- Question:
- Mario in Croatia says what do you think about another big British Giant in the literary scene GK Chesteron and his work?
- Response:
- Oh yes I haven't read everything of Chesterton's but obviously great novelist and very funny and and quirky um and his his great book the Everlasting man and other things like that were attempts 100 or so years ago um to explore the world in ways that at the end of the 19th and early 20th century people just weren't doing obviously he comes from a very traditional Roman Catholic um perspective um and and was was kind of exuberant in his delight at being able to to say the opposite of what everyone was expecting and I think sometimes he overdid that and it was just his personality I'm not an expert on him but I've I have always enjoyed reading him ...*
Now, did Chesterton enjoy saying what everyone was NOT expecting him to say?
Certainly.
Did he twist things so as to be able to do that?
Certainly not.
Did he open enquiries that others were not engaging in?
Definitely. The Lewis trilemma is kind of a repeat of what he had already said in The Everlasting Man.
Now, he's not adressing at this point those who deny the Gospels and therefore deny Jesus claimed to be God. He's adressing a very specific ecumenic nonsense.
Well, looking up, Chesterton actually did adress that too:
This quality of something that can only be called subtle and superior, something that is capable of long views and even of double meanings, is not noted here merely as a counterblast to the commonplace exaggerations of amiability and mild idealism. It is also to be noted in connection with the more tremendous truth touched upon at the end of the last chapter. For this is the very last character that commonly goes with mere megalomania; especially such steep and staggering megalomania as might be involved in that claim. This quality that can only be called intellectual distinction is not, of course, an evidence of divinity. But it is an evidence of a probable distaste for vulgar and vainglorious claims to divinity. A man of that sort, if he were only a man, would be the last man in the world to suffer from that intoxication by one notion from nowhere in particular, which is the mark of the self-deluding sensationalist in religion. Nor is it even avoided by denying that Christ did make this claim. Of no such man as that, of no other prophet or philosopher of the same intellectual order, would it be even possible to pretend that he had made it. Even if the Church had mistaken his meaning, it would still be true that no other historical tradition except the Church had ever even made the same mistake. Mahomedans did not misunderstand Mahomet and suppose he was Allah. Jews did not misinterpret Moses and identify him with Jehovah. Why was this claim alone exaggerated unless this alone was made. Even if Christianity was one vast universal blunder, it is still a blunder as solitary as the Incarnation.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Bramah. Zoroaster no more claimed to be Ormuz than to be Ahriman. The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy. It is exactly the other way. Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside the unique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. But what is much more important than their mere materialistic fate in our very materialistic society, under very crude and clumsy laws about lunacy, the type we know as tinged with this, or tending towards it, is a diseased and disproportionate type; narrow yet swollen and morbid to monstrosity. It is by rather an unlucky metaphor that we talk of a madman as cracked; for in a sense he is not cracked enough. He is cramped rather than cracked; there are not enough holes in his head to ventilate it. This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that. Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.**
This reasoning has most been attributed to C. S. Lewis, and then popularised in the form known often as "the Lewis trilemma" which has been summarised as "Liar, Lunatic or Lord."
Note what he thinks of those who would give Christianity and Islam a kind of peaceful coexistence, not just in society, that's a different story, there may be reasons for that, but in the minds of believers or unbelievers.
The purpose of these pages is to fix the falsity of certain vague and vulgar assumptions; and we have here one of the most false. There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false.
And yes, it's false whether you make it mean Mohammed thought he was Allah or whether you make it mean Jesus didn't think He was God, and most specially whether you make it mean that being a prophet is one of those things which are generally beneficial and so beneficial that it doesn't matter whether you make a claim to being God or not.
Did Krishna claim to be God or Brahman in any sense? Well there are lines in Bhagavadgita which lend themselves to such a reading.
However, given he died 3102 BC and that the first even lost manuscript of Mahabharata (of which the Gita is an extract or expanded extract) is probably from 400 BC*** or later, there is plenty of room for changing religions among those remembering him to have changed his place in religion and therefore to have attributed to him things he didn't say at all. Or just didn't mean that way. Imagine some of the verses in Bhagavadgita prefaced with "thus saith the Lord" and the reading becomes different. However, I'm not saying Bhagavadgita would be theologically correct
even read that way. I can't say for certain, I haven't read it, I can only say that read in the usual way, it is to us Catholics paganism and condemned.
Now, do I claim to be God? Not the least. But some will pretend I do, simply because, like Chesterton, I ... let's quote Tom (Nicholas Thomas) Wright ... I take
delight at being able to to say the opposite of what everyone was expecting.
Probably Mr Wright (whom as a Traditional Catholic I do not consider a real Bishop) will say I overdo it too. His right.
It's my right to disagree with Wright on Chesterton. And I think Mario from Croatia does so too. It's also my right to not be held accountable for blasphemous claims just because I have the kind of cultural attitude Chesterton had.
Now,
"obviously he comes from a very traditional Roman Catholic um perspective" ... is a bit funny to anyone who knows his biography. He was not a cradle Catholic. He was born in the kind of Liberal (English sense°) family that would be prone to pull off a list of religion founders like Jesus, Buddha, Mahomet (or Mohammed) ... and that's the kind of family he ultimately opposed by becoming Catholic.
He also didn't get to Catholicism in his teens, like I did over reading him and Tolkien, both of whom I ultimately favoured over C. S. Lewis when disagreeing,
all of whom I valued not just as fiction writers, but as essay writers. In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, I went to England and learned that English has sixteen tenses, unlike other Germanic languages that have eight.°° I also bought so many essay collections by C. S. Lewis that my suitcase was overloaded, both for its closure and for my muscles. But before twelfth grade, I had started to read some Chesterton essays borrowed from the library. And decided to become Catholic.
In his own case, he converted to Christianity (after being into witchcraft for a while) at adult age, for love. He converted to a version of Anglicanism probably more Catholic leaning than either C. S. Lewis or N. T. Wright. But as yet, like his dear wife, not yet to the Catholic Church. When his parish decided they could have a statue of Mary, but without the Christ Child, he came to very swiftly prefer the Roman Catholic Church, where you can have both.
He had already started out as a writer when converting. Now, Everlasting Man, which I quoted, is from 1925, three years after he converted. But his career as a novelist was mainly before his conversion, as some other well noted books:
The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a novel written by G. K. Chesterton in 1904, set in a nearly unchanged London in 1984.°°°
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a 1908 novel by G. K. Chesterton.°°°
Orthodoxy is a 1908 book by G. K. Chesterton which he described as a "spiritual autobiography". It has become a classic of Christian apologetics.°°°
The Ballad of the White Horse is a poem by G. K. Chesterton about the idealised exploits of the Saxon King Alfred the Great, published in 1911.°°°
Manalive (1912) is a book by G. K. Chesterton detailing a popular theme both in his own philosophy, and in Christianity, of the "holy fool", such as in Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Cervantes' Don Quixote.°°°
The Flying Inn is a 1914 novel by English writer G. K. Chesterton. It is set in a future England where the temperance movement has allowed a bizarre form of Progressive Islam to dominate the political and social life of the country.°°°
So he was not writing these from a "traditional Catholic" perspective per se. He was writing them in the same Communion as N. T. Wright or C. S. Lewis, that is in the Church of England. He was, per se, writing them from the perspective of a Catholic leaning Anglican.
But how very Catholic leaning he was is of course illustrated by the fact that Tom Wright takes him as having written them from a "traditional Catholic" perspective.
Now, here is another example. He began The Return of Don Quixote as an Anglican and completed it as a Catholic.~
The really funny thing about Tom Wright speaking on "traditional Catholic" is, the phrase has come to mean, to many, the fact of opposing some who are taken as Popes, because said people, whether the one opposing takes them as Popes or not, doesn't find them sufficiently Catholic. Chesterton had no intention whatsoever of opposing the magisterium back in his time, which means that his agreements with this movement actually do argue that traditional Catholics are right in finding a discrepancy between Catholicism in 1992 (as presented and represented by Karol Józef Wojtyła and associates) and Catholicism in 1922 (when Chesterton converted, under the undoubted Pope Pius XI).
Now one discrepancy, to the origin of Adam, not just body, but also soul, not just soul, but even body, Chesterton was a creationist. Obviously, this faces the problem of a quote in Orthodoxy:
“Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.” The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy~~
But Orthodoxy is 1908, while he was a Protestant. While a Catholic ... three years in, as noted on Everlasting Man, he said this:
Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.~~~
This is the exact same point that Young Earth Creationists like to repeat on the concept of Historical Science. It doesn't provide positive total certitude for a scenario about the past, at the utmost excludes loads of scenarios.
As a Catholic convert in 1988, age 20, I felt very fine with being Young Earth Creationist. As a Chestertonian too.
I'm skipping over mostly the times from early nineties to c. 1995 or so, at the latest 1998 or 1999, when I took some kind of Old Earth scenario, but a very limited one. No 4.5 billion years, but about as much extra time as to fit in the Silmarillion ... or Egyptian and Babylonian paganism. Not meaning I believed the Silmarillion literally was an account of these "longer than Biblical" and yet not all that long ages, but it served as an example of what it could have been. I returned on reading St. Augustine City of God, in 1999.
In 2001, I got a challenge. The distant starlight paradox. If certain celestial objects way further than Sirius or than α, β, γ Andromedae are at a distance of more light years than Christian Biblical chronology has years, and believe me, they are very obscure finds, I couldn't find a named one on wikipedia, apart from "other galaxies" (formerly known as spiral nebulae), most famous being Andromeda galaxy, which is sth else than Andromeda the constellation, if they are further away than speed of light would allow to reach within Biblical chronology, what does that do to Biblical chronology?
I tried to argue and still hold, the parallax gives "a very slim triangle" as Hovind would have and did say back then. To α Centauri, the distance of 4 light years is "measured" by trigonometry of an angle of 0.76 arc seconds. One arc second = the angle at the centre of earth between two points at the Equator, distant of 31 meters.# The parallax to α Centauri, an even smaller triangle.
However, my challenger gave an example citing a Nova which had exploded and the size of the ring, with its spread which would have (on his view) have spread outward in light speed before being reflected to shine towards us.
Part of the answer I gave is, angels performed the thing, as elaborate fireworks.
But I gave more. I attacked the beginning of the cosmic distance ladder## by stating, if angels are moving the stars, then the "parallax" need be no such thing, and the side of the triangle of length 2AU need not be at all in the triangle earth, star position 1, star position 2, unlike what it would have been if the triangle had been "star, earth position 1, earth position 2." ###
This means, this problem is solved by Geocentrism. And Geocentrism is possible if God is moving the whole shebang each day and angels moving the individual bodies within that.
Dear St. Bartholomew, thank you for 25 years of Geocentrism!
It was on 24 Aug 2001 that I gave the answer, 25 years ago. (The diagram in the footnote is later).
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Bartholomew
24.VIII.2026
Sancti Bartholomaei Apostoli, qui Christi Evangdlium in India praedicavit; inde in majorem Armeniam profectus, ibi, cum plurimos ad fidem convertisset, vivus a barbaris decoriatus est, atque, Astyagis Regis jussu, capitis decollatione martyrium complevit. Ipsius sacrum corpus, primo ad Liparam insulam, deinde Beneventum, postremo Romam ad Tiberinam translatiun insulam, ibi pia fidelium veneratione honoratur.
* Source:
Tom Wright Q&A answering personal questions about his own faith, his favourite preachers, and books!
Premier Unbelievable? | 7 July 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jef5uKjj3Jk
** Source:
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
PART II. — ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST [chapter] III. — THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100311h.html
*** Source:
Man nimmt an, dass es erstmals zwischen 400 v. Chr. und 400 n. Chr. niedergeschrieben wurde, aber auf älteren Traditionen beruht.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata
° Gladstone, not Kamala Harris
°° They are not equally useful. "I would have been going" (past future perfect continuous) is not as useful as (past) "I went" ...
°°° Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Napoleon_of_Notting_Hill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Thursday
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_White_Horse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manalive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Inn
~Source for this and some detail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Don_Quixote
~~Source:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7405654-evolution-is-a-good-example-of-that-modern-intelligence-which
~~~Source:
The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton (ut supra)
Part I. On The Creature Called Man [chapter] II. — PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN
# 40 000 km / 360 = 111.1111111111111111 km
111.1111111111111111 km / 60 / 60 = 0.0308641975308641975 km = 30.8641975308641975 m
## See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
and for a fun reflection on it:
Have you heard the expression "von Neumann chain"?
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2022/08/have-you-heard-expression-von-neumann.html
### Illustration:
Geo vs Helio
hglwrites | May 29, 2012
https://hglwrites.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/geo-vs-helio/
