Gopnik loves G.K. Chesterton, but is troubled

One line struck me as thunderously wrong: "It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity."

How is it "Hard to credit"?

Someone who fails to see that Chesterton is the master of paradox, capable of holding such seeming contraries as Sts. Francis and Thomas in a balance, has missed out a large part of GKC. Paradox is the heart of the Christian message (I won't do the obvious exegesis of "last shall be first" & c.), and the Church that exalts the poverty of Francis can exalt the richness of the Scholastics. That is PRECISELY the beauty of it! It is large. It contains multitudes.

It seems as though Gopnik has only (indeed, as a disbeliever, CAN only have) gotten at half of Chesterton. You can't understand the Church from the outside, and GKC's apologetic work will always strain the patience of someone who does not share his views. He seems acknowledge that Chesterton has found a treasure in the Church, and then berate him for exulting in that treasure. Strange.

Chesteron on what's wrong with the world? Was it "Me" or "I am"? Anyway, Gopnik's assessment of Chesteron's apologetics is wrong--Chesterton knew the human reality of the Church, but he also knew the Divine, and this is what he celebrated.

I find that Chesterton's apologetics are best taken in small doses, but "Orthodoxy" is, for my money, a brilliant work. Might I suggest that you tackle "The Flying Inn" when you next attempt the Great Man's fiction? It is fantastic and theatrical as is much of his fiction, but oddly prescient when pondering a world where English schoolchildren are disciplined for refusing to prostrate before Allah.

Sorry, that last one was me.

But hey, you knew that already, right Erin? :-) :-)

I only recently started reading some Chesterton, but I like him fairly well.

I think Chesterton was into variety and that explains some of his statements on women. I think he felt, wrongly I think, that if women got into politics or what have you they'd become "like men" and then something would be lost. Similarly I think he felt Jews were different and, judging by his autobiography, that they did not really belong in Europe. He believed in lots of different ethnic groups having their own identity or nation. So he approved of Israel while, somewhat, disapproving of Jews living with Christians. (Although there were individual Jews he liked)

That said I think this amounts to being a bit prejudiced on women and Jews. It wasn't a violent or hateful prejudice, but I think it was there. It was more like condescending for aesthetic reasons. That said I really like him by and large.

By the way, Rod, Chesterton and Percy's fiction have the same effect on me, for the most part. I really want to admire and enjoy their work because I wholly agree with their metaphysical persuasion. But once I start reading them, their styles really wear on me. Chesterton's writing sparkles, but sometimes to the point of buffoonery (i.e. the ending of The Man Who Was Thursday). Percy, at least in The Moviegoer, conjures the right existential anxiety about modern life, but his writing is simply too modern for me to savor. Still, I'm open to the possibility that I will better understand and enjoy these two writers' fiction at some future juncture.

"The weakness of apologetics is the same as for all propaganda. It only works on those who either already believe it or are already inclined to believe it. To everyone else it is either inane or unutterably ridiculous."

Posted by: Charles Cosimano | July 14, 2008 1:07 AM

Charles, I think you're probably right about that. C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity" was the book that finally broke the intellectual barrier for me, but at the time, I was already "feeling" the pull of... something? God? Had I picked up the book even a year earlier, perhaps it would have seemed "unutterably ridiculous." Or, even more likely, I'd have never picked up the book at all.

I'm curious... for those of you who came to Christianity as adults, as I did (though having been raised in the church, I'd left it for almost 20 years), did you intellectualize your way into it, or was it all "feeling." And if you DID need intellectual backup, was there a particular book (besides the Bible) that really pushed you through your skepticism into belief?

Re: Chesterton's anti-Semitism. In his late collection of essays or columns The Well and the Shadows (1935) he argues in "The Backward Bolshie" that Marx and his ideas were by-then very retrograde Victorianisms. He is also realizing that times are changing: "But the late Victorian period was the very period at which the Jews, and especially the German Jews, were at the very top of their power and influence. From the time when they forced the Egyptian War [1882, to protect European investments. ed.] to the time when they forced the South African War [Boer War, ed.] they were imperial and immune. Certainly much more so than they are now; for the Jews are now being jumped on very unjustly in Germany itself, and old Victorians like Mr. Belloc and myself, who began in the days of Jewish omnipotence by attacking the Jews, will now probably die defending them."

I read this piece in the New Yorker and went out and bought "The Man Who Was Thursday." Gopnik's piece was fascinatng.

Without refreshing my memory, I'll say that, whatever Chesterton's attitudes about the Jews were (at various times of his life), I don't think that antisemitism is a strong flavor in his best-known writing. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't antisemitism absent from The Man Who was Thursday, his masterpiece? And is it a strong flavor in

The Ball and the Cross (fiction)
Manalive (fiction)
The Ballad of the White Horse (long poem)
Orthodoxy
St. Francis of Assissi
St. Thomas Aquinas
the early Father Brown stories, at least (I haven't read all of them)

etc.?

It is many years since I read some of these, but I don't remember antisemitism being a real issue in any of them. (Perhaps I have forgotten after more than 30 years.) I think many people who are better read in Chesterton than I am would grant that this list includes most of his best work, aside from some particular essays. It may be that the essay collection that includes, for example, "A Piece of Chalk," also contains some deplorable stuff. I really don't know. What I'm saying is that I have the impression that with Chesterton there is a "canon" of the best, and wherein antisemitism is not a strong flavor. Thus, for those who are curious about trying Chesterton, it would seem that there are a number of works that may be recommended as displaying various gifts of his, but about which one need not be too apprehensive about encountering antisemitism.

These remarks are not intended to minimize the evil of antisemitism. But I'd like to think that Providence has arranged things such that the Chesterton material that, on other grounds, is most deserving of readers' attention, is also comparatively free of so obnoxious a quality.

What say you, Chestertonians?

Finally, let me say that I have taught The Man Who Was Thursday (several times) and The Ballad of the White Horse in college courses, with good response, and I have nomemory of any discussion of antisemitism arising from them.

The Gopnik piece on Chesterton was better than what I had expected on the basis of the rather weak piece Gopnik published on C. S. Lewis some time back, around the time when the first of the Narnia films was released.

Gopnik does a very good job on conveying a sense of what it is that makes the best of Chesterton's fiction so great -- though he could perhaps have given more space to Father Brown.

Gopnik is less successful in his treatment of Chesterton's essays, particularly the large-scale works on Christianity, the best of which are *Orthodoxy* and *The Everlasting Man.*

*Orthodoxy* has relatively little to say on Christian doctrine per se, but it is by far the best book that I have ever read on the lived experience of Christian or any other religious faith. I reread this every year and it never fails to invigorate me aesthetically, intellectually, and spiritually.

*The Everlasting Man* has much that is wise to say about the place of Christianity in human history and where Christianity stands (and where Christians ought to stand) in relation to the faiths that preceded Christianity -- Paganism and Judaism on the one hand and Hinduism and Buddhism on the other hand. The book is a very wise reminder to Christians not to forget how much of the world's history, of which we are the legatees, predates Christianity -- and, on a related note, how relatively early on we may still be in the Christian project as it unfolds in historical time.

Gopnik is absolutely right to temper his praise for Chesterton with an acknowledgement on his failings as a man, as a writer, and also (I think) as a Christian -- the most grievous of which is of course his anti-Semitism. That said, I think Gopnik overstates the vehemence of Chesterton's anti-Semitism and also neglects to place it in the broader context of similar misbehavior by Chesterton's peers in his own time and place who occupied positions to the left of Chesterton's own in terms of religion and politics.

Chesterton's frequent sparring partner George Bernard Shaw was an enthusiastic advocate of eugenic elimination of "undesirable elements" in "the lower orders" of society, and likewise an enthusiastic supporter not merely of Communism but of Stalinism specifically, in the Soviet Union. Each of these stances was also taken by H. G. Wells, with whom Chesterton was likewise in frequent debate.

The early years of the twentieth century were an extremely radical time when all manner of notions we now rightly reject were entertained by people whom we otherwise ought to respect and even to admire, with certain qualifications.

We don't object to some of their notions because we are more virtuous than they were, but rather because we have had the benefit of their mistakes, just as those who come after us will have the benefit of our own.

Therefore, we ought to be more humble in our own self-regard and more charitable toward those who have preceded us than Gopnik seems to be in this piece.

There's a kind of vaguely partisan point-scoring that underlies this essay in the same way that it underlies Jonah Goldberg's book *Liberal Fascism* -- a phrase coined by Wells to describe his own views that Goldberg uses as a stick with which to beat Wells, Shaw, and others who could be seen as the ideological grandparents of today's liberals and secularists in the same way that Chesterton's own objectionable stance toward Jews is used by Gopnik -- albeit implicitly -- as a stick with which at least to spank today's conservatives -- religious, "crunchy," and otherwise.

This sort of partisan point-scoring is a kind of forcing of the (grand) father's sins on the (grand) children that one could undertake, but that one ought not to -- unless perhaps it is undertaken with a rigor and consistency lacking in either Golberg's or Gopnik's recent efforts.

Finally, given the focus of the blog, I find it amazing that Rod is unfamiliar with much of Chesterton's work -- though that fact does explain the equally amazing lack of Chestertonian reference on this blog.

I recommend that Rod go read *What's Wrong With The World* and *The Outline of Sanity* as soon as he can -- both are foundational works on the sort of concerns that he pursues, works that inform a good many of the works by which Rod's work has been informed.

I got as far as Gopkin saying that part of the problem is Chestertonians. That is true. They are convinced that everything GkC had to say is valuable, and for that reason, keep alive the weaker side of C's writing' - the social theory.

Good for Gopnik - we need more examples of those who are inclined to develop relationships with those they are disinclined towards! Consider that George Bernard Shaw maintained a relationship with an enclosed Roman Catholic nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan, who published their correspondence:

http://www.bookfinder.com/dir/i/The_Nun,_the_Infidel,_and_the_Superman-The_Remarkable_Friendships_of_Dame/0226115895/

and from which the play "Best of Friends" was adapted | www.curtainup.com / bestoffriends.html |

and by which association Siegfried Sassoon embraced Catholicism late in his illustrious yet troubled life.

May I recommend the annotated version with commentary explaining London landmarks?

http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Thursday-G-K-Chestertons-Masterpiece/dp/0898707447

Outside the Ballad of the White Horse (an veritable anthem for those of us in the present generation dedicated to preserving the memory and identity of their ancestors, and a paeon to what it means to be a Christian patriot: | en.wikiquote.org / wiki / The_Ballad_of_the_White_Horse | an ancient Anglo-Saxon Lenten tradition called the "Scouring of the Horse" ensured that the turf did not encroach and destroy the ancient pagan monument carved into the chalk of the Chilterns), my favorite would be Platitudes Undone | www.amazon.ca / Platitudes-Undone-Facsimile-Handwritten-Responses /dp/0898706289 | (which technically speaking isn't even his own work so much as a tongue-in-cheek puncturing of the pompous hubris of the Victorian equivalent of moralistic therapeutic deism, the "self-improvement guru" Holbrook Jackson)

I have a personal recording of the BBC broadcast of Geoffrey Palmer reading the book | www.bbc.co.uk / programmes / b009sm39 | if you're the type who likes to listen along while commuting, I can lend it to you, email me an address if you're interested.

I've read a fair bit of Chesterton, and not only do I thoroughly enjoy it, but he pretty much saved my sanity.

What I don't get about Gopnik is how he can love Chesterton's view of reality, and find his apologetics unmoving. I understand disagreeing with the truth of GK's claim about the Church, but if you find what Chesterton finds moving, it really shouldn't matter whether you're reading his fiction or his non-fiction. "Manalive!" is (in some sense) another version of "Orthodoxy": whose pinnacle is the Romance of the Church in "Authority and the Adventurer".

I understand frustration with GKC, who adores to make the simple complex and the complex simple, who finds the most common things to be stirring and epic. I love-hate relationship - I get that; but I don't see how it's divisible into fiction vs. apologetics.

(BTW, the Church is poetic like a post office, but then so is the sun coming up every dawn.)

Augustus Johnson, your post is excellent. Thanks!

I think he liked the idea of conspiracies of rich people doing nefarious things.

I agree. It partly comes from the synthetic quality of his thought. Last term we read in class one chapter of his "Thomas Aquinas," which somehow weaves together Gnosticism, Manicheanism, Calvinism, Islam, and Hegelianism as a single Bad Idea. I was lucky we didn't have knowledgeable Calvinists in that class, just generalized evangelicals. He *is* brilliant at seeing the connections between things, and ignoring the details and the 'trees'.

But, applied to social theory and concrete every day affairs, that approach can make you connect 42 different empirical facts, ignore 1000 others, and leave you with the Jews or the Quakers as 'omnipotent', 'immune' and 'imperial' in Edwardian Britain.

And if we add to this intuitive genius for synthesis an excessive resentment of 'the rich', it was practically inevitable that GKC would be anti-Semitic, given that there were some wealthy Jews in Edwardian England who had (any degree of) political influence.

Alicia,

You're welcome. Glad to be or service.

Alicia and everyone else,

Another problem with the Gopnik essay that I forgot to mention in my previous post is that it assumes some sort of false polarity between Chesterton's prose style and the prose styles we associate with literary modernism in the generation of writers just after his own. There are as many differences as similarities between Chesterton's sense of style and 18th and 19th century style. And there are as many similarities as differences between Chesterton's project as a writer and the modernists' project.

It's worth noting that the first book by Hugh Kenner, the most well-respected scholar of literary modernism in the English language, was not on Yeats or Joyce or Eliot or Pound or Beckett or any of the modernist figures that Kenner went on to write about in authoritative terms. No, the first book by Kenner was on Chesterton. Believe me when I say that if a man once described as "The Pope of Modernism" can like both Chesterton's prose and modernist prose, then anyone can.

Kenner's book on Chesterton -- *Paradox in Chesterton* -- looks at how the Chestertonian style was a necessary means of expressing Chesterton's ideas, not some verbal eccentricity or deliberate playing of games with words, as many have alleged. Kenner does an excellent job explaining how Chesterton's paradoxical style derives from his efforts to articulate Thomist philosophy in popular terms, an effort which made those ideas come alive for his peers and for many readers since.

The book can probably only be found in university libraries, but it's worth looking for -- a brief, lucid, enjoyable, and illuminating read.

In his day, there were a number of writers who liked Chesterton's fiction and poetry but, for ideological reasons of their own, were infuriated by his politics or religion. One talked of wanting to split Chesterton in two, to which Chesterton replied that a lot of people who saw him traveling on buses thought the same. Gopnik seems to be one of that number and, like many of the rest, it seems to lead him into irrationalities.

Those who'd like to explore Chesterton's relationship with the Jews might want to read a book I recently edited, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II. Someone has noted that the book is the ultimate refutation of those who, like Gopnik, claim Chesterton was anti-Semitic. They're right.

To understand why, you need to step back a bit over a century to an era when almost everyone who was well-educated believed what the major universities were teaching almost without exception, that humanity was divided into superior and inferior races, with the former building civilizations and the latter tearing them down. That's simply how history was taught at places such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford in the late 1800s and for decades thereafter. Margaret Sanger's 1922 The Pivot of Civilization is an example of the thesis applied to birth control. We need birth control, she said, to keep the inferiors (mostly Irish, Italians and Polish Jewish immigrants) from outbreeding us. Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils was his attack on that idea as a domestic issue. Chesterton never collected under one cover his good articles on the same concept as an international issue, so I did it for him in Chesterton on War and Peace.

From his youth, Chesterton would have none of that racist nonsense. He poured scorn on the idea that there were racial distinctions that mattered among the various groups of Europeans (including Jews). He made it quite clear that ideas such as Teutons and Semities were totally nonsense, having absolutely no meaning at all. Chesterton was incapable of being anti-Semitic because he thought all ideas that Semities existed were bosh. He says that repeated. He says that clearly. He says that bluntly. And he says that in defiance of the conventional wisdom of his day.

As his pair of books, Heretics and Orthodoxy, indicate, he believed that what a nation, a people or a group believed mattered and determined how they lived not by who their ancestors were or trivial distinctions in how they looked. And in the realm of loathed beliefs, those of the Prussians, particularly Prussian professors and bureaucrats, ranked the highest. Call him anti-Prussian, and he would ;smile in delight. His loathing for all things Prussian (except their music) is why he was one of the first and definitely one of the loudest critics of the trends in Germany that became Nazism (hence my book's title). And he defined the distinction between civilization and barbarism in such a way as to include virtually all of academic Germany among the barbarians. Barbarians, he noted, see men driven by forces outside themselves. It matters not whether those forces are demons in the woods or historical nonsense like Teutonism.

I highly recommend the book. In it Chesterton was warning during WWI that there was something terrible wrong with Germany that, if not corrected, would lead to another and still more horrible war within a generation. In 1932 he went still further and warned that the next war would break out over a border dispute between Germany and Poland, precisely what happened in 1939.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace.

Adam Gopnik is scandalized by G. K. Chesterton’s increasingly fervent embrace of Catholic Christianity. His offense causes him, while making many fine points about GKC, to get the main point exactly backward—namely, that the great man’s Catholicism saved him from a lamentable narrowness and provincialism. Chesterton’s reception into the single institution without boundaries of race or class or ethnicity enlarged and deepened his sacramental discernment of divinity as it is embodied in the local and particular. It also enabled him to confess the sins of the church and to perceive the evils of the world. Gopnik fails to notice that, unlike other enlightened people of his time, Chesterton prophesied against both eugenics and euthanasia. There are plenty of enlightened people, alas, who would still like to inflict these evils—not only on Jews and gypsies, but also on the infirm elderly, the mentally deficient, the allegedly unfit and the hopelessly incurable. To have missed this most salient point makes Gopnik lamentably provincial and narrow-minded as an interpreter of Chesterton.

Ralph C. Wood
University Professor of Theology and Literature
Baylor University
Waco, Texas