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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 19, 2015 15:35:45 GMT
I couldn't find a G.K. Chesterton thread, although maybe there is one and I just wasn't doing the search properly. Anyway, I thought I'd start one as an excuse to plug my not-so-new website, The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, which is composed of short articles I've been writing for the Open Door magazine for more than a year now. It's essentially a tour through Chesterton's life and works. I'm only as far as Heretics, his first masterpiece; I'm taking it nice and slow. I can't remember whether I've plugged it here before, but I've just updated it anyway. chestertonwisdom.weebly.com/
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2015 20:53:50 GMT
There are some Chesterton posts in the "Catholic literature" thread, but I think a separate thread is a good idea.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 7, 2015 21:16:44 GMT
On a recent visit to Scotland I picked up copies of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story collection NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS (1878), its sequel THE DYNAMITER (1885) which I am told features a very unflattering portrayal of Irish nationalism, and his whimsical Ruritanian romance PRINCE OTTO (1885) - which BTW has a Germanic character called Killian. I have read PRINCE OTTO and am just over halfway through NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS, and what struck me at once was how deeply GKC drew on them as a literary model for his fiction; there are clear analogies with THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY and some of the FATHER BROWN stories, for example. (I am not accusing him of plagiarism - the styles are quite distinct - but the similarities are very clear.) I should have expected this, given GKC's tremendous enthusiasm for Stevenson, but it hadn't occurred to me - because like most people I thought of Stevenson in terms of TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE.
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Post by irishconfederate on Oct 25, 2015 23:13:32 GMT
Hello,
I am a great admirer of G.K Chesterton. Before I became a member on this forum I posted during my first ever visits to this forum under other name/s, and I said that I thought there were a lot of similarities between Chesterton and Des Fennell. I just want to add some more to that before I move on to another issue....Both were journalists, notable patriots, notable counter cultural intellectuals, notable revisionist historians (the good kind), notable social idealists, notable pioneers in thought -particularly Catholic social thought, also Fennell's book 'Beyond Nationalism' is a presentation of the same philosophy in Chesterton's book 'Napoleon of Notting Hill' to an uncanny degree, also both writers use wonder to a notable degree-although with different styles, also I just realised now that Chesterton has 'What I saw in America' and I just realised Fennell has a large opening heading on one of his central essays as 'What I discovered in New York'.........I think there are a lot more striking similarities. Perhaps his challenge to Heaney.......and this is all not mentioning they're public loyal adherence to and defence of the orthodox faith and morals. Granted, the points made before which I agree with....there is a huge gulf in a great number of ways. I just think the similarity is worth note.
From reading Des Fennell's social idealism in Beyond Nationalism somehow it had an effect on me that I began to see a certain stoicism in Chesterton's point of view or stance. The Chesterton stance, its a great one, and was won by Chesterton for men today in order for them to live buoyantly and with laughter and happily. I would like here eventually to try and discuss this stance, this 'good vision of life' which he won for a lot of people past and present. But I thought I would begin by saying that I think there is something underlyingly stoical in Chesterton's vision. Reflecting on the Chesterton stance.......(I will try and paint a sort of picture evoking what I mean on the "Chesterton stance"...PLEASE don't quote me on this ) ...........a sort of surrounding oneself in a cloak of anti-puritanism, whilst walking through the world in good cheer whilst occasionally reaffirming oneself with a kind of slightly cock-sure use of anti-puritan, pre-modern European associations....
...Reflecting on this stance I somehow sense that underneath it there is a certain stoicism and somehow lately I've been reflecting that this "Chesterton bearing" is perhaps a bit skin deep. That is what I'm sensing in devotees of Chesterton who one may see are often practicing "the Chesterton way", and what I noticed in myself when I tried to live it. And it was from reading Des Fennell's approach to the modern world that this some how all came to light. I found Des Fennell a great deal more honest about himself and the world around him and about history then Chesterton was. For some reason I want to say that Chesterton's stance has perhaps a similarity to the "simulacrum of meaning" which nationalism provides. For the nation in Chesterton's nationalism put"pre-Modern era European Civilisation", a "simulacrum of meaning", a buffer against the world, its reality, its somehow impending doom...?
I'm playfully thinking that perhaps Des Fennell's thoroughly Catholic setting and background, and also one arguably much less modern than Chesterton's, gave him a sort of advantage when looking at and describing the world as it really is....
This post of mine is not so clear.......I find the Chesterton bearing which many devotees adapt very hard to keep up in the world, not trying to say Chesterton himself was stoical. Just that his good life vision he had, and tried to represent to others maybe deserves a discussion.............
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 25, 2015 23:36:19 GMT
There are a lot of interesting points in your post. I don't think it was the case that Chesterton's persona was an affectation, but I do think there is an element of affectation, or at least of conscious effort, when other people adopt it. Indeed, Chesterton urged his readers to adopt a particular worldview-- for instance, the great importance he placed on thanksgiving and wonder. If you are not naturally inclined to feel this (or, lest it be said we are all 'naturally inclined' to this deep down, if your natural inclination has been buried deep), then it requires effort to attain it. Indeed, Chesterton made no bones about the fact that it requires effort to attain it. That was the whole point of his writing. Gratitude, wonder etc. ARE an effort for us. So I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong in the fact that the Chestertonian persona is a 'put-on' in so many of his devotees. So is every attitude towards the world other than pure spontaneity, if such a thing exists.
As for the similarities and differences between Chesterton and Fennell...I haven't read enough Fennell, but he seems to be supremely an intellectual. Can an intellectual really hold up a way of life for ordinary people? Chesterton was very intelligent, obviously, but his sympathy with the common man, and his essential kinship with the common man, would seem to make him more helpful as a guide.
All of this is, of course, a prejudiced opinion because I love Chesterton so much! Thanks for your post.
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Post by irishconfederate on Oct 26, 2015 19:36:26 GMT
Thanks maolsheachlann.
I think there is a lot of affectation in the writings of Chesterton and to say that, I feel I am committing a great sacrilege. I don't enjoy saying it.
....I remember reading Chesterton's portrait of a devout Irishman in one of his stories, and the somehow gulf between this idealised pre-modern European of his and Chesterton the author seems to leap out off the page, in retrospect.......
Chesterton was a very modern man- as we all are I think- who couldn't be those sort of peasants he espoused, or small holders, or had a working class morality, he was a modern......and in thinking about it...the things he wrote often derided the very aspects of his own, say, class....
Perhaps that's unfair (why do I feel sacrilegious in criticising Chesterton....o dear)
With regard to "Can an intellectual really hold up a way of life for ordinary people? Chesterton was very intelligent, obviously, but his sympathy with the common man, and his essential kinship with the common man, would seem to make him more helpful as a guide."
I've read many books by Fennell and I like him, and in reference to the above, Fennell was born into the Irish Catholic people! He was the first of his family for centuries to learn the languages of the world. He spent the early years of his life in Belfast being brought up by his Gaeltacht emigrant grandfather. Like most Irish people of that era they were one step away from tracing themselves from the common man. They were they're flesh and blood and living relatives. He also analysed middle class mentalities in an article which has stayed with me to this day, which literally made a sort of mockery over middle class mentalities as being, essentially puritan. He wrote a book called "Nice people and Rednecks", satirising the middle class point of view, of, themselves marking themselves out as being different to the "traditional" Catholic Irish. Chesterton was also an intellectual like Fennell, though was a great artist and, is it, satirist.....definitively unlike Fennel. But Chesterton never came to the plain words statement of Fennell, which was that the solution to the problem of the modern age was essentially..........to build community. And that this would give one life's buoyancy in the modern world, as it gratifies one to such an extent and is a kind of recreation itself. This way is open to anyone no matter who they are, Chesterton's way seems to be open to a very narrow few, most of them naturally men, and is arguably full of affectation, although he sort of intuitively got close to presenting the truth in what Fennell said, in the book 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' but never made that revelatory statement -which is actually a truth latent in the Gospels. One of Chesterton's great answers to the central problem of the age, was that affective stance. And that affective stance is in my opinion fraught with chinks, and not a guide accessible to a lot of people.
I was thinking today that Chesterton affectively presents Islam as being the "anti-Christ" and the ancient foe and other things, where Fennell is much more likely to point out the innovations and perhaps in some minor aspects superiority of Islam in respect to Christianity whilst clarifying and dismissing it for its pitfalls. He is more unaffected in his view of the past, especially with reference to the Church, and I would say is definitely far more daring to be exact in his prophecies of the future. Although Chesterton in this area, and in fact every other, is far, far, far, far more entertaining. Thank God for Chesterton.
Chesterton praises drinking beer and so his devotees often do the same, but if Chesterton was to point out the chivalric romantic aspect of say the Pioneer Society, I sort of have the picture that a lot of Chesterton devotees would be Pioneers instead? It seems then that perhaps his "good vision of life" is perhaps actually quite weak and relies on maybe that it has as its presenter one of perhaps the greatest satirists -if that's the term- of Europe, who if he presented anything as a noble cause or vilified it, would have won a lot of devotees who would have thought likewise. That he was a Catholic, and one of ours, was like an added boost to the psychology of those in our camp, which had and perhaps has members, I know I have, who sort of "glory hunt" off his ripping apart of the modern secular world. He's like a sort of Man Utd.
O dear I can't believe what I wrote above, "He's sort of like a Man United"............
Anyway I do sense I'm trying to express something ....can't put it precisely into words...
Read more: irishcatholics.proboards.com/post/new/988#ixzz3phUnLcky
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 26, 2015 21:14:46 GMT
There's nothing at all sacrilegious about criticising Chesterton. I've done plenty of it myself. I'm just not sure your criticisms here are really well-founded. In terms of affectation, or assuming a persona, or whatever you might term it...I think we all do that to an extent, but I don't think it's particularly true about Chesterton, or indeed about his followers. You mentioned a 'sense' of this in your first post, but what is it based on?
Community is one of the things we have to strive for, of course, but I think there's so much more to correcting the wrongs of modern society. And Chesterton did make practical efforts to build community with his Distributist League.
To be honest, I think it's almost impossible to compare Chesterton to Fennell. Chesterton was just a much bigger figure in every sense. I don't even see the need to compare them. They are, thankfully, batting for the same side!
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Post by assisi on Oct 27, 2015 21:04:02 GMT
Thanks maolsheachlann.
I think there is a lot of affectation in the writings of Chesterton and to say that, I feel I am committing a great sacrilege. I don't enjoy saying it.
....I remember reading Chesterton's portrait of a devout Irishman in one of his stories, and the somehow gulf between this idealised pre-modern European of his and Chesterton the author seems to leap out off the page, in retrospect.......
Chesterton was a very modern man- as we all are I think- who couldn't be those sort of peasants he espoused, or small holders, or had a working class morality, he was a modern......and in thinking about it...the things he wrote often derided the very aspects of his own, say, class....
Perhaps that's unfair (why do I feel sacrilegious in criticising Chesterton....o dear)
With regard to "Can an intellectual really hold up a way of life for ordinary people? Chesterton was very intelligent, obviously, but his sympathy with the common man, and his essential kinship with the common man, would seem to make him more helpful as a guide."
I've read many books by Fennell and I like him, and in reference to the above, Fennell was born into the Irish Catholic people! He was the first of his family for centuries to learn the languages of the world. He spent the early years of his life in Belfast being brought up by his Gaeltacht emigrant grandfather. Like most Irish people of that era they were one step away from tracing themselves from the common man. They were they're flesh and blood and living relatives. He also analysed middle class mentalities in an article which has stayed with me to this day, which literally made a sort of mockery over middle class mentalities as being, essentially puritan. He wrote a book called "Nice people and Rednecks", satirising the middle class point of view, of, themselves marking themselves out as being different to the "traditional" Catholic Irish. Chesterton was also an intellectual like Fennell, though was a great artist and, is it, satirist.....definitively unlike Fennel. But Chesterton never came to the plain words statement of Fennell, which was that the solution to the problem of the modern age was essentially..........to build community. And that this would give one life's buoyancy in the modern world, as it gratifies one to such an extent and is a kind of recreation itself. This way is open to anyone no matter who they are, Chesterton's way seems to be open to a very narrow few, most of them naturally men, and is arguably full of affectation, although he sort of intuitively got close to presenting the truth in what Fennell said, in the book 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' but never made that revelatory statement -which is actually a truth latent in the Gospels. One of Chesterton's great answers to the central problem of the age, was that affective stance. And that affective stance is in my opinion fraught with chinks, and not a guide accessible to a lot of people.
I was thinking today that Chesterton affectively presents Islam as being the "anti-Christ" and the ancient foe and other things, where Fennell is much more likely to point out the innovations and perhaps in some minor aspects superiority of Islam in respect to Christianity whilst clarifying and dismissing it for its pitfalls. He is more unaffected in his view of the past, especially with reference to the Church, and I would say is definitely far more daring to be exact in his prophecies of the future. Although Chesterton in this area, and in fact every other, is far, far, far, far more entertaining. Thank God for Chesterton.
Chesterton praises drinking beer and so his devotees often do the same, but if Chesterton was to point out the chivalric romantic aspect of say the Pioneer Society, I sort of have the picture that a lot of Chesterton devotees would be Pioneers instead? It seems then that perhaps his "good vision of life" is perhaps actually quite weak and relies on maybe that it has as its presenter one of perhaps the greatest satirists -if that's the term- of Europe, who if he presented anything as a noble cause or vilified it, would have won a lot of devotees who would have thought likewise. That he was a Catholic, and one of ours, was like an added boost to the psychology of those in our camp, which had and perhaps has members, I know I have, who sort of "glory hunt" off his ripping apart of the modern secular world. He's like a sort of Man Utd.
O dear I can't believe what I wrote above, "He's sort of like a Man United"............
Anyway I do sense I'm trying to express something ....can't put it precisely into words...
Read more: irishcatholics.proboards.com/post/new/988#ixzz3phUnLcky
Just referring to the last sizeable paragraph above, a few lines from Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy' are interesting: Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us.The 'it' he mentions is the world, life and the purpose of life that he was discussing immediately prior to the quote. Chesterton's ideas have influenced me but I also realise that I am not of the same character, personality, wit or girth as Chesterton. As in society at large there are Catholics who are intellectual, analytical; other who are emotional and charismatic. Some stern and ascetic. Chesterton comes across as humorous, engaging and generally enjoying what life and nature allows us within the restraints he mentions above. Although many of Fennell's views on modernity would be similar to Chesterton's, Fennell writes more like an academic than Chesterton. In matters of writing style there are only the odd occurrence were Fennell's phrases are similar to Chesterton's wit. Writing of how mind altering drugs were becoming common in society Fennell adds a charming little phrase that you could imagine Chesterton using: Those were the years in the history of Europe when women stopped singing as they went about their housework, and boys stopped whistling in the street.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 27, 2015 21:54:06 GMT
Chesterton is often categorised as anti-modern, but his views are more complicated than that. He was a fan of democracy, suburbia, detective stories, day trippers, penny dreadfuls, and many other things that would be odious to a consistent anti-modernist.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 23, 2016 22:32:03 GMT
I have just read MANALIVE for the first time (never got round to it in my teenage years of Chestertoxication - a question of availability). I could see how it would have enthralled me back then, but it failed to recapture the old magic (though I got a few political and geographic references I wouldn't have got if I read it back then). A couple of little points: - given that Chesterton placed such emphasis on line and denounced Impressionism, it's striking that he so vividly conveys the wind, the clouds, and the changing colours of the sky. Following on from that - it brought home to me how kinetic a writer is and how his things and people are constantly in motion. This I am afraid is a contrast with THE GENTLE TRADITIONALIST, whose protagonist is stuck in a room which he can't leave until his interlocutor allows him, and is lectured. (This might work for GKC as a short sharp shock - as when Innocent Smith awakens pessimists by offering to shoot them - but not for a whole book and not for the level of detail put forward in THE GENTLE TRADITIONALIST.)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 24, 2016 6:49:15 GMT
I have only read this book once and I didn't like it much, though I should mention that I didn't like 'The Man Who Was Thursday' or 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' much when I first read them and gained a much higher opinoin of them on a second and third reading. All of Chesterton's characters tend to talk exactly the same, which is something I find irritating, and the hilarity sometimes seemed force. Of course, the ideas that he is dramatising are ideas I agree with absolutely.
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Post by irishconfederate on Nov 5, 2016 0:05:25 GMT
Hello,
I was having a look at one of the most Catholic pieces of Desmond Fennell's recently, a pamphlet called 'Build the Third Republic'. Its the most Catholic as in its essays he's frequently referring to Christ or the Church/it's teaching.
One part of an essay struck me recently and it was the following:
James Connolly, the socialist, put the political aim before the economic aim. Every true radical must of necessity do the same because the distribution of economic power and cultural facilities, and the effectiveness of so-called "social welfare", are ultimately decided by the distribution of governmental power.
I have a real interest in radical Catholic political thought and say, pioneering Catholic social thought - I admire Chesterton for his part in pioneering the philosophy of Distributism.
I think though that I've never came across Chesterton coming to the conclusion that the distribution of economic power is ultimately decided by the distribution of governmental power. That's why I admire Fennell for pioneering that idea further in what I think he called his Representationalist philosophy.
My hat's off to the two men. Pax
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 5, 2016 19:41:46 GMT
What does he mean by the distribution of government power? I would have assumed government power is by its nature concentrated. Perhaps he meant Connolly was right to concentrate on the national question ahead of the class question? I can understand that, but I'm not sure the principle carries over into post-independent Ireland.
I have to admit, for my part, I tend to be distrustful of any kind of radicalism. Chesterton was more hospitable to radicalism, but in this regard I'm a bit dubious about Chesterton. Certainly the radical reforms he envisaged as part of his Distributist project never happened, nor does it seem realistic they ever would have.
But what I find frustrating, when talking to Distributists, is how they seem to jump between two positions; at one moment, they assure you that Ditrbutism is piecemeal and evolutionary, but at another moment they seem to be promoting a revolution akin to socialism.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 7, 2016 21:04:15 GMT
Belloc's image of distributism certainly included a powerful central state which would rule for the general good by force, be it monarchical or Jacobin. He regarded Britain as being dominated by oligarchs under the guise of liberty. This is in fact a fairly widespread French way of seeing their history and one reason why British-style liberalism has remained a minority tendency there. (Both Belloc and Chesterton also tended to regard finance capital as usury plain and simple and to admire the absolutist monarchies' habit of repudiating their debts whenever they felt like it.) Fennell's view that politics always comes before economics is a variant of his general assumption that we can make the nation whatever we want it to be if only our willpower is strong enough. The problem with this view is summed up in Fr Brown's remark that he knew a man dressed in priestly clothes was an impostor because "You denied reason. It's bad theology." By reason I would mean the existence of an external reality which is not infinitely malleable to the human will, but which must be understood and handled in accordance with its nature. This is something which Fennell has never really recognised.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 9, 2016 21:22:45 GMT
This piece in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY arguing that the post-Watergate culturally liberal Democrats paved the way for Trump by rejecting the New Deal-Jeffersonian tradition of hostility to corporate monopolies and suspicion of finance may be of interest to anyone looking for real-life analogies to distributism. Remember that the New Deal was often presented as reflecting Catholic social thought (by commentators like Mgr John Ryan) and that it had a strong strain of cultural conservatism www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
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