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Heretics (1905)G. K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 1986)
172 pp. First reading.
Posted 3 January 2007.
This book, his first, marked Chesterton's entrance into the world of English letters, and he certainly did not enter on tip-toes. It's a rousing debut, already bursting with the confidence and gaiety that marked his whole literary career. It's also a real hodge-podge, showing a joyous disregard for coherent order as he roams far and wide over the literary, artistic, and intellectual landscape of his day, examining one representative figure after another. About the only thing all the subjects of these essays have in common is that they are all heretics - that is, that Chesterton disagrees with them all.
His professed intention in the book is to take seriously what his contemporaries say about what they believe, for this he considers to be the most important thing about them. He wants to grasp their unspoken foundational assumptions and examine them. He wants to learn their doctrines, and see whether they are true. He wants to say why they are not true.
It is important to do so. It is important for the health of society, for "nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated". It is important for the vitality of intellectual life, for he sees the reluctance to dispute fundamentals as springing from a lack of devotion to truth. He is interested in ideals because without vision the people perish, and he sees our society as terminally unwilling to really express its ideal, its idea of the good:
Every one of the popular modern
phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is
good. We are fond of talking about ‘liberty’; that, as we
talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of
talking about ‘progress’; that is a dodge to avoid
discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
‘education’; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is
good.
And he's right about that. A society that holds 'toleration' or 'choice' as the greatest good, as ours does, really has no idea what is good. This is dangerous, he says, because if a people is unaccustomed to handling powerful ideas with their bare hands, they become susceptible to manipulation and fanaticism.
Ideas are dangerous, but the man
to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted
with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are
dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no
ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head
like wine to the head of a teetotaller.
Chesterton is no teetotaller.
There are nearly twenty separate essays here, so far too many for me to comment on each. He takes on Rudyard Kipling's cosmopolitanism, defending instead the virtues of rootedness and patriotism. He cautions against the rise of mass culture and the undemocratic power of media. He assails the social sciences, arguing that any branch of study which takes humanity as its subject must fail so long as it adheres to the methods of the physical sciences. He criticizes the literary establishment of his day (the "smart set" and the "slum novelists"), both for its guarded self- consciousness and its lack of real sympathy with the common man. He attacks the alleged "moral neutrality" of modern art and education. It is a little depressing to see how pertinent it all remains a full century after it was written.
Several of the essays address utopianism. In this he was remarkably prescient, for the effort to effect the "truly just state" would spill rivers of blood in the twentieth century. In the chapter entitled "The Fallacy of the Young Nation", he warns against ideals that are not sufficiently idealistic, worldly ideals which one could believe it was possible to attain, for the temptation to ruthlessness in pursuit of the ideal may be too great to resist. In another place he rejects the secular utopia of rationally organized self-indulgence on the grounds that a world in which we gained excessive control over our lives would be a sad and dull place indeed:
A man has control over many
things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of
a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much
hero that there would be no novel.
He rejects also the utopian ideal espoused by his friend and frequent debating partner George Bernard Shaw. Shaw's idea of the "Superman" was thoroughly odious to Chesterton, who called it "a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this world". Given the choice between progress and an unprogressive humanity, Shaw chose progress, imagining for himself a new humanity that would endorse and embody his ideal. In Chesterton's eyes Shaw simply fails in a central task of life: to appreciate the world we are given. He is not great enough to be humble.
Humility is the thing which is
for ever renewing the earth and the stars. It is humility, and not
duty, which preserves the stars from wrong, from the unpardonable wrong
of casual resignation; it is through humility that the most ancient
heavens for us are fresh and strong... To the humble man, and to the
humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to
the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the
faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he
realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead.
This humility that freshens the world is the fruit of a spiritual state, an inner simplicity, and it was the secret source of Chesterton's own deep capacity for appreciation and joy.
This point is worth stressing: if I've given the impression that these essays, all written against something or other, are at all dour or depressing, nothing could be further from the truth. He writes with wonderful persuasive power about the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, which he calls "the gay and exuberant virtues" in contrast to temperance and justice, the "sad virtues" of the pagan world. He sings the praises of the great festivals of our culture even as he points out the failure of secular society to produce anything to rival them (a failure with deep roots). Indeed, these essays burst with wit, laughter, and jolly exuberance, for Chesterton was much more than a critic. He was a "man in full" who gloried in the basic human joys of community, ritual, and humour. In his own day he was criticized for this comic abandon on the grounds that he was not being serious in his treatment of serious things. In the chapter "Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity", he answers this charge directly, and his response serves as a justification for this, and all the many other books he was yet to write. Call it the Chestertonian manifesto:
To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity — like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.
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