Thorough and Satisfying

Yes, in spiked online, Zac Alstin writes:

Ian Ker’s GK Chesterton: A Biography is a most thorough and satisfying account of the unique and beloved English journalist and author. Those whose knowledge of GKC is confined to the great man’s own words might tend to regard him as a somewhat otherworldly figure. In Ker’s biography we find Chesterton’s words balanced and grounded in the details of his everyday life, to such an extent that one review has even accused Ker’s book of making Chesterton ‘sound boring’. Notwithstanding his friendship or acquaintance with various literary luminaries, from Shaw and Wells, to Henry and William James, WB Yeats, Kipling, Russell and a host of other contemporaries, beyond his writing GKC did not lead the most exciting life.

We are talking, after all, about a man who elevated the ordinary and commonplace to a mystical stature; who, besides his acclaimed work on Dickens, St Thomas Aquinas, his Father Brown detective stories, well-known novels and revered apologetic works, also wrote articles about lying in bed, a piece of chalk, and ‘what I found in my pocket’. For the sympathetic reader, the details of travel, adventures abroad, and daily life at home should prove no more burdensome than similar accounts from good friends and relatives. The challenge in writing the biography of such a ‘larger than life’ character is surely to provide enough ‘life’ to bring him back down to human size.

To be in sympathy with GKC is no simple accomplishment. While Chesterton fans extol his virtues without reservation, the unfortunate reality is that many who encounter his work are unimpressed by it. Many simply do not ‘get’ Chesterton, and by some sort of unspoken truce, agree with us fanatics never to speak of him again. Yet the truce is sometimes broken, and individuals with no sympathy for the man try haplessly to reduce him to some rather prosaic characteristic. Attempts to describe him as ‘amusing’ or ‘witty’, or to focus on an element like paradox, miss the point as much as Christopher Hitchens’ disappointing effort to portray Chesterton as a ‘sinister’ and ‘morally frivolous’ reactionary.

Chesterton may have been amusing, witty and prone to deploy paradox, but these attributes must be seen as accidental, as by-products of a much deeper and more significant effort. As GKC replied to a query about his use of paradox:

I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, the thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called ‘Paradox Lost’.

The driving force behind his ‘wearisome and obvious common sense’ was a period of intense internal struggle that can only be described as mystical in its conclusion. Ker quotes from Chesterton’s Autobiography to depict the ‘psychological and spiritual crisis’ that established the living heart of Chesterton’s unique philosophy:

After having been for some time in ‘the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism’, he had ‘a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare’. And he came, ‘with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion’, to invent ‘a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own’, namely, that ‘even mere existence…was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent compared with nothing.’

This ‘mystical theory’ was more than just words, and certainly not an affected or fabricated approach to life. Ker underscores the significance of Chesterton’s perspective in the context of a decadent nihilism or pessimism among Chesterton’s contemporaries. Chesterton rejected the elitist intellectual and moral scepticism of his peers, but not before he envisaged their logical conclusion in the form of pure scepticism – the rejection of any and all knowledge claims. ‘Dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind.’

It was typical of Chesterton to take so seriously the philosophical tenets put forward by his peers, and on their own terms to find them wanting. He realised that the sceptics who embraced atheism and materialism were insufficiently sceptical. He recapitulated his critique of pure scepticism many years later in his analysis of the great medieval theologian St Thomas Aquinas, stating that he did not ‘deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real’. Instead, he explains, Aquinas ‘recognised instantly…that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask’.

But Chesterton did not replace scepticism with another theory. He describes his change in far more profound terms. As he wrote to his friend Bentley in the wake of the crisis:

Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries, came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result was that I found that things, when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of mind, that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. The frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not do for long. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.

Having found the answer to his great doubt, Chesterton returned to it repeatedly, to puncture the complacent, dreary and flawed intellectual follies of his age. His insight, more than any theory or style, underpins his work. His mysticism is the genius that shines through in so much of his writing, acting as an anchor or a bulwark against the truly weird and sinister fads of his generation, from eugenic elitism to socialist utopianism. These ideologies were easily outmatched by a man who sought a far more profound goal: to make people ‘turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learned to ignore’.

While Chesterton’s theology and philosophy continued to grow, his formative mystical experience remained a philosophers’ stone, transforming the ordinary, the common and the mundane with awe and delight at the gift of existence. As he asks at the beginning of Orthodoxy: ‘How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?’

His mystical theory informed his intellect, leading him to insights and observations seemingly beyond the scope of his knowledge and study. Ker describes at length Chesterton’s major work on St Thomas Aquinas which, to the dismay of at least one expert, Chesterton dictated in two sittings, stopping only at the half-way point to order reference materials. The expert in question, Étienne Gilson, remarked that ‘Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.’ Gilson later described Chesterton’s book as being ‘without possible comparison the best book ever written on St Thomas’.

Many of Chesterton’s depictions of Aquinas could apply equally well to himself, as he describes a mind ‘which is filled and soaked as with sunshine with the warmth of the wonder of created things’ and ‘avid in his acceptance of Things; in his hunger and thirst for Things’. The philosophical realism of Aquinas seems to consolidate Chesterton’s own ‘makeshift mystical theory’, a fact not lost on Ker, who describes Aquinas’ mind, as ‘perceived by Chesterton, as ‘highly congenial to his own in its insistence on the fact of being, in its commitment not only to reason but also to common sense’. Like Aquinas, Chesterton was ‘so unmistakably thinking about things and not being misled by the indirect influence of words’.

To ‘get’ Chesterton requires of a reader that he likewise grasp to some degree the real Things behind the words. It demands, perhaps, a willingness to appreciate the ‘strangeness of things’ and to savour the freshness and immediacy of being, instead of taking refuge within pre-conceived ideas, intellectual fads, and our favoured ideologies. The Chesterton fanatic finds in his words the gleam of something more true than the words themselves. His writing stands the test of time because, unlike the changing errors of each age, the existence that inspired him is eternal.

Chesterton fanatics are indebted to Ian Ker for this exhaustive chronicle of the life and times of our hero. Not only is it a boon to those who already love the man’s work, but it is, perhaps, a more accessible and historically informed means by which the unfamiliar reader may become acquainted with Chesterton’s unique work. As for those who simply don’t ‘get’ Chesterton, in Ker’s biography they will find the true gravity of the dangerous convictions that darkened Chesterton’s age, and the seriousness and integrity of the man who sought to combat the nascent terrors that went on by their scars to define the twentieth century.

In his The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, the same Fr Ker proposes “a new way of looking at Chesterton’s literary achievement which has gone by default.” He sees the author of the Father Brown stories, and even of The Man Who Was Thursday, as “a fairly slight figure.” But Chesterton the non-fiction writer is “a successor of the great Victorian “sages” or “prophets”, who was indeed compared to Dr Johnson in his own lifetime, and who can be mentioned without exaggeration in the same breath as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and especially, of course, Newman.”

Fr Ker identifies Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chesterton’s best work and as the key to understanding his Catholicism. “It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos that is the heart of Chesterton’s critical study.”

First, Chesterton’s Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living and even sheer being. He was originally a “higher optimist” whose “joy is in inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing,” because he simply “falls in love with” the universe, and “those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.” Hence the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, expressing both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who looks at the world in this way.

For, secondly, Dickens created “holy fools”: Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, to name but a few. And Dickens also “created a personal devil in every one of his books,” figures with the “atrocious hilarity” of gargoyles. In either case, since the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary, and since extraordinary things are so much a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd. Postmodern, or what? Read Dickens, then read Chesterton on Dickens, and then re-read Dickens: who needs wilful French obscurantism in the name of “irony”?

And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his “pallid” contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and “Gothicists”, whose “subtlety and sadness” was in fact “the spirit of the present day” after all. It was Dickens who “had the things of Chaucer”: “the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England”; “story within story, every man telling a tale”; and “something openly comic in men’s motley trades”. Dickens’s defence of Christmas was a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.”

Fr Ker traces these themes in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. The former presents Catholicism, in profoundly Dickensian terms, as “that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly termed romance”, which meets the need “so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.” Yet so to view the world is precisely to realise “that there is something the matter”, which is why pagans have always been “conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else”, since (and this is obviously much more controversial) Original Sin “in the only part of Christian theology which can be proved,” so that “the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition”, but rather “the normal itself is an abnormality.” Once again, this is like Postmodernism, only older, wiser, better.

Better not least because, for Chesterton, it was this view of the world’s flawed goodness that made Dickens a social reformer, since he recognised people’s degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity “fond of this world, even in order to change it”, in contrast to simple (one might say, Whig or Marxist) optimism or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which discourages reform. We have to “hate [the world] enough to want to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing”, for it is “at once an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.”

Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view, uniquely, as all of Christianity’s critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox “in the hearts of men, God has been put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.” Furthermore, “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling”, since “a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution.”

Chesterton extends this concept of limits as necessary to freedom, to the explicitly theological. Liberal Protestants are most illiberal, wishing to diminish rather than to increase the number of miracles, and to disbelieve in things rather than to believe in them, so as to curtail “the liberty of God.” Orthodoxy is here the limit necessary for liberty: Calvinism reserved it to God; and now scientific materialism, in succession, “binds the Creator Himself”. But Catholicism holds to the spiritual freedom both of God and of Man, whence we proceed onto the familiar ground of “the democracy of the dead” and all that.

Fr Ker shows these themes as continued in Chesterton’s books on Chaucer, and on Saint Francis of Assisi, who stands against the evolutionary or pantheistic view of nature as “a solemn Mother”, instead recognising her as “a little dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.” Supremely, though, they are re-expressed in Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933). That Doctor gave it its definitive philosophical formulation, since “the primary or fundamental Part” of Thomism “or indeed the Catholic Philosophy” is “the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World.”

Alas that Chesterton defines Aquinas against the Christianised Neoplatonism of the Augustinian illuminist tradition, rather than recognising Thomism’s Christianised Aristotelianism as nevertheless belonging within, and greatly enriching, that tradition. Had Chesterton done this, then he would have been quite astonishingly prescient in this as in so many other areas. However, what Chesterton writes about Thomism as the definitive philosophical articulation of the world-view that he shares, and argues convincingly was shared by Dickens, is of course entirely correct.

What would it mean to revisit each of the great public intellectuals, from Dr Johnson onwards, on Chesterton’s terms? How might one re-read each Dickens novel in turn in the light of Chesterton’s insights? What else may be re-read, or re-understood in any other medium, in that same light, as standing in that same tradition? Is The Man Who Was Thursday really so “slight” a novel? Is Chesterton really only a minor poet? Cannot the things that can be said about Belloc’s prescience with regard to the study of the Reformation also be said about Chesterton’s Short History of England?

And what of Thomism as the perennial philosophy of the Dickensian-Chestertonian world-view, as it surely is? Thomism is now recognised as within and not opposed to Augustinianism. Meanwhile, Blessed John Paul the Great in Fides et Ratio commended at once Thomism (paragraphs 43 and 44) and the works of Newman, Rosmini, Stein and Russians of various stripes alongside Maritain and Gilson (paragraph 74), not to mention engagement with Indian and other non-Western philosophies (paragraph 73).