather judged them both by the test of Jones. What, he asked had Gudge, the industrial-capitalist, done to strengthen the family of Jones? What had Hudge, the socialist-idealist, done to strengthen the family of Jones?

Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil, which is totally inconsistent with the family and is bound to destroy it. And Hudge calls a women’s work freedom to live her own life, and says the family is something we shall soon gloriously outgrow.
​

 

[Lotar]

Genius.

I'm not one to laud ideas originated by Catholics, but the ideas behind distributism were dead on.

 

[Montalban]

Of the apologists from last century I like C S Lewis

 

[Latreia]

I should clarify that I am speaking more about American public schools, although European school systems, including England, borrowed the Prussian model as well. The changes came into effect slowly over the 20th century, and it probably wasn't until the 70's or so that Chesterton became risky (my best guess).

Chesterton speaks openly about Christianity. He insists that faith is important and that it matters what you believe. This is in ideological opposition to the controlling philosophy of public education. He represents a direct attack on pluralism, religious relativism and political correctness from a rational standpoint. A teacher trying to teach him (as in actually explore his works, as opposed to merely mentioning him in a footnote) would get warnings and ultimately risk losing their job on the basis that the teacher is 'teaching religion'.

Yes, atheist writers are decidedly allowed. I'd say the general rationale is that they are 'not religious'. Writers are rarely officially banned, and teachers are rarely closely monitored, but all it takes is a student complaint, which they'll make for any reason at all - out of simple spite sometimes - to draw an investigation.

So that is the explanation. And it is even worse than I suspected.

When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he
declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown
definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own
imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then
he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the
vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas.
Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

The fatal flaws of relativism. To think that wisdom is still ignored continuously, right up to this very moment, when it should have been allowed to change the world.

And then, to see that this course of confusion was thrust, via the whole educational system upon Christianity by atheists. They had our children by the throat.

Thank you, Mr. Chesterton, for making it all so plain.

 

[Latreia]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GK_Chesterton

In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a
"Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture
(not Jewish ethnicity/Semitism) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.

He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later
invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In
1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:

“ In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being
uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish
problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no
reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who
has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most
famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people. ”

The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history)
has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an
enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was
on."

 

[rusmeister]

And then, to see that this course of confusion was thrust, via the whole educational system upon Christianity by atheists. They had our children by the throat.

I think the most tragic thing is that we blithely send our children off to them. Chesterton addresses the causes that we immediately turn to to explain why we do give our kids over to them, even knowing the harm (if not actively denying it).

 

[rusmeister]

It has been asked what is wrong with Chesterton. His failings (in not lining up with Orthodoxy) have been mentioned in earlier posts. No human is perfect, all are sinners who make mistakes somewhere along the line. When a person hits what we know to be true through our Faith on the order of 97%, I think that ignoring the things that conflict is excusable, as long as we keep them in mind, and know that the ultimate repository of Truth is in the Orthodox Faith.

So where did he conflict? Well, his faith was originally based on geography. He started off as an Anglican, but fairly quickly sided with the traditionalist "Anglo-Catholics", so his sympathies with Catholicism developed early on. His involvement with the Catholic priest who became the role model for his "Father Brown" stories intensified this. Nevertheless, for the greater part of his writing career he was Anglican. His writings of this longer and earlier period tend to be much more 'non-partisan'.

From shortly before his conversion to the Catholic Church onward, he begins to speak more openly and frequently about the Catholic Church as the genuine Church of Christ, and speaks in support of the papacy, throwing his immense intellect and common sense into his arguments.

In short, he became a Catholic and a Thomist (a school of philosophy which does remarkable things for providing bridges between science and faith, but whose failing (in my understanding) is in trying to de-mystify everything (as if the Faith itself could be scientifically explained). These things he defended for the last 14 years of his life.

So a useful thing to do is to identify his works as pre-conversion and post conversion.

Of course, we would identify him as heterodox. I personally feel that he came to the realization of the need to find the Church, and came as close as he could. Again, he knew very little about Eastern Orthodoxy outside of historical references, and therefore did not learn about our theology or Church history. He put his intellect to great use with what he did know, but he didn't find the Orthodox Church.

Nevertheless, most of his writings coincide with Orthodoxy, outside of direct support of the Catholic Church's claim to be the Church and the Papacy and can be read confidently, without fear of 'heterodox contamination', as long as we keep these things in mind. Certainly, the most important thing is that he points to Christ and the Church (something that most philosophers, such as Siddhartha (the Buddha) don't.

If anyone knows of anything he actually wrote pertaining to EO, I would be very interested. He wrote dozens of books, hundreds of essays and poems, and I've only scratched the surface.

 

[tekiahteruah]

If anyone knows of anything he actually wrote pertaining to EO, I would be very interested. He wrote dozens of books, hundreds of essays and poems, and I've only scratched the surface.

Rusmeister--

He did write about Eastern Christianity, and not favorably.

"First, it must be remembered that the Greek influence continued to flow from the Greek Empire; or at least from the centre of the Roman Empire which was in the Greek city of Byzantium, and no longer in Rome. That influence was Byzantine in every good and bad sense; like Byzantine art, it was severe and mathematical and a little terrible; like Byzantine etiquette, it was Oriental and faintly decadent. We owe to the learning of Mr. Christopher Dawson much enlightenment upon the way in which Byzantium slowly stiffened into a sort of Asiatic theocracy, more like that which served the Sacred Emperor in China. But even the unlearned can see the difference, in the way in which Eastern Christianity flattened everything, as it flattened the faces of the images into icons. It became a thing of patterns rather than pictures; and it made definite and destructive war upon statues. Thus we see, strangely enough, that the East was the land of the Cross and the West was the land of the Crucifix. The Greeks were being dehumanised by a radiant symbol, while the Goths were being humanised by an instrument of torture. Only the West made realistic pictures of the greatest of all the tales out of the East. Hence the Greek element in Christian theology tended more and more to be a sort of dried up Platonism; a thing of diagrams and abstractions; to the last indeed noble abstractions, but not sufficiently touched by that great thing that is by definition almost the opposite of abstraction: Incarnation. Their Logos was the Word; but not the Word made Flesh. In a thousand very subtle ways, often escaping doctrinal definition, this spirit spread over the world of Christendom from the place where the Sacred Emperor sat under his golden mosaics; and the flat pavement of the Roman Empire was at last a sort of smooth pathway for Mahomet. For Islam was the ultimate fulfilment of the Iconoclasts. Long before that, however, there was this tendency to make the Cross merely decorative like the Crescent; to make it a pattern like the Greek key or the Wheel of Buddha. But there is something passive about such a world of patterns, and the Greek Key does not open any door, while the Wheel of Buddha always moves round and never moves on."

- G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas

 

[Macarius]

Poetic, if ignorant of the depth of the incarnational nature of Eastern theology... it's odd to hear someone accusing the EAST of being obtuse and "schematic" - so often we level that objection to the WEST due to scholasticism. Perhaps he simply didn't "get" Palamas and the theosis-based understanding of salvation...

 

[tekiahteruah]

Macarius-- I agree. This is what I meant when I said that Chesterton applied his brilliant mind as best as he could to the biased scholarship of his time. When he was writing, Western writers like Dawson painted a very prejudicial portrait of Byzantium, just like other Western writers did of Asian religions. Chesterton wrote based on what the scholars of his time were writing.

 

[rusmeister]

Thanks, Tekiah.

Is that all you have? I read that, too, but found it remarkably limited and little, as I said earlier. The man wrote something like a hundred books, I've read a dozen of his biggest works, and have seen (except a brief reference or two like the one above) essentially nothing on Orthodoxy.

He was Catholic at that point, and any reference to Eastern Orthodoxy (Christinity, he calls it, to his credit) would have to have been disparaging in comparison.

One thing I have to take exceptional issue to, though, is the idea that scholarship today is somehow less limited or biased. That is the primary basis on which the modern attack on faith exists. (Pluralism + evolutionism = there is no one Truth, there are only different 'truths; representing different points of view, and we are getting better all the time - we are now so much wiser than those stone-age ignoramuses of 100 years ago.) Not saying you are saying all that, Tekiah, but implying an improvement in bias does lead to that in the end.
I see plenty of people painting prejudicial pictures of Orthodoxy today, and an awful lot of them are scholars.
Chesterton and Lewis took a great deal of effort to point out that this is a deadly fallacy.

 

[tekiahteruah]

I definitely agree that today's scholarship is equally biased, and one must try to filter as much as one can. We simply have the privilege of being able to see obvious bias in retrospect, like the clear bias against Byzantium in the works of Western historians until very recently. John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium has a pretty good discussion on the evolution of Western scholarship on Byzantium. Chesterton never got to read Norwich's book, of course, which is much more favorable (though not uncritical) of the Christian East. I agree that we have just as many problems in today's books, and I think that will be even more apparent to future readers. The case of Asian religions, though, I think is especially apparent, simply because at the time Chesterton was writing, very few Buddhist documents (relative to now) were even translated into English. How could he then be objective?

As for anything else of substance Chesterton has written on Eastern Christianity, I don't know of it. I think he basically wrote off the Christian East as an abstract, despotic dead end ("a dried up Platonism") and didn't spend much time thinking about it.

 

[tekiahteruah]

One more tangential point I'd like to make in Chesterton's defense is that it's not so much that he didn't "get" Palamas-- as far as I know, the bulk of Palamas's works now in English were not translated until after Chesterton died. Of course Chesterton might have loved Palamas, but he wasn't given the opportunity to. The same could be said of many Buddhist texts. He of course probably would have found more in Palamas to agree with, but who knows? Chesterton, like Lewis (though not as much as Lewis), enjoyed pre-Christian Greco-Roman writers.

Chesterton makes a joke in The Everlasting Man about those who agree with Darwin on principle without having actually read any of his works. I think Chesterton was honorable enough to not want to disagree with anyone on principle without being able to read their works. I think that if he were alive today, he'd read both non-Catholic Christian and non-Christian writers with generosity and kindness (and of course then critique them with his unparalleled wit).

 

[rusmeister]

I definitely agree that today's scholarship is equally biased, and one must try to filter as much as one can. We simply have the privilege of being able to see obvious bias in retrospect, like the clear bias against Byzantium in the works of Western historians until very recently. John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium has a pretty good discussion on the evolution of Western scholarship on Byzantium. Chesterton never got to read Norwich's book, of course, which is much more favorable (though not uncritical) of the Christian East. I agree that we have just as many problems in today's books, and I think that will be even more apparent to future readers. The case of Asian religions, though, I think is especially apparent, simply because at the time Chesterton was writing, very few Buddhist documents (relative to now) were even translated into English. How could he then be objective?

As for anything else of substance Chesterton has written on Eastern Christianity, I don't know of it. I think he basically wrote off the Christian East as an abstract, despotic dead end ("a dried up Platonism") and didn't spend much time thinking about it.

We may be coming closer together in common understanding.

One thing I still see disagreement in is in the quantity of material available. He has a great deal more to say about Buddhism than about Orthodoxy, and he describes pretty much the same things I've read all my life about Buddhism. I don't see a conflict between what Chesterton wrote about it and everything I have known all my adult life - of course, all the information could be wrong, but it would not be a question of quantity of material, then. Imagine a person who only had pre-Nicene fathers to work with (read). He might get a more limited picture of Christianity than we have today, but his awareness of the essential character would still be largely correct. Thus I see GKC's characterization of Buddhism to be largely correct, if lacking or mistaken in some details.

I think Chesterton's great failing in understanding Orthodoxy was (evidently) in not perceiving the unity of the Church for its first thousand years - that it was one Church and all those saints, Church fathers and history were the foundation of the Orthodox as well as Catholic Churches.

 

[tekiahteruah]

I would agree with you if Chesterton had had the equivalent of the Nicene fathers vis-a-vis Buddhism. The thing is that he didn't. Scholars were just beginning to translate Buddhist texts into English, and they didn't even really know which ones were considered important by most Buddhists (the Japanese consider some very important which were unheard of in China and elsewhere, for instance). I think this can be seen in Chesterton's lack of understanding some of the basics of Buddhism. He never talks about the four noble truths or the eightfold path, except for the simplification that Buddhism is for the eradication of desire. He does talk of reincarnation, but never in understanding that the Buddha considered it something to be transcended. Chesterton critiques Eastern thought for its circular nature (the wheel of Buddha always going forward and never moving on), but the actual thought of the Buddha was primarily concerned with the "moving on" from the cycle. He especially shows ignorance of most major strands of Mahayana Buddhism, who emphasize the Buddha's teachings on compassion and lovingkindness, which counter Chesterton's claim that Buddhism is about the mind while Christianity is about the heart. I've read Western scholars writing around Chesterton saying the same thing. Fr. Etienne Lamotte, who wrote somewhat later, said something similar. Scholars today, with more resources, paint a more complete portrait. I think that if Chesterton had more resources available today, he would probably still critique Buddhism negatively in favor of Christianity, but he would do it in a different way. My point is that quoting Chesterton at Buddhists or potential Buddhists doesn't really do us many favors-- because we have more to pull from today. You could quote Chesterton's line about Buddhism being about turning inward, not outward, and about the "simplification of the mind" and not the heart, but then Buddhists can quote back all of the Buddha's sayings on lovingkindness, or the sutras on compassion and selflessness and dedication to the liberation of all suffering beings before one can become enlightened.

 

[rusmeister]

One of the most remarkable things about Chesterton is that he is actually quite well-known for getting his facts wrong, while still being right in the main about his subjects. I would not try to say that GKC made no mistakes about his subjects. But that he was right in the main about Buddhism vis-a-vis Christianity is unquestionable for an Orthodox Christian. Certainly Buddhism does teach reincarnation as GKC described, and while the Buddha was concerned with transcending it, that it is a foundational view of Buddhist spiritual reality that we as Christians deny.

I am rather skeptical of your idea that people in the West didn't really know anything significant about Buddhism until the 20th century. You can speak of scholarship, or talk of the awareness of a superior form or branch of Buddhism, but so can Protestants speak of their own forms of worship and understanding of faith. The question remains, "Why Orthodoxy?" What is inferior about the 4 noble truths or the eightfold path? I would say that praising Buddhism to potential Buddhists without answering this question does no one any favors, either. It belongs on another thread, but I have laid out Chesterton's shortcomings in general; I would be interested in seeing your layout of the shortcomings of Buddhism.