...who was the inventor of the clerihew (a comic verse form, as the reader already knows) and Chesterton's best friend in youth. I would gladly know more about their adult relationship. Bentley was also the dedicatee of The Man Who Was Thursday, as well as its prefatory verse-- one of Chesterton's greatest poems in my view, and one that much resembles this one, especially in the motif of growing younger at heart as one ages. This poem is from Chesterton's early volume, Greybeards at Play.
He was, through boyhood's storm and shower,
my best, my nearest friend
we wore one hat, smoked one cigar,
one standing at each end.
We were two hearts with single hope,
two faces in one hood
I knew the secrets of his youth
I watched his every mood.
The little things that none but I
saw were beyond his wont,
the streaming hair, the tie behind,
the coat tails worn in front.
I marked the absent-minded scream,
the little nervous trick
of rolling in the grate, with eyes
by friendship's light made quick.
But youth's black storms are gone and past,
bare is each aged brow;
and, since with age we're growing bald,
let us be babies now.
Learning we knew; but still to-day,
with spelling-book devotion,
words of one syllable we seek
in moments of emotion.
Riches we knew; and well dressed dolls --
dolls living -- who expressed
no filial thoughts, however much
you thumped them in the chest.
Old happiness is grey as we,
and we may still outstrip her;
if we be slippered pantaloons,
oh let us hunt the slipper!
The old world glows with colours clear;
and if, as saith the saint,
the world is but a painted show,
oh let us lick the paint!
Far, far behind are morbid hours,
and lonely hearts that bleed.
Far, far behind us are the days,
when we were old indeed.
Leave we the child; he is immersed
with scientists and mystics;
with deep prophetic voice he cries
Canadian food statistics.
But now I know how few and small,
the things we crave need be --
toys and the universe and you --
a little friend to tea.
Behold the simple sum of things,
where, in one splendour spun,
the stars go round the Mulberry Bush,
the Burning Bush, the Sun.
Now we are old and wise and grey,
and shaky at the knees;
now is the true time to delight
in picture books like these.
Hoary and bent I dance one hour
what though I die at morn?
There is a shout among the stars,
"To-night a child is born."
Friday, November 2, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
A Long Extract from Chesterton's Biography of Saint Francis...
...which I quote at such length because I think it really demands and deserves it. I think this extract is perhaps the second greatest and most inspired passage out of all of Chesterton's works; second only to the great rhapsody in Orthodoxy which describes the paradoxes of Christianity.
In both cases (as so often with Chesterton) what I especially admire is that, if Chesterton had not elucidated that particular idea, it seems likely that nobody else ever would have. Chesterton was startlingly original; he possessed the deep originality that comes from seeing things as they actually are, rather than the shallow originality that comes from looking for novelties.
And another thing this passage has in common with his best passages-- or at least, my own personal favourites-- is that it is a magnificent exercise in the history of ideas. Chesterton, whenever he wrote about the past, focuses on something more fundamental than facts and dates and even ideas and philosophies; he evokes the mood, the temperature, the colouring, the feel of an era. And the remarkable thing is that even those of us who have very little knowledge of history (and I am putting up my hand here) know exactly what he means.
You need only the scantiest knowledge of the Middle Ages to see what Chesterton is getting at in this passage; in fact, I think that even a familiarity with TV comedy sketches and cartoon caricatures of medieval Europe would be enough.
Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she cured it in the only way in which it could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan civilization had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear system of logic and language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistake. That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if a man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he would come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of the testimony they bear to the truths of traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in a man like the bias on a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.
Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more decent tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same fallacy in her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small degree the heathen tradition of nature worship. What was the matter with the whole heathen civilisation was that there nothing for the mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into a proverb when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.
This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism was becoming wicked, or rather it was on the logical high road to wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow. Pagans were wiser that paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its name was Pan.
It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or kindly old person pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall suddenly what would have once stood in place of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god of their gardens.
Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars. Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do. Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The early Church called the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings, nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it. Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they wrote across that great space of history the text; "This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."
Now the historical importance of St. Francis and the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, lies in the fact that they marked the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of Roman Law that there were to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the Middle Ages.
It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a larger moral movement had clearly begun, but what may fairly be said of it is this, that over all those first movements there was still something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitentiary period. It was the twilight of the morning; but it was still a grey twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience. With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything the people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely practical, in the sense that they not only practical but also severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and practical for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three examples may be taken to illustrate the point.
First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to melt. Not only was the slave turning into a serf, who was practically free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of penance; but I am speaking of that sterner spirit of penance which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them were doubtless were examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I once debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in slavery by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would have at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.
Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching inquisition against simony or the financial corruption of the clergy; it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of the parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war; but still having all the stark and terrible responsibilities of war. There is no space here to say all that should be said about the true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and become a new religion of a military but nomadic sort; invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion; while it seems to a Catholic an insane simplification of religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes if there were any in the world; but they were the heroes of a tragedy.
Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval movements in order to note about them one general character, which refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are clean; for they no have longer any smell of perversion. Its very cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a very simple fury at an insult. Gradually against this grey background beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars are have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last.
For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer the water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are like all new things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship, and can return to nature.
While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was the break of day.
In both cases (as so often with Chesterton) what I especially admire is that, if Chesterton had not elucidated that particular idea, it seems likely that nobody else ever would have. Chesterton was startlingly original; he possessed the deep originality that comes from seeing things as they actually are, rather than the shallow originality that comes from looking for novelties.
And another thing this passage has in common with his best passages-- or at least, my own personal favourites-- is that it is a magnificent exercise in the history of ideas. Chesterton, whenever he wrote about the past, focuses on something more fundamental than facts and dates and even ideas and philosophies; he evokes the mood, the temperature, the colouring, the feel of an era. And the remarkable thing is that even those of us who have very little knowledge of history (and I am putting up my hand here) know exactly what he means.
You need only the scantiest knowledge of the Middle Ages to see what Chesterton is getting at in this passage; in fact, I think that even a familiarity with TV comedy sketches and cartoon caricatures of medieval Europe would be enough.
Anybody who supposes that the Dark Ages were plain darkness and nothing else, and that the dawn of the thirteenth century was plain daylight and nothing else, will not be able to make head or tail of the human story of St. Francis of Assisi. The truth is that the joy of St. Francis and his Jongleurs de Dieu was not merely an awakening. It was something which cannot be understood without understanding their own mystical creed. The end of the Dark Ages was not merely the end of a sleep. It was certainly not merely the end of a superstitious enslavement. It was the end of something belonging to a quite definite but quite different order of ideas.
It was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, which was the only thing that could have expelled them. Christianity had entered the world to cure the world; and she cured it in the only way in which it could be cured. Viewed merely in an external and experimental fashion, the whole of the high civilisation of antiquity had ended in the learning of a certain lesson; that is, in its conversion to Christianity. But that lesson was a psychological fact as well as a theological faith. That pagan civilization had indeed been a very high civilisation. It would not weaken our thesis, it might even strengthen it, to say that it was the highest that humanity ever reached. It had discovered its still unrivalled arts of poetry and plastic representation; it had discovered its own permanent political ideals; it had discovered its own clear system of logic and language. But above all, it had discovered its own mistake. That mistake was too deep to be ideally defined; the short-hand of it is to call it the mistake of nature-worship. It might almost as truly be called the mistake of being natural; and it was a very natural mistake. The Greeks, the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if a man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he would come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent. We might be so flippant as to say that man was simply to follow his nose, so long as it was a Greek nose. And the case of the Greeks themselves is alone enough to illustrate the strange but certain fatality that attends upon this fallacy. No sooner did the Greeks themselves begin to follow their own noses and their own notion of being natural, than the queerest thing in history seems to have happened to them. It was much too queer to be an easy matter to discuss. It may be remarked that our more repulsive realists never give us the benefit of their realism. Their studies of unsavoury subjects never take note of the testimony they bear to the truths of traditional morality. But if we had the taste for such things, we could cite thousands of such things as part of the case for Christian morals. And an instance of this is found in the fact that nobody has written, in this sense, a real moral history of the Greeks. Nobody has seen the scale or the strangeness of the story. The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence. The greatest and even the purest philosophers could not apparently avoid this low sort of lunacy. Why? It would seem simple enough for the people whose poets had conceived Helen of Troy, whose sculptors had carved the Venus of Milo, to remain healthy on the point. The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point. When Man goes straight he goes crooked. When he follows his nose he manages somehow to put his nose out of joint, or even to cut off his nose to spite his face; and that in accordance with something much deeper in human nature than nature-worshippers could ever understand. It was the discovery of that deeper thing, humanly speaking, that constituted the conversion to Christianity. There is a bias in a man like the bias on a bowl; and Christianity was the discovery of how to correct the bias and therefore hit the mark. There are many who will smile at the saying; but it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.
Rome rose at the expense of her Greek teachers largely because she did not entirely consent to be taught these tricks. She had a much more decent tradition; but she ultimately suffered from the same fallacy in her religious tradition; which was necessarily in no small degree the heathen tradition of nature worship. What was the matter with the whole heathen civilisation was that there nothing for the mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death. In the Roman Empire also, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into a proverb when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.
This is not to be confused with mere self-righteous sensationalism about the wickedness of the pagan world. It was not so much that the pagan world was wicked as that it was good enough to realise that its paganism was becoming wicked, or rather it was on the logical high road to wickedness. I mean that there was no future for "natural magic"; to deepen it was only to darken it into black magic. There was no future for it; because in the past it had only been innocent because it was young. We might say it had only been innocent because it was shallow. Pagans were wiser that paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians. Thousands of them had philosophy and family virtues and military honour to hold them up; but by this time the purely popular thing called religion was certainly dragging them down. When this reaction against the evil is allowed for, it is true to repeat that it was an evil that was everywhere. In another and more literal sense its name was Pan.
It was no metaphor to say that these people needed a new heaven and a new earth; for they had really defiled their own earth and even their own heaven. How could their case be met by looking at the sky, when erotic legends were scrawled in stars across it; how could they learn anything from the love of birds and flowers after the sort of love stories that were told of them? It is impossible here to multiply evidences, and one small example may stand for the rest. We know what sort of sentimental associations are called up to us by the phrase "a garden"; and how we think mostly of the memory of melancholy and innocent romances, or quite as often of some gracious maiden lady or kindly old person pottering under a yew hedge, perhaps in sight of a village spire. Then, let anyone who knows a little Latin poetry recall suddenly what would have once stood in place of the sun-dial or the fountain, obscene and monstrous in the sun; and of what sort was the god of their gardens.
Nothing could purge this obsession but a religion that was literally unearthly. It was no good telling such people to have a natural religion full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that had not been stained. They had to go into the desert where they could find no flowers or even into the cavern where they could see no stars. Into that desert and that cavern the highest human intellect entered for some four centuries; and it was the very wisest thing it could do. Nothing but the stark supernatural stood up for its salvation; if God could not save it, certainly the gods could not. The early Church called the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right. Whatever natural religion may have had to do with their beginnings, nothing but fiends now inhabited those hollow shrines. Pan was nothing but panic. Venus was nothing but venereal vice. I do not mean for a moment, of course, that all the individual pagans were of this character even to the end; but it was as individuals that they differed from it. Nothing distinguishes paganism from Christianity so clearly as the fact that the individual thing called philosophy had little or nothing to do with the social thing called religion. Anyhow it was no good to preach natural religion to people to whom nature had grown as unnatural as any religion. They knew much better than we do what was the matter with them and what sort of demons at once tempted and tormented them; and they wrote across that great space of history the text; "This sort goeth not out but by prayer and fasting."
Now the historical importance of St. Francis and the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, lies in the fact that they marked the end of this expiation. Men at the close of the dark Ages may have been rude and unlettered and unlearned in everything but wars with heathen tribes, more barbarous than themselves, but they were clean. They were like children; the first beginnings of their rude arts have all the clean pleasure of children. We have to conceive them in Europe as a whole living under little local governments, feudal in so far as they were a survival of fierce wars with the barbarians, often monastic and carrying a far more friendly and fatherly character, still faintly imperial as far as Rome still ruled as a great legend. But in Italy something had survived more typical of the finer spirit of antiquity; the republic, Italy, was dotted with little states, largely democratic in their ideals, and often filled with real citizens. But the city no longer lay open as under the Roman peace, but was pent in high walls for defence against feudal war and all the citizens had to be soldiers. One of these stood in a steep and striking position on the wooded hills of Umbria; and its name was Assisi. Out of its deep gate under its high turrets was to come the message that was the gospel of the hour, "Your warfare is accomplished, your iniquity is pardoned." But it was out of all these fragmentary things of feudalism and freedom and remains of Roman Law that there were to rise, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, vast and almost universal, the mighty civilisation of the Middle Ages.
It is an exaggeration to attribute it entirely to the inspiration of any one man, even the most original genius of the thirteenth century. Its elementary ethics of fraternity and fair play had never been entirely extinct and Christendom had never been anything less than Christian. The great truisms about justice and pity can be found in the rudest monastic records of the barbaric transition or the stiffest maxims of the Byzantine decline. And early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries a larger moral movement had clearly begun, but what may fairly be said of it is this, that over all those first movements there was still something of that ancient austerity that came from the long penitentiary period. It was the twilight of the morning; but it was still a grey twilight. This may be illustrated by the mere mention of two or three of these reforms before the Franciscan reform. The monastic institution itself, of course, was far older than all these things; indeed it was undoubtedly almost as old as Christianity. Its counsels of perfection had always taken the form of vows of chastity and poverty and obedience. With these unworldly aims it had long ago civilised a great part of the world. The monks had taught people to plough and sow as well as to read and write; indeed they had taught the people nearly everything the people knew. But it may truly be said that the monks were severely practical, in the sense that they not only practical but also severe; though they were generally severe with themselves and practical for other people. All this early monastic movement had long ago settled down and doubtless often deteriorated; but when we come to the first medieval movements this sterner character is still apparent. Three examples may be taken to illustrate the point.
First, the ancient social mould of slavery was already beginning to melt. Not only was the slave turning into a serf, who was practically free as regards his own farm and family life, but many lords were freeing slaves and serfs altogether. This was done under the pressure of the priests; but especially it was done in the spirit of a penance. In one sense, of course, any Catholic society must have an atmosphere of penance; but I am speaking of that sterner spirit of penance which had expiated the excesses of paganism. There was about such restitutions the atmosphere of the death-bed; as many of them were doubtless were examples of death-bed repentance. A very honest atheist with whom I once debated made use of the expression, "Men have only been kept in slavery by the fear of hell." As I pointed out to him, if he had said that men had only been freed from slavery by the fear of hell, he would have at least have been referring to an unquestionable historical fact.
Another example was the sweeping reform of Church discipline by Pope Gregory the Seventh. It really was a reform, undertaken from the highest motives and having the healthiest results; it conducted a searching inquisition against simony or the financial corruption of the clergy; it insisted on a more serious and self-sacrificing ideal for the life of the parish priest. But the very fact that this largely took the form of making universal the obligation of celibacy will strike the note of something which, however noble, would seem to many to be vaguely negative. The third example is in one sense the strongest of all. For the third example was a war; a heroic war and for many of us a holy war; but still having all the stark and terrible responsibilities of war. There is no space here to say all that should be said about the true nature of the Crusades. Everybody knows that in the very darkest hour of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and become a new religion of a military but nomadic sort; invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from the Moslem to the Monist. It seemed to the heretic a sane simplification of religion; while it seems to a Catholic an insane simplification of religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of Catholicism. Anyhow its objective character was that of a military danger to Christendom and Christendom had struck at the very heart of it, in seeking to reconquer the Holy Places. The great Duke Godfrey and the first Christians who stormed Jerusalem were heroes if there were any in the world; but they were the heroes of a tragedy.
Now I have taken these two or three examples of the earlier medieval movements in order to note about them one general character, which refers back to the penance that followed paganism. There is something in all these movements that is bracing even while it is still bleak, like a wind blowing between the clefts of the mountains. That wind, austere and pure, of which the poet speaks, is really the spirit of the time, for it is the wind of a world that has at last been purified. To anyone who can appreciate atmospheres there is something clear and clean about the atmosphere of this crude and often harsh society. Its very lusts are clean; for they no have longer any smell of perversion. Its very cruelties are clean; they are not the luxurious cruelties of the amphitheatre. They come either of a very simple horror at blasphemy or a very simple fury at an insult. Gradually against this grey background beauty begins to appear, as something really fresh and delicate and above all surprising. Love returning is no longer what was once called platonic but what is still called chivalric love. The flowers and stars are have recovered their first innocence. Fire and water are felt to be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint. The purge of paganism is complete at last.
For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer the water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are like all new things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship, and can return to nature.
While it was yet twilight a figure appeared silently and suddenly on a little hill above the city, dark against the fading darkness. For it was the end of a long and stern night, a night of vigil, not unvisited by stars. He stood with his hands lifted, as in so many statues and pictures, and about him was a burst of birds singing; and behind him was the break of day.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
On Judging Policies by the Calendar
"The Conservative has exactly the same error as the Progressive. It consists in the fact that each of them allows truth to be determined by time. That is to say, he judges a thing by whether it is of yesterday or to-day or to-morrow, and not by what it is in eternity."
Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, October 30 1920
Exactly! I have often thought that being "conservative" or "liberal" is as silly as being in favour of always turning to the left or always turning to the right. The question is; where do you want to go? What do you want to conserve? What do you want to liberate?
It seems to me that anybody who is strongly in favour of anything must be willing to be a conservative, a radical, a revolutionary, a restorationist, a liberal, a diehard, or a moderate, depending on the circumstances they find themselves in.
Of course, there is such a thing as the conservative temperament, which is a preference for small steps and caution. But to mistake a temperament for a philosophy is grievous error.
(I love my bound volumes of Chesterton's Illustrated London News column. If anyone ever wanted to make me an extravagant gift, the complete collection would be just the ticket!)
Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, October 30 1920
Exactly! I have often thought that being "conservative" or "liberal" is as silly as being in favour of always turning to the left or always turning to the right. The question is; where do you want to go? What do you want to conserve? What do you want to liberate?
It seems to me that anybody who is strongly in favour of anything must be willing to be a conservative, a radical, a revolutionary, a restorationist, a liberal, a diehard, or a moderate, depending on the circumstances they find themselves in.
Of course, there is such a thing as the conservative temperament, which is a preference for small steps and caution. But to mistake a temperament for a philosophy is grievous error.
(I love my bound volumes of Chesterton's Illustrated London News column. If anyone ever wanted to make me an extravagant gift, the complete collection would be just the ticket!)
Sunday, September 30, 2012
John Haldane References Chesterton...
...in a talk organised by the Iona Institute.
On Friday night I attended a lecture given by Scottish philosopher John Haldane on the topic, "Sex, Marriage and Love in Liberal Society" (I think that was the title and I'm too lazy to look it up). It's the second lecture organized by the Iona Institute that I've attended.
John Haldane is a very respected philosopher and there was a packed house-- in fact, the talk had to be delayed so that more chairs could be brought in.
I am not really a lover of all things Scottish (I am sad to admit), but I was completely charmed by Professor Haldane. He must have delivered hundreds of lectures in his life, but he showed a zest and a relish for the occasion that was both surprising and admirable. There was a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips through the whole event. He spoke fluently and incisively, neither blinding us with philosophical terminology, nor speaking down to us. And he showed a positive eagerness to answer questions and to enter into a discussion. (I should also say that, for once, the questions were real questions and not simply occasions for audience members to launch into a disquisition.)
He mentioned Chesterton twice-- once explicitly, when he spent a few moments discussing What's Wrong With the World, in relation to its chapter on education, and once more obliquely when he said he liked to think of Alexander De Tocqueville's Democracy in America as What I Saw in America-- which is, of course, the title of Chesterton's memoir of a trip to the States.
It seems that nearly every Catholic intellectual and writer has been influenced by Chesterton.
On Friday night I attended a lecture given by Scottish philosopher John Haldane on the topic, "Sex, Marriage and Love in Liberal Society" (I think that was the title and I'm too lazy to look it up). It's the second lecture organized by the Iona Institute that I've attended.
John Haldane is a very respected philosopher and there was a packed house-- in fact, the talk had to be delayed so that more chairs could be brought in.
I am not really a lover of all things Scottish (I am sad to admit), but I was completely charmed by Professor Haldane. He must have delivered hundreds of lectures in his life, but he showed a zest and a relish for the occasion that was both surprising and admirable. There was a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips through the whole event. He spoke fluently and incisively, neither blinding us with philosophical terminology, nor speaking down to us. And he showed a positive eagerness to answer questions and to enter into a discussion. (I should also say that, for once, the questions were real questions and not simply occasions for audience members to launch into a disquisition.)
He mentioned Chesterton twice-- once explicitly, when he spent a few moments discussing What's Wrong With the World, in relation to its chapter on education, and once more obliquely when he said he liked to think of Alexander De Tocqueville's Democracy in America as What I Saw in America-- which is, of course, the title of Chesterton's memoir of a trip to the States.
It seems that nearly every Catholic intellectual and writer has been influenced by Chesterton.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
What is Operation Black Arrow? And What Does it Have To Do With Guinness?
I will let fellow Chestertonian Stan Reynolds enlighten you...
Just now, the sight of so many posters around town advocating that on “Arthur's Day” we should all “Paint the Town Black” has me coming over feeling all Jungian.
Truly the collective unconscious works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
The lads at Guinness have even got the date (27th September) nearly right, which isn't bad considering their whole poster campaign was probably designed after working hours in the brewery, when fluids quite additional to the “creative juices” were also likely to be freely flowing.
The (eventual) arrival of any artistic response to the dark and extraordinary events culminating and centering on the night of 28-29th September 2008 is certainly to be welcomed and can, I suppose, even be carefully celebrated with (just one) balloon and some bunting.
Certainly, given how much many folk are now “in the red”, the posters' radical artistic proposal that whole towns can “paint” themselves into “the black” is most meaningful.
Whilst the black paint overall prevents the viewer from being distracted from the unfortunate philosophical reality underlying our modern situation: The Irish Endarkenment has killed the Scottish Enlightenment.
But you know I don't wish to burst Uncle Arthur's big black birthday balloon. Besides, now that I look at the poster again a little less closely (after a few pints of his excellent black porter) it seems more like a portal than a balloon. A portal upon the nihilo....Megob, now there's art for you!
Funnily enough, if we are to solve the debt crisis we need just such a very rarely visible target and I do happen to have an arrow handy.
In keeping with the dark theme it is a black arrow and I designed it -about a year ago now- specifically to burst the ballooning burden of debt.
Well, time to give it my best shot...Look out!
www.operationblackarrow.com
Subtitle / Abstract: How To Use The Philosophies of Republicanism (Sensu Stricto) and Distributism, in Combination with an Overnight “Type 2” Euro Money Creation Event, to Help Solve Both The EU's Debt and Pensions-Crises, Help Save High Social Utility Capitalism and Help Re-establish and Widen Trust-Horizons, Both Amongst the EU's Populations and Towards Their Political and Financial Institutions.
Yours sincerely,
Stan Reynolds.
Just now, the sight of so many posters around town advocating that on “Arthur's Day” we should all “Paint the Town Black” has me coming over feeling all Jungian.
Truly the collective unconscious works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
The lads at Guinness have even got the date (27th September) nearly right, which isn't bad considering their whole poster campaign was probably designed after working hours in the brewery, when fluids quite additional to the “creative juices” were also likely to be freely flowing.
The (eventual) arrival of any artistic response to the dark and extraordinary events culminating and centering on the night of 28-29th September 2008 is certainly to be welcomed and can, I suppose, even be carefully celebrated with (just one) balloon and some bunting.
Certainly, given how much many folk are now “in the red”, the posters' radical artistic proposal that whole towns can “paint” themselves into “the black” is most meaningful.
Whilst the black paint overall prevents the viewer from being distracted from the unfortunate philosophical reality underlying our modern situation: The Irish Endarkenment has killed the Scottish Enlightenment.
But you know I don't wish to burst Uncle Arthur's big black birthday balloon. Besides, now that I look at the poster again a little less closely (after a few pints of his excellent black porter) it seems more like a portal than a balloon. A portal upon the nihilo....Megob, now there's art for you!
Funnily enough, if we are to solve the debt crisis we need just such a very rarely visible target and I do happen to have an arrow handy.
In keeping with the dark theme it is a black arrow and I designed it -about a year ago now- specifically to burst the ballooning burden of debt.
Well, time to give it my best shot...Look out!
www.operationblackarrow.com
Subtitle / Abstract: How To Use The Philosophies of Republicanism (Sensu Stricto) and Distributism, in Combination with an Overnight “Type 2” Euro Money Creation Event, to Help Solve Both The EU's Debt and Pensions-Crises, Help Save High Social Utility Capitalism and Help Re-establish and Widen Trust-Horizons, Both Amongst the EU's Populations and Towards Their Political and Financial Institutions.
Yours sincerely,
Stan Reynolds.
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