[Chesterton] was content to have Frances manage his life.... His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view.But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character.
It's mostly anti-Semitism, although anyone who has ever seen a picture of GKC might have thought of gluttony. In his defense, GKC lived before the depths of anti-Semitism were exposed; and the introductory version he bought on to is a form that masks a valid complaint that is severable from the Jews. "He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe" is often described as a predecessor to the view that "loyalty to internationally-financed corporations undermines loyalty to one's own nation." You don't need any Jews to be involved to worry, for example, that Apple's or Nike's commitments to Communist China have worrying effects on our political culture here at home. You only even need 'the Chinese' accidentally; it could be any authoritarian nation with communistic values.
The reviewer continues:
I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended.
That last is certainly true, at least among the living. The Church believes in a metaphysical self, though, in which Chesterton himself is still a member -- and, hopefully, still praying for his beloved Ecclesia.
6 comments:
Chesterton's popularity is largely outside of England. One of the objections to his promotion to sainthood was, in fact, the absence of a local cult devoted to him. It is the CS Lewis phenomenon squared, whether because it has been going on for 30 years longer, or because his Catholicism is seen as one step more irritating than Lewis's serious C of E.
The pearl-clutching horror at GKC's mild anti=semitism will fade - not for the proper reason that it will be understood in context, but for the darker reason that anti-semitism is becoming more fashionable every year and will no longer be regarded as a problem in 50 years.
I first read Chesterton because someone suggested The Ballad of the White Horse to me, and for years afterwards it was my very favorite book. It really is a good poem, because across wide swathes of life a section will occur to you as you are working through the issues. Few books are as relevant. (And the parts that annoyed me at first, the boring Christian parts that weren't good war poetry, became more and more crucial as I grew older and in understanding.)
So then I read his apologetics, which are astonishingly good. "The Ethics of Elfland" and "The Flag of the World" are better things than most anyone has ever written. Every student should read them, regardless of their religious beliefs, just as a way of grasping what is wonderful about the world and avoiding the despair so central to modern life.
For these things alone, I would be inclined to forgive a great deal of wrongdoing -- especially since 'being a sinner' is merely Orthodox, as Chesterton himself would say. Of course he was a sinner. He'd have said so himself, if you'd had him over to ask.
I hope that you are not right about rising anti-Semitism. I hope that the shift towards Israel in much of the Islamic world will prove lasting; perhaps it will not. For now, at least, the Saudis and many others need the Jews, and this will tend to drain some of the religious animosity. Here in the West I almost would describe it as an internal problem to Judaism: the biggest enemies of the Orthodox are not people who can't tell one sect of Jews from another, but the anti-Jews who are Jewish but hate their heritage. It's a kind of mirror of how the worst anti-Americans are in fact mostly Americans, who've been taught to hate their heritage and therefore the blood in their own bones.
Unfortunately, most of the left, especially its more extreme and politically dominant members, is dogmatically anti-semitic. Their views are becoming common throughout the West, and Jews will be in for another hard time in coming generations.
As to Chesterton, I don't like his novels, but I greatly admire his Catholic apologia. His anti-semitism, like Eliot's, is real enough, but it is also unconscious, and only really visible to people actively looking for it. Moreover, it only shows up in scattered places.
....internal problem to Judaism: the biggest enemies of the Orthodox are not people who can't tell one sect of Jews from another, but the anti-Jews who are Jewish but hate their heritage.....
Would that it be so clear and simple!
Many of those 'anti-Jews' also hate America, perhaps because America's heritage includes the Ten Commandments. Some clearly despise any sort of morality, the necessity of property rights (properly understood), ...
And let's not let the Orthodox off too easily. Scratch hard enough and you'll find anti-Christian/anti-Catholic views which are shocking in their intensity.
As with the Muslims, there are plenty who are just decent people.
As to GKC: what's "anti-Semitic" about describing practices which are immoral or at least questionable? Is it racist to say that the black community has a murder problem?
The Left in the US has become quite anti-Semitic...several factors, I think: (1) devotion to the 'Palestinean Cause' spills over into a broader hostility toward Jews, (2) minorities resenting a generally-more-successful minority (this also applies in the case of Asians), (3) hostility toward finance seems to always and everywhere link itself to hostility toward Jews...there are probably a lot of people who think JPM CEO Jamie Dimon (who has Greek ancestry) is Jewish!...maybe even Brian Moynihan of Bank of America!
I also detect an increased trend of anti-Semitism in parts of the Right, driven I think by (a) that same hostility toward finance, (b) resentment that so many Jews support Leftist positions, particularly with regard to immigration, and (c) a sense that Jews are linked to cultural aspects of the modern world that they (the rightists in question) don't much like.
Almost none of this has anything to do with the old-fashioned religion-based hostility toward Jews.
"The Ethics of Elfland"
This is an interesting chapter. I've also read one or two of the father brown mysteries.
It's interesting, because Chesterton, like CS Lewis, is closer to the "radial-category" center of conservatism. They are conservatives. And I, apparently, am not. I'm something else. (Practically, politically, I'm very anti-left and I'm very loyal to the conservatives among my extended friends and family. More broadly, I'm sympathetic to their world.) However there is a fundamental philosophical and temperamental gulf down there that Chesterton seems to be exposing here and elsewhere.
Reading L. Neil Smith recently reminds me that I'm also not quite a Libertarian either. At least not anymore.
Guess I'll just have to continue being a martian. :-/
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