Philosophy & Theology

The Four Philosophers, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on canvas,
A.D. 1611-12 Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

"MEN talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, to the point, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters; they alone lie open to all attacks. All other sciences may, while studying their own, laugh at the rag-tag and bobtail of other sciences. An astronomer may sneer at animalculae, which are very like stars; an entomologist may scorn the stars, which are very like animalculae. Physiologists may think it dirty to grub about in the grass; botanists may think it dirtier to grub about in an animal's inside. But there is nothing that is not relevant to these more ancient studies. There is no detail, from buttons to kangaroos, that does not enter into the gay confusion of philosophy, there is no fact of life, from the death of a donkey to the General Post Office, which has not its place to dance and sing in, in the glorious Carnival of theology."

~G.K. Chesterton: G.F. Watts

Theology (ceiling tondo) by Raffaelo Sanzio. Fresco, A.D. 1509-11.
Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican

THE INSIDE OF LIFE

THE news that some Europeans have been wrecked on a desert island is gratifying, in so far as it shows that there are still some desert islands for us to be wrecked on. Moreover, it is also interesting because these, the latest facts, also support the oldest stories. For instance, superior critics have often sniffed at the labours of Robinson Crusoe, specifically upon the ground that he depended so much upon stores from the sunken wreck. But these actual people shipwrecked a few weeks ago depended entirely upon them; and yet the critics might not have cared for the billet. A few years ago, when physical science was taken very seriously, a clever boys’ book was written, called ‘Perseverance Island’. It was written in order to show how ‘Robinson Crusoe’ ought to have been written. In this story, the wrecked man gained practically nothing from the wreck. He made everything out of the brute materials of the island.

As a matter of fact, of course, it is quite unfair to compare ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with such boys’ books as ‘Perseverance Island’, or even ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, not only because it is much greater literature, but because it is literature with an entirely different aim. To lump it with the others because they all occurred on a desert island is no better than comparing ‘Wuthering Heights’ with ‘Northanger Abbey’ because both concern an old country house; or bracketing ‘Salem Chapel’ with ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ because they are both about a church. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is not a story of adventure; rather it is a story of the absence of adventure — that is, in the first and best part of it. Twice Crusoe runs away to sea in disobedience, and twice escapes with wreck or other peril; the third time we feel that he is set apart for some strange judgement by God. And the strange judgement is the great central and poetical idea of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. It is a visitation not of danger but of a dreadful security. The salvage of Crusoe’s goods, the comparative comfort of his life, the natural riches of his island, his human relations with many of the animals — all this is an exquisitely artistic setting for the awful idea of a man whom God has cast out from among men. A mere scurry of adventures would have left Crusoe no time for thinking; and the whole object of the book is to make Crusoe think. It is true that, later in the story, Defoe entangles him with Indians and Spaniards; and for that very reason I think the story loses the naked nobility of its original idea. It is absurd to compare a book like this with ordinary stories about schooners and palm-trees, cutlasses and scalps. It was not an adventurous life but an unadventurous life that was the doom and curse of Crusoe.

But this, perhaps, is wandering from the subject — if there is a subject. Let us try to get back to the desert island and the moral to be drawn from all the happy Australians and their adventure. The first and most important point is this: that when one reads of these forty-five persons tipped out into an empty island in the Pacific, one’s first and instantaneous flash of feeling is one of envy. Afterwards one remembers that there would doubtless be inconveniences; that the sun is hot, that awnings give you no shelter until you have put them up; that biscuits and tinned meat might begin to taste monotonous, and that the most adventurous person, having got on to the island, would before very long begin to turn his thoughts to the problem of getting off again. But the fact remains that before all these reflections the soul of man has said like the snap of a gun, ‘How jolly!’ I think this instinct in humanity is somewhat interesting; it may be worth while to analyse this secret desire to be wrecked on an island.

The feeling partly arises from an idea which is at the root of all the arts — the idea of separation. Romance seeks to divide certain people from the lump of humanity, as the statue is divided from the lump of marble. We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys — instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.

I do not believe that there are any ordinary people. That is, I do not believe that there are any people whose lives are really humdrum or whose characters are really colourless. But the trouble is that one can so quickly see them all in a lump, like a land surveyor, and it would take so long to see them one by one as they really are, like a great novelist. Looking out of the window, I see a very steep little street, with a row of prim little houses breaking their necks downhill in the most decorous single file. If I were landlord of that street, or a visiting philanthropist making myself objectionable down that street, I could easily take it all in at a glance, sum it all up and say, ‘Houses at £40 a year.’ But suppose I could be father confessor to that Street, how awful and altered it would look! Each house would be sundered from its neighbour as by an earthquake and would stand alone in a wilderness of the soul. I should know that in this house a man was going mad with drink, that in that a man had kept single for a woman, that in the next a woman was on the edge of abysses, that in the next a woman was living an unknown life which might in more devout ages have been gilded in hagiographies and made the fountain of miracles. People talk much of the quarrel between science and religion; but the deepest difference is that the individual is so much bigger than the average, that the inside of life is much larger than the outside.

Often when riding with three or four strangers on the top of an omnibus I have felt a wild impulse to throw the driver off his seat, to drive the omnibus far out into the country and tip them all out into a field, and say, ‘We may never meet again in this world; come, let us under stand each other.’ I do not affirm that the experiment would succeed, but I think the impulse to do it is at the root of all the tradition of the poetry of wrecks and islands.

~ G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News (1908)

IN OCTOBER

WHERE are they gone that did delight in honour
Abrupt and absolute as an epic ends,
What light of the Last Things, like death at morning,
Crowns the true lovers and the tragic friends?

Young priests with eager faces bright as eagles,
Poor scholars of the harp-string, strict and strong,
All the huge thirst of things irrevocable
And all the intolerant innocence that died young.

The dark largesse of the last gesture flinging
The glove in challenge or gold in sacrifice—
Where are they gone that had delight in honour,
That the world grows so greedy and so wise?

Vow and averted head and high refusal
Clean as the chasm where the dawn burns white,
Where shall they go that have delight in honour
When all men honour nothing but delight?

Out of the infinite came Finality,
Freedom that makes unfathomably sure,
For only a wind of all the widest windows
Can close with such a clang that iron door:

The doors that cannot shut shall never open
Nor men make windows when they make not walls,
Though emptiness extend its endless prison
In the white nightmare of its lengthening halls.

Shall they not rise and seek beyond the mountains
That which unsays not and is not forsworn?
Where should they wander and in what other Eden
Find the lost happiness of the hope forlorn,

Look in what other face for understanding,
But hers who bore the Child that brought the Sword,
Hang in what other house, trophy and tribute,
The broken heart and the unbroken word?

This month of luminous and golden ruin
Lit long ago the galleys and the guns.
Here is there nothing but such loitering rhyme
As down the blank of barren paper runs,
As I write now, O Lady of Last Assurance,
Light in the laurels, sunrise of the dead,
Wind of the ships and lightning of Lepanto,
In honour of Thee, to whom all honour is fled.

~G.K. Chesterton

(Artwork: Madonna of the Rose Garden, by Stefan Lochner. Oil on panel, c. 1440; Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.)

Modern Journalism

• "The new method of journalism is to offer so many comments or, at least, secondary circumstances that there is actually no room left for the original facts."

—Illustrated London News, Nov. 6, 1909.

• "If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot."

—What's Wrong with the World, Chap. III—The New Hypocrite. (1910)

~G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton on Politicians and Government

● "Representative government has many minor disadvantages, one of them being that it is never representative." ─ in 'Charles Dickens.'

● "The trouble with modern England is not how many or how few people vote. It is that, however many people vote, a small ring of administrators do what they please."
─ quoted in 'The Colonist,' Oct. 27, 1909.

● "I know that most politicians are engaged in trying to imitate the other politicians, which cannot be considered as a school of virtue." 
─ 'Illustrated London News,' July 9, 1910.

● "The modern representative not only does not represent his constituents—he does not even represent himself." ─ 'Illustrated London News,' Aug. 31, 1912.

● "I WOULD rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.”
— 'Illustrated London News,' Aug. 31, 1912.

● “When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.” ─ 'Illustrated London News,' March 6, 1918.

● “It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.” 
─ 'A Short History of England.'

● "It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”
─ 'Illustrated London News,' August 17, 1918.

● "The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged." ─ 'Cleveland Press' interview, March 1, 1921.

● "Politicians have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past." ─ 'Illustrated London News,' June 10, 1933.

● "He was very public, as public men go; but they all seem to become hazier as they mount higher. It is the young and unknown who have decisive doctrines and sharply declared intentions. I once expressed it by saying, I think with some truth, that politicians have no politics." ─ 'Autobiography.'

● "Everybody is familiar with jeers against politicians, jokes about political payments, journalistic allusions to the sale of honours or the Secret Party Fund; above all, nobody is now shocked by them. Perhaps it would be better if they were shocked, or in other words shamed by them. If they were ashamed of them, they might possibly make some attempt to alter them." ─ 'Autobiography.'

● "The worst sort of politicians could play any game they liked with the honour of England and the happiness of Europe, if they were backed and boomed by some vulgar monopolist millionaire; and these insolent interests nearly brought us to a crash in the supreme crisis of our history; because Parliament had come to mean only a secret government by the rich." 
─ 'Autobiography.'

~G.K. Chesterton

VISION

"He was a man of vision; he foresaw London's development and made a fortune out of building-land."

(Example of respect for the dead as conceived by the modern capitalist journalist, on whom alone be all responsibility for the comment.)

WHERE there is no Vision
The people perish
. . . Restrain your rude derision,
Where there is no Vision
When they state with such precision
The Hope they cherish.
Where there is no Vision
The people perish.

~G.K. Chesterton
(1934)

TRANSFIGURATION

"JOY, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

Artwork: Transfiguration, by Marco Benefial. Oil on canvas, c. 1730. Sant'Andrea, Vetralla.