What I’m Learning from G.K. Chesterton

Increasingly, I find myself thinking of doing my writing in a public place while standing on my head. It would be a symbolic rather than a practical act. I imagine that it might help me demonstrate two things that were dear to G.K. Chesterton and that have become dear to me. The first is the idea that it is often the person doing strange things—praying for their enemy, making themselves poor, becoming the servant of others—who is doing right things. The second thing is that in an abnormal world turning ideas on their head often turns nonsense into sense, especially if those ideas are the fashionable ideas of the secular cynics. It was Chesterton who said, “In a topsy-turvy world turning things upside down often puts them on their feet for the first time.” I’m learning to see what in this world is standing on its feet, and what in this world is endeavouring to stand on its head with the inevitable results of pain, imbalance and indignity. This education in good sense, largely conducted by reading Chesterton’s many essays, is helping me to better understand myself, other people and their perspective, and man’s place in the world.

Chesterton was born in London in 1874; he died in 1936. He was not a distinguished student; one of his teachers considered him a dull boy with few prospects: a stunning misjudgment. He began to train as an artist at the Slade School, but soon veered towards journalism, the trade in which he happily worked for the rest of his life. Journalism gave him the opportunity to write about a bewildering range of subjects. Eyebrows, Robert Louis Stevenson, war memorials, communism, bad poetry, Jonathan Swift, industrialism, Darwinism, suicide, monsters, love, and pagan religion are just some of the subjects from one of his many books of essays (All I Survey). He was a loyal but combative friend of some of the giants of English modernism, most famously with H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church in 1922, but was committed to Christianity long before that point. He described himself as a pagan as a child and an agnostic as a young man. Orthodoxy outlines the story of, and the reasons for, his conversion and is the most popular of his many non-fiction works. When Chesterton died, Pope Pius XI described him as “a gifted defender of the faith”.

And the faith needed defending because critics of religion routinely insist that their feet alone are on the ground but, as Chesterton observed, they say this while standing on their heads. It’s no wonder that their perspective is so frequently skewed. For example, two criticisms of religion are that “religion causes wars” and that “religious people are hypocrites”. Both comments are true but neither is really a criticism. In fact, they are almost recommendations for religion. Chesterton squarely faces the secular world’s accusation that religion causes wars. He does not attempt to deny the charge; instead he emphasises the sense of religious wars as opposed to the selfish nonsense of secular wars. Secular wars are fought for oil, for access to a port, to vanquish weaker nations and take their resources, to test new weapons and tactics, and to bolster the status and wealth of dictators. Religious wars are fought for a vision of truth and a vision of man. They are fought for the direction of civilisation. Religion does indeed cause wars but it asks its soldiers to fight for ideals, not merely for an oil field or a higher hill. In a sense, religious wars are the only wars that should be fought.

Of course, it is appalling that religious people plant bombs and blow up innocent men, women and children in the name of their god. Islamic suicide bombers in Israel, Christian militia snipers in Kosovo, and Hindu mobs burning down mosques in India are obvious examples of the destructive passions religion unleashes. But look closer. These madmen teach us the dangers, not of religion, but of abandoning religious orthodoxy. Bombers, snipers and incendiarists are heretics. They don’t represent religion; instead they demonstrate what happens when men depart from the teaching of their religions. In other words, they demonstrate, in a negative way, the immense value of doctrines. Chesterton described religion as a fire burning madly in the heart of man. Doctrines are the hearth that contain and direct the fire so that it provides warmth, light and cheerfulness. Heretics take the fire out of the hearth and discover that the uncontained flames quickly consume the curtains, furniture and family. They endanger their neighbours and harm themselves with their impatience with proper limits.

So it’s true, religion does cause wars. But it’s false that dogmas always inspire extremism; in fact, dogmas more often restrict it. It is true, however, that religious people are, as their critics say, hypocrites. But they’re precise and courteous hypocrites. Religious people specifically define their beliefs in the form of creeds; they make public their beliefs by proclamation and worship; they commit themselves to their beliefs through baptism and church membership. Their secular critics, however, are commonly neither precise nor courteous. Their beliefs are often undefined and unproclaimed; nor do they have any public ritual of commitment to their beliefs. If they did any of these things then no doubt their hypocrisy too would be evident to all, but the fact is that they do almost none of these things. Religious people are at least accountable hypocrites; religion’s secularist critics are unaccountable hypocrites. And whereas many religious people struggle all their lives to live out their creeds, most secular people won’t even begin the struggle to articulate their creeds.

When the detractors of religion do declare their creeds and seek to live by them—as at least the communists and the fascists were honest enough to do—then the horrifying distance between their stated ideals and the brutal realities soon becomes apparent to all. Even artists and intellectuals finally come to see the discrepancy. Did Chesterton defend Christians from the charge of hypocrisy? No, because it’s true. Instead, he explained the courteous context of their hypocrisy, and he exposed the discourteous nature of the critic’s hypocrisy.

Chesterton had the temerity to be religiously orthodox when nearly every fashionable person wanted to be a bohemian, a pacifist, an anarchist, or a socialist. He also had the temerity to champion tradition when the cult of Progress had so many powerful advocates. He pointed out that there is an intimate link between tradition and democracy. Chesterton insisted that tradition was democracy extended through time; it was the continued enfranchisement of the dead. Through tradition, previous generations of people are allowed to speak and their opinions and customs are respected. He said, “Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” In addition, tradition helps protect the common man from the ill-judged impositions of progressives like activists, economists, academics and politicians. These people frequently want society to embrace the latest ideas as if what is thought this Friday is necessarily better than what was thought last Tuesday.

Chesterton knew that tradition didn’t always enshrine sense. “I am not saying that the truth is all on the side of tradition, I am only saying that the publicity is all on the side of innovation.” Of course, it is usually the financial, artistic and intellectual elites that demand social innovation and presume to lead society. The problem is that such elites are often the very class of people least fit to lead humanity anywhere:

It is easy enough to say the cultured man should be the crowd’s guide, philosopher and friend. Unfortunately, he has nearly always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and a very shallow philosopher. And the actual catastrophes we have suffered, including those we are now suffering, have not in historical fact been due to the prosaic practical people who are supposed to know nothing but almost invariably to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything.

To make this charge isn’t to denigrate scholarship and research. Rather it reminds us of an important point that is everywhere implicit in Chesterton’s writing: man’s insistence on his autonomy (the Christian doctrine of original sin) least affects those parts of life furthest in import to the human heart (for example, mathematics) and most affects those parts of life near and dear to the human heart (for example, relationships). Thus, man’s presumptive autonomy doesn’t alter the integers of any number but it severely alters the meaning of every marriage. I am reasonably content, therefore, to take the advice of an industrial chemist who tells me how much ethanol may be added to petrol, but I am very likely to question the pontifications of a sociologist, for instance, on religion, sexuality, parenting or personal identity. It is precisely on these more important areas of life that I want to have the rich thought of the bulk of humanity and not merely the narrow thought of the latest intellectual fashion.

One of the most admirable aspects of Chesterton’s life, and one that I would dearly like to emulate, is the way he was able to argue with individuals intensely and repeatedly, yet with affability and generosity rather than with animosity. No man disagreed with George Bernard Shaw more consistently than Chesterton; perhaps no man enjoyed Shaw’s friendship more sincerely than Chesterton. “I began to argue with Mr Bernard Shaw in print almost as early as I was able to do anything,” Chesterton exclaimed. But he added, “I have learned to have a warmer admiration and an affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement.”

Chesterton was able to do this because he differentiated clearly between the worthlessness of an idea and the worth of the person who expressed the idea. It is easy enough to affirm this differentiation as an ideal; but Chesterton managed to do the more difficult task: he maintained the distinction in the tumult and pressure of public debate where emotion, reputation and provocation conspire to obliterate that, or any other, fine line.

A complementary aspect of this characteristic of Chesterton’s is his willingness to recognise truth in contrary arguments and positions even when what is admirable is mixed with much that is foolish. This isn’t generosity; it’s epistemology. Chesterton said that one was more likely to recognise truth if one had a definite conception of what constitutes truth. The sceptic is handicapped in his generosity precisely because he is unwilling to let go of his uncertainty:

It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.

Thus, Chesterton could praise the vigour and power of Nietzsche’s prose even when he thought Nietzsche’s philosophy was “an aristocracy of weak nerves”.

Chesterton didn’t suffer from weak nerves because, unlike Nietzsche, he enjoyed the brimming mass of ebullient, beer-drinking, creed-making humanity. Chesterton was naturally generous, but his Christianity confirmed this characteristic because Christianity freed him from the merely fashionable. Chesterton could examine new ideas (or more often old ideas recycled as new ideas), noting both good and bad points based on a firm belief of what good and bad entailed, irrespective of the reputation, authority or charisma of the idea’s author. Or of the amount of heat, smoke and noise generated by the idea’s champions. And if an idea had to be towed out to sea and sunk with gunfire, Chesterton made sure he salvaged all that was worthwhile from the wreck before firing his salvos.

It was as a journalist that Chesterton became embroiled in the controversies of his day. But no newspaper he wrote for ever ran headlines like these: Couple Find Love-Making a Pleasure! Baby Delights Parents! Family Survives Picnic! No newspaper today runs headlines like these, but it was through reading Chesterton that I understood why. It is because goodness is prosaic; it is hardship, tragedy and sorrow that are dramatic. And these things are dramatic because they do not dominate life; they punctuate life. Goodness, joy, success, laughter, love and beauty are and have been the everyday experience for the overwhelming majority of people throughout history. Yes, terrible things happen, but they’re odd rather than normal. Life is essentially a positive experience because it comes from the hand of a generous God. Chesterton had faith in this divine generosity and so he stood the motto of the cynic on its head. Cynics, thinking they’re being grimly realistic but in fact being grimly unrealistic, say, “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” Chesterton said, “Expect nothing and you’ll be constantly delighted.” The cynic presupposes parsimony and ignores the generosity surrounding his own life. Chesterton presupposed provision and gave thanks for the routine abundance of gifts in his life.

Cynicism and joyless negativity were things that Chesterton despised. Yet a negative and despairing view of life almost defines the intellectual history of the past century. Think of any of the cultural giants of the twentieth century and what they share is a negative worldview: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman, Edward Albee, Federico Fellini, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera, Francis Bacon, Joseph Heller, Charles Bukowski and Philip Larkin, to take a sample just from literature and the visual arts, all proclaim man’s alienation and life’s absurdity. In their world, as opposed to the real world, man’s condition is one of ultimate futility. Their humour is black rather than joyous; their tone is melancholy rather than thankful: any dancing is idiotic and any love is doomed. But in pubs on a Saturday night and in kindergartens on any day the dancing is happily sane and spontaneous. And every night millions of lovers drift off to sleep with their arms gloriously around one another. The current intellectual fashion is a sad cult of despair; it doesn’t reflect the reality of the world but the poverty of a particular worldview.

Chesterton saw this dark, unnecessary despair and rejected it. Its proponents, and there are many today, think the world is a rock that got lucky and fluked life. They see life as tenuous rather than as intended. But the evidence suggests that life and all its varied wonders are intentional: even with the vandalism wrought by man, the world is not a desolate place but a home furnished for man. For example, rocks that can be refined and stretched into girders or made into motorbikes; bark that cures malaria; trees that bleed rubber; algae that make lipids; yeasts that convert starches into wonderful things like beer and bread; shrubs that melt into bricks; molluscs that make medicines; moulds that fight infection; sand you can see through; seeds that lend themselves to coffee and chocolate; beetles that can be squashed into lacquers and dyes; stale urine that cleans clothes; and cows that drip milk and fart fuel are just a minute fraction of the vast potentialities that surround us and support us.

If life is merely an accident then there is too much that shouldn’t exist. Secularists struggle to explain the strangely practical fabric of this world. It’s as if mankind has been let loose in an artist’s workshop in which we discover that anything can be turned into something useful, beautiful or edible. To see the world as a marvellously provisioned home with a nearly infinite number of features, utensils, forces and patterns does justice to the evidence. To see the world under constant threat of returning to a cold, sterile void with all life hanging by a thread does not do justice to the evidence of nature’s fecundity and of every culture’s endless discoveries and delights.

It is no wonder that so many people feel so robbed of hope, given that for over one hundred years credibility as a thinker, artist or philosopher was almost defined by a negative worldview. Philosophers told people, Chesterton said, that “The average man must be content with small joys because he is so uncertain of large joys.” He was a happy man himself because he was certain of large joys: he had faith in a wise, loving God; he believed he lived in an essentially good world; he insisted that laughter, feasting and friendship were not absurd but delightfully intended. And for all this Chesterton was astonished and thankful. He even enjoyed rain and being tired.

There are other things I’m learning from Chesterton, but in everything there are appropriate limits, including the length of an essay. This rejoicing in limits—to see what can be done with delightful thrift—is one of Chesterton’s romantic ideals because it is one of God’s gifts to man: to live with limits in a finite world. And I realise I have not included quotes from Chesterton scholars to provide authority for my points. But this lapse is itself in honour of another of Chesterton’s precepts:

After all, what we want is direct and individual impressions of primary objects, whether pine trees or poets, and not an endless succession of critics learning from critics how to criticise.

Gary Furnell wrote on Charles Bukowski in the September issue, and his latest story appeared in the July-August issue.