"The Edge of the World: Chesterton and the Philosophy of Catholicism"

“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 7^th-14^th 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 11^th 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.

7http://www.fatima.org/essentials/facts/miracle.asp

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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

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