The Radical GKC

No modern writer or thinker has more directly impacted my life and my thinking than Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Of course, I am first and last and foremost a Catholic--and this means that I cannot and will not be subject to the narrow limits of any man's ideas, no matter how intelligent, wise, or holy. Still, it is to Chesterton that I owe, humanly speaking, this insight; for he was one of the primary human means by which the saving truths of the Gospel and the Catholic Faith were communicated to me, by the grace of God. Far from the only one--but certainly among the foremost. I call myself a Thomist--but in truth, my thinking is much Chestertonian as Scholastic. I have read a shocking amount of his shockingly large corpus, and continue to draw new spiritual and intellectual truths from it daily.

It is with this in mind, though, that I feel compelled to take a moment to lodge a protest to the use that Chesterton has been put to, and continues to be put to, in the world of modern American Christianity. The general adoption of Chesterton as a luminary of the modern American, ecumenical Christian Right has, to be sure, brought about much good--but it has also seriously deformed the public figure of the man, his thought, and his commitments. We are in great, even terrible danger of losing sight entirely of the real Chesterton--who he was, and what he stood for.

Chesterton was a famously friendly, humorous man, a man whose public enemies were also his private friends--so that, even in his lifetime, there was a general tendency to take him, as it were, as a light, rather foolish figure: a great fat man whose only message was the essential goodness of the universe and the importance of Christian tradition. This much, of course, is certainly true. The modern conservative vision of Chesterton, though, has if anything delivered a far more unforgiveable insult--turning Chesterton into a mere proponent of generic "common sense," an intellectual apologist for whatever variety of Christianity happens to suit one's fancy, a defender of the settled homes and lives of the American middle class. It was in this context that I first encountered Chesterton--and for that I am naturally grateful. Still, if this friendly, inoffensive Chesterton pleases us, it delivers an unforgiveable insult to the man himself.

Who was Chesterton? He was, from first to last, a political and social and religious radical, with enormous sympathies with revolutionaries of every sort. He was also, from first to last, a proponent of the essentially radical, revolutionary, and totalizing aspects of philosophy and religion.

Of course, the main thing that is usually forgotten about Chesterton is the simple fact that he was a journalist--and hence, first and foremost, a commentator on current events, and the social and political trends underlying them. In this, he was hardly ever anything but a rabble-rouser; a man who was not well understood by his contemporaries, not because he was too light and frivolous, but because he was too serious and direct.

The beginning of Chesterton's career as a public intellectual was the Boer War--in which Chesterton played the immensely unpopular role of radical anti-Imperialist agitator. This colonial war, fought for reasons of Imperial policy and economic interests, was immensely, indeed universally popular in England--and, for Chesterton, the object of a thoroughgoing and utterly uncompromising hatred. Chesterton first made a name for himself, not as a proponent of common sense and good fun, but as a young firebrand prone to attending Jingo rallies in order to shout taunts at their participants. His first public notoriety came from the fact that he had the nerve to oppose the British Empire at the very height of its success and universal popularity.

A brief quotation from one of poems gives his own view of this war, and its effect on his life, quite well:

"For so they conquered, and so we scattered,
When the Devil rode, and his dogs smelt Gold;
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,
When I was twenty and odd years old;
When the mongrel men the Market classes
Had slimy hands upon England's rod,
And sword in hand, upon Afric's passes,
Her last Republic cried to God."

In his Autobiography, Chesterton says that the Boer War was one of the turning points of his life--for when he realized he hated this war, hated it as he had never hated anything in his life, he was pushed to ask *why* he hated it, to unravel the strands of this most colonial and economic of wars, and develop further his own political and social philosophies. What he realized, gradually, is that what he hated about this war was simply what he hated about his entire society--its capitalism, its industrialism, its racialized Nationalism, its Imperialism, its expansive belief in progress, its lack of belief in God.

Already before this time, Chesterton had had his major spiritual and philosophical crisis, which resulted in his lifelong belief in the essential goodness of creation, and the constant necessity of humble, grateful appreciation of the world, oneself, and one's neighbor. Yet even this crisis was not purely individual; it was, in truth, a very direct intellectual battle with the prevailing philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer, and a social and religious battle with the decadence of the fin de siecle. Chesterton's declarations of the goodness of things were very far from cries of placidity; they were, once again, cries of revolt. Throughout his life, indeed, Chesterton pursued his enemies on the philosophical field with as much aplomb as any Crusader.

This essential belief in the goodness of things, though, was far from a mere placid optimism--it was a belief found in battle, and founded, as Chesterton was later to say, not on the maximum of goodness, but on its purest minimum. It was also, in Chesterton's belief, the necessary precondition for any real revolution, reform, or progress. If the world was a disappointing, despairing waste, then nothing could be done but passively accept things as they were; but if God and being were, essentially, good, if man were, essentially, precious and miraculous--then this was a recipe, not for placidity, but revolution. If a precious nation were being absorbed by an Empire, it must be defended; if a precious family was being torn apart by divorce or sin, it must be saved; if a precious man were being crushed or starved by industrialism, he must be rescued. There was no time to waste.

The combination of these ideas can be seen at their purest, perhaps, in Chesterton's first novel, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," written, by Chesterton's admission, in direct response to the events of the Boer War. This strange little parable, then, is from first to last concerned equally with the radical preciousness of existence--and an equally fiery anti-Imperialism.

A quotation from this novel--which is in most respects impossible to describe--will illustrate this well enough. In an early chapter, our main English characters encounter the exiled President of Nicarauga, whose nation has just been conquered by an assemblage of Imperalist powers (England, Germany, and America), who want to open Nicarauga to international commerce. A dialogue ensues:

" 'You need not hesitate in speaking to me,' he said. 'I am quite fully aware that the whole tendency of the world of to-day is against Nicaragua and against me. I shall not consider it any diminution of your evident courtesy if you say what you think of the misfortunes that have laid my republic in ruins.'

Barker looked immeasurably relieved and gratified.

'You are most generous, President,' he said, with some hesitation over the title, 'and I will take advantage of your generosity to express the doubts which, I must confess, we moderns have about such things as—er—the Nicaraguan independence.'

'So your sympathies are,' said Del Fuego, quite calmly, 'with the big nation which—'

'Pardon me, pardon me, President,' said Barker, warmly; 'my sympathies are with no nation. You misunderstand, I think, the modern intellect. We do not disapprove of the fire and extravagance of such commonwealths as yours only to become more extravagant on a larger scale. We do not condemn Nicaragua because we think Britain ought to be more Nicaraguan. We do not discourage small nationalities because we wish large nationalities to have all their smallness, all their uniformity of outlook, all their exaggeration of spirit. If I differ with the greatest respect from your Nicaraguan enthusiasm, it is not because a nation or ten nations were against you; it is because civilization was against you. We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilization, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples—'

'The Sẽnor will forgive me,' said the President. 'May I ask the Sẽnor how, under ordinary circumstances, he catches a wild horse?'

'I never catch a wild horse,' replied Barker, with dignity.

'Precisely,' said the other; 'and there ends your absorption of the talents. That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, "This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him." You say your civilization will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses—by lassoing the fore-feet—which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilized.'

'Something, perhaps,' replied Barker, 'but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilization can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilization.'

'You have good authority,' answered the Nicaraguan. 'Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?' "

One of the chief morals of the novel, in fact, is precisely this anti-Imperialist and anti-Colonialist doctrine: because existence is precious, because each person and each people are precious, the mere brute dominance or absorption of many peoples by one is a shocking, revolting crime.

Of course, all this was to lead, in short order, to Chesterton's belief in Christianity--but even here (especially here!), his commitment was far from an light and easy matter. For, from first to last, Chesterton's commitment was not just to Christianity in the abstract, but to the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church. Here some clarification is in order. Chesterton did not, in fact, convert to the Catholic Church for some decades: however, even during his time as an Anglican, he considered himself, as many Anglo-Catholics do, not an Anglican, but a Catholic. Even here, though, as he was later to say, he differed substantially from even most Anglo-Catholics; for while they were and are often interested in somehow "Catholicizing" the Church of England, he was interested only in finding and belonging to the Catholic Church. When he came to believe that the Anglo-Catholics were not, in fact, Catholics, he converted to the fullness of the Faith that he had already professed.

This is a somewhat longwinded way of saying that, once again, Chesterton's commitments were far from merely conservative--they were, indeed, revolutionary. Chesterton believed in Catholicism precisely as "the one fighting form of Christianity," the Church on earth tasked with shaping and informing every aspect of society with justice and divine truth. His idea of religion was not merely private or personal, but radically public, social, and even political: "A man can no more have a private religion than he can have a private Sun and Moon."

In this, he was doubly a rebel in an anti-Catholic England where Catholics, especially Catholic converts, were still viewed with suspicion and mistrust. Far from rejecting that controversy, though, Chesterton embraced it; and in his examination of history, he came more and more to see the roots of all the evils he had opposed in the rejection, first by Protestantism, and later by secular commercialism, of the great truths of the Catholic Faith. In Catholicism, too, he found a true justification for the essential goodness and preciousness of existence--a true Internationalism without Imperialism--a social teaching capable of giving true justice to the nations--and most importantly, of course, humility, repentance, the forgiveness of sins, and the reality of divine love.

All of this was, of course, to fundamentally shape his work over the course of his life--first and foremost, of course, his journalistic work, commentating, day in and day out, on the events of his time, engaging in public controversy, giving lectures, and fighting day in and day out for what he held to be the truth.

In this regard, mention should be made of what was perhaps the great work of his life, which defined and indeed consumed its last decades, taking up most of his time and enormous amounts of his own money: the founding and running of his own weekly paper, GK's Weekly, and the concurrent founding and promotion of the Distributist League. These were closely allied tasks.

For this, too, was one of the main things for which Chesterton, at every stage of his life, stood: the complete destruction and dissolution of industrial capitalism. At first, this took the form of the rather conventional Fabian socialism of his time--but rapidly, under the influence of his friend Hilaire Belloc, Pope Leo XIII, and the great Father Vincent McNabb, this anti-capitalism was sharpened and defined into the positive cause of Distributism. This was, certainly, a radical enough cause: the massive division and redistribution of the means of production from the rich to the masses. It was this, more than anything else, that consumed his energies in his last years.

As for the industrial capitalist order itself, Chesterton had nothing but contempt for it--in his view, it was was chiefly responsible for the godless Imperialism of his lifetime, the bitter oppression of the poor by the rich, the growth of promiscuity and sexual immorality, and the destruction of the chief institution of human society: the family. In one of his weekly columns, he bitterly complained that even the godless tyranny of Soviet Communism seemed preferable, for him, to slowly watching human society dissolved and corrupted by the triumphant forces of unbridled greed, lust, and pride.

When Naziism arrived on the scene, in the last years of his life, Chesterton saw it as the culmination of all that he had come to hate in his lifetime, and in his own society: the racial Imperialism of the Boer Wars, the anti-Catholicism of No Popery, the regimentation and impersonality of industrial society. In Nazi racism, especially, Chesterton saw a truly spiritual threat: racism was nothing other than the deification of pride, the complete rejection of the humble gratitude for life that he had come to believe in as a young man. Here there was no room for compromise: war with the Nazis, he argued again and again, was simply an inevitability. This was indeed to come, though he was not to be alive to see it.

For most of his life, then, Chesterton was something of a rejected prophet; his beliefs and causes regarded as backwards trifles, even if he himself was still appreciated as a humorous and beloved character of public life.

When Chesterton died, in 1936, the world was very far from embracing his ideals or his commitments; nor is it now. Still, his Distributism did find many converts in his day, including, most notably, the great and saintly Dorothy Day. In the end, these ideas, and those of the Papal Social Teaching on which they were based, did play an important role in shaping the post-War world. Of course, this world was to be shaped even more by the economic and cultural dominance of America--and here, Chesterton was far less enthusiastic. In his last years, seeing this dominance start to shape itself, Chesterton commented that, while he still despised all Imperialism, he certainly preferred an Imperialism like that of England's, founded on courage in arms, to an Imperialism such as America's, founded on economic dominance of the world.

Still, in the end, Chesterton was not a cause, but a man; and what he believed in, most of all, was not his own ideas or causes, but rather the Catholic Church herself. When he died, it was with the same faith in the essential goodness of God, and the preciousness of the world, that he had had from the beginning; a faith supported, and increased beyond all measure, by the Cross of Christ.

Among his last words were the repeated injunction: "The matter is now clear; it is between light and darkness, and everyone must choose his side." This, more than anything else, is what Chesterton stood for; and this is very far from easy comfort.

All of this is, of course, only a tiny sliver of the thought of a great man whose mind was infinitely larger than his body. It does, though, pick out in relief details that are often, in our day and age, overlooked and forgotten.