The Gospel According to America

Zachry Kincaid, director of The Matthew's House Project, reviews David Dark’s The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. (link to amazon.com)

Dark sites G.K. Chesterton who wrote a series of newspaper articles some eighty years ago about his visit to America. Chesterton says that America is a country with the soul of a church. Based in the equality of all human beings principle, Dark relates this church soul to the Apostle Paul’s sameness in Christ. But, Chesterton reminds us that America is either entirely heroic or completely insane. Today’s version of gospel is closer to insane. The abuse of freedom has driven the Gospel out of serious public thought, reduced to Ten Commandments lawn signs and ichthus-marked SUVs. We should pause, Dark says, “as we consider how easily many Americans speak of their faith as a private, personal matter; a relationship somehow contained within the heart; an odd, airy thing called ‘spirituality.’” Ought Christians to rather act in step with the early followers who “are not of this world’s way of doing things, but their hope is still scandalously this-worldly. And the intensity of their passion for a socially disruptive, enduring freedom won’t be diminished, divided, or conquered by the prerogatives of any government.”

LINK to the review

Twelve Favorites

My favorite excerpts from GKC's Twelve Types. One from each chapter:

Charlotte Bronte: The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure.

William Morris: He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling for things.

Byron: The man who is popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic about pessimism.

Alexander Pope: [I]t is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination than to pretend to have wit.

St. Francis of Assisi: [L]aughter is as divine as tears.

Rostand: We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech.

Charles II: Despotism is the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Stevenson had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of being misunderstood by his opponents.

Thomas Carlyle: He denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth century.

Leo Tolstoy: The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount.

Savonarola: He was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fell.

Walter Scott: It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are neglected by Providence.

GKC on GBS

I fear that C&F may have lost readers due to my post yesterday. Council on Drinking referenced a news article quoting George Bernard Shaw's teetotalism. But the post gave no rebuttal from his friend GKC. So this morning, remaining readers, I beg your forgiveness and provide a few quotations from GKC about GBS:

from the introduction to Heretics:

I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic — that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.

from Heretics, Ch.4, "Mr. Bernard Shaw":

Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man — the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man.

from Do We Agree?, a debate between Chesterton and Shaw:

We show man's irrepressible desire to own property and because some landlords have been cruel, it is no use talking of abolishing, denying, and destroying property, saying no one shall have any property at all. It is characteristic of his school, of his age. The morality he represents is above all the morality of negations. Just as it says you must not drink wine at all as the only solution to a few people drinking too much: just as it would say you must not touch meat or smoke tobacco at all. Let us always remember, therefore, that when Mr. Shaw says he can persuade all men to give up the sentiment of private property, it is in exactly the same hopeful spirit that he says he will get all of you to give up meat, tobacco, beer, and a vast number of other things. He will not do anything of the sort and I suspect he himself suspects by this time that he will not do it.

Council on Drinking

Should we have a drink or two before work? Should we have the taxpayers cover our tab? These are questions being asked in Sydney, Australia. LINK

Alcohol, George Bernard Shaw wrote, enables parliament to do things at 11 at night that no sane person would do at 11 in the morning. But sobriety, it seems, is back in vogue in Sydney, where two councillors are planning heresy by introducing prohibition to council meetings.

Islam and the First Amendment

This excerpt is from the article "Islam and the First Amendment" by Thomas E. Brewton; published July 22 at Intellectual Conservative.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States many different, relatively self-contained, religious and cultural communities have existed. But none of these ever denied the supremacy of the Constitution in political affairs, as do the Muslims.

Today, however, we are being pushed by liberal-socialists’ “tolerance” for hedonism toward a lawless abyss that, with the power of modern weaponry, will make the turmoil of Muslim militancy in the Middle Ages seem like the Garden of Eden.

The thrust of both liberal-socialism and Islam is to institute a form of feudal collectivism in which citizens become a modern version of serfs, whose every economic and social action is subject to unlimited regulation by government. Citizens, since the New Deal socialism of the 1930s, have gradually surrendered the Constitution’s protections of individual property and other rights against arbitrary government, in return for the nanny state in which government decides what people are entitled to receive. In short, the Servile State anticipated by Hilaire Belloc.

As has happened with so many provisions of the Constitution since 1937, those in political ascendance, either liberals or Muslims, will interpret the First Amendment to mean whatever is convenient for their desires, or simply abolish the Constitution.

New in Blogland

• Thursday is a new blog subtitled "for all those chasing after Sunday on this sometimes absurd adventure." The author has begun with an original poem "An Ode on Cheese." The mysterious silence has been broken. And now Dr. Thursday has come forth with his own rhymes on the subject of cheese. He wrote it nearly 11 years ago; we finally get to share a bite of his delectable cheese verse. Thank you!


• Splash About! is a new blog subtitled "my paper to splash about in ... a kind of scrap book to keep me quiet." The author has begun with some commentary on What's Wrong With the World's first chapter as he reads Chesterton's book.


• A Prodigy of Imbecility is a blogger's yet another attempt to begin again. He begins with a quotation from GKC: "There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."


• Blogimus Maximus is reading and commenting on Hilaire Belloc's Survivals and New Arrivals. Maximus writes that "Reading Belloc does not tell you much about the matter of history, that is true enough - but as regards the form of history, he is suberb. I would say, in general, that he is of little use as an instructor, but he helps one to organize what one has already learned, and to see it in a new light."


• Maureen Martin of CatholicNews.org, as mentioned here earlier, posted a satirical composition about Chestertonians. Some friends of GK thought it was in bad taste but I liked it ... a lot. It is a matter of opinion. I hope Maureen will someday spoof Hilaire Belloc: you know, about a guy who decides to hike across countries to Rome leaving his wife and young children at home. And if I say nice things about Maureen Martin perhaps she'll link to us - because that is what bloggers do.

Nonsense Verse

Everyman has issued a collection of nonsense verse. From a review of same:

No one does just nonsense: That would be inhuman. It works best as a hobby, a sideline. Lear was a painter, Carroll a clergyman and mathematician. Mervyn Peake, with all the mental tonnage of his Gormenghast novels installed and pressurized in his head, seems to have fired out brilliant squibs of nonsense for relief: “Of fallow-land and pasture / And skies both pink and grey, / I made my statement last year / And have no more to say.” Chesterton found the production of nonsense verse to be–literally–laughably easy: “To publish a book of my nonsense verses,” he wrote to his fiancé, “seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to watch me smoke a cigarette.” And Stevens said of “The Emperor Of Ice Cream”: “I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go. This poem is an instance of letting myself go.”

Link to Book.

Link to Review.

Delight of Truth

Ignatius Insight has a feature article this month by Fr Schall: Chesterton and the Delight of Truth. LINK

This essay might be about the "splendor" of truth rather than about its "delight," but John Paul II famously claimed the "splendor" for himself – Veritatis Splendor. Chesterton simply rejoices in truth, but not just for the sake of his own rejoicing, but because there is something to rejoice about. "I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy" – this is Chesterton’s startling reaction to his discovery that man is not made only for this earth but through it for eternal life.

Thursday on Thursday, no.3

"What is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It's mere vomiting."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Fr. Brown @ Hogwarts

From the article "Dumbledore's death in the style of GK Chesterton" published HERE by the Guardian:

"But how did you know, Father Brown?" cried Mr Shacklebolt.

The little priest blinked. "Oh, well, you know," he said shyly, "there was the medal. Why on earth would this Voldemort go out of his way to melt Professor Dumbledore's Order of Merlin? What was it to him? Merely a bauble. But to Fudge, don't you see, it was a symbol of his hatred of Dumbledore. He hated him," said Father Brown earnestly, "for the unforgivable sin of being right."

Democracy of the Dead

We didn't know about this GKC Blog: Democracy of the Dead. It's worth a look.

Using Science to Promote Morality

Chesterton wrote in 1905 about addressing the problems of impurity and terrorism. 100 years later his writing is more pertinent than ever.

A young man may keep himself from vice by continually thinking of disease. He may keep himself from it also by continually thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be question about which method is the more reasonable, or even about which is the more efficient. But surely there can be no question about which is the more wholesome.

...

It is quite certain the realists ... do in one sense promote morality ­­­­­­­­— they promote it in the sense in which the hangman promotes it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it. But they only affect that small minority which will accept any virtue as long as we do not ask them for the virtue of courage. Most healthy people dismiss these moral dangers as they dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes. Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of using science to promote morality.

[G.K. Chesterton. Heretics, Ch.2]

Patron Saint of the Jolly

A serious advent wreath making instructor and former singer writes about a rather disturbing appearance of the Ghost of G.K. Chesterton. During the apparition G.K. "joked that while his friends Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton led lives that convinced people to help the poor and commune with God, that he, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy were quickly becoming the patron saints of people 'who just read all the time.'" I would add that he has also become the patron saint of those who like to smoke cigars and drink beer. Read the humorous post by Maureen Martin HERE.

The Difference Between Belloc and GKC

In his Hilaire Belloc: A Memoir, J. B. Morton quotes Chesterton on the difference between Belloc and himself. He said, "I like gargoyles and every kind of grotesque thing, whereas Belloc likes diagrams and military maps." And Chesterton maintained (to Morton) that Belloc and he differed in every respect—except for their complete agreement about religion and politics. [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955, p. 78]

Get Enough Rest

During the earliest years of his marriage to Elodie, Hilaire Belloc would sometimes travel from his home in Littlemore to the north of England to give lectures. This kept him away from home for several nights at a time; often a member of the audience would offer him dinner and a bed for the night. G.G. Waterhouse in a letter to Robert Speaight recalled the unexpected joys of hosting Belloc for an evening:

On our return from the lecture hall he was greeted by my father, a very well-read man but too busy to attend lectures and I was firmly despatched to bed. The next morning my father complained that this very postitive young man had not only kept him up talking until two o'clock but when informed that breakfast in the household was at seven-thirty had blandly announced that he always took eight hours sleep and that he would come down when he woke. [Robert Speaight. The Life of Hilaire Belloc. p.109]

Thursday on Thursday, no.2

"I tell you that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

How Dull I Am

Joel Stein, while telling the world that Potter is for kids, tells the world how dull Joel Stein is. Maybe he only reads what can be found at the Adult Bookstore. Maybe if he had read more fairy tales he could tell the difference between right and wrong. GKC wrote that "Imagination will teach them [children] how to live a quiet and humdrum life... On the other hand, dull people always want excitement. Thee-quarters of the real luxury or prodigality or profligacy ... is due to the dullness of people who cannot imagine anything they do not experience. They are so miserably and dismally stupid that they actually have to do things." [G.K.Chesterton, The True Victorian Hypocrisy]

Joel Stein writes:

I know reading is hard. I try to avoid it whenever possible. But if I'm going to sit down and read a book, I'm going to get something out of it other than the ability to have a conversation with my second wife, who isn't even born yet. I'm sorry you were born too late [sic] for J.K. Rowling, but you had your C.S. Lewis and E.B. White and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Isn't it a clue that you should be ashamed of reading these books past puberty when the adults who write them are hiding their first names?

...

A culture that simplifies its entertainment down to fairy tales is doomed to simplify the world down to good and evil.

The full article can be found syndicated HERE at the Dallas Morning News.

Portrait with a Wart or Two

Look HERE for a caricature of the jolly Hilaire Belloc by David Levine. It appeared in the New York Review of Books on Nov 5, 1970. (And for $150 it can appear in your home.)

Fr Ian Boyd wrote in the Tablet about Belloc's frown:

His face, as Ronald Knox noticed, was in repose always sad. Like the central character in his friend Max Beerbohm's parable The Happy Hypocrite, Belloc always wore a mask; when the mask is removed, "Lo! The face was even as the mask had been." The appearance had become the reality.

The death in 1914 of his beloved American wife Elodie was a blow from which Belloc never entirely recovered. Bitter family disputes and almost continuous anxieties about money were additional crosses. He may not have been interested in reading John of the Cross on interior purification, but he lived the mystery which he claimed to know nothing about.

Diets and Crime

James V. Schall, writing in a 1996 issue of the Midwest Chesterton News:

Chapter Seventeen of The Thing (1926, CW, Vol. III, pp. 236-39) is entitled "The Feasts and the Ascetic." It deals with the fact that there is nothing at all contradictory in having a place for both feasts and asceticism in our lives and a philosophic faith that can explain why. Those who dance can also be those who fast; and indeed it would be unnatural were it otherwise. Chesterton's way of putting it is, as always, apt: "a man who overeats himself on Christmas Eve ... has no appetite on Christmas Day." Indeed, as I read all the advertisements about dieting and slimming, it sometimes appears that the modern non-Christian world has replaced the fastings that used to be proposed to be seasonal, say Advent or Lent, with fasting that is permanent, and increasingly, if I read the signs of the times, obligatory and to be enforced by civil law. What used to be a personal excess is quickly becoming a civil crime. I am thinking of smoking, but hamburgers will be next. And what used to be crimes and horrors -- I think of abortions and mercy-killings -- are now proposed as civil rights.

GK's Friend, HG, Having Fun Again

First in the U.S. by Orson Welles, now Siberia:

War Of The Worlds has been blamed for a mass panic in Siberia after locals mistook a tornado for an alien invasion.

People in the Khabarovsk region of Siberia jumped into their cars and fled their homes in panic when the freak wind arrived out of nowhere, flattening trees and destroying property.

But officials from local emergency services said the destruction had been caused by a freak tornado that ripped through the area.

They blamed the fear of an alien invasion on the recent showing of the Tom Cruise epic.

Link.

Gandhi

Martin Green, in his book on Mohandas Gandhi, writes of Chesterton's influence on the fledgling Indian separatist movement:

"Gandhi read G. K. Chesterton's essay in the Illustrated London News on September 18, advising young Indians to hold by their traditional culture rather than introducing the new ideas associated with Herbert Spencer. Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it. Gandhi also liked a letter by Chesterton to the Daily News of October 22; Chesterton preached a version of Ruskin's and Morris's enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages."

Thus Green has partially corroborated the assertion by P. N. Furbank that Chesterton was the inspiration for Hind Swaraj, Gandhi's first explanation of his program to achieve Indian independence. [Gandhi, New York: Continuum, 1993, pp. 192-93]

Administrative Note

We're working to make sure this blog is refreshed with new content every day, Monday through Friday. We expect to have a plan in place before the end of July. In the meantime, we can virtually guarantee at least four new posts every week.

Thanks and a Little Belloc

Many thanks to Joe Tremblay for keeping the blog site going while I was on vacation.

A few of my favorite Belloc quotes from The Path to Rome that I keyed-in during vacation. I was holed-up in our rented cabin for quite a few hours while my baby (Tess, three months) slept, so I had plenty of time for reading, writing, and straight typing:

“I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.”

“It is quite clear that the body must be recognized and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and drink can do so much to make a man.”

“Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread.”

While reading Tacitus, Belloc says he found “this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together.”

Thursday on Thursday

"The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride."

- Gabriel Syme, in GKC's The Man Who Was Thursday

Hilaire Belloc through the letters of Hester Balfour

Christine Flynn, a graduate student at Boston College, has put together the website Hilaire Belloc through the letters of Hester Balfour.

Finding the Ethics in His Elfland

The Matthew's House Project appears to be a fairly new place on the internet. Its stated purpose is "to develop a place in which the intersections of faith and culture can be explored." Director Zachry O. Kincaid is fond of G.K. Chesterton, and he references GKC in several of his Project writings thus far. His June article is titled The Narrative World of G.K. Chesterton: Finding the Ethics in His Elfland and begins with:

The purpose of this work is to analyze G. K. Chesterton’s fiction by coming to his fiction writing with a particular set of principles: boundary, miracle, and adventure. While these are my terms, they represent a categorization in keeping with “Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy, his primary defense of Christian theology as opposed to modernism.

These categories are significant because they provide the reader with terms to analyze Chesterton’s narrative work as a defense of Christian theology. In his work, boundary is legitimate when it includes the supernatural, miracle, when it recognizes the limitations of reason, and adventure, when it involves a renewed sense about the world. Once you understand how Chesterton uses boundary, miracle, and adventure, you become more aware of how these principles function outside the narrative world of Chesterton, in everyday life.

Wild Colts & Common Sense

A new blog has appeared: Wild Colts & Common Sense resides at chestertonlives.blogspot.com. The blogger claims GKC as the blog's patron saint. Posting thus far has emphasized learning disabilities; writing about Chesterton: "Like many atypical learners...at age 9, G.K. was thought to be a 'little slow' by his parents and went to see a 'brain doctor' regarding it." The next post was about Tom Cruise's learning disability and now his advocacy. It might be an interesting blog to watch.

Lie Detectors

In "The Mistake of the Machine," Father Brown tells Flambeau that he has no confidence in the new invention now referred to as "the lie detector." The priest then proceeds to tell his friend a story that backs up his opinion. It has taken ninety years for the world to catch up with the wisdom of Father Brown on the subject, but in October of 2002, news sources were reporting on the loss of credibility that had finally and officially overtaken the polygraph test and its practitioners. As journalist Steve Chapman reported in a typical news story, "A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the federal government stop using polygraphs to screen for security risks. Why? Because, in the words of the study, these devices are 'intrinsically susceptible to producing erroneous results.' That's academese for 'I wouldn't trust one as far as I could throw it'." (Washington Times, October 16, 2002).

Gotham City and the Fact of Sin

From a review of Batman Begins by Marc Newman; published by American Family Association - AgapePress News:

The Biblical World of Batman

No one, perhaps, has said it more effectively than G.K Chesterton: "Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was not doubt at any rate that he wanted washing."

While films like Spider-Man, The Incredibles, and the forthcoming Fantastic Four posit an essentially good world that needs to be saved from an anomalous, encroaching evil, Batman is blunt. The world is not a good place -- it is seething with sin. Even when admitting that there are some people trying to do the right thing, as did Bruce Wayne's philanthropist father, it was twisted by his home town, Gotham City, into evil. Before I am set upon by people who think this view too bleak and pessimistic, it must be noted that this view is no stranger to the Scriptures.

Our world is described in the Bible as "a crooked and perverse generation" where no one "does good" (Phil. 2:15; Rom. 3:12). The people who inhabit it are enslaved to sin (Rom.6:6). Our struggle is described as "not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12). But make no mistake -- these are forces that control those they have enslaved.

Gotham City is sin writ large. The niceties of "civilization" have been stripped away and what viewers see is raw motive. Like Abraham contending with God over Sodom, we are seeking at least some righteous to warrant the saving of the city. Enter the flawed hero -- Batman.

LINK

Clerihews

Of the 132 clerihews published in the original collection Biography for Beginners (1905) about one-sixth (23) were attributed in whole or in part to "GKC." [The First Clerihews, Oxford, 1982]

The Democracy of the Dead

The Democracy of the Dead is a collaborative blog, nearly one year old, "dedicated to analyzing politics, culture, and religion through the voices of those still living and those who have departed but left us their wisdom." It takes its name, of course, from what G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy:

If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Books on Liberty

David Gordon, in his article The Meaning and History of Liberty: An In-Print Bibliography posted at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, writes about his project to compile an annotated bibliography of "the 100 most important books on liberty." His working list of 125 books in print includes one from GKC:

Chesterton, G.K. What’s Wrong With the World? Chesterton uses his immense gift for paradox to show the fallacies of those in revolt against the natural order. He refuted contemporary feminism in advance of its birth.

For Love of Golf

Alex Kuczynski writes today in the NY Times:

If a thing is worth doing, G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1910, it is worth doing it badly. He was defending the amateur against the professional, championing the rights of the average man or woman who does a wide variety of things out of love rather than one thing out of ambitious professionalism. And if there is any other sport in America in which most people, including me, play badly, it is golf. But many of us, including me, do it for love. That said, I did ask a clerk if they stocked women's golf gloves that have a special cutout for your engagement ring.

"Ugh," he said. "We don't stock those. Please."

In some senses, it is still a man's sport.

Chesterton Sheds a Tear

"For over 300 years, London's Fleet Street was the heart of British journalism, home to many of the country's leading newspapers — and the pubs that fueled their employees. On Wednesday, however, the industry saluted the end of an era at a ceremony marking the departure of Reuters from its Fleet Street headquarters.

"The exodus is the final knell for an era when booze-fueled journalists in the male-dominated publishing world would swap yarns with sources and competitors in the pubs."

Link.

Journalism

"Journalism, as G.K. Chesterton observed, tells us that Admiral Bangs has died without having told us that Admiral Bangs had been born. It takes notice of religious people only when their activities begin to threaten secularism; it failed to notice the rise of the Christian Right and militant Islam until they had already become impossible to ignore, whereupon it reacted with alarm verging on hysteria."

Joe Sobran.

Belloc Essay On Line

Semper Fidelis has reproduced Belloc's "The Protestant Heresy." Link.

Ahlquist and the Chesterton Society

Katherine Kersten writes in the June 6, 2005, Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune:

Five years ago, Dale Ahlquist was a well-paid lobbyist with a wife, three kids and an upscale house on a Bloomington cul-de-sac. Then he quit his job and waved goodbye to his corporate paycheck. Now he's that rare thing: a guy who can't wait to get up in the morning and go to work.

Ahlquist doesn't have to go far -- just upstairs to his home office. There, amid overflowing bookcases, is the headquarters of the American Chesterton Society, of which Ahlquist is founder and president.

Ahlquist launched the society to spread the word about a man many Americans have never heard of: British writer Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton, who died in 1936. In the early decades of the 20th century, Chesterton -- 6 feet 4, 300 pounds, cigar clenched firmly in teeth -- was one of the best-known celebrities in London. Today, he's almost forgotten.

Who was Chesterton, and why would anyone give up a fat paycheck to tell the world about him? Ahlquist is more than happy to explain: "Chesterton was a complete thinker," he says, "who was equally at home in history, theology, philosophy, art criticism and literature."

For example, says Ahlquist, "Chesterton wrote the essay that inspired Mahatma Gandhi to launch the movement to end British colonial rule in India. He wrote the book that converted C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian apologist, to Christianity."

All in all, he notes, Chesterton wrote 100 books, five novels, hundreds of poems, 200 short stories (including a series of mysteries about a detective priest, Father Brown) and over 4,000 essays and newspaper columns.

Writers as diverse as T.S. Eliot, Agatha Christie and Marshall McLuhan praised Chesterton's work. Never far from controversy, he debated the greatest names of his time, including H.G. Wells and Clarence Darrow. To debate Chesterton, Ahlquist adds, was to lose.

Ahlquist discovered Chesterton by chance. "When I graduated from Carleton College in 1980," he says, "I'd never heard of Chesterton." On the plane to Italy for his honeymoon with his Italian-born wife, Laura, he picked up Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" (the book that changed C.S. Lewis' worldview) about the place of Christianity in history. "I fell in love immediately," he confides, "I've been married to Chesterton as long as I've been married to my wife."

Click HERE to read the entire article.

GKC Back In the Pop Culture

From a review of Cinderella Man:

"The film is based on the true story of James J. Braddock, whose inspiring rags-to-riches comeback in the dark days of the Depression prompted newspaper writer Damon Runyon to slap him with the epithet “the Cinderella man” — a rather milksop moniker for a boxer, and even for a boxing movie. I guess the fairy-tale reference made more sense to Runyon’s readers and Braddock’s fans than, say, “the Nicholas Nickleby of boxing,” though that would have been more accurate on several levels. Of course, it would have made an even worse movie title.

"Still, as portrayed in Cinderella Man, for sheer decency and dogged heroism Braddock is every bit the match of Dickens’ archetypal hero. G. K. Chesterton’s characterization of Nickleby as “poor, brave, unimpeachable, and ultimately triumphant” applies equally well to Braddock, whose Depression slump is as grueling and unremitting as anything in Dickens."

Link.

Motion Picture GKC

The first Father Brown motion picture, a 67 minute feature starring Walter Connolly as the priest, Paul Lukas as Flambeau, and Robert Loraine as Valentin, was released by Paramount in 1935 with the title Father Brown, Detective. Chesterton saw the film himself and said he liked it. Several inadvertent flaws in the film's presentation of clergymen suggested to Chesterton the basic idea for a new Father Brown story, "The Vampire of the Village." [The Motion Picture Guide: 1927-1983, vol. E-G, Chicago: Cinebooks, 1986, 823; Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, New York 1943, 597]

Subtle but Effective GKC

Michael Coren relates a priceless anecdote about Chesterton in his biography of H. G. Wells:

Wells was disarmed by Chesterton's good nature, disturbed by his inability to pigeon-hole the man. On a summers day in 1907, for example, Wells and Chesterton went to Oxford to attend a lecture. Walking together after the address Wells began to harangue his friend about the "bloody hand of Christianity." The diatribe lasted for over 35 minutes, without Chesterton making the slightest objection. At the end of it he turned to Wells, smiled and said, "Yes, you do have a point."

The Invisible Man, New York: Athenaeum, 1993, p. 80

Pearce on Chesterton & St Francis

Chesterton and Saint Francis, an essay by Joseph Pearce
from his new book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, is now available on www.ignatiusinsight.com.

Here is Joseph's Pearce-ing smile:

Bad Pun

Probably the worst pun in the history of the English language was penned in July of 1944 by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas when he wrote, "We were two months near Beaconsfield, where Chesterton sat on his R.C." [The Collected Letters, New York: Macmillan, 1985, p. 517]

McNabb on GKC's Death

A little take-off on the Memorial Day weekend theme:

Following the death of G.K. Chesterton . . . as soon as Father Vincent had read the Gospel for the day, his first remarks were, "Chesterton is dead," and again, "Chesterton is dead. . . A great Englishman and one of the greatest thinkers and writers of our time. His writings will be even better appreciated in years to come than they are now." A Saint in Hyde Park, E.A. Siderman.

From Gilbert Magazine, April/May 2005 (which should be hitting mailboxes now).

New GKC Blog

Peter Floriani has started a blog: Frances Blogg, named after GKC’s wife, “Frances” being her first name and “Blogg” her maiden name. Or maybe the name of the blog is "GKC's Favourite." We're not sure. No matter, we're happy to have another Chestertonian playing in the b-sphere.

Link.

The Most Famous of Oxford Societies

Once he [Benjamin Jowett] asked Belloc what he regarded as the best form of government. Belloc, as one of the only four Republicans in Oxford ... replied: 'A Republic.' 'Ah', said Jowett, 'but before you can have a Republic, you must have Republicans.' There were never enough Republicans for the Republic of which Belloc dreamed. There were enough, however, to form the Republican Club, one of the smallest, the shortest-lived, and the most famous of Oxford Societies. To qualify for membership you had to hold radical ideas of government and you had to have been fined for misconduct. The philosophy of the Club was inspired by Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday was celebrated as the principal feast of the year, although the beheading of Charles I and Louis XVI were remembered with an almost equal enthusiasm.

- Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilare Belloc, 1957

GK's Enemies

For those who like to say that Chesterton never made an enemy, there is the fact of Thomas Hardy's very last literary work. In the final days before his death in 1928, Hardy dictated what biographer Robert Gittings, in Thomas Hardy’s Later Years describes as "two virulent, inept, and unworthy satirical jingles" directed at Chesterton and George Moore—Hardy's "two most hated critics."

Aleister Crowley, likewise, is fairly characterized as an enemy. According to Joseph Pearce, “It is likely that Chesterton saw in Crowley a vision of the diabolist acquaintance of his student days at the Slade who ‘had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul’; who sought to ‘find in evil a life of its own’; who sought to corrupt women for no other reason than ‘the expanding pleasure of ruin.”

Now, Crowley was a sexually perverted, black-magic invoking, drug-using Satanist. Pearce: “He liked to be known as ‘the great beast’ and ‘the wickedest man alive.’ It’s difficult to know what this says about GKC’s other enemy, Mr. Hardy, but it cannot bode well for him.

Brown Motion Picture

The first Father Brown motion picture, a 67-minute feature starring Walter Connolly as the priest, Paul Lukas as Flambeau, and Robert Loraine as Valentin, was released by Paramount in 1935 with the title Father Brown, Detective. Chesterton saw the film and liked it. Several inadvertent flaws in the film's presentation of clergymen suggested to Chesterton the basic idea for a new Father Brown story, "The Vampire of the Village."

Finding a Cure

John Haldane writes on scotsman.com in an article Britain is debased, vulgar, brutalised - but there is a cure:

GK Chesterton remarked that in human affairs one must first find the cure before one can identify the disease. This reminds us that in the area of values one needs to know what is good, before one can say what is wrong. It is the example of a secure and loving family that illuminates the problems of failed ones. It is the sight of a well-functioning community united by shared goods that shows up the fact that in many parts of Britain communal existence long ago gave way to mere society, which in turn dissolved into mere co-existence, and from there declined into "strangerliness".

Not a Greasy, Smarmy Person

Fr Lou Guntzelman writes about humility in the Batavia, OH, Community Journal. Here is an excerpt quoting C.S. Lewis:

Most of us completely misunderstand the word humility. It's usually confused with a cringing meek attitude, submissiveness or self-deprecation.

We think it means saying we're not a very good golfer when we know we really are. That's not humility. That's being coy and subtly begging for compliments, "Oh, yes you are, you're very good!" As Dag Hammarskjold put it in "Markings," "Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation."

"Do not think that if you meet a really humble person he will be what most people call 'humble,' nowadays:" writes C.S. Lewis, "he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person who is always telling you he is a nobody. He'll seem a cheerful, intelligent chap who takes a real interest in what you say to him. If you do dislike him, it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all."

Humility is so important that it is impossible for anyone to have any type of genuine spiritual life without the virtue of humility. Humility tames the ego and rids us of superficiality and compels us to be true to ourselves and others. Because of the nature of our egos, humility is an extremely slippery quality. In the act of thinking we possess it, we prove to ourselves that we don't. Like happiness, it alights on our shoulder only when we're unaware of it.

Myth

Christianity Today interviews Dick Staub, author of Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters. The Q&As below refer to Chesterton-influenced authors CSL and JRRT.

In the book, you call both Star Wars and Christianity "mythology." What do you mean?

A myth is a story that confronts us with the "big picture," something transcendent and eternal, and in so doing, explains the worldview of a civilization. Given that definition, Christianity is the prevailing myth of Western culture and Star Wars is a prevailing myth of our popular culture. However, one of these myths is actually true and historically based, and that is Christianity. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien loved great myths, but each believed beneath all well-crafted myths there was the one true myth, Christianity.

George Lucas, to my knowledge, has never made explicitly Christian claims for Star Wars. How would you compare his fantasy world with those of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien?

As you mentioned, the Lucas story is more theologically attuned with Hinduism. In Jedi mythology, the highest good is achieved by balancing light and dark, whereas Jedi Christians believe the highest good is achieved when darkness is defeated. In Jedi Christian lore, the dark side is not just the opposite of light, but is an unequal opponent of God, who, in Star Wars terms, is the Lord over the Force.

In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, there is a ring over the other rings, and then there is a Lord of the Rings. The wizards Sauron and Gandalf represent the dark and light sides, but Tolkien's title reveals his Christian belief that above all the rings and all manner of powerful wizardry, there is a Lord of the Rings who rules over all, and who will bring history to a just and good conclusion. Tolkien said of his work, "The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; it is about God, and his sole right to divine honor."

Lewis also recognized the ultimate rule and authority of God over the "forces of good and evil." As Lewis put it, we must ultimately decide whether Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or who he said he is, the Lord. The first chapter of Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters draws this important distinction between the Star War's Hindu, monistic worldview and Christianity, which teaches that there is one who is wholly other and Lord over all.

War for Your Inner Child

Best Sellers Illustrated is a startup graphic novel publisher. BSI's first item of business is a "modernized adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic, The War of the Worlds."

You can view the promotional "trailer" at their website: www.bestsellersillustrated.com

here is the cover (linked in from the BSI website):

I Can Sympathize

Roy Campbell's "attitude, however theologically questionable, was that one should look after the pennies of heaven and let the world go to Hell." Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts, Ignatius 2000, p. 329.

un-French when seen in France

Fr Ian Boyd, in a Dec 7, 2003, article for the Tablet, writes about the French side of Hilaire Belloc:

Belloc’s ... claim to understand France was based mainly on the time he had spent in a French military college and in the French army. In fact, he left the Collège Stanislas after only a few months and the army after only one year of his three-year military service. He disliked both experiences intensely, taking from them little more than the anti-Semitism of the French Right, a prejudice which was to remain with him for the rest of his life. His knowledge of French political and cultural life amounted to little more than what he learned from a few months spent in northern France in the late 1890s, as Pall Mall magazine’s “Cycling Correspondent”.

Maurice Baring, then a young diplomat in Paris, met Belloc about this time. Baring, who was completely at home in continental Europe, thought the young Belloc was out of place. Significantly, he described him as “very un-French when seen in France. In fact his Gallicism is an untrained pose. His Catholicism is a political opinion: he is really brutally agnostic. His Gallicism too is a political opinion”.

Hardy Har

For those who like to say that Chesterton never made an enemy, there is the fact of Thomas Hardy's very last literary work. In the final days before his death in 1928, Hardy dictated what biographer Robert Gittings describes as "two virulent, inept, and unworthy satirical jingles" directed at Chesterton and George Moore—Hardy's "two most hated critics." [Thomas Hardy's Later Years, Boston, 1978, p. 211]

Pearce on GKC, JRRT, CSL, etc.

from a recent interview with Joseph Pearce:

Lazu: Gilbert Keith Chesterton is the other author you have written much about. What is Chesterton’s place in the literature of the twentieth century? How can the specific features of his works be summarized?

Pearce: Without doubt, Chesterton is a major figure in several areas. As a popular Catholic apologist he is perhaps without equal; as an essayist he is one of the finest prose stylists of the century; as a poet his work is very uneven but his finest verse deserves a place in any reputable anthology of twentieth century poetry, e.g. Lepanto, The Donkey, The Rolling English Road, A Second Childhood, The Skeleton, The Fish etc. As a novelist his work is also uneven and of variable quality, but his finest novel, The Man who was Thursday, ranks as one of the most important novels of the last century.

Lazu: It is hard to imagine that Catholic writers are well received by non-Christian literary critics in Central Europe. What is the situation in Great Britain and the United States as far as non-Catholic criticism authors such as Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, etc.?

Pearce: I am pleasantly surprised at the number of times that Chesterton is quoted in the secular press in Britain and America; Tolkien is now taken more seriously than ever before, partly because of the huge success of Jackson's films but also because The Lord of the Rings has passed the test of time and has forced itself into the canon in spite of the hostility of many critics and academics to its resolutely Christian and conservative ethos; Lewis remains hugely influential in Christian circles, both Protestant and Catholic, and the forthcoming film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might catapult him back into the popular mainstream; Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is widely accepted as one of the great novels of the twentieth century even amongst liberal critics hostile to its Catholic traditionalism.

Mental Distance

Ronald Eveston writes on LewRockwell.com about the gap between writer and reader:

[The] mental distance [between writer and reader] is a main reason why, for example, G. K. Chesterton is not widely read today (with the possible exception of his Father Brown stories). He makes, especially in his early work, a set of assumptions about his reader that are no longer true. He expects the reader to be more educated, more actively intelligent and more, as it were, sensitive to the workings of the universe than most reading public is today. He expects a lot of things to ring a bell. He expects the reader to handle more or less effortlessly complicated chains of reasoning as well as complicated strings of images, to be comfortable with the endless intertwined strands of meaning that are the stuff of thought. After all, the reader is supposed to have been to school and to University. What is more, he assumes a common moral ground. "Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I mean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy." This is from a work written in 1910. Now we have moved a long way from this cheerful faith in common sense and the ultimate spiritual brotherhood of all men. There are no things that I can assume to be inevitably common to myself and a total stranger. The stranger may be a cannibal for all I know.

C. S. Lewis, who wrote a few decades later, is much nearer to us mentally because the assumptions he makes about his readers are totally different. Chesterton expects us to join in the fray as equals, and enjoy it as much as he does; Lewis expects no more than that we should sit quiet and let him talk while he patiently and carefully explains simple things in the simplest possible terms. Lewis is better known today because he had to write for an audience that was, generally speaking, both more stupid and more wicked than Chesterton’s.

Ephemeral City

Joel Kotkin writes about the San Francisco as the "ephemeral city", and attributes the prediction of this to H.G. Wells.

There is historical precedent in the ephemeral city phenomenon. Cities are natural theaters. In the past, cities provided the overwhelmingly rural populations around them with a host of novel experiences unavailable amid the hay fields.

Rome, the first mega-city, developed these functions to an unprecedented level. It boasted both the first giant shopping mall -- the multi-story Mercatus Traini -- and the Colosseum, where urban entertainments grew monstrous both in its size and nature.

Maybe it makes sense for some cities to hitch their futures to their role as cultural and entertainment centers -- one hopes without resorting to gladiatorial contests. This is a transformation that H.G. Wells predicted over a century ago. He saw the transition of urban centers from commanding centers toward a "bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous."

During World War I, James Joyce formed a theater company to produce English plays in Switzerland. One of the productions was to be Chesterton's Magic, which went into rehearsal in May of 1918. When, however, the British consulate deemed the play unpatriotic, two of the actors resigned, and so Joyce scrubbed Magic in favor of less controversial material. [Richard Ellman, James Joyce, Oxford, 1982 (revised), pp. 439-40]

Spielberg's War

H.G., heretic, and friend of G.K., will have a new version of his story War of the Worlds released June 29. Here are some comments and some quotes from Spielberg about the new film:

As George Pal did with his 1953 version, Spielberg updates H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" from 1890s Britain to the contemporary United States, partly because turbulent times today provide a relevant backdrop for terror from the skies, and partly for simple cosmetic reasons.

"I can't stand the costumes of 1898," Spielberg said. "There's just something about those high collars, those frou-frou gowns. It's not my style, I guess.

"I think also, we're living in a fearful atmosphere, fearful times, and every version of 'War of the Worlds' that has occurred either in literature, radio or film has occurred during fearful times."

Spielberg also jettisons Wells' premise that humanity's assailants come from Mars, noting that explorations of the red planet have shown that "if life is ever discovered on the surface of Mars, it will be microscopic life."

The film never reveals where the aliens come from. Spielberg figures their anonymity adds to the terror.

"It's just really scary to imagine being invaded, especially being invaded by not only an unknown race bent on our total annihilation, but with no context," Spielberg said. "They don't spend any time explaining why they're here. There's no, 'We needed to move here because our planet has become inhospitable.'

"We have absolutely no idea why they've come, why they're doing this to us."

LINK

Here's a publicity image linked in from movies.about.com:

The New Lion King

LINK

Hey, so have you heard about the upcoming adaptation of "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe?"

If you haven't already caught the buzz for Buena Vista's [Disney's] upcoming C.S. Lewis adaptation, odds are that you will over this weekend. "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe" will debut its theatrical trailer this weekend to what is being described as the largest worldwide audience ever for a trailer premiere.

Here's a publicity image linked in from movies.about.com:

Cannonball!

Here is another conversion story. Not a conversion from paganism but from evangelical Christianity. Not a conversion to the Roman Catholic Church but to the Orthodox Church.

Frank Schaeffer is a "trophy" Orthodox convert... He appeared all over the country, from Jerry Falwell's church to "The 700 Club." But he said he soon became tired of the "hero-worship cult" in evangelical circles, where a ministry rises and falls with its big-name founder.
...
In the mid- to late-1980s, he began to dissociate himself completely from that world, seeking a faith that would be his own, instead of being tied to his career as a Christian filmmaker or his father's reputation. He began studying church history and attending Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches.

But he couldn't reconcile the idea of the papacy, and the modern, stripped-down Catholic services he attended, with their "happy, clappy nonsense," felt less liturgical and even more Protestant than the services he grew up with.

At the urging of a friend, he visited an Orthodox church, where he said he found authentic Christian worship. In 1990, he was chrismated, or anointed, into the church as a member.
LINK

The conversion story includes his father, "the renowned evangelical theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer," who was a friend of Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church and was influenced by G.K. Chesterton. Muggeridge wrote "When I was still a schoolboy my father took me to a dinner ... at which G.K. Chesterton was being entertained ... As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory." (Chronicles of Wasted Time; quote courtesy of Dave Armstrong).

I have noticed, and I am sure that you have as well, that many conversion stories begin with a line like "Well, I read Merton's Seven Storey Mountain" or "Well, I read Chesterton's Orthodoxy (or The Everlasting Man, or The Ball and the Cross)." A man can have quite an influence. Chesterton was a very large man in many ways; a large man can make a large splash of waves and ripples in all directions. This conversion story is just one of many that was helped along by a splash from Chesterton.

Maybe someone over at the Small Pax Guild will someday draw up a picture of Chesterton in bathing attire and doing a "cannonball" into the Atlantic Ocean. And perhaps someone could write an article, to accompany the fine artwork, about the influence of the Big Splash. And ship it off to a dandy publication like Gilbert Magazine.

Lord of the Servile State

William H. Stoddard, science fiction & fantasy author and creator of role playing games, writes about the influence of Chesterton and Belloc on the Shire:

... since Tolkien in fact does not tell us any of the history that might account for the origins of the Shire's dual government, I am going to talk about the sources for the idea of such a system in Tolkien's own intellectual background.

One of these two sources, I believe, was two writers of the generation before Tolkien: G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Tolkien refers explicitly to Chesterton, notably in his essay "On Fairy Stories," and though I do not know of any such mention of Belloc, he does turn up elsewhere in the Inklings' writings — Lewis mentions his theory of Distributivism in That Hideous Strength (Lewis, 1946, p.19) — and it seems virtually certain that Tolkien had at least heard about it frequently.

Belloc and Chesterton were the two leading Catholic intellectuals in their generation in England; their prose and poetry was widely read; and they joined in advocating a social order which was in effect an idealization of the Middle Ages, a system in which as many people was possible were small property owners — most notably in Belloc's own The Servile State (Belloc, 1913 / 1977), but in many other writings as well.

John P. McCarthy's Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical (McCarthy, 1978) traces the evolution of Belloc's views in detail, showing in his early views a synthesis of republican liberalism and Catholic traditionalism that Tolkien's own offhand remarks bear considerable resemblance to. The "estates, farms, workshops, and small trades" (Tolkien, 1965, p. 30) [Fellowship] that Tolkien describes could be a portrait of the society Belloc recommends. On the other side, Belloc's critique of modern industrialism as leading inevitably toward a revival of slavery seems akin in turn to Tolkien's fictional portrayal of Sauron and Saruman and to his factual comments about the horrors of the modern society.

Chalberg Reviews New Chesterbelloc Book

For a review of Jay P. Corrin's Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy, see the May 2005 issue of Touchstone. Chuck Chalberg wrote the review. It offers a nice summary of the book, which seems to focus on Catholic thinkers' tendency to find a "third way" that doesn't embrace capitalism or totalitarianism. It's a nice review (mostly on Chesterton and Belloc), but at this time there's no link for it.

Disappointed by the reception of his autobiographical Father and Son (published in 1907], Edmund Gosse complained to his fellow critic Arthur Symons that the editors were now interested only in "the new school of Chesterton and Belloc, ltd.," proving, according to Gosse, that editors "lack judgment." [Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse, Chicago, 1984, p. 439]

Courtesty of John Peterson

Joseph Epstein on Maurice Baring

Maurice Baring remained, as did so many Englishmen of his generation and after, something of a schoolboy for life. He corresponded his life long with one of his tutors in verse (in triolets, specifically). His whimsy, surely, was very much that of the schoolboy. When, for example, he was required to spell out his name for people over the telephone, he would exclaim: “B for Beastly, A for Apple, R for Rotten, I for England, N for Nothing, G for God.” Eddie Marsh remembers him at a post office in Florence insisting that the stamps he purchase be “freschi” (fresh), since “they were for an invalid.” (Non-sequitorial humor, to be sure, is not everyone’s cup of claret.) As a university student, he partook in much throwing of food and wine; and, at Oxford, where he spent two terms after work at the crammers’, he and his friends used to buy wine that they referred to as “throwing port.”

This blog is probably the best Chesterbelloc blog you're gonna find. Highly recommended.

Link.

LA Times on Catholic Laughter

Television jokes about the new pope generally have been lame, like this one from Jay Leno: "We have a new pope! Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany is now the most powerful Catholic in the world. Well, second most powerful, if you count Mel Gibson." Much funnier was this crack attributed to Dennis Miller: "Whenever I see a German on a balcony with an adoring throng, I get nervous."But seriously, folks, the dearth of really witty Ratzinger/Benedict jokes ought to be a disappointment for Catholics who agree with G.K. Chesterton, that great convert to Rome, that "it is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."

Writer Hilaire Belloc once wrote: "Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine / There's always laughter and good red wine."Or a stein of Bavarian beer.

Link.

The Amish GKC

"[T]here is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced." GKC

Citing GKC

A reader who browses through the fourteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations will learn on page 918 that the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago ("A Century of Progress") was inscribed with this quotation from Tremendous Trifles (slightly misquoted): "The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder." On the next page of Bartlett's readers are told that in a note-book dated 1945, John F. Kennedy ascribed to Chesterton the following: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up." This alludes to the idea expressed by Chesterton in the opening paragraph of "The Drift from Domesticity," which is chapter IV of The Thing.

Odd Picture Selection

Anyone know why Dale Ahlquist's picture is on the front of Joseph Pearce's Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell?

Link to book cover.

Two Big Men

This review earlier in Gilbert Magazine

On: Orestes Brownson: Sign of Contradiction By R. A. Herrera

There was a man born in the nineteenth century. He converted to Catholicism in middle age and became one of his country’s leading apologists. He wrote prolifically and was one of the leading intellects of his age. He was a huge man, standing over six feet tall and crushing the scales with hundreds of pounds.

Chesterton, right?

This same man once walked into a room and heard a guy vilifying him for becoming a Catholic. After unsuccessfully warning him to curb his tongue, he grabbed the guy by the coat-collar and seat of his pants and threw him over a stovepipe.

Okay, it’s not Chesterton.

It’s Orestes Brownson, a man every bit as colorful as Chesterton but for different reasons.

In Orestes Brownson: Sign of Contradiction, R. A. Herrera provides a compact biography of Brownson’s life, his era, and his philosophical bent.

In less than 140 pages, Herrera covers Brownson’s 1803 birth in Vermont to a family of Ethan Allen supporters to his 1876 death at his son’s house in Detroit. The quick-reading yet scholarly pages pack pounds of information. Herrera covers Brownson’s religious wanderings (Presbyterianism to Universalism to skepticism to Unitarianism to Roman Catholicism), his collaboration with early feminist radical Fanny Wright, his involvement with the New England Transcendentalists, and his role as a Northern literary leader during the Civil War.

Perhaps most importantly, Herrera provides a broad overview of Brownson’s writings and a detailed assessment of them. This is no small task (indeed, after the initial 140 pages of text, Herrera adds forty more, largely devoted to a scholarly review of his writings). Brownson’s collected writings fill twenty thick volumes, and the writings don’t come in neatly-arranged books (of which Brownson wrote few). Brownson primarily wrote for Brownson’s Quarterly Review, a journal he published for over twenty years and for which he provided most of the script for each 20,000-plus word issue.

The surface similarities between Brownson and Chesterton, as already noted, are remarkable, but it’s difficult to imagine two men more different in their literary approach. In his writings, Brownson was always uncompromising, frequently slashing, and sometimes downright mean when dealing with his opponents. According to Herrera, Brownson had an “inclination to use a battle ax to crush a butterfly.” Another recent biographer wrote: “There is in Brownson’s style a rhetorical habit of using the harsh blow of a miner’s sledge when the tap of a carpenter’s hammer would be more effective.” Brownson made many enemies in his career as a writer and, though he was the intellectual gemstone of Catholic America, he was repeatedly a source of embarrassment as well. A man more distant than Chesterton can’t be imagined.

But if you dig yet deeper and get past the writings, similarities between the men crop up again. Brownson was a kind man, his made-for-public-consumption polemics notwithstanding. He was tenderly affectionate toward his wife and children and had many friends. He was deeply devoted to God; after his conversion, always writing with a crucifix in front of him and a statue of the Virgin Mary at his side.

He was also an untiring philosopher. All biographers have agreed that Brownson was an unflagging pursuer of truth. In his efforts, he mastered foreign languages and read volumes of the best thinkers in Western Civilization, from Plato to Kant, in their native tongues. Wherever the truth took him, he went.

His pursuit eventually took him into the Catholic Church, an extremely odd journey for an intellectual in nineteenth-century Protestant America. Catholicism was exotic. Brownson had never even seen a Catholic church until his early twenties and, true to the temperament of the age, gave Catholicism little thought. He was probably a little taken back when his friend, Daniel Webster, saw him idly glancing at some Catholic works in a used bookstore and warned him, “Take care how you examine the Catholic Church, unless you are willing to become a Catholic, for Catholic doctrines are logical.”

It is telling that, when he was already highly-Catholic in his ideas and writings, Brownson was totally unaware of it until a Catholic journal re-produced one of his articles. He was somewhat stunned as he suddenly realized that his studies and ideas had unwittingly brought him to the threshold of “Catholicity” (his word). After he realized this, he investigated the possibility of conversion, but got cold feet and delayed his entry for a year.

The reason for the delay? A very Chestertonian one and a reason that contributed to Chesterton’s prolonged delay: he didn’t want to ostracize or hurt his non-Catholic friends.
It’s not surprising and it illustrates the deepest layer of Brownson. Underneath Brownson’s intellectual pursuits, underlying the argumentative writings, stronger than his occasional flares of temper, ran a consistent theme: Love for his fellow men and a desire to see them happy and saved. And in this most important though often hidden trait, this large man was most like Chesterton.

Belloc on Advertising

Hilaire Belloc wrote his humorous "True Advertising" essay in hope that advertising would start telling the (whole) truth. I will remove my AdBlock filter on any advertising source so frankly humorous. Belloc wrote in 1926:

"I suppose the people who sell chemical food in any of its hundred forms will write something like this:

"'This stuff which I am putting up in tins for you may be easily described. It is made from the flesh of the pig: honestly it is. Not from any part of the pig in particular, but just from any or all parts chopped up. Most of the pigs were healthy, and your chance of getting part of a bad one is quite small. One the other hand, it is only fair to tell you that I have put a poison to keep the stuff from putrefying, and I have put in another chemical, not poisonous, to give it colour, and another chemical, which is only poisonous in large amounts, to give it consistency. That is all I have to say about it. P.S. - Even the poisonous chemical is not there in such large quantities as to do you any immediate harm. Your health will gradually suffer, but you won't feel any acute physical pain until you have got a great accumulation of it into your system after many years.'"

LINK

Laughter

Chesterton on laughter: "It is obvious that the mind is moved by incongruity . . .". Schall on Chesterton's view on laughter: "Laughter is indeed a sign that there is a right order and we recognize it."

Apologies

I'm sorry I haven't posted something every day. I've been distracted by other projects, so this one hasn't gotten the quotidian attention I intended. I'm hoping that will change presently.

Dawson's the New Age

Excerpts from the first pages of Christopher Dawson's Christianity and the New Age:

"The men of letters . . . turned to literature and art as a means of escape from reality. That was the meaning to many of the catchword, 'Art for Art's sake.' Symbolism and aestheticism, the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight, Satanism and the cult of 'Evil,' hashish and absinthe; all of them were ways by which the last survivors of Romanticism [in the late nineteenth century] made their escape . . . There was, however, one exception, one man who refused to surrender . . . Friedrich Nietzsche."

"So we have the paradox that at the beginning of the Renaissance, when the conquest of nature and the creation of modern science are still unrealized, man appears in god-like freedom with a sense of unbounded power and greatness; while at the end of the nineteenth century, when nature has been conquered and there seem no limits to the powers of science, man is once more conscious of his misery and weakness as the slave of material circumstance and physical appetite and death. . . Man is stripped of his glory and freedom and left as a naked human animal shivering in an inhuman universe."

A GKC Fiction

In the September 1923 issue of The Adelphi, the biographer Hesketh Pearson published what appeared to be a verbatim report of a private quarrel between Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. (Shaw: "Have you any adequate excuse for not being drunk?") In fact it was entirely Pearson's invention. Chesterton was delighted and told Pearson that he ought to write his next book for him. However, the transcript was thought to be authentic by most readers, and to this day it is accepted and often quoted by Chesterton scholars. [Ian Hunter, Nothing to Repent, London: 1987, p. 94]

Weigel and GKC

"In his remarkable little primer, “Letters to a Young Catholic,” Mr. Weigel took his readers on a series of pilgrimages to places where great Catholic personalities have struggled to reconcile this world and the next, places like the bar in London’s Fleet Street, where G.K. Chesterton used to drink. Chesterton was as worldly a scribbler as ever drained a pint of beer, but whereas the hack work of his journalist contemporaries has perished, his books and essays still glow with an insight that owes everything to his faith. What makes Catholic Christianity distinctive among religions is, in one sense, its worldliness."

LINK to article

Two by Belloc

We are all familiar with science’s prodigious results. Not one of them has, as yet, added to human happiness: all have been misused to the misery of man.

The modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement.

Russell Kirk

This review appeared in Gilbert Magazine a few years ago

Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind
By James E. Person Jr.

The child Russell Kirk was visiting the family’s ancestral home, Piety Hill, in Mecosta, Michigan. He woke up one night in the front parlor and saw two men looking in the bay window. Thinking he must be seeing things, he put on his glasses and saw two men—one tall with a tall hat, the other short with a round hat. Frightened, he hid under his covers; the next morning, Kirk looked for footprints in the snow but didn’t see any. Years later, his old Aunt Fay—a long-time resident of Piety Hill—told Kirk how, as a young girl, she played with two men outside the bay window who no one else could see—Dr. Cady, a tall man with a tall hat, and Patti, a short man with a turban. She knew nothing of Kirk’s experience years earlier.

A fascinating story. And not one you’d normally associate with Kirk, a pioneer of the modern conservative movement in America.

This story is recounted in James Person’s Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind, an excellent primer on Kirk’s life and enormous corpus of writings (thirty-two books and thousands of columns and articles).

A primer was needed. Many people have read Kirk, but few have fully understood him. Kirk had a tendency to use terms and phrases without concisely explaining them. His readers often walk away from his books with an amorphous appreciation for what he was saying, but not knowing exactly what he meant, especially when he used phrases like “the permanent things” or “the moral imagination” (two of Kirk’s favorites that are found throughout his works).

Person clears away any fogginess. The permanent things, for instance, are mores or norms that transcend the world’s cultures. A basic list, Person tells us, can be found in the appendix of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, such as the duties to help others, to take special care of family members, to be faithful to one’s spouse, and to be brave. The moral imagination is the power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events, especially as embodied in poetry and art and sustained by religion. (“The democracy of the dead” was another of his favorite phrases, Kirk being a big fan of Chesterton.)

Person’s book touches all areas of Kirk’s thought and writings, from his most famous book that shaped the modern conservative movement, The Conservative Mind, to his landmark study on T.S. Eliot, Eliot and His Age. Person recounts Kirk’s writings on education, history, social criticism, and economics.

Person also devotes a substantial amount of time to a line of Kirk’s writings that many people don’t know about: his fiction. Like Chesterton, Kirk’s talents as a writer were diverse. In addition to his non-fiction books, columns, and articles, Kirk became an accomplished fiction writer, publishing numerous ghost stories and three novels, including a Gothic romance, Old House of Fear, that would sell more copies than all his other books combined. His story-telling was good enough to earn him various awards, including appointment as a Knight Commander of the Order of Count Dracula, an honor bestowed by the Count Dracula Society.

Person’s book also makes it clear that Kirk was not wholly conservative, at least as that term is popularly understood today. Again like Chesterton, Kirk’s worldview transcended the pettiness of party politics, and he can’t easily be pinned down on the political spectrum. Kirk, for instance, admired the trust-busting and early conservationist Teddy Roosevelt and listed him as one of the top ten conservatives of all time. Kirk also endorsed environmental protection legislation that was opposed by some conservatives at the time.

Perhaps most significantly, Kirk, like Chesterton, did not have an unquestioning confidence in the competitive market economy. Kirk, an admirer of Wilhelm Roepke, the man who architected Western Germany’s economic recovery after World War II, favored what Roepke called a humane economy: “an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences.” Person points out that Kirk’s economic views were similar to distributism. Person devotes much space to exploring the merits of Kirk’s economics, and in the process sheds much light on the merits of distributism.

Finally, like Chesterton, Person tells us that Kirk was a convert and led a life marked by Christian virtue. He was a good father and husband, and a charitable man who cared for the poor and downtrodden, taking many of them into his own home for extended stays.

Overall, Kirk was a writer who labored in God’s vineyard in an age that tramples His grapes. A few more such Christians and, as Kirk would often say about other great men and women of the twentieth century who spoke out against vulgarizing modernity, contemporary civilization might be redeemed by now.

On Theses and Essays

Schall on Chesterton
From Midwest Chesterton News, October, 1996.

Just when I thought that I had the importance and delight of the essay pretty well figured out, I ran across an essay of Chesterton that made me doubt the line of thought I have often used to praise Chesterton himself. The occasion for these reflections was a very nice book review of my Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays, by Professor James Finn Cotter at Mt. St. Mary's College, in Maryland. Cotter remarked, with much eloquence, that "the personal essay is a most creative form of human expression when it comes to reaching out to the reader. It is natural, authentic, and unique, and it cannot be easily faked, like a poem or a story. When read aloud, an essay touches our emotions directly and makes us think more clearly."

My Idylls and Rambles (Ignatius Press, 1994) itself contained a defense of the essay and argued that it was quite the most delightful of all forms of writing. I rejoiced that Belloc and Chesterton wrote essays with such humor and insight. I even cited Stevenson and Hazlett as favorite essayists. Now, I know that some people prefer poetry or the novel or the solid book to the short essay. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot enjoy every form that comes along, if it is good. I knew that the early essay in French was an "effort", an "attempt" or a "try" at explaining or accounting for something. Its genius is that it is open to every topic and mood, whimsical or solemn.

The day after I read Cotter's review, I decided to do a column for the Midwest Chesterton News. About a year ago, as I mentioned in an earlier column, I bought several volumes of the Collected Works, but I had noticed that I had not read any of Volume XXXV, 1929-31. So I opened up the book rather arbitrarily to the column of March 2, 1929, on "Buddhism and Christianity", a most pertinent topic considering John Paul II's remark on Buddhism in Crossing the Threshold of Hope and his Ut Unum Sint. Just as I was about to begin my essay on Buddhism (hold your breath), however, I thumbed backward to the Chesterton column of February 16, 1929. Its title was, I could hardly believe it, "On the Essay"! I, being only fourteen months old when it was written, had never seen this essay before; it was like discovering gold in your own backyard. I thought maybe Professor Cotter might like a copy of it, so I xeroxed it. I figured I knew exactly what Chesterton would say in his essay.

Then I read Chesterton's essay "On the Essay" only to discover that he did not at all say what I assumed he would say. He did say, much to my consolation, that he himself indulged in the essay all his life and loved it as a form of writing. Chesterton began his essay, however, with this quite upsetting sentence for someone, like me, prepared to exalt the essay at all costs: "There are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays." "Wow!" I thought to myself, that is quite a surprising remark -- evil re-enters the world in the form of essays! Here I had been thinking that the essay could save the world and I discover the Devil as its author!

It has been my experience, as devoted readers of the Midwest Chesterton News well know by now, however, that whenever Chesterton talks about evil, I had better pay attention; something momentous is about to happen. The plot thickens when Chesterton remarked that the essay came into English letters from the French via Francis Bacon. Chesterton added, "I can only believe it. I always thought he (Bacon) was the villain of English history." It was Bacon who taught the English that knowledge is purely positive, purely useful.

So what's up with the essay, the form of literature Schall likes most? Is the truth now out, that, as many of his best friends have darkly hinted for years, Schall himself is a cooperator in the Evil that re-enters history, no small problem as even Schall recognizes?

Chesterton admitted that "I take my greatest literary pleasure in reading them (essays); after such really serious necessities of the intellect as detective stories and tracts written by madmen." Well, you just have to laugh at such a remark. We readers of Father Brown know about Chesterton and detective stories; we readers of Orthodoxy know of Chesterton and madmen; we readers if a hundred of his books know about Chesterton and essays. So here Chesterton is telling us that essays are something of a serious intellectual problem through which evil re-entered the modern world. Why so?

Chesterton maintained that the essay is a modern invention -- though it was known to the Romans, I think, say to Horace and Cicero. Most readers know that I also do a monthly column in Crisis entitled "Sense and Nonsense". Needless to say, I have always understood that this title comes from Chesterton. Let us see how it works into our present plot:

"There is any amount of sense and nonsense talked both for and against what is called medievalism. There is also any amount of sense and nonsense talked for and against what is called modernism. ... But if a man wanted the one real and rational test, which really does distinguish the medieval from the modern mood, it might be stated thus: The medieval man thought in terms of the Thesis, where the modern man thinks in terms of the Essay.
The man who wrote a Thesis, stated what he held and then proceeded to prove it by known, orderly, logical rules. The man who writes the essay holds nothing so definite."

Chesterton said that he enjoys Stevenson, but he worried about the man who preferred, as Stevenson said in a famous essay, the travel to the arrival at the end of the road. Chesterton always preferred the flagons at the Inn at the End of the World. In logic, Chesterton pointed out that if the end of travel were not more important, no one would ever set forth. The travel itself may well be diverting enough, but it cannot be the end or purpose of the journey. The essayist, not the thesis maker, has unfortunately become our moral philosopher. He, like the traveller, has nothing definite in mind when he sets out or when he concludes. "After a certain amount of wandering the mind wants either to get there or to go home," Chesterton observed. "It is one thing to travel hopefully, and say half in jest that that it is better than to arrive. It is another thing to travel hopelessly, because you know you will never arrive." Needless to say, the medievals travelled hopefully, knowing by their theses to where they would arrive, while the moderns travel hopelessly, not having anywhere to go.

Chesterton thus was able to take that which he himself wrote thousands of times, the very essay, and subject it to critical examination about what it did and what he was doing. Chesterton found an element in modern letters that is, because of its inconclusiveness, "indefinite and dangerous." For he understood that it is dangerous for the mind not to do what the mind does of its nature, that is, come to conclusions, on the basis of a thesis, of an open argument. In this sense, Chesterton understood that the "article", the unit of argument in St. Thomas' Summae, was a far different proposition from the essay that only rambled on about one's own feelings.

Now I do not think there is anything particularly wrong with feelings or rambling, but it is not to be done for its own sake. Chesterton saw that evil re-enters in the world when the world is so proposed to us that all there is in it is travel, no goal. The evil is fuzziness, the inability to make a decision or to live by one when made, the certainty of uncertainty that paralyzes the mind and the culture.

In writing an essay, we can deal with theoretical or practical matters. This is the liberty of the essay. But properly to present theoretical matters we must put forth a theory and arrive at a conclusion based on that theory. If we substitute the looseness of the essay for the rigor of the thesis and the argument, we will end up simply roaming and wandering about the intellectual landscape.

After I read this essay of Chesterton on the essay, I asked myself, is Chesterton, in his essays, guilty of the fault that he attributes to the heritage of Bacon, of letting evil into the world because the essayist could not make up his mind about what he was arguing? I thought of the many times in these pages that I have reflected on, analyzed, commented on, one or another Chesterton essay. I realized that what was to me always unique and striking about Chesterton's essays, what made them different, was that his essays, while always revealing a good amount of wonderment and delight, were always theses. He always knew what the mind was for. Even in his playful essays, in his "attempt" to wander about within an experience or an event, Chesterton came to a clear conclusion based on principled argument. Chesterton managed to combine the virtue of the medieval thesis with the modern essay. He was so delightful, so perceptive that he taught the truth, in both sense and nonsense, under the guise of evil re-entering the world.

Reproduced with gracious permission of James V. Schall

Heavy GKC

In 1985 the heavy-metal rock band Iron Maiden released an album with the cheerful title, Live after Death. One of the songs included therein bears the title "Revelations"; and barely decipherable there, amid the successive detonations of electric guitar, someone is singing the words of Chesterton's famous 1905 Christian hymn, "Oh God of Earth and Altar."

Belloc on Our Blood

"Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be happy for long—but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food—and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus." Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

GKC Poetry

For those who missed it, The American Conservative last year (2/16/04) ran a nice piece on GKC's poetry. Among choice passages, "It is this faith that allows Chesterton to gaze upon the 'proletarians' of the world and see not misery requiring bloody revolution to correct, but workmen of the divine." Chesterton's joyful poetry is "a scandal to the true-blue modern intellectual, who combines despairing sadness with fanatic utopian dreams."

A Little Waugh

Drunken Brideshead Revisited

Sebastian Flyte: a young man with a sense of his English nobility and the oppressive air of dignity that title required him to assume. A young man with an acute sense of holiness. A young man with an intense desire for joy that he wrongly tried to capture with drink.

In the process, he blew out the transcendental receiver we're all hard-wired with. But the signal didn’t stop coming to him. He kept pursuing the exceptional feeling through more intense rounds of debauchery and drunkenness.

Fortunately for Sebastian, with the transcendental signal also comes grace. And with grace even the distortion can become a type of holiness.

This becomes clear in Waugh’s final words about Sebastian. Sebastian’s drinking worsened until he ended-up living with a shiftless German named Kurt, a pitiful and despicable man who took advantage of Sebastian, living off the small allowance that Sebastian continued to receive from his family. Sebastian provided for the man and cared for Kurt, for some inexplicable reason, but “as long as Sebastian had him to look after, he was happy.”

Sebastian’s call to holiness that he had translated as the call to drunkenness was becoming transformed in his soul and erupting in a proper form—the call to service. After serving Kurt for awhile, Kurt was caught by the Nazis, made to serve as storm trooper, escaped, was caught, and hung himself in a concentration camp. Sebastian spent a year looking for him in Europe, then went to Morocco when he learned Kurt was dead.

Eventually, Sebastian landed in a monastery near Carthage, not as a monk, but as a drunken porter. He was fit for neither the secular world nor the religious world, pathetic by both worlds’ standards.

But Waugh leaves us with the impression that Sebastian obtained a good life. The portrait painted of Sebastian’s future is touching, in an odd sort of way. In response to Charles Ryder’s question about how Sebastian will end, Sebastian’s sister responds (in a way that leaves no doubt that is Waugh’s opinion):

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of the [monastic] community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favourite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, ‘Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,’ and then he’ll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. . . If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life."

Waugh tells that Sebastian, the noble drunkard, would become a man whose vice was permanently affixed to his back, but a man who was becoming holy by carrying that self-inflicted cross as nobly as possible. His transcendental receiver, through nothing less than unmerited grace, carrying a better tune, even if still somewhat distorted.