The right reader for the right book

I have had ‘Miss Bodle’s colleague’ in my daily prayers for a long time now: is that the same young man you mention in your letter of July 3rd, or do I now say ‘colleagues’? Yes: don’t bother him with my books if an aunt (it somehow would be an aunt—though I must add that most of my aunts were delightful) has been ramming them down his throat.

You know, The Pilgrim’s Progress is not, I find (to my surprise) everyone’s book. I know several people who are both Christians and lovers of literature who can’t bear it. I doubt if they were made to read it as children. Indeed, I rather wonder whether that ‘being made to read it’ has spoiled so many books as is supposed. I suspect that all the people who tell me they were ‘put off’ Scott by having Ivanhoe as a holiday task are people who would never have liked Scott anyway.

I don’t believe anything will keep the right reader and the right book apart. But our literary loves are as diverse as our human! You couldn’t make me like Henry James or dislike Jane Austen whatever you did. By the bye did Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (I’m sure I advised you to read it) succeed or fail with you?

From The Collected Letters of C S Lewis, Vol III

Things forbidden, things permitted

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence…of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted, precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things are forbidden.

An optimist who insisted on a purely positive morality would have to begin (supposing he knew where to begin) by telling a man that he might pick dandelions on a common, and go on for months before he came to the fact that he might throw pebbles into the sea; and then resume his untiring efforts by issuing a general permission to sneeze, to make snowballs, to blow bubbles, to play marbles, to make toy aeroplanes … and everything else he could think of, without ever coming to an end. 

In comparison with this positive morality, the Ten Commandments rather shine in that brevity which is the soul of wit. It is better to tell a man not to steal than to try to tell him the thousand things that he can enjoy without stealing; especially as he can generally be pretty well trusted to enjoy them. 

(The Complete Works of G K Chesterton [Ignatius Press, 1989], 32:18)

Mystery with mystery

Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles, but he is comforted. For when he who doubts can only say, 'I do not understand,' it is true he who knows can only reply or repeat, 'You do not understand.' And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart, and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.

G K Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, chapter 4.

Worshipping the god within

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. . . . (A)ny one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre know how it does work.  That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. . . .   

Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.  The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. 

G. K. Chesterton, "The Flag of the World,"  Collected Works, Volume I 

Chesterton struggles with the freethinkers

I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying about; . . . .  I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. . . . Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the freethinkers unsettled the mind.  They do.  They unsettled mine horribly.  The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished reading Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.  As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought  broke across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."  I was in a dreadful way.

....I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting.  The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. . . . In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels.  The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep.  I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I would have gone on believing it.  I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned upside down.  Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much.  Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars.  Christianity had deluged the world with blood.  I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian because he was never angry.  And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun.  The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. 

...But then I found an astonishing thing.  I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.  If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clear round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstition of savages.  I found that it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark.  But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people [Western Europeans], and had left all others to die in the dark.  Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. . . .

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. 

G. K. Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity,"  Collected Works, Volume I. Quotes from pages 288-292 ff

Chesterton on Evolution

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. . . . It means there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think is you are not separate from the subject of thought.

Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."  

G. K. Chesterton in Collected Works. Volume I: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Blatchford Controversies.  (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 239f.]

The place to start

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs... Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

G.K. Chesterton 

What's Wrong with the World

Books to one's own taste

I have had ‘Miss Bodle’s colleague’ in my daily prayers for a long time now: is that the same young man you mention in your letter of, or do I now say ‘colleagues’? Yes: don’t bother him with my books if an aunt (it somehow would be an aunt—though I must add that most of my aunts were delightful) has been ramming them down his throat.

You know, The Pilgrim’s Progress is not, I find (to my surprise) everyone’s book. I know several people who are both Christians and lovers of literature who can’t bear it. I doubt if they were made to read it as children. Indeed, I rather wonder whether that ‘being made to read it’ has spoiled so many books as is supposed. I suspect that all the people who tell me they were ‘put off’ Scott by having Ivanhoe as a holiday task are people who would never have liked Scott anyway.

I don’t believe anything will keep the right reader and the right book apart. But our literary loves are as diverse as our human! You couldn’t make me like Henry James or dislike Jane Austen whatever you did. By the bye did Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (I’m sure I advised you to read it) succeed or fail with you?

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack

Loving Christ

But as St Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea.

From page 17 of St Francis of Assisi, by G K Chesterton.

Sticking with the principles

It was the idea that the scientist should go on exploring and experimenting freely, so long as he did not claim an infallibility and finality which it was against his own principles to claim. Meanwhile the Church should go on developing and defining, about supernatural things, so long as she did not claim a right to alter the deposit of faith, which it was against her own principles to claim.

G K Chesterton in his book, St Thomas Aquinas, page 72. 

The humble scientist

I've had the book St Thomas Aquinas, by G K Chesterton, on my shelves for many years, but had never read it until this week. What a great book, very readable, very clear and able to give insight not only into Aquinas but also into his time and into the history of philosophy in general. Over the next few days I'll be adding various long and short extracts from the book to this blog. 

We have all heard of the humility of the man of science; of many who were very genuinely humble; and of some who were very proud of their humility. It will be the somewhat too recurrent burden of this brief study that Thomas Aquinas really did have the humility of the man of science; as a special variant of the humility of the saint. It is true that he did not himself contribute anything concrete in the experiment or detail of physical science; in this, it may be said, he even lagged behind the last generation, and was far less of an experimental scientist than his tutor Albertus Magnus. But for all that, he was historically a great friend to the freedom of science. The principles he laid down, properly understood, are perhaps the best that can be produced for protecting science from mere obscurantist persecution. For instance, in the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, he fixed first on the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self-evident and that we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And unfortunately, nineteenth century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were seventeenth-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation. Thus, private theories about what the Bible ought to mean, and premature theories about what the world ought to mean, have met in loud and widely advertised controversy, especially in the Victorian time; and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
But St. Thomas had the scientific humility in this very vivid and special sense; that he was ready to take the lowest place; for the examination of the lowest things. He did not, like a modern specialist, study the worm as if it were the world; but he was willing to begin to study the reality of the world in the reality of the worm. His Aristotelianism simply meant that the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth. That for him the process was logical and not biological, was concerned with philosophy rather than science, does not alter the essential idea that he believed in beginning at the bottom of the ladder. But he also gave, by his view of Scripture and Science, and other questions, a sort of charter for pioneers more purely practical than himself. He practically said that if they could really prove their practical discoveries, the traditional interpretation of Scripture must give way before those discoveries. He could hardly, as the common phrase goes, say fairer than that. If the matter had been left to him, and men like him, there never would have been any quarrel between Science and Religion. He did his very best to map out two provinces for them, and to trace a just frontier between them.
It is often cheerfully remarked that Christianity has failed, by which is meant that it has never had that sweeping, imperial and imposed supremacy, which has belonged to each of the great revolutions, every one of which has subsequently failed. There was never a moment when men could say that every man was a Christian; as they might say for several months that every man was a Royalist or a Republican or a Communist. But if sane historians want to understand the sense in which the Christian character has succeeded, they could not find a better case than the massive moral pressure of a man like St. Thomas, in support of the buried rationalism of the heathens, which had as yet only been dug up for the amusement of the heretics. It was, quite strictly and exactly, because a new kind of man was conducting rational enquiry in a new kind of way, that men forgot the curse that had fallen on the temples of the dead demons and the palaces of the dead despots; forgot even the new fury out of Arabia against which they were fighting for their lives; because the man who was asking them to return to sense, or to return to their senses, was not a sophist but a saint. Aristotle had described the magnanimous man, who is great and knows that he is great. But Aristotle would never have recovered his own greatness, but for the miracle that created the more magnanimous man; who is great and knows that he is small.

From pages 69-71 of the Hodder edition of 1962, which surprisingly, has several proof-reading errors in it!

Fairy tales

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these strong enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
G. K. ChestertonTremendous Trifles

Progress

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. The heart of the tree remains the same, however many rings are added to it; and a man cannot leave his heart behind by running hard with his legs. In the core of all culture are the things that may be said, in every sense, to be learned by the heart.

G.K. Chesterton"The Romance of Rhyme" in On Lying In Bed and Other Essays

About God...

From a letter by G K Chesterton to his wife, Frances, after a friend of hers attacked the poem The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

The most efficient way possible of making a mixed and dubious book do harm is to attack it indiscriminately.  You would fall very foul of the unscrupulous parent who says to a child that a cake should not be eaten because it is quite nasty, when it isn't.  But that is just what is done by the moralist who tries to bully the 'young pessimist' out of his appreciation of the rich humour, the stately pathos, the wrong-headed comradeship and laughing humility of the quatrains of Omar. The decadent knows the moralist is humbugging, just as the child does, and the result in the case of the book or cake is likely enough to be - that 'stolen waters are sweet and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.'  The only sensible thing for morality to do is to take the high hand, to be calm, sane, judicial, discriminating: to take the good and leave the evil: to extract even from the most poisonous plants just that amount which is medicinal.
Virtue should trust herself anywhere and in any company - and possibly among many of her own acolytes, among inquisitors and Pharisees, spies on the soul, conductors of private Days of Judgement and maniacs of the letter of the law, she may constantly find herself in much worse company than that of the poor old man who eight hundred years ago sat nodding over his wine.

The above is quoted in Maisie Ward's Return to Chesterton.  She adds some more about Chesterton and his 'philosophy'.  

But here, as later with Shaw, Wells and the rest, he was ready to attack the parts of the philosophy he disapproved and at the same time to search out the true and great elements.  In Omar he had discovered the greatest of all, the one essential foundation of any philosophy that should stand.
It has been said that the realisation of God as upholding and sustaining all being is not a matter of 'sanctity but of sanity' [quoted in Gilbert Keith Chesterton pg 43]...He told Frances he was writing constantly 'about God' - and he later described his state of mind in contradiction to the theosophists who thought that 'where there is nothing there is God' as being almost exactly the opposite.  'Where there is anything there is God.'

From Return to Chesterton, by Maisie Ward, pgs 233/4

Chesterton and Thankfulness

Living among men who never dreamed of giving thanks for the portents of existence, [Chesterton] realised that the visions of a supreme sanity may appear close to madness.

"I am the first," says a strange figure in a very youthful story, [A Crazy Tale, published in the Quarto - Slade School Magazine] "that ever saw the world.  Prophets and sages there have been, out of whose great hearts came schools and churches.  But I am the first that ever saw a dandelion as it is."

'Wind and dark rain swept round, swathing in a cloud the place of that awful proclamation...."I tell you religion is in its infancy; dervish and anchorite, Crusader and Ironside, were not fanatical enough or frantic enough, in their adoration...some day a creature [will] be produced, a new animal with eyes to see and ears to hear; with an intellect capable of performing a new function never before conceived truly; thanking God for his creation."'

Now let us turn from the boy whose head was whirling with the sheer excitement of existence to the man writing of the great St Thomas [Aquinas]:

"He did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life; and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the liveableness of life...

"There really was a new reason for regarding the sense, and the sensations of the body, and the experiences of the common man, with a reverence at which the great Aristotle would have stared, and no man in the ancient world could have begun to understand...The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead.  It had hung upon a gibbet.  It had risen from a tomb...Plato might despise the flesh but God had not despised it...

"There is a general tone and temper of Aquinas which is as difficult to avoid as daylight in a great house of windows.  It is that positive position of his mind, which is filled and soaked as with sunshine with the warmth of the wonder of created things.  There is a certain private audacity in his communion, by which men add to their private names the tremendous titles of the Trinity and the Redemption; so that some nun may be called, 'of the Holy Ghost'; or a man bear such a burden as the title of St John of the Cross.  In this sense, the man we are studying may specially be called St Thomas of the Creator...And perhaps no man ever came so near to calling the Creator by His own name, which can only be written I Am."

Page 10/11 of Return to Chesterton, by Maisie Ward.

Small communities

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men.... In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

G.K. Chesterton
Heretics

Conservatism

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better.  But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse.  The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative.  The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact.  But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.  But you do not.  If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.  If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.  If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.  Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.

G K Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, page 99

True humility

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason.

The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.

G K Chesterton, in Orthodoxy. (no page reference given)

God, sunrises and daisies

Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that God has the eternal appetite of infancy.

G.K. Chesterton from his book Orthodoxy

The issue of God

"You cannot evade the issue of God: whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him . . . If Christianity should happen to be true--that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe--then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything."

G K Chesterton

Daily News December 12, 1903