G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study

by Julius West

Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrées. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrées, not in the bread and wine.

Nevertheless, Christianity was centrifugal rather than centripetal; it was not a mere average, but a centre of gravity; not a compromise, but a conflict. Christ was not half-God and half-man, like Hercules, but "perfect God and perfect man." Man was not only the highest, but also the lowest. "The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul."

At this point agreement with Mr. Chesterton becomes difficult. Christianity, he tells us, comes in with a flaming sword and performs neat acts of bisection. It separates the sinner from the sin, and tells us to love the former and hate the latter. He also tells us that no pagan would have thought of this. Leaving aside the question whether or not Plato was a Christian, it may be pointed out that whereas Chesterton condemns Tolstoyanism whenever he recognizes it, he here proclaims Tolstoy's doctrine. On the whole, however, the mild perverseness of the chapter on The Paradoxes of Christianity leaves its major implications safe. It does not matter greatly whether we prefer to regard Christianity as a centre of gravity, or a point of balance. We need only pause to note Chesterton personifies this dualism. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is the arrangement of little bits of iron—the inhabitants of London, in this case—around the two poles of a fantastic magnet, of which one is Adam Wayne, the fanatic, and the other, Auberon Quin, the humorist. In The Ball and the Cross the diagram is repeated. James Turnbull, the atheist, and Evan MacIan, the believer, are the two poles. We speak in a loose sort of way of opposite poles when we wish to express separation. But, in point of fact, they symbolize connection far more exactly. They are absolutely interdependent. The whole essence of a North and a South Pole is that we, knowing where one is, should be able to say where the other is. Nobody has ever suggested a universe in which the North Pole wandered about at large. This is the idea which Chesterton seems to have captured and introduced into his definition of Christianity.

Democracy, to Chesterton, is the theory that one man is as good as another; Christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the State to entrust its affairs to the aristocracy, whose breeding and environment gives it an enormous amount of intelligence. Christianity, by proclaiming that every man's body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, insists both upon the necessity of abolishing the slums and of honouring the slum-dwellers as sharers with the rest of humanity in a common sonship. This is the case for Socialism, it may be pointed out parenthetically, and Chesterton has let it slip past him. He insists that orthodoxy is the best conceivable guardian of liberty, for the somewhat far-fetched reason that no believer in miracles would have such "a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos" as to cling to the theory that men should not have the liberty to work changes. If a man believed in the freedom of God, in fact, he would have to believe in the freedom of man. The obvious answer to which is that he generally doesn't. Christianity made for eternal vigilance, Chesterton maintains, whereas Buddhism kept its eye on the Inner Light—which means, in fact, kept it shut. In proof, or at least in confirmation of this, he points to the statues of Christian saints and of the Buddha. The former keep their eyes open wide, the latter keep their eyes firmly closed. Vigilance, however, does not always make for liberty—the vigilance of the Inquisition, for example. Leaving out of account this and other monstrous exceptions, we might say spiritual liberty, perhaps, but not political liberty, not, at any rate, since the days of Macchiavelli, and the divorce of Church and State.

By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference—Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, religious indignation—Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.

In concluding the book, Chesterton joyously refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. He believes in Christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. The arguments with which he deals are these. That men are much like beasts, and probably related to them. Answer: yes, but men are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. That primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear. Answer: we know nothing about prehistoric man, because he was prehistoric, therefore we cannot say where he got his religion from. But "the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall." And so on: the argument that Christ was a poor sheepish and ineffectual professor of a quiet life is answered by the flaming energy of His earthly mission; the suggestion that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages is countered by the historical fact that it "was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark." It was the path that led from Roman to modern civilization, and we are here because of it. And the book ends with a peroration that might be likened to a torrent, were it not for the fact that torrents are generally narrow and shallow. It is a most remarkable exhibition of energy, a case from which flippancies and irrelevancies have been removed, and where the central conviction advances irresistibly. Elsewhere in the book Chesterton had been inconsequent, darting from point to point, lunging at an opponent one moment, formulating a theory in the next, and producing an effect which, if judged by sample, would be considered bizarre and undirected. The book contains a few perversities, of course. The author attempts to rebut the idea "that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom," by pointing out that in one or two priest-ridden countries wine and song and dance abound. Yes, but if people are jollier in France and Spain and Italy than in savage Africa, it is due not to the priests so much as to the climate which makes wine cheap and an open-air life possible. No amount of priests would be able to set the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo dancing around a maypole singing the while glad songs handed down by their fathers. No amount of priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. But Orthodoxy is Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of the Tremendous Trifles, "Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of truth."

Twice upon a time there was a Samuel Butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks to be published by posterity. The first (i.e. of Hudibras, not of Erewhon) had many lively things to say on the question of orthodoxy, being the forerunner of G.K.C. And I am greatly tempted to treat Samuel Butler as an ancestor to be described at length. Chesterton might well have said, "It is a dangerous thing to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly into a true Religion, for 50,000 Bethshemites were destroyed only for looking into the Ark of the Covenant, and ten times as many have been ruined for looking too curiously into that Booke in which that Story is recorded"—in fact in Magic he very nearly did say the same thing. He would have liked (as who would not?) to have been the author of the saying that "Repentant Teares are the waters upon which the Spirit of God moves," or that "There is no better Argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by Divine Inspiration, than that excellent saying of our Savior, If any man will go to Law with thee for thy cloke, give him thy Coate also." He might well have written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of Butler which an unkind fate has omitted from the things we read, and even from the things we quote. But Butler provides an answer to Chesterton, for he was an intelligent anticipator who foresaw exactly what would happen when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunction to shout with the larger crowd, should be proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious difficulties. Before a reader has finally made up his mind on Orthodoxy (and it is highly desirable that he should do so), let him consider two little texts:

"They that profess Religion and believe it consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if they should say They have a great desire to serve God, but would faine be perswaded to it. Why should any man suppose that he pleases God by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow render Religion ridiculous?"

"He sound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive Times he had never been a Christian; for the Antiquity of the Pagan and Jewish Religion would have had the same Power over him against the Christian, as the old Roman has against the modern Reformation."