To understand what G.K. Chesterton did in 1933, we have to
go back a decade to understand what he did in 1923. That was the year, soon after his conversion
to Catholicism, that Chesterton published what many consider one of his four
(or five) greatest books: St. Francis of
Assisi. He seems to have felt it was
his duty as a Catholic to present St. Francis, one of the most popular saints
among non-Catholics, in a proper light, especially in an age that held St.
Francis up as an exemplar for all the wrong reasons.
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| St. Francis: socialist, theosophist...or human? |
Being familiar with the mixture of false spirituality and counterfeit
humanism found in Fabian socialism — a blend of expanded georgist socialism and
theosophy — Chesterton tried to make it clear that there are three ways of looking
at St. Francis. 1) View St. Francis as the
ideal socialist, who showed how to attain the earthly paradise by foreshadowing
the Fabian program of reaching perfection through pacifism, vegetarianism, and
simple living. 2) View him as the ideal
spiritualist or theosophist, who showed how to attain the heavenly paradise by rejecting the
material world completely and raising one’s consciousness to higher levels.
The third way? The
way Chesterton took? To reconcile the
seeming contradiction of a man in love with the world yet who turned his back
on it to pursue a greater love of God, and a man of faith who never lost sight
of the importance of reason. As
Chesterton concluded, commenting on those who had distorted the message of St.
Francis in prior centuries (and drawing an obvious parallel with those of the
modern age duplicating their efforts),
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| Pope John XXII corrected the Fraticelli. |
Every heresy has been an effort
to narrow the Church. If the Franciscan
movement had turned into a new religion, it would after all have been a narrow
religion. In so far as it did turn here
and there into a heresy, it was a narrow heresy. It did what heresy always does, it set the
mood against the mind. . . . And it is a fact that the mood itself degenerated,
as the mood turned into a monomania. A
sect that came to be called the Fraticelli declared themselves the true sons of
St. Francis . . . . In the name of the most human of saints they declared war
upon humanity. . . . What was the matter with these people was that they were
mystics; mystics and nothing else but mystics; mystics and not Catholics; mystics
and not Christians; mystics and not men.
They rotted away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen
to reason. And St. Francis, however wild
and romantic his gyrations might appear to many, always hung on to reason by
one invisible and indestructible hair.
(G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of
Assisi. New York: Image Books, 1957,
154-155.)
In other words, at least as far as Chesterton was concerned,
St. Francis took his stand on the side of the primacy of the Intellect, not the
Will, of knowledge over opinion, of a sane faith based solidly on reason, not
the insanity of a false mystical spirituality contradicting or ignoring empirical
evidence of the senses or the logical argument of the mind.
[H]e dreams that ‘to this
age it is given to write the great new song, and to compile the new Bible, and
to found the new Church, and preach the new Religion.’ And in one rather obscure passage he seems to
hint at the thought that Christ might come again to shape this new
religion. (Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943, 67-68.)
Chesterton knew whereof he spoke, having himself gone
through the same process during his religious rumspringa. In “the earlier pages” of what his biographer
Maisie Ward termed “The Notebook” from the 1890s he recorded thoughts that appear
to have been influenced by New Age concepts.
The suspicion intrudes that “The Notebook” may be in the group of
writings about which, according to Father John Hardon, Chesterton gave an
“absolute command” that they never be published, possibly to avoid giving his
followers (many of which in Chesterton’s lifetime already seemed to be going
off on tangents) the wrong idea. As Ward
said,
That was the issue in broad terms for Chesterton the
Catholic and humanist. For Chesterton
the distributist, St. Francis’s rejection of private property for himself was
the most graphic and specific illustration possible of the importance of the
institution of private property for every child, woman, and man. Not “humanity.” As Chesterton noted, “St. Francis did not
love humanity but men.” St. Francis was
the quintessential personalist; the abstraction of the collective was
meaningless to him.
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| "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark. . ." |
That was why St. Francis’s rejection of personal private
property could only be personal and private.
He seemed incapable of thinking in generalities, and in so doing
approached the particularity of God far more closely than any collectivist ever
could. St. Francis could not, as some of
his misguided followers did, reject the idea of private property. That would have been impossible for him, for
that would have meant that he, Francis, was making decisions for others and
binding them against their will.
No, St. Francis’s way is intensely personal, and being
intensely personal, is intensely human and divine. To demand that his way be imposed on others
without their consent by applying it to the abstraction “humanity” as a whole
is something so alien to someone like St. Francis as to cross the border into
insanity.
Yet that is precisely what some of St. Francis’s followers
of then and now did. Taking the essence
of distributism, personal private property secured to individuals, as the
touchstone and exemplar of the key issue (in broad terms the shift from the
Intellect to the Will as the basis of the natural law written in the hearts of
all people), they sought to abolish not only private property for themselves as
a personal choice, but to abolish property itself entirely for all human beings — no wonder they were compared to barking dogs out to savage Christendom. As Chesterton related,
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| Poverty a counsel of perfection, not a mandate. |
Nobody so far as I know ever
proposed to interfere with the vow of the individual friar that he would have
no individual possessions. Nobody, that
is, proposed to interfere with his negation of private property. But some Franciscans, invoking the authority
of Francis on their side, went further than this and further I think than
anybody else has ever gone. They
proposed to abolish not only private property but property. . . . Everybody
knew of course that Franciscans were communists; but this was not so much being
a communist as being an anarchist.
(Chesterton, St. Francis of
Assissi, op. cit., 148-149.)
And yet the private property question, although key, was
only the most obvious example of what the renegade followers of St. Francis
worked to accomplish. As Chesterton
summarized the greater issue,
At the back of this particular
practical question there was something much larger and more momentous, the stir
and wind of which we can feel as we read the controversy. We might go so far as to put the ultimate
truth thus. St. Francis was so great and
original a man that he had something in him of what makes the founder of a
religion. Many of his followers were
more or less ready, in their hearts, to treat him as the founder of a
religion. They were willing to let the
Franciscan spirit escape from Christendom as the Christian spirit had escaped
from Israel. Francis, the fire that ran
through the roads of Italy, was to be the beginning of a conflagration in which
the old Christian civilization was to be consumed. That was the point the Pope had to settle;
whether Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided rightly, apart from the duties
of his place; for the Church could include all that was good in the Franciscans
and the Franciscans could not include all that was good in the Church. (Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, op. cit., 150-151.)
In light of such strong statements, expressed with such
force and clarity, it seems incredible that anyone, much less a follower of
Chesterton, could fall into the trap of Fabian socialism. In a contradiction of colossal proportions,
however, that is precisely what people proceeded to do. Seemingly ignoring the first and last chapters
in Chesterton’s book that refuted the two flawed understandings of St.
Francis, people took the flaws as the Franciscan gospel and turned what
Chesterton rejected into an endorsement.
Specifically, trapped by the illusion of the slavery of past
savings, neo-distributists claimed to restore property by destroying it through the
redefinition of natural law. Adding
insult to injury, they cited Chesterton’s own words as their inspiration and
authority without bothering to cite empirical evidence or make a logical
argument. They merely denigrated the
character, thought, looks, personality, or anything else, of anyone who dared
to disagree with them.
People, especially neo-distributists and neo-Chestertonians, simply
stopped thinking. Truth became
negotiable, reason something to ridicule, argument an abomination. As Chesterton later remarked, “[I]t is
generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has
been so little argument and so much sneering.”
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| William of Occam: Triumph of the Will |
Distributism descended into a morass of moral relativism and
the swamp of Fabian socialism. Nor was
this something that could not be predicted.
As the solidarist political scientist and jurist Dr. Heinrich A. Rommen
explained,
For Duns Scotus [who promoted the primacy of
the Will over the Intellect] morality depends on the will of God. A thing is good not because
it corresponds to the nature of God or, analogically, to the nature of man, but
because God so wills. Hence the lex naturalis could be other than it is
even materially or as to content, because it has no intrinsic connection with
God’s essence, which is self-conscious in His intellect. For Scotus, therefore, the
laws of the second table of the Decalogue were no longer unalterable. . . . an
evolution set in which, in the doctrine of William of Occam [a leader of the
Fraticelli] (d. cir. 1349) on the natural moral law, would lead to pure moral positivism, indeed to nihilism. (Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, Inc.,
1998, 51-52.)
The problem for Chesterton was how to get distributism — and
the distributists — back on the right track.