G. K. Chesterton Archives - James E Hartley

Be Like Aquinas

“St. Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence in the reality of his religion.”

That is G. K. Chesterton, in his book St. Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton is clearly concerned that the world is slipping back into a pre-Aquinas age.

Before Aquinas, Christian theology was heavily influenced by Plato. We can thank Augustine for that fact. As Augustine unfolded the meaning of the gospel of John’s opening line, “In the beginning was the logos,” Christianity ended up looking very Platonic. Plato believed there is an overarching logic and reason of the world, which he called the logos. There are what we now call the Platonic ideals, these perfect forms of things. There is the perfect form of the tree and of love and of friendship. All of these ideals exist up there in some abstract world. We are mucking around on Earth and can see pale reflections of all these things. We see a tree here or there, but they are not the ideal tree. We have friends, but they are not ideal friends. What we are constantly doing is seeing the things on the Earth and thinking about these perfect forms.

Aquinas comes along and says Christians are spending too much time thinking about Plato, about lofty things. Instead, they should be reading Aristotle and thinking about grounded things. The distinction between them is captured really nicely in Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens.” In the center, Plato and Aristotle are talking. Plato is pointing up because that is where the important things are. Aristotle has his hand flat pointing down at the ground, because that is where the important things are.

Aquinas comes along and says that the Church has been thinking way too much about Plato, the lofty stuff, and way too little about Aristotle, the grounded stuff. What we need to start doing is paying attention to the grounded stuff, the things of the world. Chesterton notes:

In a word, St. Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox, but a plain truism, which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant by an Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by a Christian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.

That’s what being a Christian means. It means we believe the logos was made flesh.

We can see the tension in churches today. You can walk around churches and say, “Christ is God,” and everybody will say, “Yep, that is right.” Nobody will ever once correct you. But if you walk around churches and say “Christ is man,” everyone will instantly correct you and say, “Oh that’s not all; he is also God.” When we say, “Christ is God,” nobody ever says, “Oh, and he is man too.” But Christ is both fully God and fully Man

That is what Aquinas is driving at. The incarnation means those two statements, “Christ is God” and “Christ is man,” are identically true. They are both imperfect, neither captures the totality of Christ. But one of them is not more true than the other. Christ is fully God. Christ is fully man. Can we learn about God by looking at both the things of heaven and the things of the world? Aquinas is saying we really need to be doing both of those things.

Aquinas says that if you want to learn about God, you can think about the Bible. It’s great to think about the Bible. You learn a lot about God in the Bible. But you can also think about the things of earth. Both are ways to ultimately find out about God, because in the end, there is only one truth. God is discoverable by revelation, but God is also discoverable by reason.

We have to keep this paradox constantly in mind. Christ is both divine and flesh, the logos is both with God and made flesh. Our temptation is to get off this balance beam entirely. We read the Bible to learn about God. We read other things to learn about things other than God. We make sure those things are totally separate in our lives. We can talk about the Bible, but if you’re going to talk about God in the Bible, you certainly don’t want to talk about Plato or Aristotle. Then we can talk about Plato and Aristotle, but don’t ever bring the Bible into those discussions.

Aquinas is arguing that these things are not separate. We learn about God by reading the Bible and through divine revelation. We also learn about God by thinking about all the other things we see. This idea that we learn about God in all these ways is not a shocking statement to Augustine. It is not a shocking statement to Aquinas, It is also not a shocking statement to the Apostle Paul.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (ESV). Paul says everywhere you look, there’s God. We, on the other hand, always want to rip the world in two. We show up on a Sunday morning to think about God. Then we walk out of church and we go through the rest of our life. If we remember to do a Bible study or a daily devotion, then we think about God again. But what about the rest of all the stuff you are learning and doing in your life? Does that have anything to do with God? We’ve completely separated all that stuff out.

The challenge of thinking about the Logos made flesh is to realize whatever you are seeing and doing Tuesday at 3:00 is somehow a reflection of the work of God. Christ really was a man, and what that means is he was a person like us. We think, “Sure, he was human, but he was a perfect human. Not like me.” The classic example is “Away in the manger.” “No crying he makes.” He was a baby who never even cried. But that is wrong. Christ really was a person like you. He went through life like you did. He pounded nails in boards, just like my friend Bob, who is a carpenter, does. Christ stood around and argued with people. That is what I do. Christ slept and ate and walked and laughed just like we all do. He also, not incidentally, created the world.

We need to get rid of this division in our mind that the things of God and the things of the world have no connection. They are very tightly connected. As Aquinas teaches us, that is the point of the Incarnation.

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Dreams: Chesterton, Gaiman, and Lewis

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep”

Shakespeare’s Prospero declares that in The Tempest. Figuring out exactly what it means is the task of a lifetime. So, we won’t do that, today.

But, what are dreams?

G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands is a collection of some of his early work. Stories, poems, musings, and doodles, all with that Chestertonian air of paradox embedded within. The book defies summary. Think of it as the flotsam and jetsam of a fertile imagination.

When Chesterton turns to the subject of dreams, in an essay cleverly entitled “Dreams,” we get five pages of reflection which one could spend many hours unpacking.

But, before we get to Chesterton, the biggest shock of this essay has to do with Neil Gaiman. In the substory The Doll’s House of Gaiman’s unbelievably amazing Sandman, none other than Gilbert Chesterton shows up to play a rather important role. Now Chesterton was one of Gaiman’s first loves in the literary realm (along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien). What made Chesterton so important for Gaiman was this:

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

That is a wonderful description of Chesterton. But, it does not explain how he showed up in The Sandman. And suddenly reading The Coloured Lands, I know exactly how that happened.

[Note for those who have read Gaiman: throughout Chesterton’s book, there are assorted drawings, having nothing to do with the story right before or after. Just assorted doodles. The drawing on the facing page to the start of the essay on Dreams is a picture of Cain killing Abel!]

Chesterton begins the essay:

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that “last night he dreamed a dream,” we are quite certain from the perfect and decorative character of the dream that he made it up at breakfast. The dream is so reasonable that it is quite impossible.

Why impossible? After all, we constantly read tales of perfectly comprehensible dreams, inevitably with some obvious moral attached or easily attachable. Chesterton:

Dreams like these are (with occasional exceptions) practically unknown in the lawless kingdoms of the night. A dream is scarcely ever rounded to express faultlessly some faultless ideas.…Dreams have a kind of hellish ingenuity and energy in the pursuit of the inappropriate; the most omniscient and cunning artist never took so much trouble or achieved such success in finding exactly the word that was right or exactly the action that was significant, as this midnight lord of misrule can do in finding exactly the word that is wrong and exactly the action that is meaningless.

That is, if you think about your own dreams, exactly right. They really never make sense unless you iron out all the weird wrinkles. But the weird wrinkles are what makes it a dream. Dreams are weird…and terrifying.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis captures the difference between what we imagine when we think about dreams and what Dreams actually are. Sailing into a pitch black realm, the crew takes on board a man who was screaming for help. Once on board, the rescued man screams out:

“Fly! Fly! About with our ship and fly! Row, row, row for your lives away from this accursed shore…This is the Island where Dreams come True.”
“That’s the island I’ve been looking for this long time,” said one of the sailors. “I reckon I’d find I was married to Nancy if we landed here.”
“And I’d find Tom alive again,” said another.
“Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

When you think about it, Descartes’ question of how you know you are not dreaming right now is really easy to answer. I know I am not dreaming right now because the world in which I am currently existing is perfectly comprehensible. I am typing on a computer in my office and I am not going to find myself in the next second standing on a rural road right after a parade next to an abandoned parking lot realizing my truck was stolen. And I am really certain that I won’t decide that because my truck was stolenI will instantly go to a junk dealer’s storefront to sell the following two items: 1) a baseball from some playoff game involving the Red Sox, signed by the entire team (I’ve never even seen such a baseball) and 2) a Hummel figurine of a little girl holding a flower (the exact one that my mother had). If you can’t see any connection between having your truck stolen and because of that selling two rather odd items to a junk dealer, that is the point. This is the sort of thing that happens in a dream…well not a dream, the last dream I can remember from a few nights ago.

The Lord of Dreams, that midnight lord of misrule, has a very odd sense of what constitutes continuity.

From this starting observation, Chesterton proceeds to consider the relationship of Dreams to Art. As he notes, “at first sight it would seem that the lord of dreams was the eternal opponent of art.” Dreams lack the cohesion necessary to be a work of art. They lack elegance and beauty.

But, Chesterton goes on to argue that first impression is wrong. The incoherence of dreams, that wild and unpredictable nature of them, is telling us something about Life. It is not telling us that Life is wild and unpredictable; we already know that from our hours of being awake. The wildness and unpredictability of the land of dreams is of a different kind than that which we see in the daytime.

So, what are dreams doing? And this is where Chesterton starts giggling with delight off behind the scenes of his essay. This is what Gaiman internalized when he set out to craft the tale of Dream.

There is one unity which we do find in dreams. It binds together all their brutal inconsequence and all their moonstruck anti-climaxes. It makes the unimaginable nocturnal farce which begins with a saint choosing parasols and ends with a policeman shelling peas, as rounded and single a harmony as some poet’s roundel upon a passion flower. This unity is the absolute unity of emotion. If we wish to experience pure and naked feeling we can never experience it so really as in that unreal land. There the passions seem to live an outlawed and abstract existence, unconnected with any facts or persons.

You wake from a dream in a cold sweat terrified like you are never terrified when awake; you awake with a sense of overwhelming peace and happiness; you awake with a terrible feeling of loss; you awake with a massive worry that you forgot to study for the test or you are late. All of these emotions are so strong at that moment of waking that either a) you are relieved to realize the bad emotions were generated by things that are not real, or b) you have that crushing disappointment that the good emotions were based on an unconscious fancy and you want more than anything to return to that dream world.

What is Life? Chesterton notes that is not merely what you read in a newspaper or see under a microscope. “Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconquered, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.” That is how Chesterton concludes the essay. What does that mean? I am not entirely sure what it means, but I am pretty sure it is correct.

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Christie and Chesterton

Agatha Christie meet G. K. Chesterton.

Imagine a young Agatha Christie. She wants to write Crime Fiction.

But, who should be her role model?

On the one side, she can pattern her work after Arthur Conan Doyle. Hercule Poirot becomes the modern day Sherlock Holmes, using his little gray cells to solve puzzles. (Or as Christie would actually write, his little grey cells.) The clues are all handed to the reader along with an array of red herrings. The reader tries to be as clever as the detective and notice the real clues and uncover the culprit. The novel ends satisfactorily with all the puzzles being resolved and the reader exclaiming either “I knew it!” or “I should have seen it!”

Agatha Christie became world famous following that model. In very many ways she outdoes Doyle in the quality of the stories, even though none of her detectives ever quite become as instantly recognizable as Sherlock Holmes.

But, there is an alternate reality when Christie emulates not Doyle, but G.K. Chesterton. The Father Brown stories also have a detective, in this case an unassuming priest. He roams around and solves mysteries, and the stories are quite nice as mysteries, but there is no doubt at all that Chesterton thinks solving the crime is only a part, and a relatively unimportant part, of the story. Instead, Chesterton constantly draws attention to theological puzzles and mysteries. The stories are merely ways for Chesterton to indulge himself in working out a paradox or an oddity of life and drawing the reader’s attention to larger matters.

What would have happened if Christie had gone that route? You need not wonder. You just need to read The Mysterious Mr. Quin. I started this book having absolutely no idea that it was in a different category than Christie’s usual fare. The first story seems like a conventional Christie style mystery, but it is not really her best. Then the same with the second one. Mr. Quin is indeed mysterious; he just sort of pops into the story, but it seems like it is Mr. Satterthwaite who is doing the actual solving of the mysteries… mysteries that seem less and less like mysteries as they go along.

Eventually it dawned on me. The individual stories weren’t really the mysteries in this book. The real mystery is “Who in the world is this Mr. Quin guy?” (Slaps forehead: Hence the title of the book!) He just sort of pops up, looking oddly like a harlequin (Ah, Mr. Harley Quin!) as the light shining on him seems rather consistently filtered through a stained glass window or some such thing.

How is he always there at just the right moment? Why does he keep crossing Satterthwaite’s path just as there is some crisis in the life of someone Satterthwaite meets? Why does each story seem less and less like a Whodunit?

By two thirds of the way through the book, Mr. Quin stops even seeming like a real character in the stories—he emerges as a sort of deus ex machina, showing up in time to have a brief conversation with Satterthwaite or one of the other characters before he vanishes again.

And then, he really does start showing up magically as if he just climbed an impossible to climb cliff and he departs by heading straight back to the impossible to climb down cliff. Wait, the Reader exclaims. Is Mr. Quin even a human? Is he like some sort of Spirit Being or Guardian Angel? We never find out.

By this point, I had to remind myself this was Christie, not Chesterton. If this was a Chesterton collection, the solution to the mystery is obvious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Dear Reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Why shouldn’t Mr. Quin be some sort of non-human spirt wandering the earth doing good? Why do you assume that all mysteries must be solved by tell-tale clues interpreted by clever human agency? Why do you discount the fact that some mysteries are only revealed by knowing the details of the human heart?

This all seems so very unlike an Agatha Christie novel, but her name is right on the cover. She wrote these stories very early in her career, quite literally at the same time when was working out Hercule Poirot. The Mysterious Mr. Quin is the Road Not Taken.

Does this mean that Christie decided to go the more realistic route? Can we say that Hercule Poirot is more realistic than Harley Quin? Only if we deny the existence of ethereal beings.

This Christie-Chesterton mashup has my mind reeling in exactly the same way that Chesterton always jolts one out of lazy patterns of thought.

On the one hand, I have a solid faith in the existence of non-corporeal beings. God exists. Angels and demons exist. Of this I have no doubt.

But, if I am reading a story about angles and demons, I have zero doubt I am reading fiction. I never once paused to wonder if Good Omens was non-fiction. But, that isn’t really all that surprising—everyone thinks Good Omens is fiction.

What about Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? There I still stick with fiction, but suddenly I am a lot less willing to say there is nothing real there at all. Fictional stories about real things. Sure the stories are fiction, but angels and demons are real.

If Hercule Poirot shows up to solve a mystery, I know the story is fiction, but it seems like a plausibly true story. It is realistic. If, on the other hand, Poirot could suddenly call down lightning bolts to slay the murderer, I would think the story was rather unrealistic. If Mr. Quin is just an angel who shows up to help out at a moment of crisis, why do I think that story is unrealistic? Why? Just because to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen an angel roaming the earth, I cannot deny the possibility that they are out there. So, why do I instantly think Mr. Quin is unrealistic? Why am I constantly looking for explanations of how he could both be human and do the things he does?

In other words the real mystery of The Mysterious Mr. Quin is why I find Mr. Quin to be mysterious at all.

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Yea, Faith Without a Hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.

That is T. S. Eliot in “East Coker.” The trio of faith, hope, and love is straight out of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. The oddity or intriguing thing about the way Eliot uses that trio is the idea of having one without the others. With no hope and no love, how does faith persist?

G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse is a marvelous illustration of the idea in Eliot’s poem. Indeed, once I saw this, I pulled the annotated Eliot off my shelf, fully expecting to see this ballad listed among the sources for “East Coker;” but Chesterton was not mentioned at all. (Oddly, neither was 1 Corinthians.) Did Eliot read Chesterton? I have no idea, but it sure seems like he would have.

The Ballad of the White Horse tells the tale of the 9^th century Saxon King Alfred who beats back the Danish Vikings occupying England. The great battle took place at Ethandune, where a large chalk horse is carved into a nearby hill, hence the White Horse. Alfred’s accomplishments earned him the sobriquet Alfred the Great. This poem was obviously Chesterton’s attempt to write a modern day Iliad. If you like tales of great warriors on both sides of a battle slaying each other while making grand speeches, then you’ll like this poem.

But as fun as it is to read verse describing how a great sword was hurled through the air to strike an opponent over the eye, that wasn’t the part that caused me to spend time in deep reverie. The story opens with Alfred wandering through a wood musing upon the Vikings occupying the land when he suddenly encounters the Virgin Mary.

“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,
“I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.

“The gates of heaven are fearful gates,
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred,
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
Which is too good to tell.

“But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is forever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?

A promising beginning to a tale. If you ran into the Virgin Mary one day, you might well ask if Dante described heaven accurately or something like that. But, Alfred just wants to know if the Vikings will be forever occupying the land (“if that which is forever is”) or if they will one day leave.

With the aid of hindsight, we know what answer Mary should have given; obviously the Vikings leave and we know that Alfred plays a big role in their departure. So, Mary’s reply is a bit shocking:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”

Joy without cause I get. But faith without a hope? If you know you will lose, if you have no hope of winning, how do you maintain faith? What does it look like to have faith with no hope? Faith in what exactly?

The shape of faith without hope becomes clear as the story unfolds. Alfred has no hope of beating back the Vikings, but that does not stop him from gathering the chiefs of the land. He then finds his way into the Danish camp pretending to be a wandering minstrel. On his way out of camp, he taunts them thus:

“That though we scatter and though we fly
And you hang over us like the sky
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.

“That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare in the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.

“That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose
Than you to win again.

That is exactly what faith without hope looks like. Tired of shame; heart to keep running; lust to lose again. Alfred keeps going not because he has a hope of winning the war. Alfred keeps going because he has total faith that this is what he is supposed to do. He does it knowing the sky will grow darker yet and the sea will rise ever higher. He will lose. Then lose again. And the lust to lose one more time will not diminish.

That is faith. Pure unadulterated faith.

Wise he had been before defeat,
And wise before success;
Wise in both hours, and ignorant,
Knowing neither more nor less.

We often think of a test of faith as a time when hope flickers yet we maintain our hope because we have faith. Faith, in other words, is often described as a hope-generating mechanism. Times are tough, but have faith, they will get better. That phrasing though blurs the distinction between faith and hope. Instead: times are tough, but have faith even though they will not get better. That is the real test of faith. Keep going even though you will lose because you have faith that this is exactly what you are supposed to do.

With the constant tales of victory over long odds, we build a culture of hope. Hope is a good thing; it is a theological virtue. Faith can aid in the building of hope; hope can strengthen faith. It is an easy thing to imagine hope without faith. To maintain hope when faith is dead is hard, but we encourage people to do so nonetheless. Flipping the order is equally important. To truly learn the nature of faith, it must be contemplated in the absence of hope. Sometimes in life, faith needs to be practiced in the absence of hope.

Faith, hope, and love. When all else fades, these three remain. They are all in the waiting, in the stillness, in the quiet whispers of God.