Category Archives: Chesterton

Religion and Liberty

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We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty of allowing us a religion. These people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But the mood would exist even without the creed. They say they want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion. They say they want a religion like this because they are like this already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do without it. G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion h/t: The Anchoress

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“Benevolent lawlessness”

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Anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of the world — the private house — it does work well. We modern men are perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale; in short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant. And they have always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not governed at all. “Whenever you have a real difficulty,” they say, “when a boy is bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody, or a wicked man won’t marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and British Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight.” So, at least, rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.

G.K. Chesterton (1910) What’s Wrong with the World.

h/t: The Hebdomadal Chesterton.

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“A kind of encouragement”

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Heathen and Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind in walking.

The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.

In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite another matter, it is amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy. The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage. In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because it is essentially discouraging.

G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

h/t: The Hebdomadal Chesterton

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Chesterton on the American Character

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The American’s a hustler, for he says so,
And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so
Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest,
He’ll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
He calls her a Stenographer for short.

He is never known to loiter or malinger,
He rushes, for he knows he has “a date” ;
He is always on the spot and full of ginger,
Which is why he is invariably late.
When he guesses that it’s getting even later,
His vocabulary’s vehement and swift,
And he yells for what he calls the Elevator,
A slang abbreviation for a lift.

Then nothing can be nattier or nicer
For those who like a light and rapid style.
Than to trifle with a work of Mr Dreiser
As it comes along in waggons by the mile.
He has taught us what a swift selective art meant
By description of his dinners and all that,
And his dwelling, which he says is an Apartment,
Because he cannot stop to say a flat.

We may whisper of his wild precipitation,
That it’s speed in rather longer than a span,
But there really is a definite occasion
When he does not use the longest word he can.
When he substitutes, I freely make admission,
One shorter and much easier to spell ;
If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition,
He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell.

G. K Chesterton (c. 1920′s),  A Ballad of Abbreviations

h/t: Hebdomadal Chesterton

 

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“After all, what is liberty?”

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Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I say that to take away a poor man’s pot of beer is to take away a poor man’s personal liberty, it is very vital to note what is the usual or almost universal reply. People hardly ever do reply, for some reason or other, by saying that a man’s liberty consists of such and such things, but that beer is an exception that cannot be classed among them, for such and such reasons. What they almost in variably do say is something like this. “After all, what is liberty? Man must live as a member of a society, and must obey those laws which, etc., etc.” In other words, they collapse into a complete confession that they are attacking all liberty and any liberty; that they do deny the very existence or the very possibility of liberty. In the very form of the answer they admit the full scope of the accusation against them. In trying to rebut the smaller accusation, they plead guilty to the larger one.

This distinction is very important, as can be seen from any practical parallel. Suppose we wake up in the middle of the night and find that a neighbor has entered the house not by the front-door but by the skylight; we may suspect that he has come after the fine old family jewellery. We may be reassured if he can refer it to a really exceptional event; as that he fell on to the roof out of an aeroplane, or climbed on to the roof to escape from a mad dog. Short of the incredible, the stranger the story the better the excuse; for an extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse. But we shall hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful fashion and says, “After all, what is property? Why should material objects be thus artificially attached, etc., etc.?” We shall merely realize that his attitude allows of his taking the jewellery and everything else. Or if the neighbour approaches us carrying a large knife dripping with blood, we may be convinced by his story that he killed another neighbour in self-defence, that the quiet gentleman next door was really a homicidal maniac. We shall know that homicidal mania is exceptional and that we ourselves are so happy as not to suffer from it, and being free from the disease may be free from the danger. But it will not soothe us for the man with the gory knife to say softly and pensively, “After all, what is human life? Why should we cling to it? Brief at the best, sad at the brightest, it is itself but a disease from which, etc., etc.” We shall perceive that the sceptic is in a mood not only to murder us but to massacre everybody in the street.

Exactly the same effect which would be produced by the questions of “What is property?” and “What is life?” is produced by the question of “What is liberty?” It leaves the questioner free to disregard any liberty, or in other words to take any liberties. The very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may choose to do. If he gags a man to prevent him from indulging in profane swearing, or locks him in the coal cellar to guard against his going on the spree, he can still be satisfied with saying “After all, what is liberty? Man is a member of, etc., etc.”

– Eugenics and Other Evils (1922).

From: The Hebdomadal Chesterton

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“The way to respect a religion”

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We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are the consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem — “Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To which he naturally replies — “But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.”

– G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 13 May 1911

 

h/t: The Hebdomadal Chesterton

 

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G.K. Chesterton: What Ails Us and Its Cure

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The more I read G. K. Chesterton, the more I like his work. What I find most attractive in his writing is whimsy.  “Angels can fly,” he once observed, “because they take themselves lightly.”  Like the angels Chesterton takes himself lightly. His work is marked by a sense of humility that (in my experience at least) is the fruit of two things: prayerful self-knowledge and wholesome self-acceptance in Christ. Put another way, he writes as only one who has truly and deeply repented can write. And if Chesterton (who I understand some Catholics have recommended be declared a saint and doctor of the Catholic Church) takes himself lightly, he takes the Gospel and its defense with the utmost seriousness.

Humility and whimsy are fine things in themselves and their combination in one man is rare. Rarer still, however, is Chesterton’s ability to take seriously his opponents criticisms of the Gospel.  He is able to do this because he approaches the Church as he approaches himself. This allows him not simply to acknowledge the immediately truth of a criticism but to see the deeper truth that such criticism invariably misses about both the Church and about humanity. Continue reading →

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“Deep and tenacious human habits”

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The sexes tend, without any coercion, to come together. Consequently, in all moralising or legislating about sex, we must constantly allow for an element that does not exist in any other caste, section, or division. When we see that a chief wears a sword, while his serf does not wear a sword, we shall be roughly safe in supposing that this is because the lord prefers the serf swordless. When we see (in pretty recent Irish history) an Englishman allowed to carry firearms, but an Irishman not allowed to carry firearms, we may venture timidly to suppose that it is the Englishman who has arranged this, and not the Irishman. But it is not true that when we find the man smoking a pipe and the woman not smoking one that the veto must have come from the man. It may have come from the differentiation demanded on each side by the desire to attract the other.

No tyrants wish to please their slaves, and few sensible slaves do much to please their tyrants; and for this reason men and women never have been, and never can be, merely in the relationship of tyrants and slaves. There may have been a good deal of tyranny mixed up with it; there has been, and not male tyranny only. But this evil element can never be detected or destroyed but by a sane analysis, which will recognize the element of inevitable attraction. Marriage is not a hammer, but a magnet. The family does not rest on force, but on sex. And the upshot of it is that most of the ancient customs of the sexes are conveniences: not things imposed by one party, but things equally desired by both. I am not here speaking of laws and statutes (many of which, I think, are really unjust), but of certain deep and tenacious human habits, as the disproportionate emphasis on bodily dignity in the female or bodily hardihood in the male. These were never imposed; they are the oldest and freest things in the world.

 G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 29 April 1911.

From: The Hebdomadal Chesterton

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