"His vices were his virtues"

"MEN DID WICKED THINGS in all parts of the world, including the most Christian parts of the world. But they seldom thought they were behaving like Christians. A man broke treaties, trampled on enemies, or betrayed friends, because he was ready to be contemned; he did not expect to be respected. The notion of his being actually admired as a strong man, merely because he behaved like a selfish man, is a notion so new that I can myself remember it rising steadily, like a new religion, in the late Victorian time. I can myself recall the transition in literary fashions from the dull but decent morality of Macaulay to the picturesque but barbarous mysticism of Carlyle. The school of Macaulay would balance the virtues and vices of William Rufus or Warren Hastings; but for the school of Carlyle his vices were his virtues. These great men of letters had long been dead when the process began to penetrate everywhere; but the forms it took everywhere were the more clearly the fashion because they were both variegated and vulgar. We had the praise of the colonial and commercial expansionist, of the imaginative imperial financier—a kind of pawnbroker who not only received stolen goods, but bribed the policeman to steal them. We had plays and novels about the strong-minded employer of labour, who seemed to think himself astonishingly virile because he could manage to starve a man in a siege, when he would never venture to hit him in a fight."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Dec. 15, 1917.

G.K.C.

"The internationalist and the imperialist"

"THE internationalist and the imperialist are not only similar men, but even the same men. There is no country which the Imperialist may not claim to conquer in order to convert. There is no country which the Internationalist may not claim to convert in order to conquer. Whether it is called international law or imperial law, it is the very soul and essence of all lawlessness. Against all such amorphous anarchy stands that great and positive creation of Christendom, the nation, with its standards of liberty and loyalty, with its limits of reason and proportion."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Oct. 5, 1918.

"If St. John the Baptist had wished to avoid being beheaded"

"THE HISTORICAL CASE for the Resurrection is that everybody else, except the Apostles, had every possible motive to declare what they had done with the body, if anything had been done with it. The Apostles might have hidden it in order to announce a sham miracle, but it is very difficult to imagine men being tortured and killed for the truth of a miracle which they knew to be a sham. In the case of the Apostles' testimony, the general circumstances suggest that it is true. In the case of the Arabian tale, the general circumstances avow and proclaim that it is false. For we are told in the book itself that all the stories were told by a woman merely to amuse the king and distract his attention from the idea of cutting off her head. A romancer in this personal situation is not very likely to confine herself strictly to humdrum accuracy, and it would be impossible more plainly to warn the reader that all the tales are taradiddles. In the one case, then, we have witnesses who not only think the thing true, but do veritably think it is as true as death, or truer than death. They therefore prefer death to the denial of its truth. In the other case we have a story-teller who, in trying to avoid death, has every motive to tell lies. If St. John the Baptist had wished to avoid being beheaded, and had saved his life by inventing a long string of Messianic or Early Christian legends on the spur of the moment, in order to hold the attention of King Herod, I should not regard any "resurrection myth" he might tell as a strong historical argument for the Resurrection. But, as the Apostles were killed as St. John was killed, I think their evidence cannot be identified by sound scholarship as a portion of the Arabian Nights."

~G.K. Chesterton:  As I Was Saying, X. 'About Beliefs'.

St. John the Baptist, by Pietro Bernini.
Marble, 1612-15; Sant'Andrea della Valle, Rome.

"To decree inhumanity in humanitarian language"

"IT IS just as easy to massacre men in the name of Man as to burn churches in the name of God. It is as feasible to decree inhumanity in humanitarian language as to decree sacrilege in sacred language."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 10, 1919.

"The only defensible war"

"IT IS NOT the point to put wild and visionary questions about whether the world has been vastly improved by the War; whether Utopia or the New Jerusalem have come out of the War; to ask in that apocalyptic fashion what has come out of the War. We have come out of the War, and come out alive; England and Europe have come out of the War, with all their sins on their heads, confused, corrupted, degraded; but not dead. The only defensible war is a war of defence. And a war of defence, by its very definition and nature, is one from which a man comes back battered and bleeding and only boasting that he is not dead."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Autobiography.

"The Barbarian"

"The Barbarian is very little affected by the flag under which he marches to slay and spoil. For practical purposes the Barbarian is the man who does not believe in chivalry in war or charity in peace; and, above all, who does not believe in modesty in anything."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, July 31, 1920.

“The war upon life, the denial of nature”

“THE Church was not a Manichean movement if only because it was not a movement at all. It was not even merely an ascetical movement, because it was not a movement at all. It would be nearer the truth to call it the tamer of asceticism than the mere leader or loosener of it. It was a thing having its own theory of asceticism, its own type of asceticism, but most conspicuous at the moment as the moderator of other theories and types. This is the only sense that can be made, for instance, of the story of St. Augustine. As long as he was a mere man of the world, a mere man drifting with his time, he actually was a Manichean. It really was quite modern and fashionable to be a Manichean. But when he became a Catholic, the people he instantly turned on and rent in pieces were the Manicheans. The Catholic way of putting it is that he left off being a pessimist to become an ascetic. But as the pessimists interpreted asceticism, it ought to be said that he left off being an ascetic to become a saint. The war upon life, the denial of nature, were exactly the things he had already found in the heathen world outside the Church, and had to renounce when he entered the Church. The very fact that St. Augustine remains a somewhat sterner or sadder figure than St. Francis or St. Teresa only accentuates the dilemma. Face to face with the gravest or even grimmest of Catholics, we can still ask, 'Why did Catholicism make war on Manichees, if Catholicism was Manichean?'"

~G.K. Chesterton:  The Everlasting Man.

Polyptych of St. Augustine, St. Augustine, by Piero Dello Francesca.
Tempera on panel, c. 1465; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon.