I am going to be completely offline for two weeks so I apologize in advance for any comments to which I don't reply.
I would deeply appreciate any of your prayers in the meantime.
Thanks
Maolsheachlann
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Want to Talk Chesterton? Then Check This Out!
There is a Chesterton Discusion Forum well worth visiting, at the address below. The forum has fallen rather dormant of late, which is a pity, since there have been some great discussions there in the past. Well, I asked a question there today, so I'm hoping that will get a few answers, at least. But it would be great if it could be revived.
http://gkcforum.org/viewforum.php?f=2
http://gkcforum.org/viewforum.php?f=2
Why I Am Not "Still a Catholic"
Happy New Year! Did you get any Chesterton books for Christmas? I didn't!
I'm going to do something I've never done before and cross-post something from my other blog, Irish Papist. To compound the sin, it doesn't even mention Chesterton. I simply thought it was mildly Chestertonian in its approach. Apologies to any non-Catholics or non-Christians who read this blog and who think I'm taking an abominable liberty...here goes anyway...
I often browse the religion shelves of bookshops, and there is a particular title, recently published, that always makes me grit my teeth. It is Remaining a Catholic After the Murphy Report.
As a matter of fact, there are a whole genre of similar books. Recalling the title Why I am Still a Catholic, I looked for it on Amazon just now and found that several books of that title have been published. There is also an Irish book called What Being Catholic Means to Me, which—though its title is unobjectionable—contains essays (written by various luminaries) pregnant with the whole atmosphere that reeks from a title like Why I am Still a Catholic.
What is that atmosphere, you ask me?
I think the word “supercilious” sums it up best. Though perhaps I would be better off being blunt and calling it pride. I haven’t read any of the several books called Why I Am Still a Catholic, and I may be maligning all their authors, but the title suggests that the authors believe the Church is lucky to keep them, that the Church doesn’t quite deserve their continued loyalty, that their refusal to apostasize is a sign of heroic forbearance and patience and sacrifice.
Would anyone write an article called Why I Still Love my Wife, or Why I Still Love my Children?
Permit me here to make the ritual protestations of horror at clerical child abuse. Of course, outrages such as those chronicled in the Murphy Report should be a source of lacerating shame for the Irish hierarcy and laity. But, equally of course, they don’t make a whit of difference to the truth or falsity of the Church’s doctrine, any more than a doctor abusing his patient would make medicine a pseudoscience.
And yet, although I think the damage that sex abuse has done to Irish Catholicism is grossly overstated—to be blunt, I think it is often little more than a flag of convenience for those who were lukewarm in their convictions already—I have some sympathy for those whose faith is sincerely shaken by these outrages. I can understand (though I do not agree with) the reasoning by which someone would decide that the Church cannot be infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit if some of its anointed ministers have perpetrated such horrors. Of course, to think this is to forget that God’s church is made of living stones, that He never abrogates human freedom for the sake of His designs, and that even one of Our Saviour’s closest disciples committed an unspeakable betrayal.
Still, as I say, I have some sympathy for those who feel this way, for those who would describe themselves as Still Catholic because of the abuse scandals.
What really irritates me is those who forgive the Church, not for the failings of some of its members and ministers and hierarchy, but for its very doctrines and Tradition and character. Those, in other words, who forgive the Church for being Catholic.
I have a confession to make. A confession that might shock those people who declare, with a virtuous air, that they are Still Catholics despite the Church’s “negative view of sex”, or its “homophobia”, or its “rigid hierarchical thinking”, or its supposed "pomp and splendour".
I like pretty much everything about the Catholic Church. I don’t “struggle” with accepting any of it.
I like that the Church allows us an opportunity for loyalty, humility and deference, in a world where advertisers and politicians and psychologists and spiritual gurus of all stripes compete to flatter us, and to assure us that our problems are not our own fault, but the fault of The System, or Society, or our parents, or some other culprit.
I like calling a priest “Father”, submitting to the wisdom of the Magisterium, and accepting that one lifetime and one blob of cerebral tissue isn’t enough to attain timeless Truth.
I like that the Church insists on celibacy for its priests, and that there are men who are willing to witness to their faith in Christ by making such an enormous sacrifice. I admire any man who does so, even those whose orthodoxy leaves something to be desired.
I like that the Church is willing to defy our era and declare unabashedly that homosexuality is wrong—not because I sit in judgement on those who are attracted to their own sex, or because I doubt that many people are born this way, or because I think that they are bad people. But because I don’t think anybody really believes that romantic love between two men is on a par with romantic love between a man and a woman, or that there is not something unique and timeless and sacramental in the harmony of opposites that is the love between male and female. I always suffered from the cognitive dissonance that our era imposes on us by having to pretend otherwise, by having to rebuke an all-but universal moral intuition as an irrational phobia. I suspect I am not the only one.
I like that the Church prohibits contraception. It seems grotesquely incongruous to me that the lifestyle of sexual liberation—which purports to be so wild and unfettered and heady and, above all, natural—can ultimately rely upon little pills and latex sheaths. It is the Church’s teaching on sex that is really romantic and heady—the acceptance that lovemaking is reserved for those who have crossed the Rubicon of marriage, who have committed to each other irrevocably, and who do not grudge the natural consequences of their love’s consummation—those, in other words, who are giving it everything. The world’s ideal of sex seems lily-livered and puny compared to that of Catholicism.
I like that the Church ordains only men to the priesthood—not because I think women are any less wise, or less capable of heroic virtue, or less competent than men in any other way, but because I feel sure God made us male and female for a reason—a reason that goes far deeper than biology, a reason of cosmic significance. I am content not to understand that reason. No, more than content—I am happy to feel the weight of the mystery.
I like that bishops wear mitres and carry croziers, that priests wear chasubles, that many churches blaze with colour and splendour and ornament, and that even the plainest will contain some fragments of visual poetry—statues, tabernacle, altar. We live in a utilitarian age, one that draws a ruthless line between function and beauty. Soldiers wear khaki, workplaces are monstrosities of glass and concrete, and suburbs full of identical houses stretch for mile upon mile upon mile. Our discussions, in boardroom and parliament and newspaper columns, resolve around efficiency and cost-effectiveness and usefulness. Everything has been streamlined. Utilitarianism has carried all before it—everywhere except in the Catholic Church. Within its cathedrals and chapels and oratories, beauty still has a serious purpose, beauty still matters, beauty is indispensable.
“How can a Church preach the doctrine of Christ while luxuriating in splendour and ostentation?”, its critics ask. Well, one reason is that the poor, too, crave beauty and ceremony and grandeur—and where else will they get it, where can they actually participate in it, except in a cathedral, or on a pilgrimage to the Vatican?
I like that the Church mediates between God and me. Some people think we should take a direct line to God and we shouldn’t need anybody coming between Him and us. I don’t. I think God likes mediation. He could have invented us all from nothing, but instead we all have mothers and fathers who gave us the gift of life, and lines of ancestors stretching back untold millennia. I prefer it that way. He could have made us self-sufficient monads, but instead He contrived this world so that we need to get food and knowledge and company from others—very sensibly, I think.
Christ chose to appear to a particular group of people at a particular moment, so that the vast majority of Christians would receive their knowledge of him from others. Even when he spoke to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, he didn’t simply cram him with all the knowledge he would need. He sent Ananias to induct him into the Christian fellowship, and to restore his sight.
Why do we cherish stories, like The Karate Kid, about masters and disciples? Because we recognize there is something uniquely tender and touching and joyous in that bond; because we feel growth and discovery and flourishing should not be something impersonal, but something that happens between individuals. We even feel that it means more when it is a difficult, tentative process. The Karate Kid learning his stuff from an old book would seem somehow less meaningful.
I like that the Church requires a spoken confession of sins to a priest, even though I find this incredibly difficult and embarrassing and intimidating. God forgiving my sins through a wordless, silent, invisible process seems somehow banal and anti-climactic. That they should be forgiven at all is astounding and gratuitous enough. How could I wish for it to be any easier? And—though confession is a mystical sacrament and not a psychological coping mechanism—where is the catharsis in a purely mental confession?
I like saints. I like reading about Marian apparitions. I like relics. I like shrines. I like feasts. I even like fasts (especially when they’re over).
I like homilies. I like candles glowing before shrines. I like the poetry of names like Jesus and Ezekiel and Isaac and Melchizedek.
I like ritual, for its own sake—I believe ritual expresses something, enacts something, that mere words or thoughts never could. I've noticed that people tend to make rituals of the things they love—even if it’s something like sitting down to a cup of tea and a coffee slice before opening their favourite magazine each week.
I liked John Paul the Second. I like Pope Benedict the Sixteenth even more.
I even like the penumbral, cultural aspects of Catholicism-- things that aren't strictly Catholicism itself but that seem imbued with its spirit. I like little devotional magazines with covers showing cornfields and daffodills and stone walls, magazines that mix meditations on the Gospels with household tips and trivia about The Great Wall of China. I like gently-coloured hoIy pictures. I even like programmes like A Prayer at Bedtime. I don’t like any of those things ironically or knowingly, nor do I consider them kitsch. I like them for what they are.
I like thinking of all the millions of very different men and women, all over the world and all through the centuries, who spoke the same prayers that I speak today, who meditated upon the same mysteries of the Rosary, who recited the same Creeds, who partook of the same Eucharist. I cherish the spiritual communion with all those souls. I don’t see how watering down that continuity makes the Church, somehow, belong more to The People.
No doubt the Still Catholics who trudge reluctantly to Mass and who call for radical “renewal” in the Church would consider me otiose, complacent, brainwashed. They might even call me a sheep.
But I don’t mind that too much. After all, Our Saviour never used that comparison as a slur, did he?
I'm going to do something I've never done before and cross-post something from my other blog, Irish Papist. To compound the sin, it doesn't even mention Chesterton. I simply thought it was mildly Chestertonian in its approach. Apologies to any non-Catholics or non-Christians who read this blog and who think I'm taking an abominable liberty...here goes anyway...
I often browse the religion shelves of bookshops, and there is a particular title, recently published, that always makes me grit my teeth. It is Remaining a Catholic After the Murphy Report.
As a matter of fact, there are a whole genre of similar books. Recalling the title Why I am Still a Catholic, I looked for it on Amazon just now and found that several books of that title have been published. There is also an Irish book called What Being Catholic Means to Me, which—though its title is unobjectionable—contains essays (written by various luminaries) pregnant with the whole atmosphere that reeks from a title like Why I am Still a Catholic.
What is that atmosphere, you ask me?
I think the word “supercilious” sums it up best. Though perhaps I would be better off being blunt and calling it pride. I haven’t read any of the several books called Why I Am Still a Catholic, and I may be maligning all their authors, but the title suggests that the authors believe the Church is lucky to keep them, that the Church doesn’t quite deserve their continued loyalty, that their refusal to apostasize is a sign of heroic forbearance and patience and sacrifice.
Would anyone write an article called Why I Still Love my Wife, or Why I Still Love my Children?
Permit me here to make the ritual protestations of horror at clerical child abuse. Of course, outrages such as those chronicled in the Murphy Report should be a source of lacerating shame for the Irish hierarcy and laity. But, equally of course, they don’t make a whit of difference to the truth or falsity of the Church’s doctrine, any more than a doctor abusing his patient would make medicine a pseudoscience.
And yet, although I think the damage that sex abuse has done to Irish Catholicism is grossly overstated—to be blunt, I think it is often little more than a flag of convenience for those who were lukewarm in their convictions already—I have some sympathy for those whose faith is sincerely shaken by these outrages. I can understand (though I do not agree with) the reasoning by which someone would decide that the Church cannot be infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit if some of its anointed ministers have perpetrated such horrors. Of course, to think this is to forget that God’s church is made of living stones, that He never abrogates human freedom for the sake of His designs, and that even one of Our Saviour’s closest disciples committed an unspeakable betrayal.
Still, as I say, I have some sympathy for those who feel this way, for those who would describe themselves as Still Catholic because of the abuse scandals.
What really irritates me is those who forgive the Church, not for the failings of some of its members and ministers and hierarchy, but for its very doctrines and Tradition and character. Those, in other words, who forgive the Church for being Catholic.
I have a confession to make. A confession that might shock those people who declare, with a virtuous air, that they are Still Catholics despite the Church’s “negative view of sex”, or its “homophobia”, or its “rigid hierarchical thinking”, or its supposed "pomp and splendour".
I like pretty much everything about the Catholic Church. I don’t “struggle” with accepting any of it.
I like that the Church allows us an opportunity for loyalty, humility and deference, in a world where advertisers and politicians and psychologists and spiritual gurus of all stripes compete to flatter us, and to assure us that our problems are not our own fault, but the fault of The System, or Society, or our parents, or some other culprit.
I like calling a priest “Father”, submitting to the wisdom of the Magisterium, and accepting that one lifetime and one blob of cerebral tissue isn’t enough to attain timeless Truth.
I like that the Church insists on celibacy for its priests, and that there are men who are willing to witness to their faith in Christ by making such an enormous sacrifice. I admire any man who does so, even those whose orthodoxy leaves something to be desired.
I like that the Church is willing to defy our era and declare unabashedly that homosexuality is wrong—not because I sit in judgement on those who are attracted to their own sex, or because I doubt that many people are born this way, or because I think that they are bad people. But because I don’t think anybody really believes that romantic love between two men is on a par with romantic love between a man and a woman, or that there is not something unique and timeless and sacramental in the harmony of opposites that is the love between male and female. I always suffered from the cognitive dissonance that our era imposes on us by having to pretend otherwise, by having to rebuke an all-but universal moral intuition as an irrational phobia. I suspect I am not the only one.
I like that the Church prohibits contraception. It seems grotesquely incongruous to me that the lifestyle of sexual liberation—which purports to be so wild and unfettered and heady and, above all, natural—can ultimately rely upon little pills and latex sheaths. It is the Church’s teaching on sex that is really romantic and heady—the acceptance that lovemaking is reserved for those who have crossed the Rubicon of marriage, who have committed to each other irrevocably, and who do not grudge the natural consequences of their love’s consummation—those, in other words, who are giving it everything. The world’s ideal of sex seems lily-livered and puny compared to that of Catholicism.
I like that the Church ordains only men to the priesthood—not because I think women are any less wise, or less capable of heroic virtue, or less competent than men in any other way, but because I feel sure God made us male and female for a reason—a reason that goes far deeper than biology, a reason of cosmic significance. I am content not to understand that reason. No, more than content—I am happy to feel the weight of the mystery.
I like that bishops wear mitres and carry croziers, that priests wear chasubles, that many churches blaze with colour and splendour and ornament, and that even the plainest will contain some fragments of visual poetry—statues, tabernacle, altar. We live in a utilitarian age, one that draws a ruthless line between function and beauty. Soldiers wear khaki, workplaces are monstrosities of glass and concrete, and suburbs full of identical houses stretch for mile upon mile upon mile. Our discussions, in boardroom and parliament and newspaper columns, resolve around efficiency and cost-effectiveness and usefulness. Everything has been streamlined. Utilitarianism has carried all before it—everywhere except in the Catholic Church. Within its cathedrals and chapels and oratories, beauty still has a serious purpose, beauty still matters, beauty is indispensable.
“How can a Church preach the doctrine of Christ while luxuriating in splendour and ostentation?”, its critics ask. Well, one reason is that the poor, too, crave beauty and ceremony and grandeur—and where else will they get it, where can they actually participate in it, except in a cathedral, or on a pilgrimage to the Vatican?
I like that the Church mediates between God and me. Some people think we should take a direct line to God and we shouldn’t need anybody coming between Him and us. I don’t. I think God likes mediation. He could have invented us all from nothing, but instead we all have mothers and fathers who gave us the gift of life, and lines of ancestors stretching back untold millennia. I prefer it that way. He could have made us self-sufficient monads, but instead He contrived this world so that we need to get food and knowledge and company from others—very sensibly, I think.
Christ chose to appear to a particular group of people at a particular moment, so that the vast majority of Christians would receive their knowledge of him from others. Even when he spoke to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, he didn’t simply cram him with all the knowledge he would need. He sent Ananias to induct him into the Christian fellowship, and to restore his sight.
Why do we cherish stories, like The Karate Kid, about masters and disciples? Because we recognize there is something uniquely tender and touching and joyous in that bond; because we feel growth and discovery and flourishing should not be something impersonal, but something that happens between individuals. We even feel that it means more when it is a difficult, tentative process. The Karate Kid learning his stuff from an old book would seem somehow less meaningful.
I like that the Church requires a spoken confession of sins to a priest, even though I find this incredibly difficult and embarrassing and intimidating. God forgiving my sins through a wordless, silent, invisible process seems somehow banal and anti-climactic. That they should be forgiven at all is astounding and gratuitous enough. How could I wish for it to be any easier? And—though confession is a mystical sacrament and not a psychological coping mechanism—where is the catharsis in a purely mental confession?
I like saints. I like reading about Marian apparitions. I like relics. I like shrines. I like feasts. I even like fasts (especially when they’re over).
I like homilies. I like candles glowing before shrines. I like the poetry of names like Jesus and Ezekiel and Isaac and Melchizedek.
I like ritual, for its own sake—I believe ritual expresses something, enacts something, that mere words or thoughts never could. I've noticed that people tend to make rituals of the things they love—even if it’s something like sitting down to a cup of tea and a coffee slice before opening their favourite magazine each week.
I liked John Paul the Second. I like Pope Benedict the Sixteenth even more.
I even like the penumbral, cultural aspects of Catholicism-- things that aren't strictly Catholicism itself but that seem imbued with its spirit. I like little devotional magazines with covers showing cornfields and daffodills and stone walls, magazines that mix meditations on the Gospels with household tips and trivia about The Great Wall of China. I like gently-coloured hoIy pictures. I even like programmes like A Prayer at Bedtime. I don’t like any of those things ironically or knowingly, nor do I consider them kitsch. I like them for what they are.
I like thinking of all the millions of very different men and women, all over the world and all through the centuries, who spoke the same prayers that I speak today, who meditated upon the same mysteries of the Rosary, who recited the same Creeds, who partook of the same Eucharist. I cherish the spiritual communion with all those souls. I don’t see how watering down that continuity makes the Church, somehow, belong more to The People.
No doubt the Still Catholics who trudge reluctantly to Mass and who call for radical “renewal” in the Church would consider me otiose, complacent, brainwashed. They might even call me a sheep.
But I don’t mind that too much. After all, Our Saviour never used that comparison as a slur, did he?
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
As we all know, Christmas is a time for...
...re-runs!
I have a busy Christmas ahead (busy in a fun way, I assure you), so I'm going to be very lazy and regurgitate my Christmas posting of last year. But the good news is...it's all pure undiluted Chesterton! Enjoy, and Happy Christmas! Oh, and we are now up to thirty-five followers! Brilliant!
All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his two or three famous Yuletide tales -- The Christmas Carol and The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. Of these The Christmas Carol is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed, Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best work is the most popular. It is for Pickwick that he is best known; and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In any case this superiority of The Christmas Carol makes it convenient for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in The Christmas Carol we shall find that all the three marks I have mentioned are unmistakably visible. The Christmas Carol is a happy story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity.
Again, The Christmas Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source -- the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle -- the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat, says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the stories.
Charles Dickens, 1906
One of the first reforms of Lenin and Trotsky was, I believe, to abolish Christmas. It is not the only point on which the prejudices of the most emancipated Progressives are an exact copy of the prejudices of the most antiquated Puritans.
A Christmas of Peace, 1918
Some of our more advanced ethical teachers might well write a new version of “The Christmas Carol”—a sort of Anti-Christmas Carol. For the drama of Dickens might well appear to them not a comedy of conversion, but a tragedy of apostasy. The story would start with Scrooge as a lofty and idealistic vegeterian, partaking of a pure and hygienic diet of gruel. It would end with the same Scrooge, now degraded by superstition, and engaged in a cannibal conspiracy for the assasination of a turkey…Eugenics, which often form a part of such ethics, might here suggest a thoughtful passage about the mistake made in the birth of Tiny Tim, and the desirability of correcting that mistake with all speed in some timely and quiet fashion.
The New Attack on Christmas, 1919
This is written amidst fields of snow within a few days of Christmas. And when I last saw snow it was within a few miles of Bethlehem. The coincidence will serve as a symbol of something I have noticed all my life, though it is not very easy to sum up. It is generally the romantic thing that turns out to be the real thing, under the extreme test of realism. It is the sceptical and even the rational legend that turns out to be entirely legendary. Everything I had been taught or told led me to regard snow in Bethlehem as a paradox, like snow in Egypt. Every rumour of realism, every indirect form of rationalism, every scientific opinion taken on authority and at third hand, had led me to regard the country where Christ was born solely as a sort of semi-tropical place, with nothing but palm trees and parasols. It was only when I actually looked at it that it looked exactly like a Christmas card. It was only by the sight of my bodily eyes, and against all my mental training, that I realised how true is the tradition handed down in a Christmas carol…the whole background was so mountainous as to be in many ways Northern.
Now this nameless northern element in the first landscapes of Christianity has had a certain effect on our own history. As the great creed and philosophy which united our fathers swept westwards over the world, it found its different parts peculiarly fitted to different places….while the Latins more especially preserved the legends about the soldiers, we in the north felt a special link with the legend of the shepherds. We concentrated on Christmas, on the element of winter and the wild hills in the old Christian story. Thus Christmas is, in a special sense, at once European and English. It is European because it appeals to the religion of Europe. It is English because it specialises in those religious customs that can make even our own landscape a holy land.
A Progress from England, 1920
Christmas belongs to an order of ideas which never really perished, and which is now less likely to perish than ever. It had from the first a sort of glamour of a lost cause; it was like an everlasting sunset. It is only the things that never die that get the reputation of dying.
Christmas and the Peasant Traditions, 1921
Mr. Arnold Bennett began, indeed, by eliminating the more mystical elements in Christmas by a device of curious and almost creepy simplicity. He alluded to the fact that the 25th of December was the traditional date of the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and then thought it was enough to say that it probably was not the historical date at all. There is a sort of innocence in this which I cannot but feel as faintly amusing, despite the seriousness of this aspect of the subject. Some light on the logic of the process may be thrown by merely imagining it applied to any other festival, even the most strictly secular and social festival. Suppose it were found that by some error in an official document the Battle of Trafalgar had been attributed to Oct. 21 when it was really fought on Oct. 23. It would be surely a rather extraordinary argument to deduce from this that Trafalgar Day need have nothing to do with Nelson, nothing to do with naval glory, nothing to do with patriotism, nothing to do with England. It would be rather odd to argue that because of this shuffling of dates any Cosmopolitan, any Continental enemy of England, any Internationalist who hated all flags, any Pacifist who hated all fighting, had just as much to do with Trafalgar as an English sailor.
…You cannot select a particular day without selecting a particular subject. You cannot have a day devoted to everything; it is contradicted by the very word devotion. You cannot have a festival dedicated to things in general; it is contradicted by the very idea of dedication. No religion, as far as I know, has ever had a Feast of the Universe; and Robespierre did not really get very far even with a Feast of the Supreme Being.
On Generalizing Christmas, 1922
The Christmas celebrations will certainly remain, and will certainly surive any attempt by modern artists, idealists or neo-pagans to substitute anything else for them. For the truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticise or destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new Pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified. All the men in William Morris are dignified. All the men even in H.G. Well are dignified, when they are men at all. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation.
The Survival of Christmas, 1908
Thus, by talking a great deal about the solar solstice, it can be maintained that Christmas is a sort of sun-worship; to all of which the simple answer is that it feels quite different. If people profess to feel the “spirit” behind symbols, the first thing I expect of them is that they shall feel how opposite are the adoration of the sun and the following of the star.
Christmas and the Progressive Movement, 1910
Most men need institutions to make them distinguish themselves; and they also need institutions to make them enjoy themselves. For, paradoxical as it sounds, men shrink back from enjoyment; they make one automatic step backwards from the brink of hilarity; because they know that it means the loss of dignity and a certain furious self-effacement. It is to get over this first reluctance of every reveller that men have created also coercive festivals such as Christmas Day.
The Alleged Decline of Christmas, 1910
I have a busy Christmas ahead (busy in a fun way, I assure you), so I'm going to be very lazy and regurgitate my Christmas posting of last year. But the good news is...it's all pure undiluted Chesterton! Enjoy, and Happy Christmas! Oh, and we are now up to thirty-five followers! Brilliant!
All Dickens's books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his two or three famous Yuletide tales -- The Christmas Carol and The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. Of these The Christmas Carol is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed, Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best work is the most popular. It is for Pickwick that he is best known; and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In any case this superiority of The Christmas Carol makes it convenient for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in The Christmas Carol we shall find that all the three marks I have mentioned are unmistakably visible. The Christmas Carol is a happy story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity.
Again, The Christmas Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source -- the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle -- the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat, says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the stories.
Charles Dickens, 1906
One of the first reforms of Lenin and Trotsky was, I believe, to abolish Christmas. It is not the only point on which the prejudices of the most emancipated Progressives are an exact copy of the prejudices of the most antiquated Puritans.
A Christmas of Peace, 1918
Some of our more advanced ethical teachers might well write a new version of “The Christmas Carol”—a sort of Anti-Christmas Carol. For the drama of Dickens might well appear to them not a comedy of conversion, but a tragedy of apostasy. The story would start with Scrooge as a lofty and idealistic vegeterian, partaking of a pure and hygienic diet of gruel. It would end with the same Scrooge, now degraded by superstition, and engaged in a cannibal conspiracy for the assasination of a turkey…Eugenics, which often form a part of such ethics, might here suggest a thoughtful passage about the mistake made in the birth of Tiny Tim, and the desirability of correcting that mistake with all speed in some timely and quiet fashion.
The New Attack on Christmas, 1919
This is written amidst fields of snow within a few days of Christmas. And when I last saw snow it was within a few miles of Bethlehem. The coincidence will serve as a symbol of something I have noticed all my life, though it is not very easy to sum up. It is generally the romantic thing that turns out to be the real thing, under the extreme test of realism. It is the sceptical and even the rational legend that turns out to be entirely legendary. Everything I had been taught or told led me to regard snow in Bethlehem as a paradox, like snow in Egypt. Every rumour of realism, every indirect form of rationalism, every scientific opinion taken on authority and at third hand, had led me to regard the country where Christ was born solely as a sort of semi-tropical place, with nothing but palm trees and parasols. It was only when I actually looked at it that it looked exactly like a Christmas card. It was only by the sight of my bodily eyes, and against all my mental training, that I realised how true is the tradition handed down in a Christmas carol…the whole background was so mountainous as to be in many ways Northern.
Now this nameless northern element in the first landscapes of Christianity has had a certain effect on our own history. As the great creed and philosophy which united our fathers swept westwards over the world, it found its different parts peculiarly fitted to different places….while the Latins more especially preserved the legends about the soldiers, we in the north felt a special link with the legend of the shepherds. We concentrated on Christmas, on the element of winter and the wild hills in the old Christian story. Thus Christmas is, in a special sense, at once European and English. It is European because it appeals to the religion of Europe. It is English because it specialises in those religious customs that can make even our own landscape a holy land.
A Progress from England, 1920
Christmas belongs to an order of ideas which never really perished, and which is now less likely to perish than ever. It had from the first a sort of glamour of a lost cause; it was like an everlasting sunset. It is only the things that never die that get the reputation of dying.
Christmas and the Peasant Traditions, 1921
Mr. Arnold Bennett began, indeed, by eliminating the more mystical elements in Christmas by a device of curious and almost creepy simplicity. He alluded to the fact that the 25th of December was the traditional date of the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and then thought it was enough to say that it probably was not the historical date at all. There is a sort of innocence in this which I cannot but feel as faintly amusing, despite the seriousness of this aspect of the subject. Some light on the logic of the process may be thrown by merely imagining it applied to any other festival, even the most strictly secular and social festival. Suppose it were found that by some error in an official document the Battle of Trafalgar had been attributed to Oct. 21 when it was really fought on Oct. 23. It would be surely a rather extraordinary argument to deduce from this that Trafalgar Day need have nothing to do with Nelson, nothing to do with naval glory, nothing to do with patriotism, nothing to do with England. It would be rather odd to argue that because of this shuffling of dates any Cosmopolitan, any Continental enemy of England, any Internationalist who hated all flags, any Pacifist who hated all fighting, had just as much to do with Trafalgar as an English sailor.
…You cannot select a particular day without selecting a particular subject. You cannot have a day devoted to everything; it is contradicted by the very word devotion. You cannot have a festival dedicated to things in general; it is contradicted by the very idea of dedication. No religion, as far as I know, has ever had a Feast of the Universe; and Robespierre did not really get very far even with a Feast of the Supreme Being.
On Generalizing Christmas, 1922
The Christmas celebrations will certainly remain, and will certainly surive any attempt by modern artists, idealists or neo-pagans to substitute anything else for them. For the truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticise or destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new Pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified. All the men in William Morris are dignified. All the men even in H.G. Well are dignified, when they are men at all. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation.
The Survival of Christmas, 1908
Thus, by talking a great deal about the solar solstice, it can be maintained that Christmas is a sort of sun-worship; to all of which the simple answer is that it feels quite different. If people profess to feel the “spirit” behind symbols, the first thing I expect of them is that they shall feel how opposite are the adoration of the sun and the following of the star.
Christmas and the Progressive Movement, 1910
Most men need institutions to make them distinguish themselves; and they also need institutions to make them enjoy themselves. For, paradoxical as it sounds, men shrink back from enjoyment; they make one automatic step backwards from the brink of hilarity; because they know that it means the loss of dignity and a certain furious self-effacement. It is to get over this first reluctance of every reveller that men have created also coercive festivals such as Christmas Day.
The Alleged Decline of Christmas, 1910
Friday, December 9, 2011
Thirty Followers!
Welcome to anyone who has started reading recently, and thank you to older readers!
Remember you are all welcome to blog here-- just send a post to irishchesterton@gmail.com and I will put it up as long as it doesn't libel anyone and bears some conceivable relation to Chesterton.
To celebrate, a passage that caught my eye from one of Chesterton's Illustrated London News articles (for October 10, 1908, as it happens):
As a matter of intellect and conviction I believe in one religion; but, as a matter of fancy and sympathy I can believe in any number. Charles Lamb said that he could read any books, not counting books that were not books-- such as works of history, science, philosophy and politics. So I say that I can feel a sympathy with any religion that is a religion; I don't count the Higher Pantheism or the Newest Theosophy or the Christianity of Tolstoy. I mean really jolly religions, where you do something-- bang on a gong or attempt to worship a bear.
People who want religion without ritual, ceremony and all the trappings such as robes and mitre that seem to offend their egalitartian sympathies so much, seem to me rather like people who want Christmas without turkey, baubles, tinsel or gifts. Of course, the analogy is not perfect-- but don't these people see how miserable they are being? The bishop wears his robes for our benefit, not for his own. The treasures of the Vatican are for the benefit of the pilgrims who have scraped and saved to make the pious trip, not for the sake of the curia, on whom the novelty must have worn off to some degree.
Remember you are all welcome to blog here-- just send a post to irishchesterton@gmail.com and I will put it up as long as it doesn't libel anyone and bears some conceivable relation to Chesterton.
To celebrate, a passage that caught my eye from one of Chesterton's Illustrated London News articles (for October 10, 1908, as it happens):
As a matter of intellect and conviction I believe in one religion; but, as a matter of fancy and sympathy I can believe in any number. Charles Lamb said that he could read any books, not counting books that were not books-- such as works of history, science, philosophy and politics. So I say that I can feel a sympathy with any religion that is a religion; I don't count the Higher Pantheism or the Newest Theosophy or the Christianity of Tolstoy. I mean really jolly religions, where you do something-- bang on a gong or attempt to worship a bear.
People who want religion without ritual, ceremony and all the trappings such as robes and mitre that seem to offend their egalitartian sympathies so much, seem to me rather like people who want Christmas without turkey, baubles, tinsel or gifts. Of course, the analogy is not perfect-- but don't these people see how miserable they are being? The bishop wears his robes for our benefit, not for his own. The treasures of the Vatican are for the benefit of the pilgrims who have scraped and saved to make the pious trip, not for the sake of the curia, on whom the novelty must have worn off to some degree.
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