G. K. Chesterton Rides Again

G. K. Chesterton 1874 - 1936, English Author With His Wife Frances Blogg, 1941
(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Chains, Change and Chesterton by Joseph Pearce

I recognize G.K. Chesterton as a guide who led me from the doldrums of disbelief into the glorious light of the Gospel. Unbeknownst to me, the gloom in my prison cell was the gloaming of a new day in which the Son would rise, Easter-like, in my soul. The debt I owe to him is unpayable.

I don't much care for stories of faith, but this one is surprisingly good.

Chesterton has appeared here several times before.

Marcel and Chesterton

Alekandr Vesnin’s sets for a stage adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday.*

Together again. A fine and timely post on Monday Evening. If you follow the links and read a bit you will encounter this line:

And it is a groove; perhaps there was never anything so groovy.

Are you kidding me? Groovy? A thousand years before Simon and Garfunkel's hit?

* Because I needed a picture for this post, and I wanted something besides a picture of Chesterton (that's Chester-ton, not Chester-son, which is what I have been calling him since forever). And because this is like the Nth time I have heard this book mentioned in the last couple of weeks. Probably have to read it now. Picture found on The Charnel-House.

Life among family

by Marcel "Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone's lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense." This quote has been attributed to Phil Robertson. Rick Warren seems to have said it earlier, but I haven't found an authoritative source. Anyway, these are two lies that could only have broadly taken hold among people without much family. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. G.K. Chesterton,Heretics, 1905

Stolen entire from Monday Evening. Phil Robertson might be the Duck Dynasty star in the center of the recent media brouhaha. Might not. I have no idea who Rick Warren is. I've heard of G.K. Chesterton many times. It's only since Marcel has started quoting him that I've actually read anything he wrote. I had no idea Duck Dynasty was such a popular show. Number one in the world or some such. Never seen it.

Belief in God

G. K. Chesterton - Daniel Adel

From G. K. Chesterton's autobiography: 

A man of that impossible sort, of finer spiritual culture and, therefore, of less fame or success, was Johnston Stephen, who was, I am proud to say, my friend…. He once made to me the very sensible remark, “The only little difficulty that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it.” And I remember that he was grimly gratified when I told him, at a later stage of my own beliefs, that real Catholics are intelligent enough to have this difficulty; and that St. Thomas Aquinas practically begins his whole argument by saying, “Is there a God? Apparently not.” But, I added, it was my experience that entering into the system even socially brought an ever-increasing certitude upon the original question. For the rest, while a fierily patriotic Scotsman, he had too much of such sympathy to be popular with many Scots. I remember when he was asked whether the Church was not corrupt and crying out for the Reformation, he answered with disconcerting warmth, “Who can doubt it? How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin Luther.”

Via Yard Sale of the Mind

 

Quote of the Day

The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Found on a Reddit post about The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. - G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

The more nonsensical our political conflicts become, the more I wonder about who we are. Society has been evolving for ten's of thousands of years (I could have used 'millennia', but for some reason 'tens of thousands of years' sounds better).  Most of what underpins our rules of behavior has been taken for granted for so long that we know longer know why we do what we do. Well, I don't anyway. I never thought fairy tales were harmful, but I never knew why felt that way, and I suspect most people don't either.

P.S. Could it be that the copyright on Peter Rabbit has expired? I think it must have.

P.P.S. St. George has appeared in these pages before.

 

Children's Stories

The Lion and the Puppy by Leo Tolstoy

A couple of day's ago IAman left a comment with this cryptic phrase: 

Как поговорить с кошкой, не обидев ее Толстой

which Google translates to:

How to talk to a cat without offending her Tolstoy

Google that and I find that the Los Angeles Review of Books has something to say:

THE RUSSIAN NOVELIST Leo Tolstoy, also a gentleman farmer, operated an ancestral estate called Yasnaya Polyana that included a small school for the children of the peasants who labored there. Tolstoy was known to drop by from time to time and share stories that he wrote himself, which, in his typical modesty, he predicted would be read by “thousands, even millions.”

In 1988, the children’s novelist and Russia expert James Riordan translated several of these for a collection called The Lion and the Puppy: And Other Stories for Children, published first by Henry Holt and Company. The cover has a nice picture of a lion and a puppy; the illustrations by Claus Sievert are lovely throughout. My children fell in love with that picture, and they wanted me to read them the book. My first thought was: Children’s stories by the author of the inspirational The Death of Ivan Ilyich? But pestilence has closed the schools and home reading was important. Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.

The first story turned out to be the only one we endured together. It’s about a hungry lion in the zoo, whose keepers comb the streets for stray cats and dogs to feed him. Tolstoy recounts the lion coming for a puppy that got lost by its master: “Poor little dog. Tail between its legs, it squeezed itself into the corner of the cage as the lion came closer and closer.”

The lion decides not to eat this puppy, and they become friends. Until we get to page two, when the puppy, now a year old, suddenly sickens and dies. So what does the lion do? “[H]e put his paws about his cold little friend and lay grieving for a full five days. And on the sixth day the lion died.” The end.

Today Borepatch is suffering from a gloomy outlook and quotes Hilaire Belloc. Who the heck is Hilaire Belloc, you might ask? I know I did. Once again Wikipedia provides:

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870 – 1953) was a British-French writer and historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. . . .

His writings encompassed religious poetry and comic verse for children. His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death". . . .

He also collaborated with G. K. Chesterton on a number of works.

Hoo boy. What a cheerful bunch.

WikiIslam

Stewart Dean left an interesting comment on one of Comrade Misfit's posts, so I followed the links to his page. He seems to be a thoughtful, intelligent person. I'm reading one of his pages and I find this phrase:

Lesser Jihad (forgetting the Greater)..

which intrigues me because I still can't understand how crazy can be contagious. The phrase links to a page about Jihad on WikiIslam (which had to exist because Internet).
    Recently I've been hearing stuff that implies a Jihad can be just about any kind of quest or project and does not exclusively mean holy war. However, from reading this page it sounds to me like the only real definition of Jihad is holy war, and those people who are claiming other meanings for Jihad are heretics. Well, they'd be heretics if they were Christians. I imagine Musslemen have their own word for it. Maybe the heretics will prevail and force a change of meaning on the word, but right now it's kind of suspect.

P.S. The best endorsement for WikiIslam is that is has been blacklisted by the Saudis.
P.P.S. Yes, I know history is full of examples of the crazy contagion. Germany and Japan during WWII are my prime examples today. I still cannot understand how it can happen. Marcel quoted G.K.Chesterton the other day. He makes for some interesting reading.

Distributism

David Warren is down on liberals, as he usually is. But he declares himself a Distributist, which is what exactly? Google knows:

Distributism is an economic and social philosophy advocating that the means of production should be widely owned by individuals and families rather than centralized in the hands of the state (socialism) or mega-corporations (capitalism).

First articulated in the early 20th century by Catholic thinkers like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, it acts as a "third way" that champions widespread private property, decentralized communities, and family-owned enterprises.

Oh, How Wonderful The Media

JMSmith on the media:

The Longest, Strongest Hurricane of Lies

“It is a rather serious thing that an ordinary intelligent human being should have to rely on everything else except the public press for his information about public affairs.”

G.K. Chesterton, “A Parenthesis on Minorities” (1926)*

We must at the best of times make do with a diet of very dubious information, what with the fatuous wheedling and whining of our neighbors and relations, the insouciant dishonesty of hired mouthpieces of rapacious commercial interests, the slick mendacity of politicians who propose, with well justified confidence, to remain in office by bamboozling their voters. And to this unwholesome stew we must add the spurious meat that is manufactured for a price by the Ministry of Truth that we call our media. It appears to be the creed of this perfidious rabble that he who blows,

“The longest, strongest hurricane of lies,
May have the highest seat in Paradise.”**

And this, as I said, is the character of the chefs who furnish our food for thought in the best of times. These rascals really get down to business in times of war. This is because they are, for the most part. meretricious salesmen who work on commission. As the great historian Harry Elmer Barnes long ago explained, to no effect whatever:

“If we can but understand how totally and terribly we were ‘taken in’ between 1914 and 1918 by the salesmen of this most holy and idealistic world conflict, we shall be the better prepared to be on our guard against the seductive lies and deceptions which will be put forward by similar groups when urging the necessity of another world catastrophe in order to ‘protect the weak nations,’ ‘crush militarism,’ ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ ‘put an end to all further wars,’ etc.”***

But very few ever understood how totally and terribly they were taken in and many of these inquiring minds soon forgot it. So, when it became desirable to market the next “most holy and idealistic world conflict,” the salesmen were not taxed with fabrication of new “seductive lies and deceptions.” They just once again stirred up the yokels with the old story that a damsel (a “weak nation”) was being distressed by a dragon (“militarism”), and that, upon the death of this one last dragon, the damsel and all yokels would live happily ever after.

Continue here

Changing Weather

Castles in the Clouds, weather division: In today’s weather forecast, the computer-generated model shows a giant storm off Japan – shaped like Japan.

Storm map from Yard Sale of the Mind who also has some comments on G. K. Chesterton's brother Cecil (G. K. had a brother? Who knew?) and change.

War

The eight phases of the Song of Roland in one picture; illustration by Simon Marmion from an illuminated manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France (15th century), currently preserved in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness by David Warren.

The task of war

One does well to examine the Song of Roland (the French, XIth century, chanson de geste) before jumping to conclusions about war. I particularly recommend Scott Moncrieff’s translation (1919), which had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton that has been anthologized elsewhere. He neither glorifies nor condemns war, and actually, neither did Roland in the “splendidly inconclusive conclusion.” War contains both good and evil characters and events, and is never finished in this world. Any final victory must wait patiently on God. So long as there are insane barbarians (the present regime in Iran offers an unambiguous example) they will have to be fought. It is inappropriate to “make peace” with such a vicious and deceitful enemy. And when there is fighting, there are casualties. The Lord — and Christ is not a milquetoast — does not require us to omit this task, and did not condemn it in His Bible. Those who fight for the right, deserve honour; those who insist on “peace, peace” regardless of circumstances are cowards who deserve contempt.

It is sad that there are people, even Catholics, who don’t understand this.

Probably should go read the Song of Roland (translation by Jesse Crosland), but I probably won't because it is 78 pages long.