In 1908, G.K. Chesterton published what many people consider
one of his four (or five) greatest books.
This was Orthodoxy: The Romance of
Faith, written soon after his conversion to Christianity. He had previously flirted with socialism and
theosophy, both of which were integrated into the program of the Fabian
Society.
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| Arthur Penty: New Ager, Fabian Socialist, Fascist. |
The fact that Chesterton counted many friends among the
Fabians and similar groups seems to have led his followers to assume that these
friends shared Chesterton’s views and beliefs — or (worse) that he shared
theirs. They appear to have assumed that
people such as Arthur Penty and Eric Gill, both socialists with somewhat
esoteric religious convictions, must be as good distributists and Christians as
(presumably) Chesterton himself.
Nothing would be further from the truth. Chesterton could agree with people on some
things, and disagree with them on others, but all without affecting his
friendship. Like Ronald Knox (and,
later, Fulton Sheen), Chesterton could have great sympathy with the sinner,
even be very good friends with him (or her, as the case may be), but have
absolutely no tolerance for the sin.
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| George Bernard Shaw, Fabian Socialist. |
One area of very strong disagreement, especially with Fabian
socialists such as Shaw, Penty, and Gill (who later switched to “social
credit,” a form of Christian socialism), was the “enthusiastic” source of their
enlightenment. As Chesterton explained
his rejection of their irrational foundation of faith,
“Of all conceivable forms of
enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible
is the worship of the god within. Any
one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from
the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him
turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything
rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can
find any in his street, but not the god within.
Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with
violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to
behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine
captain. The only fun of being a
Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but
definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon,
terrible as an army with banners.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith.
New York: Image Books, 1990, 76.)
Not surprisingly, given the alleged combination of
philosophy and theology in theosophy, reliance on the inner light in modern
religion is the same error we see in modern philosophy: the idea that
everything begins with one’s self. As
Mortimer Adler described this error behind the errors:
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| Adler: Culpable errors are ugly monuments to the failures of education. |
“How did those little errors in
the beginning arise in the first place?
One answer is that something which needed to be known or understood had
not yet been discovered or learned. Such
mistakes are excusable, however regrettable they may be.
“The second answer is that the
errors are made as a result of culpable ignorance — ignorance of an essential
point, an indispensable insight or distinction, that has already been
discovered and expounded.
“It is mainly in the second way
that modern philosophers have made their little errors in the beginning. They are ugly monuments to the failures of
education — failures due, on the one hand, to corruptions in the tradition of
learning and, on the other hand, to an antagonistic attitude toward or even
contempt for the past, for the achievements of those who have come before.”
(Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, op.
cit., 194-195.)
Clearly bad philosophy — or at least bad philosophical assumptions
and principles — leads to bad theology, not to mention (as William Crosskey
brilliantly demonstrated) bad political and legal theory. What is interesting is that Chesterton and
Knox (and Adler) put the “blame” (if that is the right word) in the same place:
Platonism.
Knox titled the final chapter in Enthusiasm, “The Philosophy of Enthusiasm.” After a few introductory paragraphs in which
he opined that enthusiasm appeared to him to be in abeyance — for the time
being, anyway — Knox asked, “At what sources do they feed, these torrents which
threaten, once and again, to carry off our peaceful country-side in ruin?” As he answered his own question —
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| Revolt of Platonism against Aristotelianism a number one error. |
“Basically it is the revolt of
Platonism against the Aristotelian mise
en scène [stage
setting — ed.] of traditional
Christianity. The issue hangs on the
question whether the Divine Fact is something given, or something to be
inferred. Your Platonist, satisfied that
he has formed his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will
divorce reason from religion.” (Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 578-579.)
Chesterton and Adler both noted the Platonic revolt against
Aristotle, while Sheen put it in terms of rejecting Aquinas. It doesn’t matter which, however, as both
Aristotle and Aquinas stressed the primacy of the Intellect over the Will, and
thus the necessity of both faith and reason, where for the Platonist the Will —
faith — is everything, the Intellect nothing; “nothing really matters [for the
Platonist] except the Divine will.” (Ibid.,
579.)
The problem, however, is that reliance on one’s personal
understanding of God’s Will without reference to empirical evidence or logical
argument causes disagreements and contradictions to appear with an unsurprising
regularity. Employment of the intellect
is anathema to the truly spiritual person who “will have God served for himself
alone.” (Ibid.). This results in two distinct types of
spirituality, “one which is too generous ever to ask, and one which is too
humble ever to do anything else.” (Ibid.)
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| Exaggerations of Augustine's thought lead to error. |
Both Chesterton and Knox traced this capacity for
contradiction to the philosophy of Augustine of Hippo, although putting it like
that is unfair to Augustine. As Knox
pointed out (and Chesterton concurred), while there is nothing wrong with
Augustine’s thought, there is a great deal wrong with exaggerations of Augustine’s thought. As Knox said, “Exaggerated now from this
angle, now from that, St. Augustine’s theology has provided, ever since, the
dogmatic background of revivalism” (ibid., 580), "revivalism" being a form of enthusiasm. As Chesterton put it,
“St. Augustine followed a
natural mental evolution when he was a Platonist before he was a Manichean, and
a Manichean before he was a Christian.
And it was exactly in that last association that the first faint hint,
of the danger of being too Platonist,
may be seen.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 79.)
This clear and unmistakable language makes it all the more
surprising that what Chesterton called “Neo-Neo-Platonism” (ibid., 78) seems to have displaced
Aristotelian-Thomism as the prevailing philosophy among neo-Chestertonians, as it
has virtually everywhere among those whom Chesterton termed “moderns.” The suspicion intrudes that, while
neo-Chestertonians have certainly run their eyes over the countless pages written
by Chesterton and others, they may not actually have read them in the sense Adler meant in his bestselling How to Read a Book (1940). Instead, to all appearances, they went
through the texts in search of self-affirming quotes and ideas that could be
twisted all out of recognition to suit their own purposes.
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