Lewis on Fairy Tales & True Myth

Fairy Tales

I saw how (fairy) stories could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood.

Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?

I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze things. And reverence itself did harm.

The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.

But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?

- C.S. Lewis, in an essay called "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said"


True Myth

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the mind of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through what we call "real things."

- The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves

Thanks to the Denver Post for rounding up these quotations.

Chesterton's Alphabet

Many thanks to Nick Milne; he has transcribed Chesterton's "An Alphabet" from Collected Nonsense and Light Verse.

A is an Agnostic dissecting a frog,
B was a Buddhist who had been a dog,
C was a Christian, a Christist I mean,
D was the Dog that the Buddhist had been,

You can read all of GKC's "An Alphabet" at Nick's blog, A Gentle Fuss.

Belloc on Men & Monkeys

The Marmozet

The species Man and Marmozet
    Are intimately linked;
The Marmozet survives as yet,
    But Men are all extinct.

[Hilaire Belloc. The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. 1896]

A Pity

The water tower on the top of Campden Hill, the structure that figured so decisively in the battles of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, was razed in 1970. The London Encyclopedia, Bethesda: Adler, 1986, 762.

Complement the Papal Writings in 2007

We [Wineskin Media] are pleased to announce our 2007 Social Justice Engagement Calendar, soon to be available from IHS Press [link to IHS press].

...

With this weekly calendar, you’ll sample major papal writings:

• Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII
• Singulari Quadam, Pius X
• Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI
• Mater et Magistra, John XXIII
• Pacem in Terris, John XXIII
• Populorum Progressio, Paul VI
• Octogesima Adveniens, Paul VI
• Laborem Exercens, John Paul II
• On the Ecological Crisis, John Paul II
• Centesimus Annus, John Paul II

...

You’ll also hear from Vatican II, with Gaudium et Spes, as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

...

As a bonus, this year’s calendar also includes selections from the works of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. These engaging Catholic laymen, while certainly not doctrinal authorites, consciously modeled their economic theories on Catholic social principles. They complement the papal writings as they clarify and explore the underlying economic issues. And they’re funny.

And as some of us most heartily and vigorously refuse to be led to Socialism, we have long adopted the harder alternative called trying to think things out.
-- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

GKC: Not a Self-Help Guru

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man just about to take the high jump. Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run—"In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL." It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other—which, it is not for me to say.

-- G.K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of Success" in All Things Considered, 1915

Lewis and Narnia

Pretty good feature piece at NYT about LWW and Lewis, though I have two quibbles:

[T]here are some Hollywood observers who seem to believe that there is a good reason Lewis is among the last of the classic children’s authors to be adapted for the movies, and that in taking on Narnia, Disney has backed itself into a corner. If the studio plays down the Christian aspect of the story, it risks criticism from the religious right, the argument goes; if it is too upfront about the religious references, on the other hand, that could be toxic at the box office.

I assume that the writer is referring to “playing down the Christian aspect” in the marketing. Such a worry is misplaced. There’s no need to mention the Christian aspect of the story in the mass marketing. Every Christian worth his salt has heard that it’s a Christian-based film. If there is a need to get the word out among Christians, it’s being accomplished just fine through the “sub-strata” marketing of the film: disbursing ten-minute excerpts to local churches.

If the writer is referring to the content of the film itself, the concern is ludicrous. Just adapt the book the best you can for the screen. The religious message is there and the allegory isn’t particularly deep or complex, but the Christianity is not overt. I read the books during my middle school years, and I had no idea there was a Christian message in them (perhaps I’m daft, but even when Aslan was killed and resurrected, it didn’t dawn on me). Make the film for the sake of the story and let any religious messages work themselves out.

Did they actually sleep together, this earnest, scholarly young man, conventional in almost every other way, and a woman 26 years his senior? Walter Hooper, the editor of Lewis’s “Collected Letters,” thinks it “not improbable.” A.N. Wilson, the best and most persuasive of Lewis’s biographers, argues that there’s no reason at all to think they didn’t, leaving us with the baffling and disquieting psychological picture of C.S. Lewis, the great scholar and writer and Christian apologist-to-be, pedaling off on his bicycle, his academic gown flapping in the wind, to have a nooner with Mum.

The writer here is talking about Lewis’ odd relationship with the mother of his friend, Edward Moore. They agreed to take care of each other’s mother if the other died, and Moore did. Lewis lived up to his promise with incredible loyalty, and his friends and biographers have puzzled about it for the past fifty years.
I don’t know if Lewis had an affair with the woman, but I’m assuming the NYT writer came up with the most damning evidence possible, and the best he has is this quote: “there’s no reason at all to think they didn’t.” And that from a biographer who isn’t particularly fond of Christianity. With that piece of evidence the writer wants to imagine Lewis riding off for a nooner? That writer has an over-active imagination, as have many others.

Garry Wills recommends...

Garry Wills was recently interviewed by Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News:

DMN: You draw on St. Augustine, G.K. Chesterton and John Henry Newman. For the layperson who might want to get started with those writers, do you have a reading plan?

Wills: For Augustine, probably the best thing is to read a good biography, and Peter Brown's [Augustine of Hippo] is the best. ... For Chesterton, Orthodoxy is a wonderful starting point. For Newman, any collection of his sermons.

Progress...

-- by Zach Brissett of In Toon With the World, Small Pax, and Southern Appeal

Atheist vs. Syme

"The Raving Atheist" takes on The Man Who Was Thursday.

Thursday on Thursday, no.19

"You are a very fine fellow. You can believe in a sanity which is not merely your sanity."

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

Illustrious St. Paul's

Many Chestertonians will recall that Milton had once been a pupil at Chesterton's school, St. Paul's, but perhaps fewer are aware that Samuel Pepys and Edmund Halley also were educated there. The London Encyclopedia, Bethesda: Adler, 1986, p. 762.

New GKC Blog

Brand new GKC blog from Gilbert! contributor, Kyro Lantsberger.

Nick Milne, Chestertonian Blogger

Nick Milne, Welcome to blogland! Nick is the college recipient of this year's Gilbert & Frances Scholarship. His essay "On Intellectual Honesty" was published in the most recent issue of Gilbert Magazine, and it also appears on his new blog A Gentle Fuss.

Google Print: Belloc on Beer

I concur with Eric that Google Print is "pretty neat." Here are the results of a search for 'beer' in Hilaire Belloc's The Path to Rome (link):

Pages 1 - 10 of 10 in book for beer. (0.04 seconds) Page 34 Those great men — Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him — drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. ... Page 75 Or she would put her head in and say — “I can recommend our excellent beer. It is really preferable to this local wine.” And my neighbour, a tourist, ... Page 98 said I. “Beer,” said she. “Anything else?” said I. “No,” said she. “Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.” I drank this with delight, ... Page 121 For my part, I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the ... Page 122 ... which are so many yards and so many yards, . . .“ &c., and so forth . . exactly like a mill. I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer ... Page 130 ... we separated; I had no time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, ... Page 154 Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead — if he could get it — liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, ... Page 187 THE GOOD SAVAGES 187 there ordering beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would have me their butt, and even as it was found ... Page 276 [Sorry, this page's content is restricted] Page 317 ... will return to the simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon ...

For Friday: Guinness & Friendship

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:


N.B. - the source for these images is the Illustrated London News Home Page.

Chesterton the Prophet

G.K. Chesterton presented a lecture to the Lyceum Club in 1923. The Chesterton Review recently republished some notes taken during the lecture, and I posted an excerpt from them last month (The Need of a Philosophy). These were Chesterton's concluding remarks:

"It is necessary therefore for each of us to arrange an order in our thinking and if you decide to accept these beliefs you must be able to explain why you believe them and how, and within what limitations. Without some such consecutive philosophy, society will become a monster without a brain."

I Would've Bought It

In 1922, during his lecture-tour stay in Chicago, Chesterton met with Sinclair Lewis and John Drinkwater to converse over illegal whiskey. They decided to collaborate on a murder mystery, a three-act play to be entitled, Mary Queen of Scotch, with each of them contributing one act. Not surprisingly, the three authors forgot about the project as quickly and easily as they had dreamed it up.

Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 304.

Thursday on Thursday, no.18

"Millionaires I can understand, they are nearly all mad."

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

Gigantic Secret

Sam Schneider wrote in his blog (A Fish Hook Through the Nose):

I got home today and needed a good laugh, so I sat down in my bed with two red pillows propped behind me and finished G.K. Chesterton's great work [Orthodoxy]. I never thought that a book on philosophy could make me laugh out loud, but from now on that will be my central deciding factor in all such books. At this point, I would like to write a long quote from the last two pages of the book, a passage that sent chills along my body, carried by a deep, inexpressible joy. However, as I myself usually skim such quotes in other blogs, let me leave it a great and fathomed secret, one that you will only know if you yourself open up this same book and read it. My only recommendation is the penciled words I encountered at the end of my copy, "Wow. I will be forever changed."

I am sure the last paragraph of Orthodoxy has changed the lives of many people.

Deep Thoughts by G.K. ?

A blogger discovered Chesterton and described him as a cross between C.S. Lewis and SNL's Jack Handey. This is the danger of quote collections, I suppose. But I'm sure G.K. is laughing heartily!

Here are a few Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey:

"One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh no," I said, "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late."

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

"It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."

more Deep Thoughts can be found here

GKC in Gheon

I bought an old copy of Henri Gheon's Secrets of the Saints, a four-in-one volume that contains The Secret of the Cure D'Ars, The Secret of the Little Flower, The Secret of Saint Margaret Mary, and The Secret of Saint John Bosco. For $11.00, including P&H, I was pretty pleased at the prospect of it arriving.

And when it did, I discovered that there was an added bonus: An essay by Chesterton, "The Challenge of the Cure d'Ars," which was written as an epilogue to the first English edition of The Secret of the Cure d'Ars. The publishers of my newly-acquired 1954 edition said it's "too good to be omitted in this collection." I read it, and I agree. The first line alone may have been worth the entire $11.00:

"The Catholic Church is much too universal to be called international; for she is older than all the nations."

For Friday: Guinness & Golf

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:

Playing Marbles

Chip Scanlon wrote yesterday at Poynter Online:

The story [Mark Maremont. "The CEO's Private Golf Shuttle". WSJ. 1 Oct 2005] showed in exacting detail how members of the business elite take advantage of corporate planes meant to save time and ensure the security of CEOs. This way, they get free transportation to golf courses where they can indulge their passion for a pastime G.K. Chesterton defined as "an expensive way of playing marbles."

Dear Reader: Do you know the source of this GKC quotation?

Thursday on Thursday, no.17

"I regret to inform you that your remarks convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways."

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

Belloc as Historian

I missed this article by Michael Hennessy about "Belloc as a Catholic Historian" at Seattle Catholic in early September. But yesterday's reprint in Spero News alerted me to it.

If Belloc most wanted to be remembered for his serious verse — although he thought its quality too slight to merit the devoted attention of posterity (a judgement from which I, for one, demur) — he is perhaps best known today as the author of the humorous "Cautionary Verses for Children", and for his historical works. Although he was a historian by training, having read what even then was dubiously referred to as Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford (in between bouts of orating, throwing port, belittling unbelievers, singing, presiding over the Union and walking here and there at tremendous pace with a bottle of wine in one pocket and chunks of bread and cheese in the other), he often felt more duty than pleasure in writing his numerous histories.

read more...

For Friday: Guinness for Strength

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:

(speaking of heroic virtue ...)



SOURCE

No Opportunity for Heroic Virtue?

Paul Burnell, writing in a BBC News article about the putative miracle and possible canonization of Cardinal Newman, asks why there are few English Catholic saints:

Catholic writer Dr William Oddie said it is difficult to pinpoint the reason.

"In a lot of ways England is a bit of a backwater in the Catholic Church - we're really pretty small beer.

"It could be there has been less opportunity to live a heroic life in the modern era."

The former Editor of The Catholic Herald added: "Maybe the English haven't been holy enough."

However Dr Oddie is quick to nominate another English candidate for sainthood - the writer GK Chesterton.

"He was a man of immense holiness - he would also be the first journalist to be canonised."

Less opportunity to live a heroic life in the modern era? Perhaps Dr. Oddie is a hermit and has no contact with the modern world. How else to explain his ignorance of the opportunity provided by the world today? We still have family, work, and culture (and I think England does as well) -- all of which are attacked by the modern world. Yes, that is where virtue comes in to play.

Thursday on Thursday, no.16

"I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do -- I can die."

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

Family Friendly Violence

Steve Tilley of the Edmonton Sun writes:

Traveller's Tales' latest title will try to walk the fine line between intense action and teen-friendly fun, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe mixing puzzle-solving and exploration with copious amounts of monster slaying. The game hits stores Nov. 15, just ahead of the Disney flick's Dec. 9 release.

As a bit* of a lark, the developers temporarily added computer code that instructed the game to show blood splatters with every impact of sword or arrow on monster flesh, and the screen was soon awash in red as the game's quartet of kid heroes had it out with waves of critters.

But that's not what Narnia is about, said Burton [director of game development studio Traveller's Tales]. "I don't think it glorifies violence," he said. "It's not like you're getting into a car with a prostitute, sleeping with her and killing her to get the money back." [a reference to Grand Theft Auto]

LINK

Perhaps if Hollywood makes a new Thursday movie we'll get a spin-off video game of bomb-throwing anarchists.

* Yes, a bit, it may be just a single bit in the computer program. What's the difference? Mr. Burton correctly sees the difference is enormous. One little bit is not as good as another; it is the fine line between the right and wrong solution.

Pride Before Ignorance

Craig A. Boyd, Professor of Philosophy and Director of Faith Integration at Azusa Pacific University, invokes GKC in a recent blog post:

G. K. Chesterton, one of the past century’s most brilliant and witty thinkers, believed that arrogance was really a sign of insanity. The arrogant person lives in a world of her own creation, makes herself God and fails to see the world from a perspective other than her own, self-assumed superiority. Chesterton addresses the “madman” by saying, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”

Link.

For Friday: Guinness & Lobster

Chesterton wrote the column "Our Notebook" for The Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936. Here is an advertisement from a 1930 edition:

SOURCE

Another GKC Confession

Yet another blogger tells us how he came to love GKC's writings and shows that there are a lot more GKC friends out there than we mention on the front page of this blog. Link.

I read some excellent books, such as "Handbook of Christian Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli. I also read some easier reads like "Mere Christianity" by C. S. Lewis and "Why Do Catholics Do That?" by Kevin Orlin Johnson. While reading these, as well as many other tracts, articles, booklets, etc., I noticed a common theme emerging. (BTW, might I recommend the articles in "This Rock" magazine, as well as the booklets "Confession of a Roman Catholic" and "The Catholic Church Has the Answer" by Paul Whitcomb - excellent, quick reads that help demolish most objections.) That common theme (aside from, of course, the fact that Catholics are not only Christian, but the first Christians) is that each authors all kept quoting this one apologist: Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

Thursday on Thursday, no.15

"Well, it seems that we have all the same kind of morality or immorality, so we had better face the fact that comes of it."

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

Mystical & Prophetic Dimension of a Culture

Jaime Antúnez Aldunate, editor of the Chile-based Catholic review Humanitas, was recently interviewed by Zenit. The first part of the interview was published Oct 11, 2005 (LINK). An excerpt:

Borrowing a word from that great British thinker of culture and history that was Christopher Dawson, one could say that when the mystical and prophetic dimension of a culture declines, its very religion also "becomes secular, is absorbed in the cultural tradition to such a point that it identifies with it, and finally it becomes only a way of social activity and perhaps even a slave or accomplice of the powers of this world." Much of this is also happening in the present day.

The Need of a Philosophy

G.K. Chesterton gave a lecture to the Lyceum Club in March 1923. Notes taken from this lecture were published in The Philosopher during the same year. Russell Sparkes provided the lecture report to The Chesterton Review; TCR republished it in the most recent issue (Vol XXXI, Nos.1&2, Spring/Summer 2005). Here is one quotation from GK's lecture:

"The utilitarians did assume that man had a special duty to man but the modern view is different -- modern duties must now be equally guided by our relations to animals. The rights of animals is the subject of much controversy, and discussion on the point is undetermined. Some people will eat fish and not meat. There was a man who would eat lobster sauce because it was at the cost of only one life, while he would not eat shrimp sauce because that was a holocaust. In any case it has been well put, that if animals have no rights man has duties to them."

Today you might meet a man who will eat a tomato. The tomato is given by a plant that continues to live after the fruit is plucked. But this man will not eat a carrot because harvesting the taproot is an act of violence destroying the plant. I do not agree with this man, but at least he is arranging an order to his thoughts and he can begin to explain them.

Anchoress on GKC

The popular blogger, The Anchoress, has re-produced thirty GKC gems on her blog. It's worth a look. Link.

Samples:

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.-Illustrated London News 1906

Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.- Heretics

Oct 7: Lepanto & Our Lady of the Rosary

The Battle of Lepanto by Paolo Veronese (c.1528-1588)

Apart from the signal defeat of the Albigensian heretics at the battle of Muret in 1213 which legend has attributed to the recitation of the Rosary by St. Dominic, it is believed that Heaven has on many occasions rewarded the faith of those who had recourse to this devotion in times of special danger. More particularly, the naval victory of Lepanto gained by Don John of Austria over the Turkish fleet on the first Sunday of October in 1571 responded wonderfully to the processions made at Rome on that same day by the members of the Rosary confraternity.

[LINK. Catholic Encyclopedia. 1912]

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

[LINK. Chesterton. Lepanto. 1915]

No One Took Their Place?

The guy at Shackblog laments:

It seems telling that there are no voices of reason and intelligence standing out in all of the Christian publishing industry like Lewis or Chesterton did at one time. If there were somebody out there smart enough and reasonable enough to actually have something to say, he/she is constantly feeling pressure to "write more little books about Christianity", which, of course, will never make any impression on anybody outside of the Church's walls.

I think he's right, but it's more the fault of the reading audience than a lack of ability among the writers. The folks at Touchstone tread in this tradition, as do a number of blogs. Believe it or not, I intend my other blog, The Daily Eudemon, to do so, but it would be difficult to discern it from day-to-day. If I were to attempt (attempt!) to write like Lewis and Chesterton, I would lose readers faster than a stripper loses clothes.

Thursday on Thursday, no.14

"All the blue devils in blue hell contributed to my blue funk!"

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

Relics of Chesterton & Friends

The Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, Illinois, houses a major research collection of the books and papers of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.
...
[The] Wade Center has a museum where such pieces as C.S. Lewis's family wardrobe and writing desk, Charles Williams's bookcases, J.R.R. Tolkien's desk, Pauline Baynes's original map of Narnia, and a tapestry from Dorothy L. Sayers's home can be viewed. Photographs, rare books and manuscripts, and other small items of memorabilia round off the displays. A current exhibit, entitled "The Craft of Detective Fiction", details the contributions made by G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers to the genre of detective fiction.

LINK

Look Backwards to Transform the Future

Spero News republished Fr. C. John McCloskey's review of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery Publishing, Washington 2005).

Read together with Triumph (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2001), Harry Crocker's recent history of the Church, Woods' book will fascinate, delight and instruct in a manner worthy of the 20th-century Catholic historian and polemicist Hilaire Belloc, showing us how to look backwards to transform the future.

LINK

Fr. C. John's Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan contains books by Chesterton, Belloc, Tolkien, Lewis, Dawson, Muggeridge, Knox, and many others.

Chesterton the Blogger

The Anchoress discusses the blogger v. journalist debate:

What - in these changing times - defines a journalist? While a journalist can also be a blogger, is it out of the question for a blogger to be a journalist? Can some bloggers morph into that fabled classification of “journalist?”

G.K. Chesterton was a journalist who wrote prodigiously - he never stopped writing - novels, treatises, polemics, opinion columns, dialogues and debates and poems. No one today doubts that he was a journalist, yet I am quite certain that were he alive in this era, he’d be a blogger, and a BIG one in every way. Being fat and unphotogenic, he would very likely come up more from blogs than from any sort of mainstream venue. And yet he would still be (and would very likely completely identify as) a journalist.

Link.

Portillo on Joy

Authentic joy is based on this foundation: that we want to live for God and want to serve others because of God. Let us tell the Lord that we want nothing more than to serve him with joy. If we behave in this way we shall find that our inner peace, our joy, our good humour will attract many souls to God. Give witness to Christian joy. Show to those around you that this is our great secret. We are happy because we are children of God, because we deal with him, because we struggle to become better for him. And when we fail, we go right away to the Sacrament of joy where we recover our sense of fraternity with all men and women.

[Alvaro del Portillo, Homily, 12 Apr 1984; quoted by Francis Fernandez Carvajal in In Conversation With God, vol.5, p.155]

There is no direct reference to GKC in the quotation above; Bishop Portillo does use the same language as Chesterton to talk about joy. Many people were — and still are — lead to God due to the peace, joy, and good humour shown by Chesterton. Also you noticed (how can a reader of GKC not notice?) that Portillo referred to joy as "our great secret."

Burke on Chesterton on Joy

Cormac Burke, in Authority and Freedom in the Church (p. 143), writes this about GKC and the "gigantic secret":

As Chesterton suggests, it is joy not because we are in the right place, but because we are in the wrong place. We were lost, but Someone has found us and is leading us home. It is joy not because we are alright — we are not — but because Someone can put us right. Christian joy comes from facing up to the one really sad fact of life, which is sin; and countering it with a joyful fact that is even realer and stronger than sin: God's love and mercy.

[cited by Francis Fernandez Carvajal in In Conversation With God, vol. 5, p.145]

Thursday on Thursday, no.13

"I knew I was a poet. I knew my intuition was as infallible as the Pope."

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

Just One Chesterton Book Away

This is from John Zmirak's review of The Exorcism of Emily Rose:

The film raises and addresses profound questions about the nature of evil and why God permits the suffering of the innocent—but doesn't pretend to answer them. And that's just what the filmmaker intended. Scott Derrickson, a graduate of the artsy Christian liberal arts university, Biola, calls himself an "orthodox Christian" and confesses that he's addicted to the novels of Walker Percy, and to reading and re-reading G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. In fact, as Derrickson told me in an interview, Catholic screenwriting maven Barbara Nicolosi warns him, "You're just one Chesterton book away from crossing the Tiber," and becoming a Catholic. Whatever his background, Derrickson has crafted a compelling drama which sends you out of the theater feeling queasily fascinated, wondering if you need to seek some kind of protection, despite your faith or lack thereof.

LINK

(thanks to Democracy of the Dead for finding this one)

Damn Short Words

Earlier this month Ariel Vanderhorst of the Vocabulary Reclamation Project issued a challenge inspired by the following text of Orthodoxy:

Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

The challenge is to write a blog post entirely with one-syllable words. You can read the challenge HERE. In the comments Ariel added some guidelines: "... the post must be half a page, or at least several good paragraphs. If longer, you will be elevated to genius status. As well, the post's content must mirror the standards (high, of course) which your blog normally maintains. No 'see Spot run' stuff. The post should contain some propositional content; that is, we should be able to read it and agree. Now that the rules have been posted, you may break them at your leisure." His own stab with a swordstick can be found at his BitterSweetLife blog (LINK).

Any more takers? Make sure to drop a link to your post here in the comments. And let Ariel know as well.

Considering Culture

This past Saturday the Daily Times of Pakistan republished Chesterton's essay "French and English" (LINK).

If we are to be international we must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other.

The essay was published in 1908 in the collection All Things Considered. The 9th edition (1915) of ATC can be found online HERE.

New Gresham Book on Lewis

[Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis,] wrote "Jack’s Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis," which traces the life and times of best-selling author C.S. Lewis. The book is slated for release in October from Broadman & Holman.
...
Gresham explained that the memoir is not a scholarly work filled with academic analysis, but a "simple recounting of the story of what I believe to be the extraordinary life of an extraordinary man."

LINK

Thursday on Thursday, no.12

"Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?"

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

Free GKC

24 on-line books by G.K. Chesterton can be downloaded in pdf format at this site. 25 if you count two versions of Orthodoxy.

Thanks, Inn.

Blog Grist

Volume 8, Number 8 of Gilbert Magazine is hitting mailboxes this week. It is also the free sample issue available online (LINK). This issue contains a nice little article about blogging (see page 28). The author is someone we know who has "been busy drinking, procreating, drinking, reading, drinking, and writing. And oh yeah, blogging."

God Always Vivisects

In the wake of Katrina and while preparing for Rita, John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute writes about suffering.

[There] remains much suffering that is not manmade. The question is why there is suffering of any kind. And why would a so-called "good" God allow suffering? Indeed, if there is a good God, according to theologian C. S. Lewis, then he is no less formidable than a cosmic monster. And the more we believe, as traditional Christians do, that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is little hope in avoiding the pains of life. "A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport," writes C. S. Lewis in his book A Grief Observed, "might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless."

LINK

I think this blogger may have been around awhile, but I haven't seen him. He's Dad 29, and this is his by-line:

"Old. Nasty. Likes Chesterton."

Nasty and Chesterton aren't usually seen in the same phrase, but this blog might be worth watching. Link.

Marriage & Sanity

Justin Dyer, a graduate student at Oklahoma University, writes about our culture's current problem understanding the nature of marriage. Is marriage whatever our culture defines it to be? Or is marriage something not created by man but recognized by our laws? Is marriage when any two people come together in love? How about a mother and her son? Or three adolescent girls? Or a horse and his boy? Our culture will have to say "Whatever else that may be, it is not marriage."

The tale of our society’s search for a new meaning and a new articulation of marriage reminds me of a novel that G.K. Chesterton once envisioned writing.

The story was to be about an "English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas."

After experiencing all of the fascination and terror of discovering New South Wales, he realized, with a gush of happy tears, that he was actually back in Old South Wales.

The novel was to be a romantic allegory of Chesterton’s own philosophic voyage. "I did try to found a heresy of my own," he later remarked about his younger days. "And when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered it was orthodoxy."

And so as we set sail to found our own heresy regarding marriage, I hope that nature and reason will bid us to discover anew the wisdom behind the public orthodoxy that we have collectively inherited.

LINK

Separation of Faith and Culture

The G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture is holding a conference in Argentina to address how problems in contemporary culture directly affect faith.

According to the Rev. Ian Boyd, director of the Chesterton Institute, this is the first conference the institute is holding in the Hispanic world. It will take place Sept. 21-24.

...

The conference theme, “Chesterton and the Evangelization of Culture,” addresses how the contemporary failure of culture has been the separation of faith and culture.

“Most people borrow their way of thinking and behaving from the culture that surrounds them,” Boyd said.

LINK

Thursday on Thursday, no.11

"Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless — like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars."

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

Heart Full of Devils

Yesterday blogger Dominique Cimafranca of the Philippines wrote about how he discovered G.K. Chesterton through a Father Brown mystery in a Reader's Digest compilation.

Ultimately, the key lies in [Father Brown's] understanding of human nature.

Take the following exchange from "Hammer of God", for instance, when Father Brown confronts the criminal with his deed. Horrified at his discovery, the perpetrator attempts to commit suicide.

[He] threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him in a minute by the collar.

"Not by that door," he said quite gently; "that door leads to hell."

"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?"

"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart...."

The last line sent shivers down my spine when I first read it. In just one line Chesterton had summarized so succinctly the source of human evil, that is, the human heart. That we are neither angels nor supermen. That we are driven by passion and desires. That even the best among us traverse life dancing a delicate dance between good and evil.

LINK

In Toon With Belloc

Small Pax Guild member Zach Brissett hosts his own editorial cartoon blog at In Toon With the World. Today he posted a 'toon of Hilaire Belloc:

Schall On "Catholic Political Philosophy"

Fr. James V. Schall has a new book entitled "Roman Catholic Political Philosophy" published by Lexington Books. He was interviewed by Zenit; the interview was published this past Saturday. Here are some excerpts:

Q: Please explain the title "Roman Catholic Political Philosophy," since Catholicism is not a political movement.

Father Schall: The title is deliberately paradoxical, even provocative. It is, if you will, a countercultural thesis. Two different, known things are juxtaposed. They, I argue, have a relation that, if not spelled out, ends up confusing both political and revelational realities.

Since Catholicism is not a political movement, it frees political things to be political things. It does not encourage them, as so often happens in modernity, to be confused with religion or metaphysics, or become, in effect, substitutes for them.

...

Q: Which philosophers embody the principles of Roman Catholic political philosophy that you outline in your book?

Father Schall: One finds guidance from many sources, of course, not only Roman Catholic ones. I have learned much from Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. They served in many ways to open political philosophy to a more serious consideration of reality and what is at issue in understanding it.

Among Catholic writers, I am particularly in debt to my teachers, Professor Heinrich Rommen, Father Charles N.R. McCoy, Father Clifford Kossel, S.J., and Father Ernest Fortin, A.A. I have written a book on Jacques Maritain and consider Yves Simon of fundamental importance, as is Etienne Gilson. Christopher Dawson remains a favorite. I have learned much from David Walsh, John and Russell Hittinger, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, and my colleagues George Carey and Joshua Mitchell.

What can one say of G.K. Chesterton, who is one of the great minds and most incisive as well as most delightful. I have loved Hilaire Belloc, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, E.F. Schumacher and a host of others.

Several of my books, "Another Sort of Learning" especially, have been guides to reading in these areas. I have long been an admirer of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as first-rate thinkers. And finally there is the abiding debt to Plato and Aristotle, to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, to whom I return again and again. There is nothing quite like reading these latter four with students.

The entire interview can be found in two parts HERE and HERE.

Not a GKC Friend?

Chesterton had a profound influence on the prose style in which Thomas Merton wrote his 1948 best-seller, The Seven Story Mountain. According to Merton's biographer Michael Mott, Chesterton epitomized the kind of consciously literary, urbane, and "chatty" writing style that he, Merton, labored to avoid at all costs. [Seven Mountains, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984, 229, p. 249]

John Robson on New Orleans

From the Ottawa Citizen:

"Finally, hailing the violence as a liberating response to poverty or racism is, as G. K. Chesterton said, a slander on the poor. And on blacks, a majority in pre-Katrina New Orleans, most of whom either evacuated in an orderly manner or coped in an heroic one, and neither sought nor seized an opportunity to behave badly."

George MacDonald

"... in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read, including even all the novels of the same novelist, it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald ..."

This is taken from G.K. Chesterton's introduction to George MacDonald and His Wife [Greville MacDonald. 1924]. It was reprinted in GKC as MC and is available online at the American Chesterton Society website (LINK).

MacDonald died September 18, 1905. So this month marks the 100th anniversary of his death. On the anniversary weekend there is a conference in Waco, TX at Baylor University:

George MacDonald and His Children
George MacDonald is seen as the founder of a literary genre: religious fantasy — which, as the 20th century has unexpectedly shown, has become a major and popular form. We welcome papers linking MacDonald and his circle (Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll) with his successors, including G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and the Oxford Inklings. Also of interest are papers connecting MacDonald with his German roots — Goethe, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Hoffmann. In addition, we shall have a section on the development of children’s book illustration from Arthur Hughes through to H.R. Millar, which covers the great age of illustrated books before World War I.

For more details about the conference go HERE.

Thursday on Thursday, no.10

"Perhaps policeman is a relative term. In an evolutionary sense the ape fades so gradually into the policeman, that I myself can never detect the shade. The monkey is only the policeman that may be. Perhaps a maiden lady on Clapham Common is only the policeman that might have been."

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

Narnia: Still Shots & Changes

Paul Davidson wrote Sep 2 at ign.com:

A whole pile of new still shots from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe have appeared online, this time at the German website Altium Silentium. The photos include new views of the Pevensie children at the professor's manor, in the snowy woods around Lantern Waste, and with the White Witch. The locations and ambience seem perfectly adapted from the novel by C.S. Lewis.

Not everything is the just like the original, however. In spite of the very good reports insiders are relaying, there's at least one modification that seems unnecessary and might annoy fans of the book – just as Peter Jackson's excessive changes to The Lord of the Rings irked many a Tolkien fan.

read the rest HERE

Who You Callin' "Incomparable"?

In June of 1921, Max Beerbohm wrote discouragingly to a prospective biographer that he, Max, was not [as Shaw had labeled him] "the incomparable Max," but rather (as the humorists had it) "the comparable Max." Beerbohm continued, "I am not incomparable. Compare me. Compare me as an essayist (for instance] with other essayists. Point out what an ignoramus I am beside Belloc, and how Chesterton's high spirits and abundance shame me." And so on. The biographer, Bohun Lynch, had mentioned he was planning a little book. "Oh, keep it little!" begged the incomparable Max. [S.N. Behrman, Portrait of Max, Random House, 1960, 21-22]

Tolerance of Folly and a Sense of Humour

N.S. Jagannathan of The New Indian Express wrote yesterday:

There are plenty of stories of eccentric British judges, whose asides and obiter dicta from the bench are celebrated in literature and legal anecdotage. One instance from many should suffice. In one of his stories, that incomparable wit, G K Chesterton, has a delightfully unconventional judge telling a young man in the dock. "I am sentencing you to six months imprisonment as the law requires, despite my God-given conviction that what you need is six weeks in the countryside."

Certainly, tolerance of folly and a sense of humour would not come amiss in judges who have to endure a good deal of nonsensical casuistry in the course of their duties.

LINK

As a father of young children I find "tolerance of folly and a sense of humour" necessary for sanity.

Thursday on Thursday, no.9

"I am a Sabbatarian. I have been specially sent here to see that you show a due observance of Sunday."

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

GKC: South African Epicurean

This is from today's South African Wine News:

When British novelist GK Chesterton visited the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century, he commented it was a pity the Cape's poor cheeses were an inferior match for its fine wines. Boy, would he be surprised today. A cellar-door restaurant is de rigueur in a Cape winery portfolio - along with homegrown cheeses, olive oils, preserves, breads and branded winery caps, t-shirts and t-cloths.

LINK

Fumare

If you haven't found the Fumare: Law, Culture, and Catholicism...up in smoke blog yet, then click here now. Fumare now boasts a handful of contributors. Yesterday one contributor produced a post on Hilaire Belloc and the slowly forming American Belloc Society.

Wells on Wheels

From an article about sports on television:

The popularity of cycling races just keeps growing and growing. Small wonder, because not only is it engaging TV, it recalls a remark by HG Wells who said, "Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future."

LINK

The Age of Uncommon Nonsense

LifeSite has a special report triggered by the Man “Plague Species” exhibit in the London Zoo (see Eric's TDE post from Saturday). John Jalsevac begins his article quoting Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails: "See the animal in his cage that you built, are you sure what side you're on?... Are you sure what side of the glass you are?"

The root of his article begs us to read Chesterton:

But the unfortunate fact is that “evolution really is mistaken for explanation”, which G.K. Chesterton points in Everlasting Man, which is by far one of the best books on the question of Man, and which everybody ought to read immediately if they haven’t already. “It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read Origin of Species.”

Much like the Big Bang theory, the theory of Darwinian evolution creates the dangerous aura of The Answer, when it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s exactly the same monstrous fallacy so many made of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, making the ludicrous leap from the relativity of space and time to the relativity of morality, all to the absolute horror of Einstein.

However, contrary to mainstream reporting, being a “close-minded creationist”is not seen by many honest thinkers and believers as the only credible option to Darwinism. That Man may, in some mysterious, miraculous fashion, have resulted from a physical evolution of primates over a period of many, many thousands or millions of years, that led him to the point of coming into the full possession of his sublime and spiritual humanity is by all accounts possible. Remote, but possible, and all the more miraculous for its remoteness.

It seems quite reasonable that no matter how slow a miracle may happen, it still remains a miracle. Says Chesterton: “The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.”

...

Chesterton was fond of pointing out that we currently live, not in the age of common sense, but the age of “uncommon nonsense”. The man of uncommon nonsense—only too often a scholar of great acclaim—puts men and women into a cage and believes that he has proved something sublime. While the man of common sense visiting the zoo in the hope of glimpsing an exotic animal blushes on seeing an exotic dancer instead and promptly goes home to soothe away the distressing feeling that the world has gone completely loony with a drink and a Sinatra record.

"A lot of people think humans are above other animals. When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that special,” said another visitor to the zoo, who was evidently suffering from temporary amnesia that caused him to forget the pyramids, the Panama canal, and the complete poetical works of Pope.

LINK

GKC Still Debunking Tomfoolery

"So now we know. Women’s IQ is, on average, five points less than men’s. That is the conclusion of two researchers’ summaries of 57 academic studies on gender and intelligence in the British Journal of Psychology in November. . .

"All you need to know for pop psychology purposes is that Professor Richard Lynn and Dr Paul Irwing have found that there are three men to each woman with an IQ of more than 130 and 5.5 men for each woman with an IQ above 145. Oh, and the difference between the sexes really opens up only after the age of 14. . .

"As it happens, Lynn has not only established that men tend to be brighter than women, he has also controversially discovered that Europeans have a higher IQ than the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. And — lest you were working up a liberal ecstasy of embarrassment about it — he also found that the oriental peoples of east Asia have higher average intelligence by five IQ points than Europeans. So there.

"Faced with scholarship of this nature, I tend to take refuge in G K Chesterton’s brilliant little novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which a deposed president of Nicaragua argues about the merits of civilisation with an advocate of the same, an English civil servant called Barker. The former president sternly inquires of Barker whether he knows the best way to lasso a wild horse. To which the civil servant replies with dignity that he never catches wild horses and suggests that he sets very little store by such barbarian dexterity.

"Precisely, says the Nicaraguan. 'If the bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but nobody ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a bedouin to teach him’.'

"The point is rather simple. It’s that it is easy to establish standards of worth by which people are found wanting without actually asking whether we are measuring the most important attribute for the business of existence. And when we set up IQ tests as the standard by which women are found inferior to men, we may indeed question whether a high IQ is all it’s cracked up to be."

Link.

Noteworthy This Week in Blogland

Basement Man ("an average guy with a wife and daughter who lives and works in America") posted his impressions of GKC's What's Wrong with the World. Here is one snippet:

There are natural consequences to sex. Our attitude toward sex now is flippant. What if the consequence for whistling or lighting a cigarette were that an angel or genie were tied to our necks like supernatural balloons? Would we be so eager to perform these acts? Chesterton’s point is that sex has major consequences; it isn’t simply something we can do and forget — there are lasting impressions from the act.

LINK


The author at The Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilstone wrote a report of his summer holiday trip to the Tolkien Society's conference and convention (Aston University, Birmingham, England).

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session.

LINK

Thursday on Thursday, no.8

"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad, but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition."

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

Dedication to GKC

It remains for the true master of Chestertoniana to list all the books that have been dedicated to GKC. At the head of this list, or near it, will be the great 1913 mystery novel, Trent's Last Case, by Chesterton's lifelong friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. (Yes, he's the originator of the clerihew verse form). The dedication reads, in part, "I dedicate this story to you because the only really noble motive I had in writing it was the hope that you would enjoy it."

In the Picture, But Standing, Not Seated

Here are a few snippets from a recent article on Maurice Baring by Ralph McInerny:

It is a name one encounters in reading about others ... always it seems a background figure, in the picture, but standing, not seated, famous by association rather than achievement.
...
He flourished in a time when the entertainment to be found in books occupied a far larger portion of people's lives than it does today. Would his essays now be wasted on the desert air of a televised talk show? Baring himself saw how "what is called Education" was depriving the world of readers.
...
From youth he was given to triolets and later composed telegrams of them... He also exchanged verse letters with his dear friend Belloc.

The full article can be accessed HERE (Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format).

"in the picture, but standing, not seated" refers to the painting by Sir James Gunn. It can be viewed HERE.

Quotes About Quotes

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 notebook 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.

Hot Water & Fresh Air

Yesterday IgnatiusInsight.com reprinted a 1998 article by Dr. Janet Smith titled "Hot Water and Fresh Air: On Chesterton and His Foes."

I believed Chesterton labored so hard to debunk the foolishness of his times, because he knew that all of us, himself included, are prone to latch on to the trendy. In Orthodoxy, he lays out his own personal odyssey of discovering the truth and calls it an "elephantine adventure in pursuit of the obvious." He acknowledges, "I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it." For my part, I am with Chesterton in praying for the grace to recognize the obvious. I have seen too many get entangled in subtleties and nuances to the point where they become incapable of breathing fresh air and eventually asphyxiate themselves.

Perhaps reading Chesterton would be the cure, for he is always a breath of fresh air.

LINK

Janet Smith herself has worked tirelessly to debunk the foolishness of our times. She wrote Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later, edited Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader, and recorded Contraception: Why Not? - her talk that many thousands have heard. Go to One More Soul for more info on Dr. Smith.

Aslan on the Move: Navasota, TX

Third Annual Southwest Regional Retreat of the C.S. Lewis Foundation and The Hill Country Institute for Contemporary Christianity

“Aslan on the Move: Narnia Revisited”

Date: November 18 – 20, 2005

Location: Camp Allen Episcopal Retreat Center, Navasota, Texas

...

This year’s retreat will feature commentary on C.S. Lewis’ wonderful collection of stories for both children and adults, The Chronicles of Narnia are a wonder of delight for both young and old, and, as in 2004, we will offer programs for both adults and children.

Our speakers for the adult portion of the weekend will be Dr. Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University and Dr. Paul Ford of St. John’s Catholic Seminary in Camarillo, California. They will lead us into the wonderful world of Narnia and explore the characters, themes and timely lessons Lewis developed in this Christian fantasy world, where Aslan moves and breathes unexpected life. You need only bring a desire to learn, live, and grow. Lewis believed we needed more good Christian stories to be told, and we can use his insights and skill to bless others as we learn about Christian storytelling with purpose and continue our own spiritual journeys.

LINK

Thursday on Thursday, no.7

"I should think very little of a man who didn't keep something in the background of his life that was more serious than all this talking — something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink."

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

Thursday's Trifles

A new "Thursday" blog appeared yesterday called Thursday's Trifles:

I am a 19 year old male University Student, studying Physics and Math. I am completely and utterly in love with the Catholic Church. I am a "Macaddict," though I do use windows for some work. One of my greatest heros is G.K. Chesterton, who gave me the inspiration for this blog. Something else you will see me write about a good deal is Firefly/Serenity. Firefly was a short lived T.V. show on Fox. Serenity is the film version which opens 9.30.05.

Hypocrisy

Keeping in mind that these are only allegations:

Before Monsignor Eugene Clark became embroiled in a sex scandal of his own, he made headlines in 2002 when he blamed gays for sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.

Now, Eastchester resident Philip DeFilippo is accusing Clark of having an affair with his wife, Laura DeFilippo, Clark's longtime secretary. The allegations surfaced in divorce papers filed last week in Westchester County Family Court.
...
Clark has served on the boards of several organizations, including the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Seton Hall University.

[Ernie Garcia. LINK. Aug 11, 2005]

G.K. Chesterton has a few words about hypocrisy:

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.

[GKC. Heretics, Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants. 1908]

Gresham and Jack

I haven't followed much hoopla about the upcoming Narnia movie -- only the few items that I've posted here. But this article is good; it talks about co-producer Douglas Gresham's relationship with C.S. Lewis.

Gresham knew C.S. Lewis (Jack) personally when he was a child; Douglas Gresham is one of two stepsons of C.S. Lewis from Lewis's marriage to Gresham's mother, Joy Davidman. One of Gresham's fondest memories of him was Jack's sense of humor and wit.
...
"The one thing that is always lost in recollections of Jack in movies and biographies about Jack is his enormous humor and vibrancy of his wit. You couldn't be with Jack for more than five or ten minutes without roaring with laughter. One of the great hallmarks of the Inklings meetings was the gales of laughter that came as they discussed each other’s work," said Gresham.

LINK [Ginny McCabe. WorldNetDaily. August 13, 2005]

G.K. & Brews in the News

Christopher Orr wrote August 9th at the New Republic Online about the Thin Man movies of the 1930s and 1940s. The six mystery films starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as the detectives Nick and Nora Charles. Orr has some insightful comments about Hollywood, social life, and drinking:

[T]hese days what is perhaps most striking about Nick and Nora is not their easy blend of comedy and drama or their balanced sexual dynamic, but rather their carefree booziness. In modern American movies, the consumption of alcohol is limited largely to fraternity pledges, lost souls, and the occasional Billy Bob Thornton character. The idea that discerning, well-adjusted adults would on occasion choose to have a few drinks in the company of like-minded friends is almost heretical unless it is accompanied by suitably catastrophic consequences — a fist-fight, adulterous affair, or car accident.

Some would argue, no doubt, that any onscreen hint that drinking can be fun must be avoided for the sake of the children — though how this problem is solved by limiting portrayals of the activity to plastered high-schoolers and collegians is not quite clear. Sadly, I suspect Hollywood's dim view of sociable drinking has just as much to do with its dim view of sociability. The activity that accompanies alcohol consumption most frequently, after all, is not wife-swapping or vehicular homicide but rather conversation, and conversation of a particular kind: banter, chitchat, idle musing, or witty repartee. With relatively few exceptions, American movies today have little use for talk that has no purpose beyond itself, that doesn't move the plot forward or reveal some hidden character trait but rather consists merely of two or more people taking pleasure in one another's company and inviting us to do the same, as the Charleses do with such genial ease. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that "Americans do not need drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing." Were he alive today, I suspect he would find this observation more true than ever.

LINK

Prophet

"It appears, then, that the two processes are going on side by side, the decline of Church membership and the decline of dogma; the evacuation of the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit."

Ronald Knox (1927)

This passage shouldn't prompt me to refer to Knox as a prophet. He merely saw toward its beginning something that we see wholesale today: the religions (or sects or individual parishes) that water down their teachings lose members.

Thursday on Thursday, no.6

"Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."

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

"We called the dog Indiana"

The Stone Table is an online forum for fans of C.S. Lewis. It appears to be put together due to the upcoming Narnia movie. Here are a couple items from the site's frequently asked questions page:

How do I contact C.S. Lewis?
Sadly, Lewis died in 1963.
So unless you know the number of a really good medium, unfortunately contacting him is not possible.

Why is C.S. Lewis sometimes called Jack?
As a child he disliked the name Clive and after his dog Jack was run over in Ireland, he took that name. He was called Jack by all his family and friends.

GKC and Islam

From The Sunday Telegraph 08-07-2005, "Faith on its knees." Section: Features; Letters To The Editor:

Apropos Niall Ferguson's stimulating thoughts on religion, G K Chesterton also wrote: "It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.'' Would Islam pass the test today?

Adrian Longley London SW11

The Authorised Biography of Fr Brown and Obi-Wan

Alec Guinness, most famous for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, played Father Brown in the 1954 film The Detective. Piers Paul Read's Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography was released June 21 by Simon & Schuster. Katherine Powers reviewed the biography at the Boston Globe.

Where Read is uniquely good and perceptive is in his treatment of Guinness's cruel tongue, his bullying — there is no other word for it — of his wife and son, his castigation of himself for his sins and inadequacies, his battle against existential bleakness, and his Catholicism. The last is of immense importance in the actor's life. Read (correctly, I'm sure) notes that Guinness's embrace of Catholicism in its English version had a snobbish element. ("After a few months in the arch-diocese of Archbishop Spellman," he wrote from New York, "I have a lot of sympathy with anti-Catholicism.") But his faith was primarily his hedge against despair. To quote what, according to Read, was his favorite passage from G. K. Chesterton, "The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time." Surely it is that contrariness that lay at the heart of Guinness's genius.

LINK

Correction: More Clerihew

A correction has been made to the More Clerihew post of July 30. Thank you, Mr. Peterson, for catching this.

The clerihew about Cervantes/Dante was from the pen of G.K. Chesterton.

On page 43 of the facsilile edition of "the notebook" (The First Clerihews) it is associated with the gavel, and that was Chesterton's icon in the notebook.

~ John Peterson

Hefty Book Meme

Eric Scheske at The Daily Eudemon, and blogfather of Chesterton & Friends, has created a hefty book meme and has tagged me for it. Mr. Thumos has cleverly called it the "Textual Defense Initiative (TDI)."

1. Name your three biggest non-reference books (excluding the Bible and text books).

2. Name your three biggest reference books.

3. Tag three others.

By “biggest,” we’re not looking for number of words. We’re looking for weight. Heft. Something you’d drop on invaders while defending a castle.

I own few hefty books. To stop an intruder I would push over a bookshelf.

non-reference:

Laszlo Polgar. Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. In my collection this wins the Fewest Words award as well as Most Heft.

The Riverside Shakespeare.

Cervantes. Don Quixote. An English translation with lots of commentary. Monty Python of the early 1600s.

Honorable Mention (because they are loved by my children and are reasonably thick): Bill Bennett (ed.). Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass. These are great books to read aloud after dinner to children ages 2 to 102.

reference:

Orchard, Bernard et al. (eds.). A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture. Published by Nelson and Sons in 1951. I found my copy via www.abebooks.com. The bookplate shows that it was previously owned by a nunnery in California. Hopefully they tossed it because they already had plenty of other copies on hand.

Frederick Copleston. History of Philosophy, Book 1 (Vol 1-3).

I, too, had a "Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary" ... and it was huge. Guests would gasp when they saw it. But after several words could not be found in it, but only in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the "Webster's" "Unabridged" was tossed into the trash.

tag three others:

atheling2 at The Pugil Stick
Robert Pearson at New Victorian
Michael Vooris at Thursday

Inkling Conference

Hillsdale College's Center for Constructive Alternatives is holding a conference entitled, "C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings" in September. Speakers include Walter Hooper, Gilbert Meilaender, and Thomas Shippey. All lectures are free. I plan to attend, since the College is only an hour from my house.

For more information: Link.

Carpenter on GKC on CSL

In his 1979 study of the Oxford Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter concludes that the mind of C.S. Lewis had two aspects, the poet and the Debater, and when the debater was in ascendancy, Carpenter says interestingly enough that Lewis showed the mark of Chesterton. [The Inklings, Houghton Mifflin, p. 221]

Thursday on Thursday, no.5

"There are many kinds of sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man ... really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means — from sheer force of meaning it."

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

Suppression of Silence

Rob Woutat recently wrote about the 'Suppression of Silence':

It's getting harder to find music-free zones these days. Libraries have held out, and most doctors' offices, the state ferries, and so on. But Italian restaurants have long piped in "That's Amore" to trick us into believing we're in Italy, to make us feel we're having an authentic Italian experience, even it it's fabricated in part by red-and-white-checked table covers and the crooning of Dean Martin, that old Italian from Steubenville, Ohio. As British essayist G.K. Chesterton said, music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the musician.

[LINK. Kitsap Sun. July 31, 2005]

My experience with doctors' offices is that they usually have a television blaring CNN, Fox News, or Cartoon Network. Woutat deals with blaring televisions in his article as well. I agree with Eric who proposes adding Noisiness to the list of capital sins. Yep, right after Lust.

The Strange Creed of Unbelief

Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, writes today in the L.A. Times:

The writer G.K. Chesterton once suggested that atheists were "balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything." I was reminded of this critique last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be London bombers, Muktar Said Ibrahim, and a former neighbor of his in Stanmore, the suburb of North London where he grew up.

Americans tend to assume that what is going on in Europe today is a struggle between Islamic extremism and Western — or Judeo-Christian, if you will — tolerance. But this is only half right.

"He asked me," Sarah Scott said, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything. And he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah, you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."

Now, it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (Wouldn't you prefer, say, two desperate housewives?) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?

LINK

Narnia For Dummies

What is an allegory? And who - I forget - is that lion supposed to represent? Finally, the book I've been needing is here...

C.S. Lewis & Narnia For Dummies is a plain-English guide that provides a friendly introduction to the master storyteller and Christian apologist, revealing the meanings behind the The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters as well as his other works. You will also discover how his life influenced his writings, more about his friendship with Tolkien and the Inklings, and why Lewis went from being a confirmed atheist to a committed Christian and how he addressed his beliefs in his writings.

LINK

Hopefully "Chesterton, G.K." shows up in the index.

What's Wrong with Canada

Ted Byfield writes about Canada's ratification of homosexual marriage and What's Wrong with Canada:

About 1910, the Christian journalist and humorist G.K. Chesterton wrote a remarkably prophetic book, which accurately set forth all the fundamental social issues that would beset the oncoming 20th century. He called it, "What's Wrong With the World."

What was wrong, he contended, was that we so rarely asked what would be right. People were so focused on the ills of society, they deluded themselves into believing they had reached some kind of accord. In fact, they had not – and if they could ever bring themselves to project the kind of society they would regard as an ideal one, only then would they discover their irreconcilable discords.

"This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion," said Chesterton, "that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood, but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong."

A devoted beer drinker, Chesterton imagined himself standing alongside the fierce abstainer Lord Cadbury in front of what they would both amicably condemn as "the bad pub." However, he added, "It would be precisely in front of the good pub that the painful personal fracas between us would occur."

"Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them."

There is no better description of the current state of Canadian conservatism. We do not ask what would be right, because we fear the real divisions between us would quickly appear and prove irreconcilable. So we paper over the issues and feign a unanimity that isn't really there.

The full article of July 30, 2005 is HERE at WorldNetDaily.