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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 7, 2021 11:03:07 GMT
Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society of E&W offers a critique of ORTHODOXY, which he thinks borders too much on subjectivism, pragmatism and divine command theory. Now I think he has a point to some extent - it is interesting to contemplate the possibility that the thief Flambeau, disguised as a priest, who advocates divine command morality, might speak for part of Chesterton's own sensibility as much as the Thomist-Aristotelean rationalism expressed by Fr Brown (though in the end it is precisely this rationalism which allows Fr Brown to outwit Flambeau even on his own terms) - but from my long-ago memories of reading ORTHODOXY I think Dr Shaw has mistaken the unquestionably orthodox doctrines that God created the world out of nothing and without His constant sustension it would be nothing, and that God does not create from necessity or compulsion but out of pure grace, for occasionalism (the denial that laws of nature exist separately from God's arbitrary will). Similarly, Dr Shaw suggests that Chesterton's leniency towards the French Revolution and failure to understand how anyone could think democracy is opposed to tradition relate to subjectivist romanticism has a certain amount of truth (his remark that the view that you can't put back the clock is easily disproved by putting it back does suggest a command model of reality, and he is a bit soft on original sin in some places though not in others) but ignores the minor detail that Rousseauism and the French Revolution were directed to a significant extent against an enlightened despotism which was quite arbitrary, cynical and anti-Christian. (Indeed, one critique of Chesterton and very much more of Belloc might be that they wrap up early modern absolutism in mediaeval trappings). I think Dr Shaw has not really grasped what GKC is saying about the nature of Being. casuistrycentral.blogspot.com/2016/10/worries-about-chesterton.htmlIt's interesting that all of the comments disagree with Shaw. I think he's wrong about everything. Chesterton explicitly says that his argument for Christianity is not pragmatic; he argues that, if you find a key that fits a particular lock (as Christianity fits the desires of the human heart), it's highly likely that the key was made for the lock. He is not arguing for occasionalism but simply that rationalism on its own doesn't explain the pattern of cause and effect. I don't have time to answer all his other points. A great weakness of Traditionalists is the eagerness to be "super Catholic" in everything and forget that all truth and virtue, even those originating outside the Catholic tradition, are from God. I think this is what Pope Francis means by escaping from a "self-referential" mindset. I'm also reminded of Jesus restraining the apostles from interfering with the man who was casting out demons in Christ's name without a mandate from them.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 7, 2021 19:23:57 GMT
One of the other points that Shaw neglects is that there is a tradition of Catholic apologetic going back to Chateaubriand, Lamennais and Lacordaire through Christian Democracy and Christopher Dawson which presents the Faith in terms similar to those used by Chesterton. Now Shaw, or other integralists, might argue that this tradition is fundamentally misguided (Chateaubriand was influenced by Rousseau, Lamennais died outside the Church, European Christian Democracy these days is not particularly Christian, etc) but it is too substantial simply to be dismissed out of hand or treated as crypto-Protestant as Shaw does. It might be said that THE POET AND THE LUNATICS, which I discussed earlier in this thread, is a protest against the divine command theory and the way it can bleed into making God in one's own megalomaniac image; the fact that Chesterton feels this temptation himself gives him clearer insight into its dangers. (There's a reason why he is so suspicious of pure Calvinism - which his own parents reacted against - and why he insists on the dangers of pure Unitarianism of the Islamic type in contrast to Trinitarianism.)
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 21, 2021 13:06:33 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 29, 2021 20:43:15 GMT
I reread GKC's autobiography recently. Much of it is so familiar (especially since I read Fr Ian Ker's biography a couple of years ago) that it's hard to rediscover the sense of wonder from first reading when I was a teenager, so here are a few thoughts: (1) Wikipedia is a great resource for reading this, as it helps to understand the minor men and women of letters mentioned by GKC who would have been familiar to contemporary readers but not to us. (2) GKC may have disliked Impressionism (though, to be honest, the descriptions of the wind and its effect on trees in MANALIVE strikes me as having an Impressionist tinge) but his visual sense with its love of big blocks of bright colour reminds me of the Fauves - though I suspect GkC might not have appreciated the comparison): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauvism(3) The detail that Chesterton developed a strong sympathy for Irish Nationalists during the Boer War, because unlike most so-called British 'pro-Boers' (who generally saw the war as unjust or avoidable but thought once it had broken out it must be won) he shared their desire for the Boers to defeat the British and win the war is an interesting detail. (It also helps to explain why, as he describes later, when he visited Germany some of his German contacts thought it might be possible to persuade him to sympathise with Germany against his own country.) (4) His description of how, when he got involved with the Liberal Party and went canvassing, he would get caught up in arguing with the first householder on the side of the street assigned to him because he failed to realise that the purpose of canvassing is not to convert opponents but to identify and mobilise sympathisers, will be familiar to anyone who has had experience of canvassing in recent Irish referenda. More later
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 29, 2021 23:53:35 GMT
I reread GKC's autobiography recently. Much of it is so familiar (especially since I read Fr Ian Ker's biography a couple of years ago) that it's hard to rediscover the sense of wonder from first reading when I was a teenager, so here are a few thoughts: (1) Wikipedia is a great resource for reading this, as it helps to understand the minor men and women of letters mentioned by GKC who would have been familiar to contemporary readers but not to us. (2) GKC may have disliked Impressionism (though, to be honest, the descriptions of the wind and its effect on trees in MANALIVE strikes me as having an Impressionist tinge) but his visual sense with its love of big blocks of bright colour reminds me of the Fauves - though I suspect GkC might not have appreciated the comparison): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauvism(3) The detail that Chesterton developed a strong sympathy for Irish Nationalists during the Boer War, because unlike most so-called British 'pro-Boers' (who generally saw the war as unjust or avoidable but thought once it had broken out it must be won) he shared their desire for the Boers to defeat the British and win the war is an interesting detail. (It also helps to explain why, as he describes later, when he visited Germany some of his German contacts thought it might be possible to persuade him to sympathise with Germany against his own country.) (4) His description of how, when he got involved with the Liberal Party and went canvassing, he would get caught up in arguing with the first householder on the side of the street assigned to him because he failed to realise that the purpose of canvassing is not to convert opponents but to identify and mobilise sympathisers, will be familiar to anyone who has had experience of canvassing in recent Irish referenda. More later That's a good point about Fauvism. I was reading the New Jerusalem today in which Chesterton defends the aesthetic sensibility of Jerusalem Christians which he believed many English people would find gaudy. I always thought the Chesterton's reaction to Impressionism was odd.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 21, 2021 21:39:00 GMT
One passage of GKC's autobiography which I disliked was his discussion of Belloc. I can think of two points in particular which really stunned me: (1) Chesterton says he is not familiar with the details of the controversy over Belloc's commentary on the First World War, but says vaguely that he believes Belloc's casualty figures were criticised but later figures suggest he was correct. This is just not good enough - the fact is that in all his writings Belloc often makes up figures off the top of his head to give an impression of authority. Belloc was fundamentally a student debater going for immediate effect - like Christopher Hitchens. This may be tolerable when dealing with opponents who don't argue in good faith but just sneer, but it rapidly turns the practitioner into the sort of person Kingsley accused Newman of being; someone who despises the pursuit of truth for its own sake. This is the dark side of the Chesterbelloc commonsense philosophy; it is easily deployed to assume that what seems commonsense must be true and therefore need not be examined, and indeed that examination is unnecessary or even undesirable. (2) Chesterton praises a poem by Belloc about revolution as being the only one he knows of which gives a precise military plan (in fact like Belloc's battle sketches it is a vulgarisation of Jomini's analysis of Napoleonic warfare which treats what happens on the battlefield as decisive and ignores Clausewitz's emphasis on how an army is sustained and the wider political context of war. Incidentally one problem with Belloc's war commentary is that he is treating WWI as a Napoleonic war whereas it was something very different.) Worse, Chesterton quotes with admiration the last lines of the poem in which, after describing how the victorious revolutionaries will "hew their [the defeated opponents] horses at the knees/ And hack and slash their timber trees" Belloc concludes "And all these things I mean to do/ Lest perhaps my little son/ Should break his hands as I have done." Chesterton praises the last lines as a burst of human feeling, but they strike me as calculated sentimentalism used to justify cruelty and destruction undertaken for their own sake. The spite and hatred of Belloc are not pretty, and Chesterton seems oblivious to them.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Nov 22, 2021 12:04:42 GMT
One passage of GKC's autobiography which I disliked was his discussion of Belloc. I can think of two points in particular which really stunned me: (1) Chesterton says he is not familiar with the details of the controversy over Belloc's commentary on the First World War, but says vaguely that he believes Belloc's casualty figures were criticised but later figures suggest he was correct. This is just not good enough - the fact is that in all his writings Belloc often makes up figures off the top of his head to give an impression of authority. Belloc was fundamentally a student debater going for immediate effect - like Christopher Hitchens. This may be tolerable when dealing with opponents who don't argue in good faith but just sneer, but it rapidly turns the practitioner into the sort of person Kingsley accused Newman of being; someone who despises the pursuit of truth for its own sake. This is the dark side of the Chesterbelloc commonsense philosophy; it is easily deployed to assume that what seems commonsense must be true and therefore need not be examined, and indeed that examination is unnecessary or even undesirable. (2) Chesterton praises a poem by Belloc about revolution as being the only one he knows of which gives a precise military plan (in fact like Belloc's battle sketches it is a vulgarisation of Jomini's analysis of Napoleonic warfare which treats what happens on the battlefield as decisive and ignores Clausewitz's emphasis on how an army is sustained and the wider political context of war. Incidentally one problem with Belloc's war commentary is that he is treating WWI as a Napoleonic war whereas it was something very different.) Worse, Chesterton quotes with admiration the last lines of the poem in which, after describing how the victorious revolutionaries will "hew their [the defeated opponents] horses at the knees/ And hack and slash their timber trees" Belloc concludes "And all these things I mean to do/ Lest perhaps my little son/ Should break his hands as I have done." Chesterton praises the last lines as a burst of human feeling, but they strike me as calculated sentimentalism used to justify cruelty and destruction undertaken for their own sake. The spite and hatred of Belloc are not pretty, and Chesterton seems oblivious to them. These seem extraordinarily specific criticisms. I've read the Autobiography many times and I don't even remember these details. You've said on several occasions that you came under the sway of Chesterton and Belloc as a teenager. Is it possible your reaction to them now is excessively emotive?
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Post by Young Ireland on Nov 26, 2021 21:57:55 GMT
One passage of GKC's autobiography which I disliked was his discussion of Belloc. I can think of two points in particular which really stunned me: (1) Chesterton says he is not familiar with the details of the controversy over Belloc's commentary on the First World War, but says vaguely that he believes Belloc's casualty figures were criticised but later figures suggest he was correct. This is just not good enough - the fact is that in all his writings Belloc often makes up figures off the top of his head to give an impression of authority. Belloc was fundamentally a student debater going for immediate effect - like Christopher Hitchens. This may be tolerable when dealing with opponents who don't argue in good faith but just sneer, but it rapidly turns the practitioner into the sort of person Kingsley accused Newman of being; someone who despises the pursuit of truth for its own sake. This is the dark side of the Chesterbelloc commonsense philosophy; it is easily deployed to assume that what seems commonsense must be true and therefore need not be examined, and indeed that examination is unnecessary or even undesirable. (2) Chesterton praises a poem by Belloc about revolution as being the only one he knows of which gives a precise military plan (in fact like Belloc's battle sketches it is a vulgarisation of Jomini's analysis of Napoleonic warfare which treats what happens on the battlefield as decisive and ignores Clausewitz's emphasis on how an army is sustained and the wider political context of war. Incidentally one problem with Belloc's war commentary is that he is treating WWI as a Napoleonic war whereas it was something very different.) Worse, Chesterton quotes with admiration the last lines of the poem in which, after describing how the victorious revolutionaries will "hew their [the defeated opponents] horses at the knees/ And hack and slash their timber trees" Belloc concludes "And all these things I mean to do/ Lest perhaps my little son/ Should break his hands as I have done." Chesterton praises the last lines as a burst of human feeling, but they strike me as calculated sentimentalism used to justify cruelty and destruction undertaken for their own sake. The spite and hatred of Belloc are not pretty, and Chesterton seems oblivious to them. Is it possible that Belloc's attitude may be coloured by the Franco-Prussian War and the revanchist sentiments stemming therefrom that were commonplace among Frenchmen of his time? This BTW was one reason why the French demanded such punitive terms from Germany during the Versailles Treaty negotiations.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 28, 2021 22:57:59 GMT
Belloc's anti-Germanism is quite understandable and it's not what I was talking about. It is fairly clear from the context that Belloc is talking about something like a French-revolutionary context, where the opponents are native aristocrats. Belloc's preference for Jomini over Clausewitz doesn't seem to reflect anti-Germanism; he just doesn't seem to be aware of Clausewitz, and he has a general preference for emphasising the will overcoming material constraints. Part of where it comes from BTW is Belloc's sense that he had been ill-treated because of his religion. He had a brilliant career at Oxford and was President of the Oxford Union debating society, and his tutors told him he was certain to get a fellowship at All Souls (a college without undergraduates - such fellowships are highly prestigious and he would have been the first Catholic to get one). He didn't get it, at least partly because he made an issue of his Catholicism. After being turned down for several other Fellowships, he had to go to London and become a journalist; he would have preferred to read for the Bar, but he now had a young family to support and needed to start earning straight away. This last, I think, underlies the "my little son" passage. BTW I came across this sympathetic though critical account of Belloc's First World War articles just now: thehilairebellocblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 28, 2021 23:06:04 GMT
Maolseachlainn - I am not being emotive, quite the opposite. I am trying to analyse Chesterton and Belloc as I re-examine them over a long period of time to analyse what is their best, what is their worst and what is in between. One difference between them BTW is that Chesterton was pretty much contented with his life, while for reasons given above Belloc was often bitter and resentful. (Part of this is visible in his dismissal of much of his work as hack - he valued his poetry highest.) One of the most amusing passages concerning Belloc in GKC's autobiography, BTW, is the description of Henry James discoursing in a rather abstract manner on the glories of European civilisation and being interrupted by the sudden appearance of European civilisation in the form of Belloc - just back from a long Continental hike, scruffy, unshaven and loudly demanding beer and bacon. More later.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2022 0:21:55 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 12, 2022 19:35:27 GMT
Recently reread Chesterton's 1930 collection FOUR FAULTLESS FELONS. When I read it originally I was a teenage enthusiast who could see no flaw in Chesterton; now I recognise it as a somewhat tired rehash of some of the themes from THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. One of the stories even features a doctor who looks sinister when he wears dark glasses, but when he takes them off has a cheerful and amiable face. The idea that a certified lunatic could commit murder with impunity, and that it is a great deal too easy for two doctors to certify someone, also recurs from THE POET AND THE LUNATICS. The most obvious contemporary reference is the first story, where an attempt to murder a reforming colonial governor turns out to be perpetrated by a hardliner who opposes his reforms. This is clearly a reference to postwar British moves towards conceding self-government to India and Egypt, and the hostility this faced from Tory Diehards. GKC is quite blunt about colonial atrocities but it is noteworthy that no natives appear as significant characters and the anti-colonial view is expressed by a disreputable Jewish agitator. Once again, I am sorry to say, the stories are marred by antisemitism. Where Belloc has a constant, implacable, roaring-hot hatred for Jews, Chesterton has a nasty habit of throwing in spiteful asides (a character who turns out to be a murderer is given a hooked nose; another character, when he is chastised for trying to assault a woman, emits a string of oaths in Yiddish). In no case would the story be affected if the character were a gentile. The last story also has an aside which gives. I am afraid, an unfortunate illustration of how much of distributism is fantasy. We are told that the Ruritanian country where the story takes place is one of those where the peasantry have survived its being traversed by armies for centuries but is now being uprooted by the workings of international finance. Chesterton thereby shows how little he realised of the devastation inflicted by late mediaeval or early modern armies (let alone later ones) living off the land - that is to say, looting the countryside. There might have been peasants in the countryside over the centuries, but many of them would not have been descendants of the original peasants.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 12, 2022 23:12:59 GMT
Have been reading THE MIND OF CHESTERTON by Christopher Hollis (1969). This is the reflections of a man who was a GKC fan and friend in the 30s, looking back from 30-40 years of experience including WW2 and a period as MP. Some interesting thoughts: (1) He recalls that Frances Chesterton was one of those people who seems to radiate goodness - I've met a few myself. (2) HE remarks that Chesterton's fear that women suffrage would lead to the breakup of the family by sending women out to work has not been realised, because most women stay at home unless they can afford servants to look after their children. Haven't times changed since 1969? (I am not saying Chesterton was right about woman suffrage!) (3) He brings home to me my big mistake in dealing with GKC when I was young. I thought of him as a systematic thinker, whereas he was an intuitive one at his best; he also kept the mindset of the student debater he was at secondary school, throwing out attention-catching ideas without being fully committed to them. (4) He notes that Chesterton does not have a real sense of how violence gets out of control, and how a man is changed by killing someone. (He points out something I never noticed - during the fighting in THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL the buses keep running.) There is an exception which Hollis does not mention - the devil's temptations in THE BALL AND THE CROSS involve tempting the revolutionary and the reactionary to overlook massacre and oppression respectively. This is an interesting exception because it sits very oddly with the novel's praise of fighting for principle and contempt for compromise and pacifism. As I have remarked, it is a sobering experience to compare the NAPOLEON with the conflict between districts in Troubles Belfast, for example.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 13, 2022 14:47:57 GMT
Have been reading THE MIND OF CHESTERTON by Christopher Hollis (1969). This is the reflections of a man who was a GKC fan and friend in the 30s, looking back from 30-40 years of experience including WW2 and a period as MP. Some interesting thoughts: (1) He recalls that Frances Chesterton was one of those people who seems to radiate goodness - I've met a few myself. (2) HE remarks that Chesterton's fear that women suffrage would lead to the breakup of the family by sending women out to work has not been realised, because most women stay at home unless they can afford servants to look after their children. Haven't times changed since 1969? (I am not saying Chesterton was right about woman suffrage!) (3) He brings home to me my big mistake in dealing with GKC when I was young. I thought of him as a systematic thinker, whereas he was an intuitive one at his best; he also kept the mindset of the student debater he was at secondary school, throwing out attention-catching ideas without being fully committed to them. (4) He notes that Chesterton does not have a real sense of how violence gets out of control, and how a man is changed by killing someone. (He points out something I never noticed - during the fighting in THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL the buses keep running.) There is an exception which Hollis does not mention - the devil's temptations in THE BALL AND THE CROSS involve tempting the revolutionary and the reactionary to overlook massacre and oppression respectively. This is an interesting exception because it sits very oddly with the novel's praise of fighting for principle and contempt for compromise and pacifism. As I have remarked, it is a sobering experience to compare the NAPOLEON with the conflict between districts in Troubles Belfast, for example. I question whether it's better to be a "systematic thinker" than an intuitive one. I think there is a lot of truth in what Nietzsche said: "The will to a system is lack of integrity." The more involved an intellectual system is, the more weaknesses it has. It's more likely that any given insight will be true (or interesting, or fruitful) than some grand unified theory. I'm not aware of Chesterton ever having claimed to be a systematic thinker.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 14, 2022 22:52:15 GMT
I didn't say that it's better to be a systematic thinker rather than an intuitive one. The lunatics described in ORTHODOXY are systematic thinkers, but they're mad because they start from a delusional standpoint - they lack common sense. Any serious thinker will combine both to some extent; compare Newman's sudden realisation that his position as an Anglican was similar to that of heretics condemned by his heroes of the Early Church and his subsequent struggle to think through the matter and realise that he was not under a delusion. The point that I was making was not about GKC but about my own mistake. For the record, an intuitive thinker is someone who grasps the essential points at issue after surveying the situation; this is what Gilson meant when he said GKC understood Aquinas better than scholars who had spent a lifetime studying him. One of Hollis's points is that GKC's great central insight, suddenly grasped as a student and from which all else flows, is the essential goodness of existence - of Being. This is the key to Christianity per se. Contrast GkC's insight into WB Yeats - whom he knew quite well as a young man - that Yeats had adopted the Eastern view that all is illusion, and realised its implications to an extent that many of his admirers did not. Nietzsche is a bad example because he disbelieved in reason, which by its nature is shared, and believed truth is created and imposed by the will. St Francis of Assisi might be a better example.
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