On Honor and Its Opposites

Honor is not the highest thing; it is not even really a complete thing in itself. Nevertheless, it is in the final balance necessary for the stable achievement of any degree of virtue or morality in life.

What We Want

Philosophically speaking, there is no question about what we want. What Aristotle knew is also what Augustine knew, what Aquinas knew, what even Descartes knew: that our very nature as rational embodied beings has inscribed in our flesh and in our hearts and every feature of our selves a desire that can be diverted and opposed, but never effaced. 

Put philosophically, our moment-by-moment existence as individuals is constituted by our rational and embodied receiving of and participation in being as form: therefore, we cannot help but want to completely fulfill that being by receiving and participating in form and being in their objective fullness. Put simply, as beings who know and enjoy, we cannot help wanting to know and enjoy everything.

More immediately, since our existence at every moment and in its totality is entirely defined by our reception of being as form, we cannot help wanting our reception of being to be true. Truth and intellect are properly the same relation. We exist by knowing the truth; and it is self-contradictory to want to know the truth and at the same time reject it. 

Hence, our nature contains within itself the constant, pressing imperative to know each thing it receives truly, objectively, according to what that thing is in itself and not merely as it appears to our senses or preferences or lesser desires, and to relate to it truly, which is to say to relate to it by the relation of truth, which is to say, to act in regards to it according to what it is and what it is for.

For both of these reasons, as Plato long ago pointed out, it is incomprehensible nonsense to say that it can ever be beneficial to us, can ever even be rationally thinkable and not a self-contradiction in terms, to deliberately believe what is false or do what is evil.

Yet as Plato knew also, there is another part of us that is not constituted simply and totally by intellect and truth--another part that has desires that are not solely objective workings-out of the desire to know and enjoy everything. For Plato, this other part of us--which we might call the body, though there are better names for it--was the problem, and the solution was to permanently shed it.

Aristotle, though, rejected this position, and proposed a middle course that also corresponds to more or less the common sense of the human race and the normative Christian position of the last two thousand years. This other part of us, Aristotle acknowledged, was not simply and totally constituted by the relation of truth in the same way as the intellect; it was, however, ordered to that relation, its nature constituted totally by a telos and receptivity towards receiving truth from the intellect and embodying that truth in objective and embodied and temporal actions. Or, put more simply, our human bodies are not intellects, but things that exist to be taught by the intellect the truth and to follow and live that truth out.

Hence, whatever the ultimate fate of the body or soul might be in the afterlife, the entire task of morality in this life is for the intellect to teach truth to the body in such a way and to such a degree that it comes to continually and stably share in and embody and carry out the relation of truth in respect to every thing it encounters.

Or, put more incisively, the whole goal of human morality is to establish a permanent and unbreakable bond between body and soul, such that every truth grasped by the intellect is infallibly lived out by the body. This stable bond Aristotle called a "habit" or "excellence," but it is better known today by the Latin term "virtue."

If all this is correct, then there is simply no question what you want, what I want, what you and I cannot help but wanting. We want to always and everywhere infallibly do what is objectively true and good, which is to say, what in fact corresponds to the natures and telos and happiness of every thing and every person we encounter.

Here, though, is the whole trouble: that if we want this, we do not always or even often know what we want. Different reasons for this gap have been given in human history. For Plato, the problem was merely ignorance; for Aristotle, it was habitual vice, a poor use of the body and the embodied mind; for many Christian philosophers, it was both of the above and also the perverse will of a prideful intellect seeking its own self and lesser finalities above the terrifying transcendence of a God who is both the proper end of the intellect and infinitely beyond its capacity to grasp or choose by its powers alone. 

All, though, would agree that virtue and truth and the good are the objective ends of our bodies and minds and whole selves, and that therefore we in some sense want them even when we oppose them, even when we in fact choose their opposites.

Interiority and Politics

This is what the Apostles called a hard saying; that is, a saying that does not appear at first glance to give much aid or comfort to our actual pitiful lives and selves. To tell a child who very much wants to hit his sister that he in fact wants to love her is, I think, true; but also not much of a comfort to the child's delicate feelings of offended dignity at not being allowed to do what he wants. 

We all are much more like that child than we would like to think; and much more of our emotional lives consist of delicate feelings of offended dignity over not being allowed to do and say the manifestly stupid and harmful things we happen to want in the moment. And it is in respect to this reality that it is often more truthful merely to say that the heart of man is desperately wicked above all things, who can fathom it--and then to punish the child and/or ourselves.

There is, however, a practicality in the belief that what we really want is always and everywhere the objective good--though it is rarely put in a practical form.

From this comes the basic conflict between modern and pre-modern accounts of desire. For the ancients and Medievals, desire was conceived of objectively, as beginning with the objective good eliciting desire in the subject, conforming that subject's appetite to itself, and terminating in the subject's enjoyment of the object by way of proper relation. For moderns since the 16th century, however, desire has been conceived as beginning with the subject, as an inchoate and irrational and limitless impulse outwards that only subjectively takes its objects as good and in so doing forces those objects to conform to itself, and hence which terminates in the violent subjection or subjugation of object to appetite.

Yet if one thinks of desire as essentially limitless and subjective, then one necessarily thinks of both morality and politics as primarily about reconciling the essentially opposed and limitless desires and (in the technical sense) interests of individual people and groups, and thus making it possible for people to live together in some form of society. And the only way to do this, for all the cleverness of Enlightenment thinkers, is via some form of discipline and extrinsic imposition of hostile ends onto the subjective desires of individual people. If this is true, then morality will be conceived of most essentially as a form of violence. And we can see this quite well in all contemporary approaches to law and morality. 

If it does nothing else, the belief in the objectivity of the good and of people's desire for it has a profound effect on the character and actions of the person tasked with training others to choose the good--placing love at the heart of punishment, and desire at the heart of education. If it is really true, as more or less every philosopher and Christian theologian from Aristotle until the Reformation thought it was, that the goal of governance and parenting and education alike is to create a permanent, habitual inner bond between truth and self and body and soul and cause people to reliably and freely choose the good, we would frame both laws and curricula rather differently than we presently do.

Of course, the belief that what people really and truly want is the good does not necessarily dictate a gentle or indulgent method of training or moral education--far from it! We tend as a matter of course to be much less indulgent and much more consistently demanding in seeking what we genuinely believe that we want than in what we think others want for us; and the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to helping other people seek what they want. The belief in a purely extrinsic imposition of the good tends to lead to an odd fluctuation between total indulgence and indeed indifference to conduct on the one hand, and extraordinarily coercive and violent attempts to punish and compel conduct on the other. The reason for this is simple: if people's character and choice only matter, not to themselves, but to society and/or the government and/or some private interest, then the reality is that the vast majority of people's conduct and moral character and virtue and vice simply does not matter. Where it does matter, though, the only method of proceeding is to use whatever means necessary to force them to do what those with power want or need them to do; and in this, their moral character and choices and even free will is mostly beside the point.

On the other hand, belief in the objectivity of the good and our own constitutional desire for it imposes on each person and on society collectivity an imperative that is constant and totalizing--but which is limited, not extrinsically, but intrinsically by the thing aimed at (the interior, stable, habitual choice of each individual person of the objective truth of their relations with all other persons and things) and the means necessary to achieve those ends (habit-forming interior human desire and action).

The implications of all this are limitless, moment by moment and day by day; and until one has actually tried to live out this way of doing and being, there is little that can be comprehensibly said to the outsider. 

I really do believe that if we could untangle all our manifold and petty and perverse desires and wishes and habits, it is true that we would ultimately discover that at the root of them all lies the infinite receptivity of the intellect for the fullness of truthful being and objective goodness. I have, to a reasonable extent, succeeded in untangling my own moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions and discovering their ultimate roots in the objective good; and in discovering this, I have succeeded to a certain degree in altering those moment-by-moment desires and choices and emotions so as to better conform them with their ends. 

In doing this, though, I have also and inevitably come to notice the degree to which my moment-by-moment daily desires and wishes and enjoyments were and still to an extent are irrational and perverse and self-contradictory, not relative to some violently imposed external standard, but relative to their own aims and in themselves. And all of this is not easy.

Yet if one has never even attempted this struggle, has never even conceived of one's desires and choices in these terms however inchoately, I struggle to understand how one could be expected to understand the good--or, really, meaningfully desire or enjoy it. The whole task is in the doing.

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

Chesterton as War Propagandist: Or, Against the Ignorant, Mendacious, Calumniating Anti-Chestertonians

As people who know me in real life can attest, I have for the past fifteen years or so regularly joked that--despite being (by this point) nominally an academic expert with a PhD and a book from Oxford University Press on 4th century political theology--the area which I am actually most qualified to write on is Star Trek. However, in the dry, sober, unhumorous light of day, the single topic I am probably actually most fully qualified to write on is the life and thought of G.K. Chesterton.

Regular readers of this """weblog""" will note that pretty much every essay I have written for The Adventures of Captain Peabody since its inception has included at least a few credited or uncredited paraphrases of Chesterton. These citations, though, drastically underrate the degree to which I have stolen from Chesterton over the years. 

The truth is, there is more or less no thought I have had on any topic since the age of twelve that has not derived to at least some degree from a thought by Chesterton. This is not an exaggeration. Since the age of twelve, I have self-consciously and deliberately done everything in my power to adopt and assimilate Chesterton's approach to the world as my own. The basic structures of my reasoning on history, art, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, humor, enjoyment, and theology all derive to greater or lesser degrees from his own: as does by extension every thought or creative product deriving from those structures. In the scale of my various identities, "Chestertonian" comes just behind "Catholic Christian" and very far ahead of "American."

Grotesque, Egotistical Presentation of Credentials

Beyond that, though, I have in fact read a shockingly large proportion of Chesterton's shockingly large corpus: and what is more (believe it or not!) remembered most of it. That, though, gives a perhaps unhelpful impression of my engagement with Chesterton, which has not been academic and systematic but constant and totalizing. Put simply, "reading Chesterton" is something I do every day, multiple times a day, on top of and alongside anything else I happen to be reading or doing. The vast majority of the works by Chesterton I have read I have read not once, but somewhere between a dozen and a hundred times.

Or, as Chesterton's close personal friend Hilaire Belloc put it:

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now *I* from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The 'World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
*I take them all because of Chesterton*,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,}
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called 'Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed'?
No matter--it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

I have naturally read many times all of his so-called "major works" of Christian apologetics and philosophy: namely, Heretics, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man. I have also, however, read and re-read his less well-known works on Christian topics, namely The Thing, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Well and the Shallows, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. I have read and reread many times all of Chesterton's six novels (The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, Manalive, The Flying Inn, and The Return of Don Quixote), as well as more or less all of his short stories (including not only all 53 Father Brown mysteries, but also the one-off collections The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, and the early unpublished writings collected in The Coloured Lands and elsewhere). I have read nearly all of his poems that have been collected (some thousands), and memorized more than a dozen of them, including his famous epic poems Lepanto, The Ballad of St. Barbara, and the book-length Ballad of the White Horse. I have read all those books covering his frequent travels and impressions taken from them: What I Saw in America, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, Sidelights on New York and Newer London, Christendom in Dublin, and The Resurrection of Rome. I have not read all, but at least a reasonable proportion of his works of literary criticism, including his Twelve Types, The Victorian Age in Literature, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his Chaucer. I have read most of his works of political and economic theory and polemic, including Utopia of Usurers, Eugenics and Other Evils, William Cobbett, What's Wrong with the World, and The Outline of Sanity. I have read his one and only Short History of England. I have read all three plays he wrote in his lifetime, namely, Magic, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, and The Surprise, as well as the mummer's play The Turkey and the Turk. I have also, relevantly to this essay, read most of his works of anti-German war propaganda, including The Barbarism of Berlin, Lord Kitchener, The Crimes of England, and the posthumous collection of his anti-Nazi columns and essays The End of the Armistice. 

(I left out a few books here because I missed them in the Wikipedia list of Chesterton works I found and/or wasn't 100% sure I had read them even though I likely did.)

While I have not read all his collections of essays, I have read at least a reasonable proportion of the weekly or more than weekly columns he wrote for most of his life and from which these essay collections were drawn. In particular, I have read and reread all of the weekly columns, reviews, and letters he wrote for the Daily News from 1901 to 1913. It is literally true that I do not know how many of the weekly columns he wrote for the Illustrated London News from 1905 to 1936 I have read--as I used to simply read through volumes of them ad libitum without taking any particular notice of what the year was or which I had read before--but I believe upon sober reflection that I have read certainly the majority of them (including definitely all between 1914 and 1919 and all from 1930-1936, of which I made particular note), and consider it likely that I have in fact read something approaching all of them. I have also read everything he wrote (including both weekly columns and occasional anonymous leaders, easily distinguishable by his distinctive voice) for his brother's newspaper The New Witness from 1919 to 1922 (the only years, alas, currently available online); and am at the present slowly reading through everything he wrote for his own newspaper G.K.'s Weekly in the available online archives: so far, I have only made it from Sept. 1925 to February 1926, but am making steady progress. This remains, for me, the true "frontier" of Chesterton reading, which will hopefully last me until death.

Oh yes, and I have also naturally read a decent amount of scholarship and writing on Chesterton: including most notably Chesterton's own Autobiography, and Ian Kerr's voluminous and magisterial G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, my copy of which is in tatters from reading it in the shower too much. I have also read many times the initial biography written by Maisie Ward, a personal friend of Chesterton: as well as owning and frequently rereading the rare and hard-to-find supplement Return to Chesterton, a delightful and profound book consisting of dozens of largely unedited accounts and anecdotes of Chesterton by personal friends and people he took under his wing as children and adolescents.

All this might well make me seem like a rather crazed monomaniac, the proverbial "man of one book" spoken of by Aquinas. I can assure my readers that this is not the case: as, for instance, the many books on diverse topics reviewed in this space might indicate. Besides getting a PhD in Classics and writing a book on 4th century political theology, I flatter myself in thinking that I read rather widely. In the past few months, for instance, I have read an academic book on Ottoman political theory, another on modern Islamic movements to revive the Caliphate, another on Medieval European social organization, and another on the internal economy of the contemporary Pakistani military, in addition to a few works of fiction. Still, all the while, I have been also and on the side reading and rereading G.K. Chesterton.

It is, in fact, Chesterton who led me to become such a generalist, and my general reading that leads me back to Chesterton. He himself read and wrote rather widely on very different topics all throughout his life: and a close personal friend compared him to a house with large windows opening in every direction. I have, to a much smaller extent, aspired to be the same.

For the purposes of this essay, however, I should point out that my knowledge of Chesterton extends not merely to his text, but to his context. I would venture to say that I have a fairly decent working knowledge of all of the major authors and politicians, intellectual and religious and political movements, major world events, and journalistic fads of Chesterton's lifetime. A decent amount of that knowledge, it is true, comes via absorbing and researching the references to these events and fads and figures found in Chesterton's voluminous writings--while some more comes from reading a decent proportion of the non-Chesterton writings and reviews and columns and leaders of the weekly popular newspapers Chesterton wrote for. But I have also directly read a decent number of other contemporary authors and/or scholarly works on the period. 

Hence, while I would never profess to be a scholarly expert on the Victorian Era or the early 20th century or WW1 or the '20s or the '30s, I can speak with reasonable facility on and around, for instance, the Eugenics movement in Germany, England, and America, the Celtic Revival, the Decadents, the WW1 German military, the lead-up and results of the Russian Revolution, the introduction of Russian literature into England, the birth and early development of the English Air Force, the rise of Imperialist Jingoism and Mafficking in England, the Darwinian debates over evolution, Teutonist racialism in England and Germany, the Victorian debates over Birth Control, the Great Strikes of the 1900s, Orientalism as a cultural movement, the French syndicalist movement and its American and British offshoots, the place of Jews in England and France in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anarchist dynamite attacks and assassinations, the economic downturn in England, France, and Germany after WW1, the birth of modern policing, the origins of science fiction, the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and '30s, detective fiction in Britain and America, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, and so on and so forth. More than this, I am intimately familiar with the language and cast of mind of people in these times and places and could give, I fancy, a pretty decent approximation of how different groups wrote and thought. I have also read or read about a great number of the authors and topics from earlier history written about by Chesterton, including such diverse figures as William Cobbett, William Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides.