Reading and misreading Chesterton

Jay Parini, professor of English at Middlebury College, has penned an essay, "Rethinking Chesterton", that appears in a recent edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes:

Chesterton's work includes nearly every type of writing—poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, biography, political and social argument, playwriting, detective fiction, and Christian apologetics. Yet he was, in the main, a journalist at heart, pumping out weekly columns for a variety of papers, especially The Daily Mail, on every conceivable subject, and his devoted audience included the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, who was "thunderstruck" by Chesterton's fierce independence of thought.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fabulist, never failed to mention Chesterton among his favorite writers. Being a fan of detective fiction, he too adored the Father Brown stories, regarding Chesterton, with Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle, as a founding father of the genre. Yet it was more than the detective fiction that interested Borges; he quoted Chesterton extensively as a linguistic philosopher, crediting him with "the most lucid words written about language."

Writers often gravitated toward Chesterton, including George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, both ardent socialists but good, if contentious, friends during his lifetime. Indeed, Chesterton debated Shaw in public on several occasions, and Chesterton's own idiosyncratic but highly suggestive history of the world (The Everlasting Man, 1925) might be considered a riposte to Wells's The Outline of History (1919). (Wells regarded human beings as a species who evolved from a highly primitive form and might one day use their intelligence to establish a peaceful and prosperous world. Chesterton thought that impossible; human beings would continue to suffer from something akin to what Christians call "original sin.") Among later writers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien admired him, while W.H. Auden took the trouble to edit a selection from Chesterton's nonfiction in 1970.

The reason for the interest is simple: Few writers have ranged so widely and so well, in aphoristic prose that repays thoughtful rereading. At his best, as in his Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906), Chesterton ranks among the finest critics of English literature. His studies of Victorian fiction and poetry (there is also a remarkable 1903 book on Browning) still command our attention, and his Autobiography (1936) is among the treasures of that genre—a genial if rambling production that brings English life and letters during the early decades of the 20th century into vivid relief.

It's a decent essay, with many good and welcome points, but Parini badly misreads Chesterton in at least one instance:

One hears this characteristic note of prickly opposition in the very first sentence of the Autobiography: "Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in a little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge."

In other words, for Chesterton, hardly any firm ground exists. So he bows in "blind credulity" to "mere authority" and the "tradition of elders," though he seems to do so for whimsical reasons.

To the contrary, for Chesterton there is plenty of firm ground. The opening of his Autobiography is a sarcastic broadside against those who would deny the essential value and central place of authority, tradition, and history, making the simple point that every man—even the most avowed atheist or staunch relativist—must accept basic facts and truths in order to begin their assault on facts and truth. At the end of his Autobiography, Chesterton touches on this topic again:

That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of.  Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth,
theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything. A very brilliant Hindu scholar and man of science said to me, "There is but one thing, which is unity and universality. The points in which things differ do not matter; it is only their agreement that matters."  And I answered, "The agreement we really want is the agreement between agreement and disagreement. It is the sense that things do really differ, although they are at one." Long afterwards I found what I meant stated much better by a Catholic writer, Coventry Patmore:  "God is not infinite; He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary."  In short, the other teachers were always men of one idea, even when their one idea was universality. They were always especially narrow when their one idea was breadth. I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one.  And even in this passing illustration about my own private fancy, this was doubly demonstrated.  If I had wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw, and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood. Even in this one case, there are two ways in which it might have turned on me and rent me.  One would have been by encouraging the delusion to which I was most prone; and the other by excusing the falsehood which I thought most inexcusable.  First, the very exaggeration of the sense that daylight and dandelions and all early experience are a sort of incredible vision would, if unbalanced by other truths, have become in my case very unbalanced indeed. For that notion of seeing a vision was dangerously near to my old original natural nightmare, which had led me to move about as if I were in a dream; and at one time to lose the sense of reality and with it much of the sense of responsibility. (emphasis added)

As for Chesterton's acceptance of the authority of the Catholic Church, it was anything but "whimsical", as a reading of either The Catholic Church and Conversion or The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic attests. In the former, for example, Chesterton wrote:

But it is one thing to conclude that Catholicism is good and another to conclude that it is right. It is one thing to conclude that it is right and another to conclude that it is always right. I had never believed the tradition that it was diabolical; I had soon come to doubt the idea that it was inhuman, but that would only have left me with the obvious inference that it was human. It is a considerable step from that to the inference that it is divine. When we come to that conviction of divine authority, we come to the more mysterious matter of divine aid. In other words. we come to the unfathomable idea of grace and the gift of faith; and I have not the smallest intention of attempting to fathom it. It is a theological question of the utmost complexity; and it is one thing to feel it as a fact and another to define it as a truth.

In the latter, Chesterton refers to the "special spiritual authority" of the Catholic Church, and then, later, criticizes the notion that good authority must be distrusted for no good reason:

I have chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave. The nature of my supposed slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss. It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw. That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable; which is entirely reasonable.

Other examples abound, but here is a passage from St. Thomas Aquinas about the place and need of proper authority:

The ordinary modern critic, seeing this ascetic ideal in an authoritative Church, and not seeing it in most other inhabitants of Brixton or Brighton, is apt to say, "This is the result of Authority; it would be better to have Religion without Authority." But in truth, a wider experience outside Brixton or Brighton would reveal the mistake. It is rare to find a fasting alderman or a Trappist politician, but it is still more rare to see nuns suspended in the air on hooks or spikes; it is unusual for a Catholic Evidence Guild orator in Hyde Park to begin his speech by gashing himself all over with knives; a stranger calling at an ordinary presbytery will seldom find the parish priest lying on the floor with a fire lighted on his chest and scorching him while he utters spiritual ejaculations. Yet all these things are done all over Asia, for instance, by voluntary enthusiasts acting solely on the great impulse of Religion; of Religion, in their case, not commonly imposed by any immediate Authority; and certainly not imposed by this particular Authority. In short, a real knowledge of mankind will tell anybody that Religion is a very terrible thing; that it is truly a raging fire, and that Authority is often quite as much needed to restrain it as to impose it. Asceticism, or the war with the appetites, is itself an appetite. It can never be eliminated from among the strange ambitions of Man. But it can be kept in some reasonable control; and it is indulged in much saner proportion under Catholic Authority than in Pagan or Puritan anarchy. Meanwhile, the whole of this ideal, though an essential part of Catholic idealism when it is understood, is in some ways entirely a side issue. It is not the primary principle of Catholic philosophy; it is only a particular deduction from Catholic ethics. And when we begin to talk about primary philosophy, we realise the full and flat contradiction between the monk fasting and the fakir hanging himself on hooks.

For more on the life and thought of Chesterton, see Fr. Paine's Introduction to the 2006 Ignatius Press edition of Chesterton's Autobiography: