Ralph McInerny
University of Notre Dame
This paper was given on November 11, 2002, for the Center for Ethics & Culture's lecture series G.K. Chesterton Returns to Notre Dame.
It takes a lot of gall to talk on Chesterton, and my gall is divided
into three parts. First, after some general remarks about the man, I will
recall GKC's visit to this campus nearly seventy years ago and what he
brought to Notre Dame. Second, I will try to evoke something of the ND
to which he came. Finally, I will indulge myself in speculation as to
what a visit by GKC to the ND of today might look like.
1. The Man Who Discovered America
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London on May 29, 1874 and died in
1936. He never attended a university – and had many other merits
as well. After what we might call prep school, when many of his friends
went off to Oxford he entered the Slade School of Art in London where
he observed that calling oneself an artist did not entail producing art.
It was the fin de siècle, the Gay Nineties, the era of the decadent.
Chesterton became an artist of a sort – but then, whatever he was,
it had always to be modified in this way. He was a journalist, a Christian
apologist, one of the theoretician's of the non-capitalist, non-socilaist
economic theory called Distributism, a novelist, a mystery writer, a renowned
debater, one of the first radio personalities, a poet, lecturer, a literary
critic. His artistic talent can be seen in the illustrations he made for
his friend Hilaire Belloc's novels. Being everything, Chesterton flirted
with the possibility that he was nothing, merely ephemeral -- much of
what he wrote appeared in newspapers and periodicals and seemed destined
to suffer the fate of that most fleeting of thing that we call News. And
yet he has survived. His collected works are appearing from Ignatius Press,
many of his titles have never gone out of print. Now he runs the greatest
risk of all – becoming a cult figure, the inspiration of what sometimes
seem almost fan clubs. Devotees collect Chesterton memorabilia. One enthusiast
showed me Chesterton's walking stick which he had acquired. There are
Chesterton clubs, Chesterton reviews and magazines. On the other hand,
he received an honorary degree from Notre Dame, about which more later.
Serious estimates of Chesterton range from Evelyn Waugh's extremely critical
review of The Man Who Was Thursday to Hilaire Belloc's laudatory
On The Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters. Chesterton
published a hundred books, more or less, and this does not include the
flood of journalism. He was so multi-faceted, that it is possible to think
of him only in terms of one of the things he did. For many, he is the
author of the Father Brown mysteries. For others he is the author of Heretics,
Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. For others he is
the author of the best book ever written on Charles Dickens. For a few,
he is an anti-semite. Distributism continues to be discussed. Some love
mainly his verse, comic and serious. All would agree that there is something
slapdash and hurried in almost everything he did. Most disarming and refreshing
of all, he seems not to have taken himself seriously.
Let me illustrate what I mean when I characterize his work as slapdash.
Having written a book on St. Francis, Chesterton was asked to write a
book on Thomas Aquinas. He agreed. The account of the writing of this
book found in Maisie Ward's 1943 biography of Chesterton is scarcely credible.
She tells us that Chesterton dictated half the book off the top of his
head and then asked his secretary to run up to London – this quintessentially
urban man had moved to the country – and bring back some books on
Aquinas. She did, he flipped through them, then dictated the rest of the
book. That is what I mean by slapdash. But there is more, his intuitive
genius. St. Thomas Aquinas, the book also known as The Dumb Ox,
has been fulsomely praised by the greatest Thomists of the 20th century,
not least among them Etienne Gilson. Gilson had devoted his life to the
study of St. Thomas and yet he said that he could never have written a
book as unerringly on the mark as Chesterton's. Chesterton did not have
Gilson's learning but he instinctively put his finger on the central theme
of Thomas's thought, the complementarity of faith and reason as this emerged
from the controversy over what was called Latin Averroism. In Chesterton's
case, in short, slapdashery usually went hand in hand with an unerring
sense of what is essential.
The Catholic view that the natural is a prelude to and the complement
of the supernatural was something Chesterton possessed long before he
became a Catholic. It can come as a surprise to learn that Orthodoxy
was written years before its author became a Catholic. Chesterton's
appreciation of the natural led to his celebration of the common man,
but that celebration was accompanied by a lively criticism of received
opinion. Throughout his career, Chesterton was the effective foe of what
was wrong with the world. Sometimes this was expressed in comic form.
If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have crowned Neaera's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
And my house with dancing girls! But Higgins is a Heathen
And to lecture-rooms is forced
Where his aunts who are not married
Demand to be divorced.
He was a tireless critic of capitalism, which he saw as an assault on
the common man. His era's fascination with evolution – not merely
as a scientific explanation of the diversity of species, but as a general
theory of man and society – earned Chesterton's jovial scorn. As
well as serious attention, for example, in The Everlasting Man.
He was an anti-imperialist. He wrote a history of England in which he
deplored what Henry VIII, Cromwell and Elizabeth had done to the Church
in England. The utilitarianism and ruthless capitalism that he saw as
the ultimate upshot of the historical postlude to the reformation in England
was a constant target of his ebullient and genial critcism. He shared
Cardinal Newman's contempt for liberalism.
Chesterton's style has received much attention. It figures in Belloc's
essay already mentioned; Hugh Kenner wrote his first book on paradox in
Chesterton, which he explained as a variation on analogy. If analogy stresses
the surprising similarities between seemingly disparate things, paradox
draws attention to overlooked contradictions and differences. His style
occasionally degenerated into cuteness, but there is scarcely a page of
Chesterton's that does not arrest and delight the mind. Belloc was right
to stress the clarity of Chesterton's style and reasoning.
It is risky to try to pull a central theme from this enormous output,
but I would suggest this. Chesterton's central gift was to rescue the
obvious from oblivion, to recall the forgotten in such a way that the
reader feels the aha! of recognition. The central metaphor of Orthodoxy
is of a man who sets sail in search of the new and strange and eventually
lands on a distant shore that turns out to be the island from which he
set out. To see the mysteriousness and romance of the everyday has become
difficult. Cultural encrustations distance us from what is right beneath
our nose. Much of Chesterton's writing was aimed at enabling us to see
what we have always known and somehow forgotten.
This poet's sense of the wonder of the world is already present in Chesterton's
boyhood notebooks. Orthodoxy runs the risk of seeming to make Christianity
merely an aspect of common sense. What Chesterton means is that we are
destined for the supernatural and there is in a sense a natural desire
for what is beyond our natural grasp.
The Notre Dame Visit
All subsequent accounts of Chesterton's visit here rely on the one found
in Maisie Ward's life of the author. The sheer size of the man left a
lasting impression. He weighed at least 300 pounds, was tall, and had
a rumpled scruffy look, wild hair, and innocent eyes that peered through
his pince nez glasses. Prohibition was the law of the land and was of
course ignored. Chesterton was a legendary drinker who, like his friend
Belloc, wrote poems in praise of wine. He mused that Americans have the
oddity of considering smoking and drinking as vices. For him they were
among the great blessings of mankind. He availed himself of these blessings,
not always wisely and sometimes too well.
Chesterton delivered 36 lectures in all at Notre Dame, on Victorian literature
and on great figures of the Victorian era. When he took the stage in Washington
Hall he had an average audience of 500, a significant percentage of the
student body. Tom Stritch, who was there, told me credit could be gained
from attending and fulfilling further requirements.
If we rely on The Victorian Age in Literature, we can get a sense
of Chesterton's approach to his topic. Sometimes critics turn to novels
and poetry as raw material to be elevated by their interpretation and
to achieve its final telos there. Chesterton assumes that we already know
and like the work he speaks of and his intention is to enhance our appreciation
of it. Criticism is at the service of the text, not vice versa. At the
outset of his Charles Dickens, Chesterton reflects on what is meant by
calling such an author great.
There are popular expressions which every one uses and no one can explain;
which the wise man will accept and reverence, as he reverences desire
or darkness or any elemental thing. The prigs of the debating club will
demand that he should define his terms. And, being a wise man, he will
flatly refuse. This first inexplicable term is the most important term
of all. The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute.
If a man falls back again and again on some such word as ‘vulgar'
or ‘manly,' do not suppose that the word means nothing because he
cannot say what it means. If he could say what it means he would say what
it means instead of saying the word.
‘Great' does mean something, and the test of its actuality is to
be found in how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men
and not to others; above all how instinctively and decisively we do apply
it to four or five men in the Victorian era, four or five men of whom
Dickens was not the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing.
Whatever the word ‘great' means, Dickens was what it means. Even
the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous
critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think.
They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
Not only do these paragraphs provide a sense of Chesterton's style, they
underscore his difference from our times when the Western Canon, the roll
call of great writers, has been dismissed as an ideological ploy meant
to enslave women or support capitalism or perpetuate a moribund tradition.
I refer you to Harold Bloom's melanchoy book, The Western Canon.
Chesterton speaks to those who have read Dickens and know that he is great
even though they cannot adequately say why.
This is a disarming approach but it is not the approach of a mere mindless
cheerleader, a fan. In much the same way, his readers know that Chesterton
is great even when they are made uneasy by what he says. A logical analysis
of the opening paragraphs of Chesterton's book on Dickens would yield
something other than paradox. For all that, we know that he and Dickens
are great. And this leads us on to try to understand why. The greatness
is the judgment we make as we read them. Criticism assumes this judgment
and seeks to support it.
Nevertheless, Chesterton would be in agreement with those who dismiss
the Western Canon because the authors who make it up write against a background
that is wider than works of the imagination. The most significant aspect
of that background is the religious, a view of what we are and why we
are. The Western Canon reflects the Christianity which provided the background,
one way or another, against which it was produced. Dante, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Chaucer, Milton, cannot be understood apart from the Christianity
they presume in their distinctive ways. I called Bloom's defense of the
Western Canon melancholy because, while recognizing this, he himself does
not share the great authors assumption that Christianity is true. This
has the result of making his defense merely aesthetic, personal, a preference.
And this in turn concedes his adversary' s claim that the Canon reposes
on the arbitrary.
Chesterton reads the great Victorians against the background of what he
calls the Victorian Compromise. Do not look for a crisp definition of
this. It emerges impressionistically from the pages that make up the first
chapter of The Victorian Age in Literature. In the immediate
background is the French Revolution – and in a smaller way, the
American – and the fact that they had no counterpart in England.
The revolution failed because it was foiled by another revolution; an
aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor. It was about
this time that the common lands were finally enclosed; that the more cruel
game laws were first established; that England became a land of landlords
instead of common land-owners. I will not call it a Tory reaction; for
much of the worst of it (especially of land-grabbing) was done by Whigs...
Now this fact, though political, is not only relevant but essential to
everything that concerned literature. (P. 18)
"The spirit of revolt in England took a wholly literary form."
Chesterton sees two things at work in the Victorian Age, one
conscious, the other unconscious, one theoretical, the other emerging
from practical experience. On the theoretical level was Utilitarianism
which however genial in Mill ended in the inhuman outlook of Malthus.
The myth of evolution sapped the sense of freedom, industrial capitalism
aimed at a prosperous nation but led to an impoverished populace. What
Chesterton sees underlying Victorian literature is the tension between
the dominant political and economic theories and the irrepressible truths
about ordinary human beings that constantly butt against those theories.
The theory was at first implicitly then overtly atheistic. The theory
ran counter to ordinary human wisdom about life and was also a slow but
sure denial of Christianity. However sadly this might be expressed, as
in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, it was assumed that the tide
of faith was receding and being replaced by a supposed rational approach
to life. If Christianity was the assumption of the literature of earlier
times, Victorian authors wrote in an ambience where unbelief was thought
to be mandatory.
Dickens] could create all the farce and tragedy of his age over again,
with creatures unborn to sin and creatures unborn to suffer. That which
had not been achieved by the fierce facts of Cobbett, the burning dreams
of Carlyle, the white-hot proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly
achieved by a crowd of impossible creatures. In the center stood that
citadel of atheist industrialism: and if indeed it has ever been taken,
it was taken by the rush of that unreal army. [89]
Perhaps this will suffice to give a sense of Chesterton's approach to
literature. He was ever a foe of the aesthetes he had encountered in is
art school days – though he wrote with great charity and understanding
of Oscar Wilde. But then he always found things to praise in those he
was about to condemn. Victorian literature occurs in an atmosphere where
on the theoretical plane the religious and moral in any tradition sense
were increasingly rejected. The myths of progress, of evolution, of Manchester
capitalism, of untrammeled freedom, on the one hand, and the vestigial
memory of the truth of the matter. Chesterton's critique of the 19th century
in which he had been born was very like Newman's whose life almost spanned
the century. This makes his reading of the Victorian greats almost unique;
it is personal without being idiosyncratic. Nonetheless. One can sympathize
with the publisher who placed at the head of the book this disclaimer.
The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an authoritative
history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of
views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made
by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.
2. The University That Received GKC
In 1930-1931 Chesterton came here to Notre Dame at the invitation of Father
Charles O'Donnell the poet president of the university. While here he
gave two series of lectures in Washington Hall, the one on the Victorian
period in English Literature the principal one. He had published The
Victorian Age in English Literature in 1913 and, although there are
several batches of notes taken on the Notre Dame lectures in the Archives,
the early book provides a sense of his approach to the subject.
It is an interesting fact about Notre Dame that some of the most distinguished
writers came here to lecture. William Butler Yeats was here on two occasions,
the second while Father O'Donnell was president. Robert Hugh Benson spoke
here as did F. Marion Crawfold, two writers you would do well to acquaint
yourself with. Henry James spoke here. And one could go on. Many of the
Laetare medalists of the last quarter of the 19th century were writers
and Ave Maria magazine was a publication of national importance. Maurice
Francis Egan was lured here by Father Sorin, and the house on the corner
of Notre Dame Avenue and Napoleon was built for him. He called it The
Lilacs. Egan left here for a similar professorship in literature at the
nascent Catholic University of America and ended as our ambassador to
Denmark for some dozen years. And of course Jacques Maritain was a freqent
visitor and was here for the opening of the Jacques Maritain Center in
1957.
That is the context of Chesterton's visit to Notre Dame. He was part of
a tradition of distinguished visitors, many of whom formed a lasting affection
for this place. Who has ever walked through the tunnel from the Morris
Inn to the McKenna Center and not found himself mesmerized by the series
of photographs that put the past of this place so vividly before the eye.
Our athletic tradition, particularly football, is known to millions who
have never set foot on this campus. It is difficult not to know that history,
celebrated in song and story and film. But just as today sports are only
an aspect of a wider whole, so has it always been. Recalling Chesterton's
visit can be a spur to learning of that context. Rockne was coach when
Chesterton visited, and he attended a game in what was then the new stadium,
now encompassed by the expanded stadium. Perhaps you know the poem The
Arena Chesterton wrote here, inspired by football. This is how it
begins:
I have seen, where a strange country
Opened its secret plains about me,
One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one
Seen afar, in strange fulfillment,
Through sunlit Indian summer
That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.
Professor Schlereth's book on Notre Dame provides a number of campus walks
which enable one to discover the past of the campus which in some respects
exists as a palimpsest under the current use of the land. As we go about
the present day campus it is well to recall the giants who walked here
in the past. We have, I suspect, an insufficient sense of the history
of this place. A visit to the community cemetery off the road that runs
from the grotto to St. Mary's is to a kind of Arlington Cemetery of the
Congregation of Holy Cross. There one finds the graves of the first generation,
Father Sorin and his companions, and of all subsequent generations of
Holy Cross religious lyng row after row under crosses of identical size..
You should of course read Marvin O'Connell's magnificent life of Sorin
recently published by the University Press, easily the most comprehensive
account of the founding and founder of Notre Dame. The books by Richard
Sullivan, Thomas Stritch and Edward Fischer are more personal books of
continuing interest. Nor should one overlook John Meany's O'Malley
of Notre Dame. Frank O'Malley is one of the few lay professors buried
in the community cemetery, but a visit to Cedar Grove Cemetery on Notre
Dame Avenue, just south of the bookstore, can seem, to someone of my vintage,
a kind of faculty meeting of the departed. The coordinates of space we
occupy are haunted by this past, and its influence on us goes largely
unrecognized, when not willfully ignored. It is an oddity of this place
that it constantly sees itself as at Square One in a way that verges on
impiety.
To be shamelessly self-advertising, I will mention that my series of mystery
novels set at the University of Notre Dame, of which six have now appeared,
meld a present-day murder with some aspect of the history of this place
– the novel Knute Rockne published in 1925, the relationship between
the university and the Indians already here, Orestes Brownson, and Chesterton's
visit to campus in 1930, this in Irish Tenure (1999). The just
published Celt and Pepper features the poetry of Father O'Donnell.
The Notre Dame to which Chesterton came in 1930 was unabashedly Catholic.
It was the name of the university, its dedication to Our Lady, that decided
the English author to accept the invitation. The prominence of Holy Cross
priests in the administration and on the faculty would not have surprised
him. The university was then, of course, male. Cooeducation did not begin
until the early 1970s. Chesterton's assumption that religion, man's relationship
with God, is the central fact of human life and thus provides the ultimate
reference point for assessing literature would not have surprised his
audience. Through his long career, Chesterton had judged the dominant
dogmas of modernity to be in conflict, first, with common sense, and,
second, with Christianity. It was the struggle between the secular atheist
dogma and the irrepressible sense of good and evil, as well as the vestiges
of Christian belief, that guided his apparaisal of the great Victorian
writers.
In spite of all the silly talk about his vulgarity, he [Dickens] really
had, in the strict and serious sense, good taste. All good taste is really
gusto – the power of appreciating the presence – or the absence
– of a particular and positive pleasure. He had no learning; he
was not misled by the label on the bottle – for that is what learning
largely meant in his time. He opened his mouth and shut his eyes and saw
what the Age of Reason would give him. And, having tasted it, he spat
it out. [86]
It has often been pointed out that it was the Catholic character of Notre
Dame which at first froze us out of big time football, and there are those
who say that the football program was deliberately chosen as Notre Dame's
entry into the WASP stronghold. Whatever truth there is to this, it cannot
be the whole truth. It presupposes that Notre Dame was somehow ashamed
of its own tradition and uncritical of the dominant social and intellectual
ethos of this country. This is manifestly false. The philosophy and theology
requirements at Notre Dame were a longterm effect of the revival of Thomistic
thought decreed by Leo XIII in his encyclical Aeterni Patris which appeared
in 1879 – the year the Main Building burnt down and was rebuilt.
In the Scholastic of those times you will read of the proceedings
of the local Thomist Society, the papers of which were reprinted in what
was then the university publication of record. The Catholic viewpoint
dictated a critical attitude toward the intellectual and cultural trends
of the day. Leo XIII had seen in a return to the kind of philosophy most
perfectly represented by Thomas Aquinas the requisite intellectual answer
to the errors of the day. To be a Catholic was not to long for the fleshpots
of Egypt, if only by anticipation. Catholic colleges were seen as places
where the truth was pursued and when properly pursued was seen to support
and complement the faith. Students were readied for a world which was
hostile to their basic beliefs.
All this indicates the perfect fit between Chesterton and Notre Dame.
No wonder he felt that he had come home.
3. What if Chesterton visited ND today
I wonder if Chesterton, or someone like him, would today be high on administrators'
lists of candidates for visiting lecturer at Notre Dame. Would he be given
an honorary degree nowadays? Apart from a few eccentrics like Professor
Freddoso, it is the rare professor who mentions Chesterton in class, let
alone makes him a central figure – some perhaps do not know the
name. Those who have organized this series of lectures devoted to Chesterton
doubtless do not feel that their efforts are redundant, that the talks
that will be given this week merely echo what students will have learned
in class. I have a hunch that this effort is countercultural. Notre Dame
has changed.
It is not simply that Father Malloy does not write poetry – at least
I have never heard that he does – nor that Chesterton himself seems
largely forgotten here. His sort of Catholic writer is of course rare
today, but not perhaps wholly extinct. We did give an honorary degree
to Walker Percy and, when I was new here – that's half a century
ago – Flannery O'Connor was a visitor here. And as a young professor,
I heard Jacques Maritain lecture in the auditorium of what was then the
new Moreau Seminary. But these events were either long ago or surprising
exceptions we run to Bill Cosby and Tim Russert nowadays for commencement
speakers.
I am not suggesting that writers like Chesterton are heavy on the ground
– in either sense – and that we are ignoring them. Catholics
in this country have become so throughly assimilated into the secular
culture that the most reliable champions of abortion in the congress are
soi-disant Catholics. But the university exhibits this same trend –
not, thank God, on abortion – and has not a little to do with what
has happened to Catholics in the country at large.
In 1990 Pope John Paul II issued a document on the Catholic university
whose title is historically evocative. Ex corde ecclesiae. As a historical
fact, universities were ecclesiastical entities. It is not that they began
as religiously neutral places and were coopted by some enterprising Catholics.
The history of universities is a slow – sometimes abrupt –
transition from Catholic or at least religious institutions to secularized
places where religion is as privatized as it is in the wider culture.
There is a growing literature on the secularization of the great American
universities which began under Christian auspices and over time metamorphosed
into areligious or even anti-religious institutions. Professor George
Marsden is one of the leading historians of that development. James Burtchael
has told the parallel story of the drift toward secularization of Catholic
colleges and universities in his The Dying of the Light.
By and large, graduates of Catholic universities have not received an
education that prepares them to do battle with the aspects of American
culture which are antithetical to common morality and Christianity. The
general tone of The Observer could not be what it is if that
were so. Our student journalists are indistinguishable from their counterparts
at Meatball Tech, Princeton and Stanford. There is no discernible Catholic
mentality in most discussions of the issues of the day, whether those
on campus or in the wider world.
The reaction to Ex corde ecclesiae is eloquent of what has happened.
The Faculty Senate voted all but unanimously, if not unanimously, to reject
the timid implementation of that document suggested by the bishops. The
most secular and wertfrei understanding of academic freedom is adopted
here and elsewhere, with the teaching Church seen as an intruding menace.
Brilliant writers like Gary Wills – once a visitor on this campus,
actually several times – has written a history of the Church which
makes the Watchtower of the Jehovah's Witnesses seem supportive of the
papacy by comparison. And he, like others, defines Catholicism ad libitum
and in strident opposition to the Magisterium.
Catholics who accept the guidance of the Church in matters of faith and
morals are in diaspora in America, and alas at Notre Dame as well. I fear
that Chesterton, were he to come among us today, would think we had institutionally
joined the enemy. Catholicism flourishes in Sacred Heart Basilica and
in our residence chapels, and in the Center for Social Concerns. But it
is scarcely audible in the classrooms, in the life of the mind and imagination.
It is not the liturgy or a laudable concern for the poor that makes a
university; these can flourish anywhere. It is the life of the mind and
imagination that is essential to a university. If we appraise ourselves
by the same standards as secular universities we will become increasingly
like them. Once we had standards of our own – the time honored ones
that formed our civilization.
After his initial dismay at what we have become, I think a Chesterton
redivivus would be excited by the opportunities our situation presents.
How exciting to bring Catholicism to a Catholic university. How exhilarating
for the robust Catholic to find himself in a countercultural position
in a Catholic university. I think those who organized this series must
have felt this. George Bernard Shaw sometimes ended his letters to Chesterton
with the slogan, "To hell with the Pope!" Nowadays he would
sound like some of our theologians and Catholic writers. If you are under
the ironic necessity of being autodidacts in learning of the Catholic
tradition, you are not unlike Chesterton himself. Nonetheless, we have
a right to feel dismay that this is so.
Cardinal Newman included in his The Idea of a University a section
entitled "A Form of Infidelity of the Day." In the Middle Ages,
he wrote, defending the faith was difficult because its attackers were
within the walls. In the 19th century, he continued, things are simpler
– now our enemies are outside and manifestly in array against us.
In these terms, we can say that we ourselves have the worst of both worlds,
the medieval and the modern, as described by Newman. Chesterton, like
Newman and so many other Catholic heroes of the past, can suggest ways
and means for us to take on the task before us. And of course, Chesterton
has a poem relevant to our situation with which I shall end.
Though giant rains put out the sun,
Here stand I for a sign,
Though earth be filled with waters dark
My cup is filled with wine.
Tell to the trembling priests that here
Under the deluge rod,
One nameless, tattered, broken man
Stood up and drank to God.
