Conference 2009
The July 4 conference on ‘The Holiness of G.K.Chesterton’ was, by general consent, a great success, and the texts of the conference addresses will in due course be appearing, with others, in a book of the same title: watch this space for news of its publication. In the meantime, we present here the opening remarks of the Society’s chairman, Dr. William Oddie.
In a recent article in my old paper The Catholic Herald, I recounted a story from last year’s conference of the American Chesterton Society; and I shall open my remarks this morning by telling it again. After I had delivered my paper, I was asked what stage the Cause towards Chesterton's beatification had reached. When I said there was no Cause, the audience showed signs of incredulity. I explained lamely that there had to be evidence of a cult: one man stood up and said, indicating the audience of approximately 500, "what the heck do they think we are?"
I think I need to say, nevertheless, that this conference is not intended as the opening salvo in a campaign for Chesterton’s canonization. This is not a uniquely Roman Catholic audience, and even among Catholics who believe that Chesterton was indeed a saint, there are some who think that to canonize him would be, dread word, ‘counterproductive’ since it would diminish his appeal to non-Catholics. I personally disagree; but it’s not my purpose or that of this gathering to press that view.
But I would, all the same, be disappointed if by the end of the day, we have not established at least that the idea of such a thing would not be unthinkable, or as A.N.Wilson recently wrote, ‘bizarre’. In the words of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, ‘if for the faithful [there is] no reputation of holiness, the bishop cannot even initiate the cause.’ Is there, and if there is not should there be, such a reputation; that is our question.
To begin at the beginning, how do we know a saint when we see one? Is there a checklist, that we can tick off? John Henry Newman once expressed his dislike of hagiographies which in his words ‘chop up a Saint into chapters of faith, hope and charity’. The danger, he thought, was the creation of a notion of sanctity which was somehow bland and conformist. He pointed out that the Saints of the early church ‘rather than writing formal doctrinal treatises…write controversy’. Not only that, they ‘mix up their own persons … with the didactic or polemical works which engaged them’. Newman could almost have been writing about himself; he could also have been describing someone as yet unborn: Chesterton, you will remember denied that he was a real novelist by saying that he ‘could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked… and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women. But I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.’
The saints of the early church too were controversialists; but though Newman disliked their being chopped up into chapters of faith, hope and charity, they could hardly have been saints without these cardinal virtues: indeed, they became controversialists because of them.
It is this before all else that we need to understand about Chesterton. He never flaunted his personal faith in his writings. But his passionate commitment to it could emerge at any time. At one of his frequent speaking engagements a Canon Barnett recalled that a member of the audience ‘spoke discourteously of Christ’:
Mr Chesterton [recalled Canon Barnett] bore him for the allotted time, and then slipping off his indifference like a loose coat, sprang to his feet and, with glorious eloquence and rapidity, told of his own faith, stripped the incidents of time and circumstance from the Character which has transfigured history, and declaimed that reverence and humility were the paths all men should keep open, for they alone led to the evolution of the true. I never now read anything by Mr. Chesterton without seeing him on that platform defending, in a physical elephantine rage, his spiritual angelic surety.
And this spiritual angelic surety was intellectually decisive: it absolutely governed his thinking about everything, whether he was actually writing about religion or not. As he put it in December 1903, very early in his career as a writer,
You cannot evade the issue of God; whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him…. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. Zulus, gardening, butcher’s shops, lunatic asylums, housemaids and the French Revolution — all these things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He really lives and reigns.
And his perceptions of the real world and everything in it had already been transformed by his new faith: as he had put it earlier that year, after conversion, ‘with this idea once inside our heads a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’
So, we can say that his faith was the rocklike foundation of his thought. We can say, too, that his whole life exemplified the virtue of hope; indeed, it defined him as a writer in a century increasingly engulfed by hopelessness. And we can say too that what he called pessimism —and for him it’s a key word—was one of the few things that could rouse him to real anger, to controversy which had about it a fierce and personal tinge. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in an attack he launched as early as 1901 on Schopenhauer, that great philosopher of absolute loss of all hope:
In the case of Schopenhauer, [he wrote] tinging all the heavens with his own tremendous mood, it is inevitable that we should speak personally. And of all men whose souls have influenced the world, Schopenhauer seems to me the most contemptible.
…. In his most famous essay, ‘The Misery of Life,’ he moans that ‘every satisfied wish begets a new one,’ which seems to me the definition of happiness…. Schopenhauer positively complains of the fact that the heart is ‘a bottomless abyss,’ as if to find a bottom to it would not be the end of all human hope.
Chesterton’s distaste for Schopenhauer needs no explanation; two human beings could hardly have been more different in mind and heart. In his Autobiography, Chesterton wrote that his life had been ‘indefensibly fortunate and happy’. Schopenhauer truly believed that ‘no man is happy’; he certainly was not.
Chesterton’s attitude to Schopenhauer, we can say, is a touchstone for his deep and instinctive opposition to one of the most powerful currents, perhaps even the mainstream, of twentieth-century culture; it is also a touchstone for his prophetic relevance to that culture and to that century. With hindsight, we can see Chesterton’s passionate gratitude for creation and his real and unconditional love of humanity as indicating from the very beginning of his career that his place in twentieth century culture was inevitably to be one of passionate revolt, against a civilisation in which, more and more, the human race was to be perceived as inhabiting the heart of darkness.
Chesterton’s intellect was entirely suffused by his faith; his heart was filled by a hope that welled up from his unfailing gratitude for the gift of life. As for his charity, we can say that Schopenhauer was one of the very few exceptions that prove the rule: nowhere in general do we see it more clearly than in his love for his intellectual opponents. He was, as I have said, like the saints of the early Church, a controversialist. He was a controversialist because he hated heresy: but he had an extraordinary capacity for loving the heretic: he might have come to love Schopenhauer if they had actually met, as he did frequently meet Shaw and Wells: he might even have cheered him up. In controversy, no matter how fierce, as Belloc wrote after his death, “...he seemed always to be in a mood not only of comprehension for his opponent but of admiration for some quality in him.... it was this in him which made him, with other qualities, so universally beloved.”
When he died, there were of course many epitaphs. Pius XI sent a telegram describing him as a "gifted defender of the Catholic Faith". But for most of those who loved him his true epitaph was that lovely verse written years before by the poet laureate, Walter de la Mare, which by the wish of his widow Frances appeared on the service sheet at his funeral Requiem Mass; it’s a verse I love to quote; and I cannot resist the temptation to end these opening remarks by quoting it now:
Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and innocence his heart at rest.