I was in the middle of G. K. Chesterton’s essay “The Book of Job” when I began to get something of why so many admire his work. It seems fitting that it would be Chesterton’s reflections on this mighty and paradoxical text that would tip me off to the strengths of a writer who specializes in paradox. It long seemed to me that at his worst, Chesterton is a nostalgist for a simpler and more unified time that never really was. In fact, I still believe that at his worst he is a nostalgist for a simpler and more unified time that never really was. For example, in the aforementioned essay Chesterton laments the loss of a quasi-Edenic past: “But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war”–as if such complexity were not preferable to a unity that I doubt ever really existed. Before he fell more or less out of sight, the comedian Dennis Miller commented that the last time a society was pretty much on the same page was Nazi Germany, not a particularly strong advertisement for cultural unity. One can of course find a certain degree of cultural unity in certain ancient texts–Chesterton’s example is the Iliad–but one does an intellectual disservice to read the Iliad simply as a simple report of the way things were rather than as a more complex text (remember that the opening note is Achilles’ raging dissent) with its own complex relation to its world.
But the passage that first really seized my attention in the Job essay is one worthy of Harold Bloom: “The central idea of the great part of the Old Testament may be called the idea of the loneliness of God. God is not only the chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old Testament.” I suspect that Bloom might agree with me that there are plenty of other strong characters in the Hebrew Testament–Jacob, for example, who tricks his brother out of his birthright, wrestles an angel, and has twelve sons one of whom is Joseph, another of the scripture’s strong characters, the central figure in the long narrative that finishes up the book of Genesis. But Bloom also talks about Yahweh as a great character of Hebrew scripture, and what is striking about Chesterton’s comment is his recognition that God is actually a character in the most complex of senses in this most complex series of texts. Chesterton, as a devout Catholic of his age (he converted in 1922), might have been expected to read the scriptural texts not as texts making extravagant use of familiar literary devices, but rather as the somehow unmediated word of God; however, such a stereotype of what it meant to be a devout Catholic in his age–like many another stereotype–will not withstand scrutiny. Catholic scholars might have been a bit slow to take up the higher criticism of the Bible coming out of Germany in the nineteenth century, but many Catholic scholars and journalists (Chesterton was the latter) were quite capable of complex thought. It was after all Chesterton who, in response to clergymen who “have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about religion,” wrote the following: “The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity” (“Thoughtful Jokes,” G. K. Chesterton: Essential Writings, Orbis Books, 2003, 93). I’d say this passage is pretty much Chesterton at his best.
But he was of course not always at his best. As Gilbert Adair wrote, in considering the multiple manifestations of Chesterton, “There was the Chesterton who employed paradoxes (the feeblest of which were little more than platitudes performing handstands, while the best were as brilliant as Wilde’s)” (Foreword, The Club of Queer Trades, Modern Voices, 2007). As Adair also points out, there was also the Chesterton who was, “alas, anti-Semite.” This latter manifestation of Chesterton is one that often receives only passing treatment, and one that at times gives rise to defenses that sound unmistakably like special pleading, and it’s really a fault of Chesterton’s that anyone who reads him should be able to face. Certainly, in his recent book G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), Stephen R. L. Clark addresses Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, though in my opinion he soft-pedals the issue a bit. Perhaps I shall write a blog devoted to the issue, for I feel that it calls for greater development than I have the time and space for at the moment.
For now I shall end by emphasizing two points that I found quite compelling in Clark’s study. One is Clark’s statement that Chesterton’s “constant themes were, on the one hand, that things don’t have to be the way they are and that other ways of living are imaginable and, on the other hand, that common humanity was–with all its failings–admirable.” The other compelling point in Clark’s study, and one related to the first, is his explanation of Chesterton’s economic philosophy of distributism. As the Wikipedia entry on this philosophy indicates, it is based in large part on such Catholic social justice encyclicals as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and it advocates–as its name implies–the distribution of property among the populace, thus allowing more smaller units of labor to be in somewhat greater control of their economic lives. As Clark explains, Chesterton “did not propose that the state should legislate against the buildup of an honest fortune: it is, after all, implicit in the notion of ‘property’ that people may lawfully and justly magnify and adorn it. His point was rather that the state should stop intervening to protect the interests of a few capitalists. If big businessmen and usurers, he thought, did not control the state, then ordinary property owners and craftsmen could secure their living.” These ideas are perhaps more progressive than one might expect from Chesterton, but he remains, after all, a figure capable of providing some delightful surprises. I am beginning to find in his writings a vision of the possibilities open for the future of something like a common humanity, possibilities that shine even through Chesterton’s own blind spots.