G.K. Chesterton may one day be recognized as possibly the
most genial man of the twentieth century.
While he hinted on occasion that this might be due to indolence or
similar flaws, it could probably better be attributed to an inherent good
nature that, while something for which all human beings have an inborn
capacity, some manage to develop to a higher degree of completion.
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| "Old Thunder" |
If someone wanted acerbic, barbed, or (on occasion) bitter
commentary from the Chesterbelloc, Hilaire Belloc, “Old Thunder,” was the shop
for it. Chesterton generally contented
himself with the implied irony of the paradox, or the uncomfortable humor of a
contradiction made obvious. He was, as
he described Aquinas, “the sort of man who hates hating people.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 141.)
Yet even a placid ox of a man like Chesterton or Aquinas can
be transformed into a bellowing bull, given provocation. And that provocation is what Siger of Brabant
gave to Aquinas, and which — as Chesterton seemed to hint — ended by killing
him. As Chesterton described Aquinas’s
reaction to the presentation of Siger of Brabant’s sophistry of the Double Mind
of Man (or, as we might say, a justification for the contradiction of having
your cake and eating it, too) that we covered in the previous posting in this
series,
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| Even Ferdinand could be provoked. |
“Siger of Brabant, following on
some of the Arabian Aristotelians, advanced a theory which most modern
newspaper readers would instantly have declared to be the same as the theory of
St. Thomas. That was what finally roused
St. Thomas to his last and most emphatic protest. . . . To many, this would at
least seem like a parody of Thomism. As
a fact, it was the assassination of Thomism.
It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was an untruthful way
of pretending that there are two truths.
And it is extraordinarily interesting to note that this is the one
occasion when the Dumb Ox really came out like a wild bull. When he stood up to answer Siger of Brabant,
he was altogether transfigured, and the very style of his sentences, which is a
thing like the tone of a man’s voice, is suddenly altered. He had never been angry with any of the
enemies who disagreed with him. But
these enemies had attempted the worst treachery: they had made him agree with
them.” (Ibid. 92-93.)
Chesterton followed this passage with sentence after
sentence, paragraph after paragraph, going into a most atypical fulminating
detail about the exact nature of the treason that had been committed against
Aquinas and against truth. Yet, even in
the heat of anger and under the most extreme provocation, Chesterton noted that
Aquinas never lost sight of the real issue: the primacy of truth, and the union
of faith and reason.
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| Betraying Truth |
Yes, as Chesterton analyzed the situation, Aquinas had every
right, even the duty, to be angry at the betrayal of truth. More than a suspicion intrudes, however, that
Chesterton wasn’t merely referring to an ancient controversy. Not only Aquinas, but Chesterton himself
seems to have been protesting the treachery of having his own words and work of
a lifetime twisted into support for the very things he opposed.
Thus, we have a fourth paradox that The Dumb Ox may really be more about Chesterton than Aquinas, and Chesterton’s
betrayal by his own followers. Nobody
can write well about something he doesn’t know well, and Chesterton wrote very
well about the betrayal of Aquinas. He seems
to have taken the “assassination of Thomism” very personally indeed, almost as
an assassination of Chestertonianism, to coin a term.
Chesterton’s passion suggests he knew whereof he spoke when
he wrote of the enemies of Aquinas who “attempted the worst treachery” by using
his own words and arguments to support their attacks on truth and reason. Simply by giving that “one twist to the mind”
they had shifted from reason-knowledge-intellect as the basis of the natural
law, to faith-opinion-will, and brought down the whole of the law in anarchy
and chaos.
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| The inevitable end of the betrayal of truth and reason. |
And in so doing, they undermined the foundation of all true
reason and faith, putting in motion forces that continue to have the potential
to destroy society — something Chesterton and Rommen saw rising in Nazi
Germany. These superficial sophists,
intent upon gaining the world at the cost of their human souls, had also
violated Aquinas’s personal integrity, the conformity of “his outer and his
inner life.”
“He had returned victorious from
his last combat with Siger of Brabant; returned and retired. This particular quarrel was the one point, as
we may say, in which his outer and his inner life had crossed and coincided, he
realized how he had longed from childhood to call up all allies in the battle
for Christ; how he had only long afterwards called up Aristotle as an ally; and
now in that last nightmare of sophistry, he had for the first time truly
realized that some might really wish Christ to go down beneath Aristotle. He never recovered from the shock. He won his battle, because he was the best
brain of his time, but he could not forget such an inversion of the whole idea
and purpose of his life. He was the sort
of man who hates hating people. He had
not been used to hating even their hateful ideas, beyond a certain point. But in the abyss of anarchy opened by Siger’s
sophistry of the Double Mind of Man, he had seen the possibility of the
perishing of all idea of religion, and even of all idea of truth. Brief and fragmentary as are the phrases that
record it, we can gather that he came back with a sort of horror of that outer
world, in which there blew such wild winds of doctrine, and a longing for the
inner world which any Catholic can share, and in which the saint is not cut off
from simple men.” (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 140-141.)
As apocalyptic and uncharacteristic of him as it is, we’ve
seen Chesterton use this argument, even this language, before. This was in the conclusion of St. Francis of Assisi, and is worth repeating
to show the parallel:
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| "The world was not made only for Franciscans." |
[T]his was not so much being a
communist as being an anarchist. . . . 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.” (Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, op. cit., 148-151.)
But was Chesterton referring only to Aquinas and the Angelic
Doctor’s bellowing “apocalypse of anger”?
Or was he also thinking of and drawing a conscious parallel with those
of the modern age — and, more, his own followers — who demanded “the sacrifice
of . . . a sane point of view” in order to establish their utopias and bring
the world into conformity with their personal, enthusiastic vision, not of
reality as it is, but as they think it should be?
That would appear to be the case. As Chesterton summed up the effect on the
modern world of abandoning common sense — not coincidentally adding a short
catalog of errors resulting from basing the natural law on faith-opinion-will
instead of reason-knowledge-intellect,
“[T]he abstract philosophies of
the modern world have had this queer twist. . . . Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point
of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. .
. . A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were
suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is
outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative
to a reality that is not there. The
modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will
grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if
once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind. (Chesterton, The Dumb Ox, op. cit., 145-146.)
Many of today’s followers of Chesterton, with their
incomprehensible admiration of the warmed over Fabian socialism of people like
Arthur Penty and E.F. Schumacher, cannot be said to have done Chesterton any
favors. Yet it appears evident that
Chesterton saw this coming, and perhaps — on purely human terms and in a
personal sense — gave up.
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| "I can write no more." |
His writings in the last few years of his life, those that
followed The Dumb Ox, were, of
course, solidly literary and philosophically sound. They were also unremarkable, at least for
Chesterton, particularly in light of Orthodoxy,
St. Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, The Catholic Church and Conversion, and
(of course) St. Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb
Ox”. It is almost as if he were
referring to himself when he wrote,
His friend Reginald asked him to
return also to his equally regular habits of reading and writing, and following
the controversies of the hour. He said
with a singular emphasis, “I can write no more.” There seems to have been a silence; after
which Reginald again ventured to approach the subject; and Thomas answered him
with even greater vigor, “I can write no more.
I have seen things which make all my writings like straw.” (Ibid.,
141.)
Afterwards,
He . . . seemed to desire
nothing but a sort of permanent retreat.
A request came to him from the Pope that he should set out upon some
further mission of diplomacy or disputation; and he made ready to obey. But before he had gone many miles on the
journey, he was dead. (Ibid. 96.)
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