“When
our last bow is broken, Queen/And our last javelin is cast/Under some
sad, green evening sky/Holding a ruined cross on high/Under warm
westland grass to lie/Shall we come home at last?”1
If one were standing on the little island of Athelney in the year
878, this is the question he would have heard King Alfred inquire of
the Blessed Virgin. Behind the king on the skyline one could see the
curling smoke of burning cities and charred fields, telling of the
wrack and ruin of England under the cruel nihilism of the invading
Danes. The whole land was shuddering under the cloud of war. The
screaming pirates of the sea had defeated the Anglo-Saxon armies
driving them into hiding and proceeded to pillage that Catholic
civilization of its wealth. The White Horse figure on the hill of
Wessex, that stood for the history and tradition of Merry Old
England, was in danger of being overrun by weeds. England was on the
brink of plunging into the depths of despair and hopelessness brought
by paganism and its bloodthirsty gods.
“Shall
we come home at last?” asks King Alfred. This pleading question
resounds and echoes throughout the history of the Catholic Church.
Always is the Bride of Christ struggling for breath amidst the
stifling stench of paganism, heresy, and schism. The Coliseum
threatened to crush the life of the Church as it crucified and
devoured its members; the pagans slit the throats of the Irish Monks;
the Church's heart was torn by anti-popes; Islam slaughtered the
Eastern Christians burning their way to the center of Christendom;
the doctrine of Luther spread like leprosy; Enlightenment philosophy
blasphemed God; Modern Ideologies sacrificed the heart of reason on
the altar of humanity; and Materialism eradicated the desire of man
to reach up a hand to heaven or breath a prayer to a Deity. Standing
amidst the crumpled ruin of human history, the Catholic whispers the
heartfelt question, “Shall we come home at last?”
The
skies thundered over the island of Athelney, but were muffled by the
answer of the Mother of God as it crashed from heaven like a golden
arrow into the heart of King Alfred, “The gates of heaven are
lightly locked/We do not guard our gain/The heaviest hind may
easily/Come silently and suddenly/Upon me in a lane...I tell you
naught for your comfort/Yea, naught for your desire/Save that the sky
grows darker yet/And the sea rises higher.”2
Courage. Courage to approach the treasure chests of heaven, courage
to damn the swirling pools of Hell, courage to be humble, and courage
to keep swimming when hope fades away on the horizon and then is lost
completely. This is what was demanded by the Holy Virgin, this is the
blood that flows through the veins of the Church; the courage to be
faithful and the faithfulness to be true.
In his
two books, Orthodoxy and The
Ballad of the White Horse, G.K.
Chesterton writes of how Catholicism and its breed of warriors have
withstood the test of time and risen up to challenge falsehood with
that Catholic courage that allowed a peasant to defy an emperor and a
pope to kiss the ground. Chesterton breathed the freedom of his faith
and though he only converted to Catholicism in 1922, he was a
Catholic at heart when he wrote these two works around 1908. In these
two books Gilbert Keith Chesterton has interwoven the fabric of
Catholicism; Orthodoxy
as a philosophical work and The Ballad
as a dramatization of a Catholic living that philosophy in the battle
of this life. Orthodoxy was
both a personal and public venture for Chesterton. He said that
Orthodoxy was a kind
of “slovenly autobiography,” but this usually confuses the reader
who does not see Gilbert as a baby grow up to be the small giant of
six feet four and two hundred some-odd pounds. In his book on
Chesterton, Gary Wills makes a keen observation about Orthodoxy's
claim to tell Chesterton's story, “We who live after the appearance
of Chesterton's Autobiography
know how little that book resembles the memoirs of a man merely
recollecting events. His intellect always turns events into issues,
facts into symbols.”3
Wills seems to say that it is an intellectual autobiography, one that
tells the story of one's intellect in the pursuit of truth. It is a
defensive autobiography that Chesterton wrote in response to a
challenge from Mr. G.S. Street who demanded that Chesterton publish
his own philosophy before continuing to demolish those of others.
Chesterton acquiesced to this demand, “I have attempted in a vague
and personal way,” he says, “in a set of mental pictures rather
than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I
have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not
make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”4
His thesis? The Catholic Faith is the faith of rationality and the
only one true faith and this is what is explained in Orthodoxy
and acted out in The Ballad of the White Horse. The
Catholic faith is not only Chesterton's faith, but it is his
philosophy.
Chesterton
stood by King Alfred on that dreary day on the island of Athelney and
watched him pull this philosophy out of its sheath and strike a blow
for Merry England and Catholic Civilization. He also stood by Christ
on the Cross and watched Him die, with the love of the God-Man
flowing out of his pierced heart. The cross gave meaning to the
sword. It made the sword a cross and the cross a sword, its only a
matter of which end you grasp. The sword of Catholicism is a sword of
attack, but it is also a sword of defense and there is no one more
adept at wielding it in both ways than Mr. Chesterton in these two
books.
Chesterton's
philosophy in Orthodoxy is
Catholicism and he approaches it in different aspects. In Chapter one
he says that his philosophy is orthodoxy which means “the Apostles'
Creed” and the first question a reader would ask is, how can a
philosophy be a creed or religion?5
First let us look at the definition of philosophy. Fr. William
Wallace in his book The Elements of Philosophy defines
philosophy as, “a type of perfect and even divine knowledge that
enables one to judge of all things in terms of their ultimate
causes.”6
Also breaking the word “philosophy” down to its Greek roots, one
can accurately translate it as “love of wisdom.” This is where
Chesterton's genius emerges again, showing religion not as a psychic
necessity of man's insecurity or a crutch for women and the weak, but
something as real as stepping out into the morning sunshine. Religion
is a philosophy and philosophy pursues the big questions in life.
Referring
back to the definition of philosophy, religion is obviously concerned
with the nature of existence, knowledge, morality, reason, and human
purpose just like it is concerned with salvation, goodness, truth,
and the Ten Commandments. Modern philosophers like Karl Marx have
been able to dupe people into believing that you can separate reality
from meaning and religion from our daily life. In his work A
Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right
Marx declares, “The first requisite of the happiness of the people
is the abolition of religion.” Marx wanted to eradicate religion,
but how foolish to desire the abolition of something which pursued
the same philosophic questions of man regarding essence, being, etc.
Descartes pondered the question of what it meant to be a man while
St. Thomas asked what it meant to be a saint. Hegel tried to crack
the secret to history by appealing to the world spirit while St.
Francis de Sales wrote on submission to Divine Providence. Catholics
are just as philosophical as the most popular philosophers with the
addition of Holy Mother Church who gives them the guidelines for the
pursuit of truth and salvation for its attainment. Religion does not
only have mere aspects of a philosophy, a religion is a philosophy!
It is a way of life, a mentality, and a conviction.
Chesterton's
next task is to show how the Catholic Church stands apart from all
the other failed systems of belief and this is the jousting
tournament only St. George will emerge victorious. When asked how he
was converted to Catholicism Chesterton said that ironically it was
on account of all the bad arguments against Catholicism, “A slow
and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind –
the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing.
For not only had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had
apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed
inconsistent with each other.” In the arguments against Catholicism
Chesterton found some that accused Catholicism for one thing while
another condemned Catholicism for the exact opposite. “No sooner
had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than
another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to
the west...I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain
turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not
for fighting too little, but for fighting too much.” These
inconsistent attacks stem from the modern philosophers' and
historians' inability to grasp the Catholic ideal, which is beyond
their comprehension on account of Catholic morality and the battle to
maintain the via media.
Confused
by these contradictory attacks, Chesterton delved deeper into the
question of Catholicism. He began to see this mystical creature
called Catholicism calling on its members one moment to destroy the
enemy and the next moment to go singing to the mouths of lions. This
phenomenon is captured in The
Ballad
when Our Lady contrasts the Catholic and the pagan, “The men of the
East may spell the stars/And times and triumphs mark/But the men
signed of the cross of Christ/Go gaily in the dark.” What can
explain such behavior? Are these crazed men from padded cells -
raving one moment and humming softly the next?
Continuing
in this marveled state of mind, Chesterton stood by and observed the
other attacks on Christianity. He saw it accused of being too
narrow-minded because it threatened the understanding that all
religions are united under a single realm of human conscience.
Another attack was that the Church was anti-family by dragging
beautiful young girls off to the cloisters while others attacked the
Church for being too pro-family by confining women to the monotony of
home life. Other critics blamed the Church for not standing up for
women's rights in her history, but then scoffed at all the women that
filled the pews. They defamed the Church for its penitential and
inhumane ashes and sackcloth while at the same time remonstrating Her
for Her pomp and ceremony with wine and gold vestments. They ask when
will Catholicism finally calm down and submit itself to the taming of
modern scrutiny.
Chesterton
answers this question quite simply: it is not tameable. “The
orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the
conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.” The Church
has never been tame because it is forced to fight evil on all fronts,
battling for the truth rather than lay down Her arms and surrender.
She has never chosen the easy path. “It would have been easier to
have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been
easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the
bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is
easy to be a heretic.” In an effort to find the proper balance in
life the Church is like a “giant and romantic rock” that holds
humanity in the balance between two extremes, unlike other so-called
“religions” that tip one way or the other, crashing down the
precipice. The Muslims believed God to be irrational, Buddhists
believed that death was just a recycling of life, the hedonist
believed in unleashed passions, the Puritan believed in their
eradication, Lutherans believed only in the Scriptures, and
modernists only believed in humanity. The Catholic Church takes on
the responsibility of maintaining the balance while being threatened
on all sides and one can see this balance in the lives of the saints.
Chesterton gives the example of St. Thomas Becket, “Beckett wore a
hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said
for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt
while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and
gold.” Using St. Thomas as a model, the Catholic sees how one must
bear the weight of temporal and exterior responsibilities, but he
disciplines his interior so as to make rich apparel seem like a
hairshirt while it is really the gold raiment he bears closest.
Not only
is this precarious balance maintained in a single person's intellect,
will and passions, but also in the mystical body of Christ. The monks
prayed and fasted in the desert, striving against the devil in
spiritual combat and meditating on Christ's temptation of the loaves;
there was the mother who prayed with her rosary and her working
hands, contemplating the holy family in Nazareth; the soldier swung
his sword in praise to God and marched remembering the hunger and
thirst of Calvary. The members of the body of Christ, though they
seem to live extremes if taken individually like the monks who only
fast and the mothers who don't, are really balanced if taken as a
whole. There is an incredible and mysterious unity that gathers all
under the same mantle. In the green forest of Wessex, King Alfred
contemplated the various roles of all God's children, thinking about
how all walks of life can be carried out in imitation of God
Almighty. When he stirred the pot of the peasant woman, he thought of
the poor, “And well may God with the serving-folk/Cast in His
dreadful lot/ Is not He too a servant/And is not He forgot?” The
whole Church was a family united by spiritual bonds that transcended
all ties of flesh and blood and were bound firmly together to the
rock of Peter. Chesterton speaks about this relationship of different
vocations, “Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows,
flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and
because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still
drink cider in the orchards of England.” The beauty in this passage
lies in the great variety of the ways of life that the members of the
Church live. It is like a garden in the house of God where all the
flowers are indeed different but sprout and are nourished by the same
sacred soil.
One of
the greatest stumbling blocks for non-Catholics is understanding the
importance of the little points of theology. “How can you believe
in so complex a religion,” they ask, “with your filioque,
immaculate conception, and transubstantiation? How do these effect
your life? Are these made up by prattling theologians to amuse
themselves?” To answer such a question is to point to the gigantic
rock of Christendom. It is all a matter of balance. If the Church
were to allow one person to budge the gigantic rock of Catholicism
one inch, the whole system of Truth would crumble. “It was only a
matter of an inch,” remarks Chesterton, “but an inch is
everything when you are balancing.” Truth balances on a mountain
top and is surrounded by treacherous falsehoods and no matter which
way it falls, it will cease to be. If Catholicism is the custodian
and guardian of the truth then it necessarily has to hold up all of
its implications. If Christ declared, “My body is meat indeed...my
blood is drink indeed,” and “If you will not eat my flesh or
drink my blood, you will not have life in you,” then the doctrine
of the Eucharist is one of the most profound beliefs in the world.
When the creator of the world transubstantiates Himself into one of
His creations, then it is part of reality and must be defended as
such. This is accompanied by St. Thomas' detailed defense of the
Eucharist using the argumentation of matter, form, substance, and
accident demonstrating how this fits into the framework of creation.
Catholicism believes that if you are going to uphold the truth, then
it must accept the whole truth with its uncomfortable and apparent
inconsistencies and complex doctrines.
Catholic doctrine is complicated, very complicated, and there are
some points of belief that can never be fully understood, but that
does not mean that it should be dismissed! When the Blessed Virgin
challenged King Alfred to have “joy without a cause” and “a
faith without a hope,” she did not explain how he was going to win
the Battle of Ethandune with the blowing of a horn. She rather
invoked his place as a man, king and creature of God to submit
himself to the will of the Almighty and face the consequences with
laughter and a battlecry. If this vision was too complicated for King
Alfred, or Trinitarian dogma too complicated for the Catholic, then
creation is too complicated for human beings! Science is complex!
Does man disavow his romantic desire to see a night sky filled with
stars because he does not understand how or why they are there? Does
he loathe and despise the rising of the sun or the lulling sound of
ocean waves because he does not comprehend why they are inspiring or
attractive? Man lives under rules of nature. Gravity dictates that a
man fall out of bed onto the floor instead of falling onto the
ceiling, but man does not question it. Nor does he complain when he
rubs two sticks and flame springs out and call it an attack on his
personal belief that such a thing is impossible. Grace and gravity
are matters of fact, which naturally follow from the order of the
earth. In a sense, even science requires faith! A man does not know
why the sun will rise tomorrow, but he has a firm, dogmatic belief
that it will not fail him.
This is the position Chesterton sets forth regarding the Church and
the reality of Doctrine. But not only does modern man think that the
Church is too complicated, but he also thinks the Church is stuffy
because it comes up with all of these rules, regulations,
irregularities, and inconsistent, odd beliefs. But Mr. Chesterton
counter charges, “Whenever we feel there is something odd in
Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something
odd in the truth.” Modern man is so puffed up with pride that if he
is unable to experiment, reproduce, or place under a microscope a
phenomenon, then it is not worthy of his attention, but rather of his
scorn. At the same time, he himself accepts certain inconsistencies
without thinking twice about it. Chesterton points this out,
“Having
noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg
on the right and one on the left, he [modern man] might go further
and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same
number of toes, twin eyes,
twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last
he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one
side, would deduce that there
was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he
was right, he would be wrong.”
At the
moment when man thinks he has found the right key, he discovers that
he has the wrong door.
Modern
morality prides itself in being liberal, liberal in the sense of
“unfettering” humanity and abolishing creeds. Their understanding
of morality is one without limits and this is why they cannot
comprehend Christianity which has rules and regulations, outlawing
certain behavior and discouraging certain actions. Chesterton takes
up the defense by saying that complete anarchy would not only ruin
discipline and fidelity but also fun, “It would not be worthwhile
to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all contracts
would not only ruin morality but spoil sport.” (137) If man is not
bound, then where is the adventure in life? If man is free, than he
should be free to bind himself. “If I bet I must be made to pay, or
there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to
fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful
I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in
vowing.”(137) “Love is not blind, that is the last thing it is,
love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” This
fundamental principle of love is probably the most misunderstand of
the foundations of morality. Modern man does not understand that love
can mean sacrifice, pain, and self-denial, for such things are
unpleasant, but that is where he goes wrong. Love can mean a
sacrificial binding of oneself and can be most pleasing depending on
what one is sacrificing for and binding oneself to.
Part of
the romance of life is to see what man will bind himself to and his
honor is defined on how true he is to that which he is bound.
Catholic doctrine does define limits but it is for the sake of man
himself that it does so to guide him to the truth and protect him
from error. “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,” says
Chesterton, “But they are the walls of a playground...But the walls
were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice.” King
Alfred remarks on the the freedom of man. As he sat playing the harp
to the King Guthrum and his Danish nobles under the guise of a
minstrel, he rebuked them for their nihilistic and fatalistic
doctrine and sang a song of Christian men who were given a choice.
“When God put man in a garden/He girt him with a sword/And sent him
forth a free knight/That might betray his lord.”(43)The choice was
to either to submit to “the White Lord's broken yoke”(45) and
find the blessing of God or “go clothed in feasts and flames/When
all is ice within”(46) and seek after his own glory and liberal
morality. Only if rules exist can there be a transgression. If man is
not bound to follow rules then the meaning of freedom, right, and
wrong is lost and he is left with an epistemology and psychology that
is twisted and wrecked.
That is
the auto-biography of man filled with inconsistency and irrationality
and it took the God-Man to establish His Church on earth ruled by
men, but guided by Divine principles, to bring logic to the picture.
Catholicism is complex, but so is nature and man himself, but if that
complexity of Catholicism is what keeps it balanced and true, then
who is man to claim all of its treasures while denying its ownership?
Chesterton calls the Church complex, but it is a complex key to
happiness, “A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by
accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a
lock, then you know it is the right key.”(89) The beauty of
Catholicism though, is that as complex as it is, it always within
reach of the child of God. That was the message of Our Lady to King
Alfred on the island when she said, “The gates of heaven are
lightly locked/ We do not guard our gold/Men may uproot where worlds
begin/Or read the name of the nameless sin/But if he fail or if he
win/To no good man is told.” King Alfred besieged those heavenly
gates with his simple perseverance and undying confidence though,
“the night grows darker yet and the sea rises higher.”
Besides
complexity and seeming irrationality, Chesterton points out modern
man's other difficulty with Catholicism is the belief in the
supernatural. One of the chief manifestations of the supernatural is
by way of miracles. Miracles are one of the most incredible witnesses
to the truth of Catholicism and the most obvious and clear, but never
have phenomena such as miracles been so downplayed by historians and
philosophers. Why? Their main argument is concerned with lack of
evidence, but there, Chesterton says, is where they are wrong.
“Anyone may call my belief in God merely mystical...but my belief
that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief
at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the
discovery of America.” In 1917 between thirty to one hundred
thousand people stood in the field of Cova da Iria in Portugal and
watched the sun dance during an apparition of Our Lady to three
shepherd children. One of the thousands was a professor of natural
sciences at the University of Coimbra. Dr. Joseph Garrett, who
witnessed the event, accounts,
“Suddenly,
one heard a clamor, a cry of anguish breaking from all the people.
The sun, whirling wildly, seemed all at once to loosen itself from
the firmament and, blood red, advance threateningly upon the earth
as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight...All the phenomena
which I have described were observed by me in a calm and serene
state of mind without any emotional disturbance. It is for others to
interpret and explain them. Finally, I must declare that never,
before or after October 13, 1917, have I observed a similar
atmospheric or solar phenomena.”7
This
miraculous event was predicted by the Blessed Virgin to serve as a
warning to humanity to repent of their sins to end the first World
War and to prevent an even more horrible war. As we know now, World
War II followed shortly after and from such a tragic course events,
miracles reveal themselves as signs from God and a warning to all who
deny their divine origin and redemptive quality.
There is
no lack of evidence for the miracle of the sun nor for so many others
like the image of Genazzano which is currently free-floating at her
shrine near Rome or for the Eucharistic miracle at Lanciano, Italy.
People like Thomas Paine and Richard Dawkins do not take into account
hard, scientific evidence. Chesterton scoffs at such “intellectuals”
who turn a blind eye to an inconvenient truth, “The open obvious,
democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears
testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when
she bears testimony to a murder.”8
Chesterton goes on to say that when a skeptic denies a ghost story
told by a peasant either it is because the man is a peasant or the
story is a ghost story. In that case, “you either deny the main
principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of
materialism – the abstract impossibility of miracle.”9
Catholics are not prohibited by their creed to accept all evidence,
but it is rather the rationalist whose reality is restricted by his
ideology. One would think that these witnesses like children or
ordinary craftsman to incredible miracles would be inclined to think
that they would not have the means to make up something of such a
magnitude. Such people have an honesty to their lives that are not
confused by abnormal ambitions, but rather taken by pure incredulity.
Chesterton emphasized this, “I am forced to it by a conspiracy of
facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not
the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all
men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who
testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists.”
The
modern rationalists also employ circular argumentation to try and
prove miracles and the middle ages together. They say that medieval
documents recorded miracles and believed in them because they were
superstitious. But when the rationalist is asked why the Medievals
were superstitious, he will say that it is an account of their belief
in miracles! They believe in miracles because they are superstitious
and superstitious because they believe in miracles! Is this just bad
logic or a sinister agenda? The Danes fared no better when confronted
with miraculous events. They were likewise driven back by the
apparition of Our Lady over the army of King Alfred, “For back
indeed disorderly/The Danes went clamouring/Too worn to take anew the
tale/Or dazed with insolence and ale/Or stunned of heaven or stricken
pale/Before the face of the King.” Their paganism had blinded them
with fear of these Catholic peasants, inspired by the vision of their
Queen, who did not know when to die.
Modernism
has not only attacked miracles as a spiritual contribution of the
Church and Her Divine Spouse, but it has also attacked the temporal
contributions such as the building of civilization. In modern
education exists the black legend of Catholicism driving civilization
into the Dark Ages. If one were to read the history books, he would
see the grandeur and glory of the ancient civilization of the
Phoenicians, the pyramids of Egypt, and the floating gardens of
Babylon, then there seems to be a huge cloud that settles on history
between the 7th-14th centuries known vaguely as
the age of barbarism, the age of the idiot, the age of superstition.
Indeed it was, but what has been written off the history books is
that the Catholic Church was the hero who saved the day and turned an
age of darkness into an age of light. A careful study of history
would show Catholicism encouraging men to pursue the good, the true,
and the beautiful. It never leads to darkness, but to a brilliant
sunrise. Chesterton asks, “How can we say that the Church wishes to
bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that
ever brought us out of them.” The Middle Ages is the most defamed
age because it was when the influence of the Church was most apparent
in the advancement of civilization, invention, and culture. The
progress of that age was the foundation of everything else to come.
Many
sources demonstrate the truth of Catholic influence over that amazing
period. The historian Thomas E. Woods shows how the monks composed
the skeleton of the education system, which was a thriving
breakthrough in man's history, creating libraries of thousands of
books and keeping records that have informed the modern age of the
richness of the past. The monks revolutionized the practical arts and
agriculture, “During a period of fifteen hundred years...they saved
agriculture when nobody else could save it” declared Henry Goodell,
president of the Massachusetts Agricultural college.10
The monks spearheaded the use of irrigation, beer-brewing,
bee-raising, breeding, pioneered the production of wine(discovering
champagne), water power, business economics, and iron production.11
Another source continues the litany of religious driven advancement,
“In
effect, whether it be the mining of salt, lead, iron, alum, or
gypsum, or metallurgy, quarrying marble, running cutler's shops and
glassworks, or gorging metal plates, also known as firebacks, there
was no activity at all in which the monks did not display creativity
and a fertile spirit of research. Utilizing their labor force, they
instructed and trained it to perfection. Monastic know- how[would]
spread throughout Europe.”12
One monk
from the 11th century named Eilmer showed up the Wright
Brothers and early explorers of the air by eight hundred years by
flying a glider 600 feet!13
A Jesuit priest, named Fr. Francesco Lana-Terzi, would advance the
findings of Br. Eilmer and earn the title of father of aviation. He
was the first to ever systematically demonstrate the geometry and
physics of a flying vehicle in his 1670 book Prodromo alla Arte
Maestra.14
This
is just the beginning of volumes of books recounting the achievements
of Catholicism in human history. Other achievements would include
clock-making, production of the modern blast furnace, creation and
maintenance of the the largest system of healthcare and charity,
creation and maintenance of the largest educational system, the
creation of universities, advancements in land cultivation, and
writing of Canon Law, the first modern legal system in Europe. 15
Woods continues,
“Father
Nicholas Steno, a Lutheran convert who became a Catholic priest, is
often identified as the father of geology. The father of Egyptology
was Father Athanasius Kircher. The first person to measure the rate
of acceleration of a freely falling body was yet another priest,
Father Giambattista Riccioli. Father Roger Boscovish is often
credited as the father of modern atomic theory...some thirty-five
craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and
mathematicians.”16
Mr. Woods goes on and on enumerating the many wonderful gifts and
efforts of the Church in those centuries, which propelled
civilization out of the age of illiteracy and barbarism into a golden
age of art, architecture, science, philosophy, and theology.
This
enormous amount of evidence of the Church's contribution to the
Middle Ages points to Chesterton's argument that the Church was, “the
one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark...This is the amazing
thing the religion(Catholicism) did: it turned a sinking ship into a
submarine.”17
No agnostic or modernist can every say that the Church is irrational
and stifles progress. Chesterton says that the agnostic,
“is a non-believer for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue
reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they
weren't; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn't; because
miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but
they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are
particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but
it was picked out in peculiarly bright colours and gay with gold;
because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it
isn't, it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a
railway train.”
Chesterton
solidly drives his point home like a nail in the coffin of modernity.
Once you take the trouble to actually examine the history of the
Church, all the masks are broken through, the lies are untwisted, the
makeup rubs off, and the man behind the curtain emerges. In the the
last chapter of The
Ballad, King Alfred
rules a land of peace and prosperity granted by the Blessed Virgin
and one can see the flourishing of a society under Catholicism, “In
the years of the peace of Wessex/When the good king sat at home/Years
following on that bloody boon/When she that stands above the
moon/Stood above death at Ethandune/And saw his kingdom come.”
Catholicism is the recipe for a good and ordered society striving for
virtue in this valley of tears with a happiness and perseverance
unnatural to paganism.
Having examined how the Catholic Church is not the tyrannical
Step-mother that men have made Her out to be, Chesterton discusses
what kind of man is produced by Her. What kind of man is he? The
Catholic is taught that he is born as an image of God and heir to the
kingdom of Heaven and is expected to live accordingly. He does not
believe that he is an overdeveloped ape or an underdeveloped god, but
rather a creature raised above the level of ordinary creation and
gifted with intellect and will. Chesterton defends this dignity of
man above animals, “The startling thing is not how like man is to
the brutes, but how unlike he is...That an ape has hands is far less
interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he
does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the
violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.” Man is set apart in
how he uses his imagination and memory toward the building of
wonderful things like civilization. “Who ever found an anthill
decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a
bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old...We talk
of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has
broken out...materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite;
it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.”
Besides knowing that he is not an ordinary brute, the Catholic man
also knows that he should be no ordinary man. When the parents of
humanity fell, the curse of original sin fell on their offspring.
With the handicaps of a darkened intellect and weakened will, man
tended toward his fallen human nature, seeking after his own good
above the goodness of God. When Christ became incarnate, his message
of love was an appeal to the restoration of the pact in Eden when man
was solely concerned with serving God by love of Him and love of
neighbor. Chesterton describes Christ's doctrine as, “curiously
gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and
mountains hurled into the sea.”(165) With the law of the New
Testament, man was called to something indeed “gigantesque,”
something he did not understand and that was charity.
This
particular virtue was a rupture in moral thought totally foreign to
the pagan world. The concept caused the Romans to stare at the
Christians wide-eyed, uncomprehending of the revolutionary motto,
“Love your enemies.” “Charity is a paradox,” says Chesterton,
“like modesty and courage. Stated badly, charity certainly means
one of two things – pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving
unlovable people.”(104) That was the revolution of Christianity,
following a Divine precept which did not make sense in natural terms.
Chesterton continues to say that Christianity “divided the crime
from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times
seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.”(104) Chesterton says
that this paradoxical language is integral to Catholicism because the
Catholic is torn between heaven and earth, striving to live a life on
earth in imitation of a life in Heaven.
Chesterton points out that another virtue so vital to the Catholic
life is courage. He defines courage as, “a strong desire to live
taking the form of a readiness to die, 'He that shall lose his life,
shall save it.' ”(101) The Catholic for Chesterton is constantly
living the adventure of warfare with the world, the flesh, and the
devil and he must be ready to die to self in order to live for God.
This is where the virtue of self-sacrifice is bound to the virtue of
courage with the ultimate example being the martyr.
“Christianity...has marked the limits of it [courage] in the awful
graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him
who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of
dying.” The paradox, a rhetorical tool often used by Chesterton,
here tries to put into perspective the Catholic's mentality of laying
down one's life with a greater good in mind. It stretches the mind of
the reader when considering the two concepts of life and death. Fr.
Aidan Nichols describes the use of the paradox as a device to “open
thought to a subjacent truth.”18
The subjacent truth here is the life beyond the grave, and the
transcendental quality of man to be courageous, the virtue of
offering your life for love.
King Alfred was ready to die the martyr's death for his Faith and
country, but he still did not know what that commitment entailed.
When he was mustering the chiefs to fight against the Danes he called
for their aid in the name of the Mother of God and the hopelessness
and helplessness of his cause. “Out of the mouth of the Mother of
God/More than the doors of doom/I call the muster of Wessex men/From
grassy hamlet or ditch or den/To break and be broken, God knows
when/But I have seen for whom.”(20) He had not received any
assurance of victory from the Blessed Virgin, but only the challenge
of Catholicism, “Do you have joy without a cause/Yea, a faith
without a hope?”(14) It is a paradoxical challenge asking the King
if he will do something that seems “unreasonable” and trust in
the reason of heaven rather than the wisdom of earth. That is where
the Catholic imagination is a truly progressive thing because it
always seeks to improve earthly situation by a divinely instructed
mind. Stephen Clark in his book on Chesterton points out, “Chesterton
was right, at any rate, to identify imagination as a vital
contribution to our lives: only if things could be different have we
any hope of making them be different.”19
Our Lady challenged the King and his men to imagine with a Catholic
mindset that through the providence of God, the Mother of all would
provide. King Alfred and the chiefs answered the challenge with a
roaring assent and went forth “to desire life like water and yet
drink death like wine.”(101)
The quality that Chesterton emphasizes along with charity and
courage for the Catholic man is something strange,
transcendental-like, mysterious and yet very real: wonder. Chesterton
believes that wonder springs from a man's true appreciation of
reality and not only of the explosive and exciting facts of life but
especially of the calm and regular which can be the really explosive
and exciting experiences. “Ordinary things are more valuable than
extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.”(46) It is
in these ordinary things that Chesterton says man can learn how
wonderful the world is and what mysteries and lessons it holds. This
Chestertonian virtue of wonder is one of the most important, if not
the key quality of a human being. Man is raised on nursery rhymes and
fairy tales which introduce him into the wild and wonderful realm of
the world. This foundational education of reading books like Beauty
and the Beast, for example, helps us understand human nature and
that is something that should never be lost, but fostered and fondled
into the adult years and to the grave. Wills remarks on this
childlike quality of wonder,
“Chesterton returned to the simplest kind of perception, to the
rapt, outward attention of the child. This simplicity of perception
led to purity of insight; and Chesterton noticed first what Aquinas
claims we do first perceive, though the fresh apprehension is dulled
and covered over by the intellect's operation on this raw material.
Chesterton saw the “first act” of things – their being –
almost more vividly than he saw the things themselves.”20
This virtue of wonder expressed particularly in fairy tales is the
wisdom of innocence and the seed of purity that are the foundations
of the citadel of Faith from which the Catholic sallies forth and
rallies to combat its enemies. Chesterton conveys the importance of
such an education, “My first and last philosophy, that which I
believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery...the
things I believed most then, the things I believe must now, are the
things called fairy tales.”(49) A modern skeptic would scoff at
such tom-foolery and childishness, but he is ignorant of the secrets
of fairy tales that Chesterton has brought to light.
Chesterton's understanding of fairy tales is more than the fact that
they are good stories and something to be read to children to stir
their imagination or put them to sleep; more importantly they are the
catechism of common sense. When reading those stories as a child,
Chesterton said that they instilled in him a certain trust in
goodness and a hatred of evil while fostering an aversion to vice and
a love of virtue.
“There is the lesson of 'Cinderella,' which is the same as that of
the Magnificat – exaltavit humiles. There is the great
lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved
before it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the
'Sleeping Beauty,' which tells how the human creature was blessed
with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also
may perhaps be softened to a sleep.”
It was through this medium that a child was brought to understand the
more mysterious and beautiful realities of life. It was introduced
through a fictitious world to bring the child into the real world,
but Chesterton believed that fairyland revealed reality and our
modern world was the one crawling with goblins, witches, treachery,
and deceit while conserved by castles with shining knights, purity of
maidens, and the right word whispered at the gate. This is where most
people lose Chesterton for he enters a realm which they abandoned in
their childhood. “As I put my head over the hedge of the elves,”
he says, “and began to take notice of the natural word, I observed
an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles
were talking of the actual things that happened -dawn and death and
so on – as if they were rational and inevitable.” What
Chesterton means is that we have lost the sense of wonder that a
child has when walking through a meadow or the scream of delight when
seeing a baby bird for the first time. It seems that those are the
times when men as children really appreciated things as they should
be appreciated. God created the world which would have engrossed the
minds of Adam and Eve until they fell and it was only then that their
perception of reality became dull with sin and weary through vice.
This is the point Chesterton is trying to make, that man begins to
lose the vision of beauty, truth, and goodness that was never meant
to be lost. He should no more be embarrassed to fondle a dog, or pick
a flower, or build a tree fort than when he was a child. Man has been
reduced to a certain stiffness that is not known to children by a
prideful practice of manners for the sake of manners and not manners
for the sake of others. Nor does Chesterton mean that men should be
immature. The fine line was drawn by Christ Himself, “Amen, I say
to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you
shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”(Matt. 18:3) Men should be
childlike not childish and it is that child-like sense of wonder that
brings monks in the desert to praise God in His creation, a mystic to
be enraptured, and a soldier to die for the love of his country.
Chesterton takes it a step farther by making magic real, or rather,
reality to be magical. Men take the order of nature for granted and
do not think twice about the wonderful order and structure of nature
around them. Science, Chesterton says, is really just a stuffy way of
perceiving magic as something that is ordinary. “The man of science
says, 'Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall'; but he says it
calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in
the fairy tale says, 'Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will
fall.” Men naturally assume that because they do one thing, another
will follow because it is a “law of nature.” But there Chesterton
emphatically states where man goes wrong. A law of nature is not a
law because a law “implies that we know the nature of the
generalization and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of
the effects.” Man really does not know how an apple falls
but only why it falls. “The ordinary scientific man is
strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential
sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.”(53)
He can come up with a system of measuring how fast it goes one way
and deduce the reason for its fall by the shaking of a limb, but he
does not realize that just because it is that way does not
mean it has to be that way. He merely takes a miracle and
names it gravity.
All of this is to impress upon the reader how truly wonderful God's
creation is and how fairy tales are just the instruction manual to
our world. Fairy tales only replace words like “gluttony,”
“home,” “pride,” and “saint,” with others like “ogre,”
“castle,” “giant,” and “Jack the Giant-killer.” Or as
Chesterton puts it,
“These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the
forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make
rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment,
that they run with water...We have all forgotten what we really are.
All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and
posivitism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we
forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and
ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we
forget.”(54)
The reason that Catholicism is always budding and blooming with
gigantic cathedrals, explosive doctrines, and blossoming saints is
that it has embraced this spirit of wonder and the spirit of
humility, remembering how small we really are like Tom Thumb.
God never tires of the great and beautiful, “it may be that has
the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we.”(62) He is ever young and ever
keeping that spirit alive in the Church and its members of the
mystical body. It is being attached to Him and His Church that made
Chesterton understand that woven into the green fields of earth was
something more splendid than elves and more terrible than dragons,
“Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense
that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric
privilege.”(66) The only way to understand life as that “eccentric
privilege” is through humility. Dale Alquist says that Chesterton
understand this key principle, “The key to happiness and the key to
wonder is humility. Chesterton understands this better than any
modern writer. More than that, he also embodies it. Humility means
being small enough to see the greatness of something and to feel
unworthy of it, and privileged to be able to enjoy it.”21
Without that remarkable recognition of how small we are, we miss how
large everything else is.
Now comes the end of our story. Having traversed the sky with the
stars and run through the grass like children, we find that at the
end of our journey with Chesterton we have only just begun. The end
of one thing leads, in this case, to the beginning of another.
Chesterton is like the old grandfather whose knee we sat upon and
heard the eternal truths whispered into our ear and who now entrusts
us to live the lessons our ancestors learned and pursue the work they
left undone. Religion, he tells us, is a philosophy to be lived and
loved in the arms of the Catholic Church. She is the guardian of the
deposit of faith and the doctrines of reality who guides Her children
along the path through the mire of rationalism, materialism,
modernism, and all other philosophies sprouting from evil. Chesterton
has been careful to teach us particularly that Heaven and earth are
not divorced, but exist as the whole system of reality complete with
dust and doctrine, gravity and grace. The Catholic man is to be
charitable, courageous, and have that virtue of wonder and
appreciation for reality that preserves his innocence and ensures his
entry into the eternal fountain of youth in Heaven. Through Orthodoxy
and The Ballad of the White Horse, Chesterton has taught
us valuable lessons and handed us the banner of Catholicism to carry
on in the tradition of truth. But what happened to King Alfred?
When the last word was said and the mist cleared, King Alfred looked
up to see that the Blessed Mother had departed the little island of
Athelney. In the distance he heard the shouts of Danes and the
clanging of spear on shield. But he was not alone. Our Lady left him
fortified with his Faith, his courage, charity and sense of wonder,
mighty weapons against pagan deities and cruel philosophies. “Shall
we come home at last?” This question died away and was replaced
with confidence and a furious love of life. King Alfred lived on in
history renowned for his smashing victory at the battle of Ethandune
and the saving of England and its civilization. His shining example
struck the heart of G.K. Chesterton in his London office in 1910 and
it was then that G.K. Chesterton embarked on a mission to tell the
story of a Catholic hero to the world. Two years previously,
Chesterton had finished Orthodoxy, in which he published the
story of Catholicism to the world. The two emerged as works on the
philosophy of Catholicism and the philosopher King Alfred, both of
which Chesterton adhered himself and his thought. He confessed in
Chapter one that Orthodoxy was “a sort of slovenly
autobiography”22and
in the Ballad he said he stood by Alfred and “saw the sign
that Guthrum saw.”
“Shall
we come home at last?” Chesterton quite clearly demonstrates that
King Alfred did not risk himself and his armies for an earthly
paradise nor does he claim in Orthodoxy
that Christian man shall find true peace or happiness in this world.
There is something else that has laid claim to the hearts of men. “I
fled Him, down the nights and down the days/ I fled Him, down the
arches of the years/ I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways/ Of my
own mind; and in the mist of tears.”23The
carpenter that died on his own wood and the God-man that died by the
hand of his own creatures had come to show man another way, the way
of truth, the bridge of charity, and the warpath of Christian
courage; all leading the way home. We are not of this world, as
Chesterton has taught us, but have been born into a fallen state like
“the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone
down before the beginning of the world.”24The
truth of Catholicism has proved itself true by chartering the course
and following the northern star, trying to pull as many drowning men
into the barque of Peter and brave the stormy seas until it comes
safe to port. It has broken all earthly limits and bounds and gone
flying off the edge of the world into the arms Heaven.
“All the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for
this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in
to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do
not fit in to the world...The modern philosopher had told me again
and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt
depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the
wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.”25
1G.K.
Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse(New
York: Dover Publications, 2010), 11.
2Ibid,
12, 14.
3Garry
Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (Sheed
and Ward: New York, 1961), p. 23.
4G.
K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy,
(St. Benedict Press: Charlotte, NC, 2006), 1.
5Ibid,
5.
6William
A. Wallace, O.P., The Elements of Philosophy
(Alba House: New York, 1967), 3.
8169
9169
10Henry
G. Goodell, “The Influence of the Monks in Agriculture,” address
delivered before the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture,
August 23, 1901, 22. Copy in the Goodell Papers at the University of
Massachusetts.
11Woods
33-35
12Reginald
Gregoire, Leo Moulin, and Raymond Oursel, The Monastic Realm (New
York: Rizzoli, 1985), 271.
13Stanley
L. Jaki, “Medieveal Creaitivity in Science and Technology,” in
Patterns and Principles and Other Essays (Bryn
Mawr, Pa.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995), 81; see also
Lynn White Jr., “Eilmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh-Century
Aviator: A Case Study of Technological Innovation, Its Context and
Tradition,” Technology and Culture 2(1961):
97-111.
14Joseph
MacDonnell, S.J., Jesuit Geometers (St.
Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1989), 21-22.
15Woods
36-45, 29
16Woods
5
17Orthodoxy
165-166
18Aidan
Nichols, O.P., G.K. Chesterton, Theologian(Manchester,
NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2009), p. 93.
19Stephen
R. L. Clark, G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward
(Templeton Foundation Press, West Conshokocken, PA, 2006), p. 29.
20Garry
Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (Sheed
and Ward: New York, 1961), p. 24.
21Dale
Alquist, Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius
Press: San Francisco, 2006), p. 33.
22Orthodoxy
- 6
23“Hound
of Heaven” by Francis J. Thompson
2486
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