BOOK REVIEW
SUNDAY’S CHILD
Dale Ahlquist, G.K. Chesterton: The
Apostle of Common Sense (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 183 pp.,
$13.95, Paperback.
Dale Ahlquist, Common Sense 101:
Lessons from G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 316
pp., $16.95, Paperback.
Reviewed by James G. Bruen, Jr.
In a wild chase in
Chesterton’s anarchist nightmare The Man Who Was Thursday, the
mysterious Sunday escapes by cab, fire engine, elephant, and balloon from
conspirators bearing the names of the other days of the week before finally
revealing to them who he is. “I am the Sabbath,” he says; “I am the peace of
God.” One pursuer reacts fiercely, refusing reconciliation; another expresses
gratitude, but desires understanding; a third thinks it silly; another is happy
and content; a fifth is not happy and demands an explanation of his adventures;
and the sixth day wants to know why he was hurt so much. Sunday does not
explain anything. “Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin upon
his hand, and gazed at the distance,” at last adding only “I have heard your
complaints, in order.” Soon, Sunday is transformed: “the great face of Sunday,
which wore a strange smile[,]… grew to an awful size, … larger and larger,
filling the whole sky; then everything went black.” From the darkness one of
the pursuers hears, not an answer, but “a distant voice saying a commonplace
text that he had heard somewhere, ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’”
No one can describe God
completely or know His mind perfectly. Ultimately, we must recognize our
inadequacy and, like Job, accept His will, for He is the Creator from whom we
receive all not as a matter of right but gratuitously. Our task is to give
ourselves to Him completely. To do this, though, we must know, love, and serve
Him. We must attempt to describe Him and to know His mind, even though the results
must be imperfect, so that we can love and serve Him more perfectly. We
necessarily meet riddles, paradoxes, and questions beyond our ability to
resolve: God is a mystery of unfathomable depth. In this sense, Chesterton’s
works are gloriously failed attempts to know and explain God and His creation,
especially man. And in doing so, Chesterton consistently shows us something he
says God “concealed.” The “one thing that was too great for God to show us when
He walked upon our earth,” Chesterton says in Orthodoxy: “His mirth.”
Dale Ahlquist calls
Chesterton the Apostle of Common Sense. Chesterton is also the Apostle of
Mirth. Chesterton saw the humor in creation and life, and it permeates his
writing. Simply put, Chesterton is deadly serious and fun to read.
Chesterton himself filled
the whole sky. At six feet four inches and three hundred pounds, he filled it
physically. Writing a hundred books, thousands of essays, poetry, plays, fairy
tales, literary criticism, biography, newspaper columns, autobiography, mystery
stories, and more, he also filled it metaphorically. Chesterton is immense –
corporally and in the corpus of his work. Reading all he wrote is itself a
colossal endeavor, but a complete plumbing of its depths is perhaps impossible,
for he wrote perceptively about everything. Ahlquist revels in the attempt. “An
ocean of words poured out of his pen,” he writes in Common Sense 101:
Lessons from G.K. Chesterton. “I have simply immersed myself in that
ocean.”
Common Sense 101 is unlike any other Chesterton
book I have read. Although I hesitate to say it, Common Sense 101 is a
systematic presentation of Chesterton’s thought. I hesitate because the term
“systematic” incorrectly implies a formality that detracts from Ahlquist’s
playfully serious approach. “This is not a book about Chesterton,” writes
Ahlquist, but “a book about everything else from a Chestertonian perspective.”
Ahlquist “tries to get inside of him and inhabit him like a large house so that
we can see the world through the windows he provides,” but we also meet the
character who is the man of the house. Suffused with Chesterton’s and
Ahlquist’s humor, Common Sense 101 brings Chesterton to life better than
some biographies I have read. Ahlquist has fallen in love with Chesterton, and
he is inviting the reader to do so also.
Chesterton was a
controversialist. “Always focused on the larger picture and on eternal truths,”
says Ahlquist, Chesterton shied from nothing, able to “expound, it seems on any
subject,” and “proud of defending the common man and common sense.” And always
with great mirth, laughing at his own jokes. “If a man may not laugh at his own
jokes, at whose jokes may he laugh?” asks Chesterton. “May not an architect
pray in his own cathedral?” After all, he says, “Joking is undignified; that is
why it is so good for one’s soul.”
Ahlquist has employed his
apparently encyclopedic familiarity with Chesterton’s writings to draw together
snippets illustrating Chesterton’s substance and wit into chapters on different
topics that together provide his worldview, a Catholic worldview.
After a colorful
introduction to Chesterton, the second chapter addresses the wonder of
creation. “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want
of wonder,” says Chesterton. In the third, “The Riddles of God,” Ahlquist
delves deeply into Chesterton’s use of paradox to point to truth, saying
Chesterton is a mystic, for “the mystic is the man who tries to address the
doubts and solve the riddles.” The “absolute paradox,” of course, is Jesus Christ,
Who is God and man.
Chesterton did not earn a
college degree. He went to art school instead, becoming a writer almost
accidentally. “Art,” says Chesterton, “is the signature of man,” and that is
the title of Ahlquist’s fourth chapter. “Chesterton does not leave us much
wiggle room,” says Ahlquist. “He says that when art is not in the service of
heaven, it is almost always in the service of hell.” Ahlquist uses Chesterton
to contrast the daily news with eternal verities, then discusses Chesterton on
literary criticism (“Chesterton says that the best thing we can get out of an
interest in literature is a finer interest in life”), before addressing
Chesterton’s poetry and the necessity of rhyme in poetry. In the eighth
chapter, Ahlquist turns to education. “The purpose of Compulsory Education is
to deprive the common people of their common sense,” says Chesterton. “The one
thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is
this: that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and
speaking it we are happy.” Science, for example, is a secondary thing, either a
tool or a toy.
One thing is wrong with the
“ordinary version of … history that most moderately educated people have
absorbed from childhood,” says Chesterton; “there is not one word of truth in
it from beginning to end.” Chesterton says “there is no intelligible history
without a religion,” and history “is made windy and barren by the narrow notion
of leaving out theological theories.” His masterful The Everlasting Man presents Christ as the center of history.
By the eleventh chapter,
Ahlquist has moved to Chesterton’s arguments on feminism and other anti-family
fads, then he goes to democracy, big business, wage slavery, big government,
and distributism. Next, it’s Chesterton on Puritans and pagans, on the art of
defending the faith, and on Catholicism.
“G.K. Chesterton is one of
the greatest ecumenical writers. He is admired by Catholics, Protestants and
even non-Christians because of his goodness and truthfulness and unconquerable
joy. He is very fair to other faiths. He acknowledges that many Protestant
sects have had their own saints and prophets and provided a living and
inspiring faith for their adherents. But each of these sects came about because
they believed they were right and everybody else was wrong. In the end, their
ultimate claim has to be weighed against the claim of the Catholic Church, from
whom they broke away. And it requires far more faith or fanaticism, says
Chesterton, to believe that a small chapel can sustain its own claim over the
great international Church.”
Ahlquist relates
Chesterton’s sacramental understanding of creation and then turns to man’s
fallen nature. “When we rebuke a man for being a sinner,” says Chesterton, “we
imply that he has the powers of a saint.” After discussing love and marriage,
Ahlquist concludes with a plea for a return to common sense and for
reintroduction of Chesterton’s ideas into the public arena, goals worth
fighting for: “Help bring sanity back to a world gone mad.”
Chesterton’s interest was
truly universal, and in Common Sense 101 Ahlquist has synthesized his
ideas expertly. Common Sense 101 nevertheless avoids some topics, for
example, Chesterton on usury or on the Jews. And some topics, for example,
Chesterton on the home and family, may have been more fully presented if in a
single chapter rather than blended intermittently into chapters on other
topics. But these are quibbles; a perfect plumbing and presentation of
Chesterton’s depth is perhaps impossible.
In G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, Ahlquist comments,
“there is no best first book to read by Chesterton. Whatever one chooses to
read first, it seems it would have been better to have read one of the others
first. Or several. … By the time you read your third or fourth book by
Chesterton, you will find that you have gotten past the problem of reading the
first one.”
The Apostle of Common Sense tries to whet the reader’s appetite for Chesterton
by reviewing some of the books Chesterton wrote. Ahlquist here “focuses more on
Chesterton’s Catholic and Christian writings than on his novels or poetry or
literary criticism.” Orthodoxy, Heretics, The Everlasting Man, The
Thing, The Outline of Sanity and
a half dozen other books by Chesterton each merit a chapter of a dozen or so
pages. Ahlquist makes Chesterton’s St.
Francis of Assisi come alive, much as Chesterton made the saint come alive.
Ahlquist’s discussion of Fr.
Brown, Chesterton’s famous non-descript priest-detective, is a delightful
meditation on Chesterton, his insight into the human condition, and his
rightful place in the pantheon of mystery writers.
“Everyone immediately
recognized that the Father Brown stories were breaking new ground. Chesterton’s
approach brought motive and character back into prominence in detective fiction
and freed these stories from the imitative techniques of the rivals of Sherlock
Holmes. He certainly captured the attention of the leading mystery writers of
his day. They embraced his new style of murder mystery. They began writing
stories of domestic crimes with human motives, with a limited list of suspects,
with obvious (though well-disguised) clues, and with an unlikely detective who
solves his puzzles without relying on superhuman knowledge or intelligence.
Indeed, whenever you think of the great detectives of mystery fiction’s golden
age – Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Philo
Vance, or Nero Wolfe – remember their parentage. Remember they had a father.
His name was Fr. Brown.”
The Fr. Brown stories are
one of the better starting points for someone new to Chesterton, Ahlquist
indicates. “They are full of Chesterton’s wit and wisdom, and they are good
yarns. Besides that, they are detective stories.
Detective stories are about finding the truth. And Chesterton understands that
our search for truth is what defines us.” It’s hard to disagree, although I
also recommend the novel Manalive to
those new to Chesterton. “Sadly underrated,” according to Joseph Pearce
(Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton), Manalive puts flesh on Chesterton’s
admonition that the best thing we can get from an interest in literature is a
finer interest in life. Elsewhere, Ahlquist calls it Chesterton’s “book on how
to live Chesterton.” (An inexpensive paperback edition of Manalive is
available from Dover
Publications.)
It is somewhat fashionable
to attack Chesterton as an anti-semite. In G.K. Chesterton (1986),
biographer Michael Ffinch, for example, lambastes Chesterton as “strongly
anti-semitic,” even though “Chesterton himself always hotly denied that he
was.” By “the most serious blemish on Chesterton’s character: I mean his
attitude to the Jewish people,” says Ffinch. “It is a weak defence to say that
Chesterton’s attitude was in no way unusual at the time.” In The Outline of
Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (1982), Alzina Stone Dale says the
“answer that his attitude was not uncommon and had some historical justification
cannot be used in the post-Holocaust world.” In a tepid defense in Wisdom
and Innocence (1996), Joseph Pearce says that some Chesterton statements
appear “tasteless to the sensitivities of those who recall the worst excesses
of the Second World War,” but “it must be remembered” that he wrote them “long
before the war.” Chesterton “attacked the Jews when he felt they were
perpetrators of injustice, but as soon as he saw that they had become the
victims of injustice he was swift in their defence.” According to Pearce,
“The main reason for the
eventual reconciliation between Chesterton and the Jews was, ironically and
paradoxically, the anti-Semitism of Hitler. The Jews forgave Chesterton his
earlier indiscretions because ‘he was the first to speak out when the real
testing time came’, and Chesterton softened his attitude to the Jews because he
was horrified to see the hardening of attitudes in Germany and its results.”
Even in the preface to The
Father Brown Omnibus (1982), Auberon Waugh feels compelled to comment on
“what is sometimes seen as his anti-Semitism,” saying “no discussion of
Chesterton would be complete without some mention of this aspect, although it
scarcely appears at all in the Father Brown series.” Waugh says:
“The period between 1870 and
1910 saw an increase in Jewish influence in Britain, which extended through
finance and politics to the court. … Nowadays people rail against the
international combines; in those days, long before the Holocaust revealed
unmistakably and for all time the dangers of such sloppy thinking, it was the
Jews. But Chesterton was far too genial a man to bear malice against any
individual or group, except maybe the Quakers. He was attacking what seemed to
him a power structure.
“It would be small comfort
to a Jewish reader to assure him that Chesterton’s apparent anti-Semitism … was
incidental rather than intended. … His apparent xenophobia was no more than a
hatred of the structure of power and wealth, which he insisted on seeing as
something alien to the genial, beer-swilling English nature.”
Chesterton would have
demolished the idea that the Jewish Holocaust is the dividing and defining
point in history. Christ is. Similarly, he would have laughed at the Bush
Administration’s braggadocio that “everything is different” after 9/11 and made
shambles of the Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare. Although neither of
Ahlquist’s books touches on the accusations of anti-semitism or discusses 9/11,
Common Sense 101 responds nevertheless to the suggestion that everything
has changed because of the Holocaust or 9/11 or both of them: “if names and
dates are important to you,” writes Ahlquist, “then here indeed are the most
important, in fact, the only ones you need to know: B.C. and A.D., Before
Christ and Anno Domini, respectively.” Chesterton also would have suggested
that fashions and fads are unimportant but truth and moral norms are precious
and constant. He would have defended The Passion of the Christ and The
Gospel of St. John against the smear of anti-semitism, exposing the tactic
as an attack on Christ and His Church. “What is really working in the world
today is Anti-Catholicism and nothing else,” noted Chesterton in The Well and the Shadows.
Ahlquist does not shy away
from the accusations of anti-semitism that haunt Chesterton. His robust defense
of Chesterton, though, is not in either of these books, but on
the website of the American Chesterton Society, of which he is the
president:
“The most devastating
accusation against G.K. Chesterton is that he was an anti-Semite. It has been
repeated so many times that not only do his enemies assume it be fact, so do
many of his friends. They ignore the fact that Chesterton was a great defender
of the Jews, from his schoolboy days to the day of his death. So why does the
charge persist? Two reasons. One, it is a convenient way to discredit
Chesterton altogether. The charge itself is as good as a guilty verdict; it
suggests a fundamental flaw in Chesterton that must therefore make all of his
writing suddenly suspect, especially his defense of Christianity in general and
Catholicism in particular. Two, it ensures that Chesterton's honest (and
sympathetic) criticisms of the Jews will not be taken seriously, but will be
immediately dismissed or ignored as anti-Semitic ravings.
“Chesterton was puzzled by
the charge of anti-Semitism in his own lifetime. He thought it strange that he
could criticize everyone except the Jews. …
“The main problem is that no
one bothers examining the evidence. Much of the so-called support for the
charge is taken from [The New Jerusalem
(1920)]. However, the quotations are carefully lifted out of context or else
blatantly misquoted. …
“His initial point is that
it is absurd to say that Jews have only been oppressed and have never been the
oppressor. His main argument about Jews being the oppressor is the consequences
of usury in the Middle Ages. It is an issue no one ever wants to discuss. In
fact, no one ever dares to discuss the reason why Jews were historically
unpopular in Europe. The problem is epitomized by the literary discussions of
Shakespeare and Shylock that never mention the word "usury."
Chesterton insists that Shylock is not disliked because he is a Jew but because
he is a usurer.
“Chesterton is frank in his
criticism of wealthy international banking firms run by Jewish families that
have a huge influence on European political and commercial affairs in his own
day. But again, his attack on them is not that they are Jewish but that they
are too rich and too powerful and make for an unjust world. Chesterton is
always a defender of the poor and always a gadfly of the rich. The chief
character in the New Testament was much the same way.
“But the real "Jewish
Problem" as Chesterton calls it, is that the Jews were a people in exile,
a people without a homeland. Patriotism is a natural virtue, always praised by
Chesterton, but the Jew's patriotism is for a land that he has lost and not for
the land in which he is an exile, no matter how well his host country treats
him. It is important to note that he is talking about the Jew in Europe, not
the Jew in America, where we are an entire nation of exiles, who have a loyalty
to this country that is always mixed with a loyalty to our ethnic heritage and
national origin. It was not that way in Europe, where a nation was a more
organic thing, and the Jew, through no fault of his own, was always an
outsider. …
“As with all of Chesterton's
writings, The New Jerusalem has a
prophetic quality. But certainly the most chilling prophecy is Chesterton's
warning that unless England (and Europe) admits that there is a "Jewish
Problem" rather than denying it or ignoring it, there could be a violent outbreak
against the Jews.”
Why would anyone want “to
discredit Chesterton altogether”? Well, he’s dangerous. Look at what his pen
skewers successfully and rebuts persuasively with great joy and hilarity:
feminism, the free market, capitalism, statism, socialism, contraception,
Calvinism, Protestantism, scientism, big business and big government,
militarism, and everything else that is not Catholic. If you are more enamored
with Planned Parenthood, the American Enterprise Institute, the Democratic or
Republican Party, the National Organization for Women, the Global War on
Terror, or anything else, than with the Truth and His Church, then Chesterton’s
pen, his thought, and his aphorisms are a great threat. All the more so because
Chesterton was a convert who defended the Church for years before he entered
it. He was persuaded by the Truth, and has been persuading others for more than
a century. Ahlquist, too, is a convert, drawn into the Church by Chesterton.
Ahlquist, the publisher of
(and a regular contributor to) Gilbert Magazine,
is proselytizing for Chesterton, for common sense, and for Catholicism. He does
it well. I recommend these books highly. Even
those intimately familiar with Chesterton’s writing should be impressed by Common
Sense 101. If it doesn’t whet the appetite for Chesterton among those
otherwise unfamiliar with his writings, nothing is likely to. The Apostle of
Common Sense, though, presents a hidden danger. Its introductions to
Chesterton’s books could induce readers to bypass those books, thinking
Ahlquist’s presentation so good that they need not read the books themselves.
Dale’s Notes would substitute for reading Chesterton. That would be a shame:
the aim of Common Sense 101 and The Apostle of Common Sense is to
encourage a world that neglects Chesterton to read him anew, and, hopefully, to
rediscover common sense.
This review was
published in the October 2006 issue of Culture
Wars.
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Impossible Possibilities by James G. Bruen, Jr. These five brief interlocking stories of people who accomplish the proverbially impossible were published originally in the American Chesterton Society’s Gilbert Magazine. Each story stands alone, but together they also constitute a single narrative, Impossible Possibilities. Whimsical yet serious, Impossible Possibilities is a story of family, rootedness, and struggle against big business and government. Impossibile Possibilities was inspired by G. K. Chesterton’s Tales of the Long Bow. $2.99. Read Reviews e-book for Kindle
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