Hitchens spits his last breath at Chesterton
Posted on 01 March 2012
In the climax of MOBY DICK, Captain Ahab utters these dying words: “To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
Grimly enough, Ahab’s harpoon with which he hoped to spear the great sea beast tangles its line with his leg, and Ahab is pulled into the sea and drawn after the whale literally which he had been drawn after psychologically all this time.
Those of you with a sci fi bent might recall these same words breathed out with his dying breath by the genetic superhuman Khan Noonean Singh against Captain Kirk before he attempts to blow up the Enterprise with one last superweapon.
In both cases the White Whale and the famous starship emerge unharmed from the assault.
The Catholic Thing reports that Christopher Hitchens has written a final article before he passed away, his last publication. Oddly, and to my mind, sadly, he chose to drive his harpoon against the vast bulk and vaster spirit of GK Chesterton.
Foolishly, Hitchens titled an article — I assume it was Hitchens’ title since he uses the word throughout — about the lifelong arch-anti-aristocrat anti-Imperialist anti-Capitalist pro-Irish Chesterton ‘The Reactionary.’ The man who coined the brilliantly exaggerated caricatures of Hudge and Gudge when discussing the dismal state of British politics can be called many things, but ‘Reactionary’ is hardly one of them.
I recommend only that those who regard Mr Chesterton as a ‘Reactionary’ (which means a reflexive and thoughtless defender of the status quo, that is, of industrial capitalism, if has any meaning at all) please read his EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS, wherein Chesterton (in a lapse of his normal wisdom and lucidity) describes Capitalism as ‘a corrupt prison’ where the rich somehow have the power deliberately to create and maintain the poverty of the poor in order to force an unwilling workforce to toil for starvation wages in their dark, satanic mills.
The article is not worth reading, as the insight into Chesterton is on a par with that wildly wide-o’-the-mark envenomed dart. It consists of Hitchens listing some famous paradoxes or insights of Chesterton’s, sneering at them in an airy albeit leaden fashion without addressing them, as if this showed Chesterton, rather than Hitchens, to be arid. It quotes some of his poetry without saying anything about its literary merit or place in history, aside from a dismissive snort that Chesterton was Catholic. The article touches on the claims the Chesterton, who was nearly a Zionist, was an anti-semite, as if this were the crucial point in the man’s life. Next it tries to link Distributism to Nazism by a sort of Hitchensian free association.
Speaking as a yellow journalist, I submit that, even by the standards of yellow journalism, the article is crap.
You would be more edified to seek out an eleven year old and solicit his opinions on Goddard’s versus Tsiolovsky’s contribution to rocket science. You might run across a Boy Scout with a merit badge in rocketry, and be pleasantly surprised that the child knew whereof he spoke.
Like many Christians, I had been praying for an eleventh hour conversion by Mr Hitchens.
Exactly such circumstances as this wonderfully focused my own mind on the issue of my atheism, its hopelessness and its inadequacy as a moral, metaphysical, mental or physical model to the cosmos, or guide to navigate life. My own experience makes me unable to see either the harshness or the ghoulishness of using the deathbed as an instrument to jar the blinded soul awake. To me, using the threat of death to reach a lost soul seems no more than benevolent common sense.
And yet, it seems, Mr Hitchens was not reached. We know not for sure, but it looks like he died in his sins, and fell into the outer darkness.
At times like this, I wish I were a Calvanist, who thinks that Christ’s salvation was only meant for those who, by the high command of overarching predestination, had been foreknown and foreordained for salvation, and the good Lord meant and intended a dying man should not repent; for then at least I would have the cold comfort of thinking this was God’s Will.
But I am, for better or worse, for fairer or fouler, wedded to a gentler and more rational mother Church. I believe the inscrutable purposes of God leaves free men’s will to seek their own damnation, if men freely choose pride and hell over humility and heaven. So I believe the Blessed Virgin weeps to see a child of God cast into the dark inferno, and all the saints with her.
My prayers for Mr Hitchens seem not to have been heard. Neither seemed our Lord’s in the garden of Gethsemane: the cup He prayed to pass Him by He drained to the lees.
Instead we have the heathen raging impotently against the apostle of Common Sense, our own beloved GK Chesterton, a pygmy against a titan. I doubt the reputation of Chesterton is marred, any more than the reputation of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
One of the first things that led me to doubt the crystalline logical purity of my atheist was antics like this from public atheist figures. Hitchens, who has never once washed the wounds of a leprous beggar from Calcutta, spent his reputation mocking the saintly Mother Theresa.
Mr Hitchens is more on his own level attempting to belittle a fellow man of letters like Chesterton, but even here poor little Chris is over his head. Chesterton was something of a polymath, writing everything from Father Brown mysteries, to MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH to biographies of George Bernard Shaw or Saint Thomas Aquinas to epic poems about the battles of Alfred the Great to quasi-science fictional flights of fancy to apologetics to eugenics to all the topics of his day. Is the bitter and witty Mr Hitchens prepared to match wits against the corpulent and jovial inventor of Innocence Smith?
Was that the best thing Mr Hitchens could find to do in his last days, with the shadow of the Grim Reaper’s sickle already falling across his pages?
We are all of us, for all we know, in our last days, and all the dead who ever were, great and small, were once as we are now. Let the sad example of Mr Hitchens serve as a remainder that our time on this hither shore is but brief.
Sorry and all. Chesterton was a hero, a multiform genius, and “the only poet who knew what was going on” (quoth Neil Gaiman, and quite right too – compare Chesterton’s views of the contemporary world with those of nearly every one of his most eminent contemporaries, including even TS Eliot, and you will feel that you are in with a sharp-sighted adult after listening to a roomful of self-centred adolescents fed on ill-informed mimeographed sheets). He touched no literary form that he did not ennoble, from the historical essay to the nonsense verse and from heroic fantasy to literary reviews. But he WAS a Jew-basher. Instinctively so. Sneers at Jews rise over and over again in his prose and verse. To give one instance out of literally hundreds, it defaces such a fine poem as “The Song of Quoodle” (“…The park a Jew encloses/ Where even the law of Moses/ will let you steal a smell”). Now, not only is this yet another sterile poke at the supposedly grabby and miserly Jews, but it contains a subtler bit of nastiness that you can only appreciate if you are familiar with GKC’s historical theories. For in GKC’s view of the History of England, “to enclose” is a dirty word. It represents all the subversive activity of the English upper classes, their destruction of ancient rights for their own selfish and corporate advantage; and while this is a reasonable interpretation of English enclosure history – indeed, one with which I happen to agree – to stick it to the Jews is despicable. The Jews were only allowed into England under Cromwell, when the enclosure movement was already triumphant and unstoppable, and never had any serious part in English landed society. GKC used to expand on the few Jews, such as the Rotschilds, who had made enough money to buy land and a title, as if that explained everything, in the classic way of Jew-bashers everywhere; not considering that those Jews were vastly outnumbered by families of Dutch, Scottish, even French and Italian, descent. The English aristocracy has always been moderately welcoming to those with money and political power, such as the wave of Anglicized Dutch who came in with William III. But of the Dutch, of which much more and worse can easily be said, GKC has next to nothing to say. You say that he was “almost a Zionist”, and I say that that is disingenuous: he was vaguely drawn to the idea of the Jews leaving Europe for Palestine until 1929, when he actually visited the country and promptly fell for every single Arabic lie against the Jews. His book on that journey is an embarrassment: in the year when the Arabs butchered the oldest Jewish community in the world – that of Hebron – down to the last woman and child, GKC, the wisest man of his generation and the most far-sighted, was incapable of doing anything except regurgitating propaganda that even the more enlightened pro-arabists – such as TE Lawrence – knew to be worthless. It is simply an incredible and depressing spectacle, the more so because the book then features a simply stupendous chapter on the First Crusade that is the best thing (I speak with some authority, since I made a study of the First Crusade for a dissertation in college) that any historian has written on the subject, and miles better than the standard and seductively misjudged history by Sir Steven Runciman.
What is true is that GKC chose the right side from the beginning when Nazism began to be a power in Europe; used the right words, showed that he understood the real nature of the thing he saw – at a time when even Winston Churchill was still being careful – and, among its foulnesses, rightly listed the brutal assaults on defenceless Jews. But that does not in any way make him pro-Jewish; it just makes him a man who did not push his stupid and irritating prejudice as far as to blind himself (and he did blind himself in Palestine in 1929). That, at least, compares favourably with the likes of Nesta Webster, who started out as a passionate anti-German and swiftly allowed her idiotic notion of Hebraism to align her to the worst enemies of her own country. But it is not much to say on behalf of any man, let alone one from whom we have a right to expect so much more.
The saddest if not the worst thing about Chesterton’s Jew-bashing is that it is not funny. The funniest man this side of Wodehouse, when he started on the Jews, fell curiously flat. A fourth-rate racist comedian would have been funnier. The allusion to the Law of Moses in “The Song of Quoodle” is typically infelicitous. I don’t know how to interpret it, except than as the sudden manifestation of a mindless itch that, from time to time, had to be scratched. In fact, I would say that this piece of unassimilated absurdity in the make-up of one of the century’s wisest and best human beings may have been left there by God, like his other few flaws – in particular, his utter inability to appreciate music – so that we should be remembered that wise and great as he was, he was still only a human being, a mortal and in need of forgiveness and of redemption.
(sigh) Yeah, that ugly element of Chesterton is hard to be rid of.
I would say that the antisemitism is there on the basis of off-the-cuff slurs rather than a deeply embedded theme (compare, for instance, Lovecraft’s constant use of race and inbreeding as themes in his Cthulhu mythos as an expression of his own virulently racist worldview). I’m not sure, though. I haven’t really delved into his wider work.
I think a pressing question is whether his antisemitism was there from cultural influence or his own ideas.
Yes, that is the flaw that he is expiating in Purgatory. Well, he was a sinner like ourselves, as he himself would be the first to declare, and nobody ever said saints were perfect from the get-go or flawless in all they said or did. May we all come to the love of God and be forgiven our own beams that we cannot see in our eyes!
Perhaps with less historical insight than yourself, sir, when I read Chesterton’s book on his trip to the Holy Land, to me it seemed clearly, and not tentatively, to promote what is now called Zionism, the belief that the Jews should have their own homeland. It parallels his belief that the English peasantry was dispossessed during the enclosure laws, and the land should be returned to them.
Since I am a recovering libertarian, I took all his anti-Rotschilds remarks as anti-Capitalist, not essentially as anti-Jewish. When he criticizes a Jewish banker and the ‘moneyed powers’ he sees as ruining the world, I don’t see him in parallel bashing the poor Jew. He was just as critical of rich Christian bankers. This leads me to believe it was the concentration of wealth that he hated.
I admit this hatred of wealth is combined with the typical distaste for Jews as foreign and landless influences one finds in many an Englishman of that time and earlier. To call this distaste ‘anti-semitism’ is a gross exaggeration at best.
But even so, even supposing GKC to have been an anti-Semite, if you or I or any honest man were tasked with writing up an account of Chesterton’s life, would this be the issue about him to focus all the attention of the reader upon? Is the author of THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE to be remembered for his rude jest in ‘Song of Quoodle’?
I myself have been subjected to this type of pinpoint myopia. There are people out in the world who have heard my name, and know nothing about me except that I am a homophobe and a gay basher, people who never the article on which that accusation is based (where I was complaining about the injection of politics into science fiction, and it happened that the political issue I selected was the pro-LGBT pressure on the Sci Fi Channel). Likewise, there are those who will never read a word of Chesterton, warned off by such voices as Christ Hitchens, calling Chesterton an anti-Semite and a Jew-basher.
Nevertheless, I am very pleased your admiration for Chesterton is as high as my own. He was truly an astonishing man and had a gift for epigram like I have never seen since.
Oh, absolutely. And that Hitchens should have practically died cursing – as he did with Blessed Theresa of Calcutta before – is deeply saddening. However, it is important not to leave opposing debaters any stick to beat us with, and that means acknowledging where there is a weak point in our heroes. The last thing we want is to be stuck with the image of being uncritical idolaters – which is exactly what our opponents would love us to be, or better still to seem.
I acknowledge the weak spot. GCK’s remarks against Jews are unsightly. But even Christopher Hitchens did not go so far as to call him an anti-Semite, at least, not of the ‘mark them with a yellow star’ camp, which is what the word meant in its pre-inflation meaning.
I am quite sad about Hitchens. He seemed so like what I was before my conversion. I had hoped he would live, or find eternal life.
It is almost impossible for a Late Modern, living post-WW2, to view anti-Judaism as anything more than anti-Semitism. Chesterton had the prejudices of his class in his era. He didn’t like Jews, largely, I have read, because his son was ruined by a Jewish money-lender. Generalization is statistically invalid, but a common human failing. But he also wrote that he believed “Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew of Europe.” IOW, his class prejudice did not extend to a murderous hate.
“Chesterton had the prejudices of his class in his era. He didn’t like Jews, largely, I have read, because his son was ruined by a Jewish money-lender.”
If the biographies on the web are to be believed, G.K. Chesterton and his wife had no child of their own. They adopted his secretary, Dorothy Collins.
It was his brother, who was sued and convicted for libel for printing in his paper evidence of insider trading involving several Jewish parties(and a whole lot of non-Jewish ministers and businessmen); none of the parties involved were ever punished. Chesterton considered the incident a complete disgrace.
I agree that Chesterton could be called a “Jew-basher” in some sense; he seemed to almost subconsciously associate Jews, especially rich Jews, with all the things he hated most about modern English society, from imperialism and capitalism to plutocracy and aristocracy. Most of the anti-Judaism in his works comes (as Mr. Barbereli points out) in strange sorts of parenthetical elements, like the Jewish shopkeeper at the beginning of The Ball and the Cross or the odd Moses Gould from Manalive. In terms of his actual beliefs on the Jews, he seems to me to have been quite moderate for the time, though I don’t know enough to talk, as Mr. Barbereli does, that much on the subject. Certainly, though, one can see the same set of negative associations show up at times in his discussions of the “Jewish Problem.”
It certainly cannot be overlooked, however, that he was very close friends with a number of Jews throughout his life, a sometime supporter of the cause of Zionism, and all throughout his life a determined opponent of anti-Jewish persecution and violence. Even while at school, he defended Jewish classmates from bullying in determined fashion, and wrote in the school newspaper hearty denunciations of Russian persecution of Jews as quite literally devilish. In private, he wrote a poem in praise of Cromwell’s readmission of Jews into England, as well as a poem denouncing the French for the Dreyfus affair. His opposition to Hitlerite violence against Jews was not an isolated incident or belated conversion, but rather was of piece with his entire life’s outlook. Chesterton, whatever his private prejudices may have been, was at all times simply too honest a man to feel anything but disgust and hatred for those who perpetrated violence or injustice against the Jews. So, while I agree that there is definitely an anti-Semitism prejudice present in his works, I wouldn’t call him an anti-Semite in beliefs or actions without a great deal of qualification.
Of course, Mr Hitchens’ purpose in bringing up the topic at all was to provoke discussions such as this. Look at how many comments on this thread (including my own) center on the question of Chesterton’s alleged antisemitism. Compare it to the rest of his life, his accomplishments, their significance. It’s trivial, even if it were so.
This is the way socialists argue. They accuse the victim of being a witch, or of betraying some high moral principle, or of child molestation, or something equally horrible. Then that is the topic. Even if it is answered correctly and definitively, the accusation just comes up again later.
It’s much more pleasant to discuss a man such as GKC, even in his flaws, than the possible damnation of a soul; especially as we all seem to agree that GKC, whatever his faults, was enormous in his genius, his good sense, and his goodness. I don’t think anyone who visits this thread will come away with a lowered impression of the man.
Chesterton also wrote “The ballad of Gibeon”: http://fpb.livejournal.com/474636.html
Off the top of my head, it was the Marconi Scandal (an insider shares trading corruption scandal of the time, where the government were giving plum contracts to business interests owned by certain persons related to government officials in return for cheap stock which they then sold at profit, but I haven’t the details to hand).
It was Chesterton’s brother Cecil, not his son (as Sylvie says, Chesterton and his wife were childless) who was the journalist who investigated and reported on the story in the Distributist newspaper “New Witness”, and there was a trial involving the Isaacs brothers (the Jewish brothers who were, respectively, the Attorney General and the chairman of the Marconi company) because they brought a case for criminal libel against Cecil Chesterton. G.K. of course supported his brother, and I think a lot of the acrimony came out of that affair; Chesterton had long recognised the cosy nature of English politics at the time, where the two parties – the Tories and the Liberals – were all made up pretty much of the same class of people, related by marriage, blood and the old school tie, and Parliament was just a case of replacing Tweedledum with Tweedledee. If you read his story collection “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, it is a very cynical (for Chesterton) group of tales about an English gentleman who is a member of the upper class, knows these politicians, and knows the dirty laundry that doesn’t get washed in public about how the country is really run.
So I think that whatever latent racism or anti-Semitism or whatever you want to call it got stirred up by this affair, where it really did seem – from Chesterton’s viewpoint – like a ‘cosy cartel’ of rich and connected and influential Jewish businessmen meddling in English politics for their own profit and using their influence to ruin the reporter who exposed their shady dealings.
That’s no excuse for his comments, of course, but it does seem to have been the tinder that inflamed his prejudice. What makes it harder to understand is that his friends Maurice and Lawrence Solomon, and Waldo and Digby D’Avigdor, who were at St Paul’s School with him and members of the Junior Debating Club, were Jewish.
Argh. That should be Lucian Oldershaw, not Undershaw. That’s what comes of writing without the biography to hand
And I’m probably wrong about Lucian Oldershaw, but definitely Maurice and Lawrence Solomon, and Waldo and Digby D’Avigdor, who were at school with him and members of the Junior Debating Club, were Jewish.
I’m nearly completely certain I have it right at last
This is akin to my own reflections. After the Marconi scandal, Chesterton was in the same position as Mel Gibson. At least one highly-connected and influential rich Jew tried to ruin his career. Any comment he makes about the rich Jew and his rich friends mulcting the public sound, to our over-sensitive post-Holocaust ears, like antisemitism.
I look at it this way. If a man who walks through a bad section of town has been robbed three times by young Blacks, his comments about young Black crime are not racism, even if he speak in generalities about “black crime” and even if his comments affirm a common racial stereotype. It is a case where the stereotype is based in reality.
If the same man starts to hate all Blacks or accuse them all of crime, or seek their extermination through Planned Parenthood by decimating their unborn, at that point he has crossed the line, and is racist.
I don’t think Chesterton crossed the line. The Rothchilds are not something he made up. The large and ancient banking families did have cozy and corrupt Good Ol’ Boys relationship with the upper class in England at the time: and for Chesterton, being a member of the cozy rich who wrote the laws was the same as grinding the faces of the poor.
It is not racist to say some of those families are Jewish. It is not racist to say they should have a land of their own, their ancient ancestral land in the Middle East (at the time, owned by the Ottomans). But there is a line, which I think, for example, Henry Ford crossed, if you say because the Jews have no homeland, they can never be patriots and never be trusted. I cannot bring to mind anywhere that Chesterton said such a thing. Maybe someone more well read in his work can do so.
I would like to be sure. The Marconi Scandal is often quoted, but the impression of contemporary observers was, one, that Cecil Chesterton – who was even more reckless than his brother, and rather less eirenic – dug his own grave by being imprecise and rude, and, two, that he gave a widespread impression that animus against Jews was the motivating reason for him to attack the affair at all. As for the first point, it is perhaps worth remembering that Rufus Isaacs was one of the greatest lawyers of the day, particularly good on financial scandals (he was the man who destroyed Whittaker Wright, the greatest financial con man of the time), and that to go up against him with anything less than perfect arguments was suicide. And while anti-semitism was indeed a plague in the British upper classes at the time, nonetheless to give a public and indecent display of it just wasn’t done. Cecil Chesterton may have had a point, but he gave his opponents all the weapons they needed to ruin him, and you can hardly blame them for doing exactly that.
Perhaps he was fighting in the last ditch — one can hope. He had some time after writing this.
Yes. As the Cure’ d’Ars told a grieving woman who feared that her brother, a suicide, was damned, “There is space enough between the bridge and the water for repentance and Grace”.
“Between the saddle and the ground is the mercy of God”.
Indeed. We can’t assume his damnation based on his last essay. We don’t know what the illimitable grace of God may have done to reach him in the last hour, the last minute, the last second, the last trillionth of a second…whatever was necessary. If you would pray for him, continue praying for him.
It may be a kind of left-handed compliment to Chesterton; that Christopher Hitchens’ last article should be one on him. Of all the problems or enemies or causes or attacks he could have made, he chose to write one last article – the last he ever produced, though whether he knew that that would be the one I have no idea – not about the Pope, or American religiosity, or Islam, or socialism, or financial collapse, or world politics, or atheism as a philosophical ideal – but rather about a journalist who was born under Victoria and died just before the outbreak of the Second World War, someone not even universally known to all his co-religionists and the remnants of whose fame, in the wider public, rest on his Father Brown detective stories?
At least if Ahab went down raging, his target was indeed the White Whale and not a minnow
You are right that this is a compliment to Chesterton. I would have preferred a right handed one, but the idea of treating one’s enemies honorably is a Christian and a pagan conceit, one which postchristians seem to have lost the art of.
What a difference 70 years make. Mr. Chesterton does not seem to be particularly anti-Semitic, certainly less so then the overwhelming majority of politicians and people in Europe and Great Britain at that time. We have a tendency to judge others based on the current sensibility, regardless of whether or not we held an even worse sensibility even 40 years ago. Speeches by Civil Rights leaders at the start of the Civil Rights movement seem racist today, and quoting them without sanitizing them can get politicians in very hot water. Many of the Feminists that worked hard to get the vote would be (or are) considered anti-feminists today.
If Mr. Chesterton said a single word about the defenseless Jews in Nazi Germany then he is likely among the Jews best friends from that time period, even if he did have prejudices towards Jews. As a prominent Jewish Holocaust historian recently pointed out too few were willing to say or do anything. Don’t judge him by our understanding of what it is to be anti-Semitic, look at the normal standard of his day and then judge him on if he was more friendly to the Jews and believing they were deserving of human dignity then were newspapers, politicians, and church leaders up to the highest levels in the Vatican.
Sorry, that is quite wrong. No, Chesterton was not typical of his time, and his prejudice was indeed noticed and castigated. For one thing, you must not imagine the Jews of Britain at the time to have been illiterate or timid. Humbert Wolfe delivered an excellent quatrain:
Here lies Mr.Chesterton,
Who to Heaven might have gone,
But didn’t, when he heard the news
That the place was run by Jews.
And plenty of non-Jews agreed.
This is what Mr. Chesterton says about himself:
If we look on Wikipedia we get:
“The Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: “he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.”"
Well…I guess he chose ‘madman’.
Regarding the eternal fate of Mr. Hitchens, God alone knows. As the saying of my own country goes, “Between the saddle and the ground is the mercy of God.”
Regarding headlines on newspaper stories, Chesterton was himself a journalist and knew how the industry operates; from “What I Saw in America”, ‘Irish and Other Interviewers’:
“Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American ‘stories’ have always been in the headlines. And the headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can safely be let loose to wander about the town.”
As regards Chesterton the reactionary – why, yes, of course the man who wrote the following was a reactionary – but doesn’t it all depend on what you are reacting against?
“But my purpose here is only to point out one particular thing. In all that long list of variations there must be, and there are, things which energetic modern minds would really wish, with the reasonable modification, to restore. Dr. Clifford would probably be glad to see again the great Puritan idealism that forced the Bible into an antique and almost frozen formality. Dr. Horton probably really regrets the old passion that excommunicated Rome. In the same way Mr. Belloc would really prefer the Middle Ages; as Lord Rosebery would prefer the Erastian oligarchy of the eighteenth century. The Dark Ages would probably be disputed (from widely different motives) by Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Cunninghame Graham. But Mr. Cunninghame Graham would win.
But the black case against Conservative (or Evolutionary) politics is that none of these sincere men can win. Dr. Clifford cannot get back to the Puritans; Mr. Belloc cannot get back to the mediaevals; because (alas) there has been no Revolution to leave them a clear space for building or rebuilding. Frenchmen have all the ages behind them, and can wander back and pick and choose. But Englishmen have all the ages on top of them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, without being able to take so much as a brick out of it. If the French decide that their Republic is bad they can get rid of it; but if we decide that a Republic was good, we should have much more difficulty. If the French democracy actually desired every detail of the mediaeval monarchy, they could have it. I do not think they will or should, but they could. If another Dauphin were actually crowned at Rheims; if another Joan of Arc actually bore a miraculous banner before him; if mediaeval swords shook and.
blazed in every gauntlet; if the golden lilies glowed from every tapestry; if this were really proved to be the will of France and the purpose of Providence–such a scene would still be the lasting and final justification of the French Revolution.
For no such scene could conceivably have happened under Louis XVI.”
Believe or not, in my first draft, I wrote the line saying that Hitchens did not write the headline; but then when, upon examining the article, I saw the word used over and over again, I no longer could give him the benefit of that doubt. A journalist of his stature has some sway over editorial whims.
When an objective writer using the dictionary definition of ‘Reactionary’ he may perhaps mean what you mean; but Hitchens was an old school European Socialist. The word has a technical meaning in their lingo: it means Rich Uncle Pennybags, the Monopoly icon. To apply that to Chesterton, of all people, is as foolish as calling him an anti-Semite or a wild pagan.
Foolisher. It is possible to ascribe pagan passions to a man who was anything but ascetic and who defended wine and beer in memorable language; and it is possible to exaggerate his silly obsession with Jewish stereotypes into a cosmic principle – which, I emphasize, it was not. But to describe this lifelong enemy of Tories and power-mongers of every type, of entrenched interests and back-room deals, of enclosure and aristocratic illegality, as a “reactionary”, is to show oneself a foreigner to elementary fact. GKC was widely popular with Britain’s socialists in his time, and they often agreed on practical matters.
Amen to that.
And because you can never just stop at one Chesterton quotation, here is a taster to make you go and read the rest of this article (and I note that Chesterton was perfectly able to sneer at himself), “The Real Journalist”:
“The notorious G. K. Chesterton, a reactionary Torquemada whose one gloomy pleasure was in the defence of orthodoxy and the pursuit of heretics, long calculated and at last launched a denunciation of a brilliant leader of the New Theology which he hated with all the furnace of his fanatic soul. In this document Chesterton darkly, deliberately, and not having the fear of God before his eyes, asserted that Shakespeare wrote the line “that wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.” This he said because he had been kept in ignorance by Priests; or, perhaps, because he thought craftily that none of his dupes could discover a curious and forgotten rhyme called ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. Anyhow, that orthodox gentleman made a howling error; and received some twenty-five letters and post-cards from kind correspondents who pointed out the mistake.”
I’ve heard it asked, “why not live as thou want and then become Christian on thy deathbed?” Setting aside that no man knows the hour of his death, as I’ve gotten older, I come to realize that it’s because habits are so very hard to break. After a lifetime spent turning away from God, rare is the man (or woman) who would suddenly turn the other way.
I know they say no one can know another’s soul but of everything I saw and read about Hitchens, he enjoyed plenty of vices, especially pride. He’d probably find Heaven too small for him anyway. I quite agree with Lewis’ conjecture: In the end, God just gives us what we want: to be with Him, or far away. (and how else can one escape the Infinite Himself?)
Your last sentence reminds of a terrible verse by Edith Sitwell:
“Hell is no vastness, it has naught to keep
But little rotting souls.”
Frankly, I suspect that she may have caught the idea of Hell better than Dante or Milton. Their very greatness of soul gets in the way; it makes their conceptions too grand. It is difficult to believe that the likes of Farinata or the devils who go to explore Hell in the fifth book of Paradise Lost can be really everlastingly unhappy, with not a spark of joy between them.
Farinata I think could be unhappy, but the trap of his pride is that he refuses to acknowledge that unhappiness. So his ancestry is of bluer blood than anyone else in the circle with him; what avail that now, with no deeds of valour to do, no renown to win, no rule to sway? Who has he got to look down his nose at, in the fiery coffin in the city of Dis?
The exploring devils will make themselves unhappy, because the same factionalism and sedition that got them to agree to rebel in Heaven will not vanish in Hell, and as soon as the novelty of their situation wears off, they will be back to plots and intrigues for power and place.
But I’m very glad to see an Edith Sitwell quote
CS Lewis’ conception of Hell in THE GREAT DIVORCE as a place of dreary isolation is akin to the sentiment you quote from Sitwell. My wife has a complete collection of ‘near death experiences’ where people have died (or almost) on the operating table or by sudden accident and were later revived, some with eerie memories that might not be dreams or hallucinations. One or two report a realm of darkness and horror which is akin to the classical ideas of hell, but not in any way romanticized: endless darkness filled with rage and pain and hate. It is the closes thing we have to an eyewitness report.
And also the hell in The Great Divorce is very small. As CSL writes, all the hell would fit into a single atom of Earth and all the earth would fit into a single droplet of Heaven.
Well, that seems to go contrary to intuition. It would seem hell would need vastly more room, would it not?
Whose soul is the more spacious – that of the redeemed and Deified saint, or that of the unrepentant sinner bending in on itself? And for that matter, who says that the majority of souls will be damned in the end? That is not what God wills.
Well, since I am pretty well known here as one of the few regular atheists, my comment is obviously not too serious.
But I did not realize that it is supposed that a good soul takes up more space than a bad one like a king size bed takes up more space in a 16′ x 16′ bedroom than a twin bed.
No? I didn’t know the issue was settled.
1) Suppose that our spiritual metaphors of “greatness” were objective reality in the spiritual world? At any rate, the important fact is that Hell is IRRELEVANT. It is the place of those who have made themselves irrelevant. Physical smallness is as good an image to explain that as any other.
2) God wills that all should be saved, and died in the effort. That is established, at least as far as Christian theology goes. If you want to discuss something outside Christianity, well and good, but that is not what we are speaking about here.
No, I am not trying to speak outside of the Christian viewpoint here, merely inquiring ( I realize my original question on this sounded a bit blithe). By saying that God wills that all should be saved is not saying the same as that all will be saved, is it? There should still be a large onus upon man himself else it would make man’s actions pretty irrelevant to his salvation. And it appears to me that if I were a Christian, I would have to conclude that hell has quite the population. Then again I am probably guilty of applying my philosophy’s sense of justice to a Christian worldview (haphazardly?). I’d have a hard time accepting a God of too much forgiveness.
Despite what you may have heard, the will of God in certain matters is crystal clear. What clouds the issue is the unwillingness of certain people to hear that will.
Why, sir, are you not familiar with the seminal articles about the temperature comparison between Heaven and Hell, which concluded that Heaven is the hotter place, and the rebuttal, published in “The Journal of Irreproducible Results” (that title brings back happy memories of when I was studying to be a lab tech and spent time in the college library reading scientific magazines such as that instead of the textbooks)?
I’ve read those. Quite amusing, but what’s rather sad is that they’re based on an old article by a “freethinker” called “A Mathematical Proof for the Non-Existence of Hell,” which is actually dead-serious, thereby proving that thinking too freely can mean thinking stupidly.
Not necessarily.
If I may be crude a moment, as they frequently say, a person with pride is one with his “head up his own ass”. It is easy to see how, in a land of pride, everyone would become so inner focused that they’d all collapse into little soul singularities.
Don’t think it is restricted to issues of pride. I know plenty of people with no esteem or self at all that have their heads quite well jammed up their arses. Having one’s head up their own blowhole is a self-sufficient ailment for some!
I like your use of illustration though! It made for a very funny dark landscape of people in embarrassing positions walking around with great difficulty.
You need neither esteem nor any self at all to be proud. Pride is self-preoccupation. Such as being too preoccupied with your own views to let the truth dent them.
Can’t tell if the last sentence was a shot across the bow or not. Self-preoccupation without a self. Well there is selfishness without a self, so I’ll accept your formulation. I use a strictly Aristotelian conception of pride – not a form a vainglory. Not sure if there is a distinction that Aquinas or Christianity draws.
It is very horrible to contemplate Hell. There are many Christians I know who are as scandalized as atheists at the notion that a loving God would consign on of His beloved sons there: it is unimaginable. Mr Hitchens was one of the few Leftist of which I had heard tell who actually put Leftist ideals above Leftist partisanship, particularly in the affairs and wars of the Clinton Administration. Such honesty is rare.
The Jewish problem viewed through Chesterbelloc is given out in Belloc’s The Jews which is on my reading list. One thing he says that Jews were over-represented in espionage by virtue of being present in all European nations.
Belloc was also prescient about the permanent problems with Arabs that would be caused by Zionist Project. He views Belfour Declaration very darkly and for him the Anglo-Jew friendship was based upon the Enemy of Enemy being Friend principle, the common enemy being Catholicism.
First, there is no such thing as a Jewish problem. Jews don’t riot in the streets, don’t threaten other religions and generally work harder and more successfully than most. That, perhaps, is why some people find them a problem. Second, Catholics in particular are not allowed to think of Hebraism as a problem. Persecuting the Jews because of their Jewishness has been forbidden since the days of Gregory I the Great’s decree Sicut Iudaeis (594 AD) and reiterated and explained by Thomas Aquinas, our greatest philosopher. Of course many Catholics have violated this commandment, just as many Catholics have fornicated – heterosexually or homosexually – stolen, swindled, lied, coveted the goods of others, committed murder, incest and rape, plotted murder and vengeance in secret, etc etc etc etc etc… That does not prove that fornication, theft, fraud, lies, covetousness, murder, incest, rape and conspiracy are not forbidden by the Church. Quite to the contrary: the Church would not forbid them if they were not possible. The Church does not forbid three-legged walking or four-dimensional painting.
The Balfour Declaration was a product of anti-Semitism, and I am not, repeat not, joking. The whole idea was that the Jews were this monstrous world-spanning conspiracy whose favour would no doubt win the war for the Allies. Therefore they had to be propitiated. When the British realized that there was no Jewish conspiracy and that they had had to win the war by their own effort unaided by any supernatural conspiracy, they turned against the Jews. British policy in Palestine was consistently pro-Arab, for which the Arabs have never been grateful; the armies that in 1948 tried to destroy the Jewish community were armed and in some cases commanded by Britons. As for Palestine being in any way an exclusively Arabic country, that shows that both you and Belloc knew nothing whatever of Ottoman history and law.
Have I said that Palestine was exclusively Arab?
The term “Jewish problem” was a terminology of that period. It does not mean a problem caused by Jews.
Belloc was also prescient about the problems that could be caused due to the prevailing association of Jews with the Bolshevik revolution.
Again, there was NO “prevailing Jewish” participation in Bolshevism. You might as well speak of a “Caucasian problem” because of the presence of Stalin, Mikoyan and Ordzhokonizhe in the upper ranks of the Bolshevik party. The only Jew who was more than a follower and an obeyer, Trotzky, had rejected the Jewish identity and indeed treated Jews who came to beg him for relief in the horrors of civil war with contempt. The Russian civil war may well be described as the story of villages conquered first by the Whites, who butchered the local Jews because of their Bolshevism, and then taken over by the Bolsheviks, who butchered the local Jews because of their opposition to Bolshevism. The important thing, obviously, was to have some excuse to murder Jews.
Has anyone brought up the fact that several of Chesterton’s close childhood friends were Jews? With two friends, Chesterton co-founded the Junior Debating Club as a teenager. It was composed of twelve members, from his social circle, of which four were Jews. With everyone’s departure from school and entrance into college, the club broke up, but they remained lifelong friends and had a number of reunion dinners in later years (even decades later), eventually including their wives.
Yes, he had Jewish friends all his life, including people who had originally taken against him because of his dumb asides. But that in itself proves little – “some of my best friends are….”
It proves the point in dispute. A man who has Jewish friends is not an antisemite. The antisemites who claim to have Jewish friends are lying in an attempt to shield themselves from the accusation.
Dawn Eden (who is Jewish) found herself struggling with this issue immediately before her conversion. I remember how bitter and distressing her blogpost about being on a trip with Chesterton fans was.
And then suddenly, she was converted, and Chesterton was her friend again. In less than a month.
Of course, I’m known to keep Tertullian in my prayers, so maybe I’m just optimistic.
Lines to a Don
by Hilaire Belloc
Remote and ineffectual Don
That dared attack my Chesterton,
With that poor weapon, half-impelled,
Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,
Unworthy for a tilt with men —
Your quavering and corroded pen;
Don poor at Bed and worse at Table,
Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;
Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,
Don nervous, Don of crudities;
Don clerical, Don ordinary,
Don self-absorbed and solitary;
Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;
Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;
Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,
Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic;
Don hypocritical, Don bad,
Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad;
Don (since a man must make an end),
Don that shall never be my friend.
* * *
Don different from those regal Dons!
With hearts of gold and lungs of bronze,
Who shout and bang and roar and bawl
The Absolute across the hall,
Or sail in amply billowing gown
Enormous through the Sacred Town,
Bearing from College to their homes
Deep cargoes of gigantic tomes;
Dons admirable! Dons of Might!
Uprising on my inward sight
Compact of ancient tales, and port
And sleep — and learning of a sort.
Dons English, worthy of the land;
Dons rooted; Dons that understand.
Good Dons perpetual that remain
A landmark, walling in the plain —
The horizon of my memories —
Like large and comfortable trees.
* * *
Don very much apart from these,
Thou scapegoat Don, thou Don devoted,
Don to thine own damnation quoted,
Perplexed to find thy trivial name
Reared in my verse to lasting shame.
Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,
Repulsive Don — Don past all bearing.
Don of the cold and doubtful breath,
Don despicable, Don of death;
Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;
Don evil; Don that serves the devil.
Don ugly — that makes fifty lines.
There is a Canon which confines
A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse
If written in Iambic Verse
To fifty lines. I never cut;
I far prefer to end it — but
Believe me I shall soon return.
My fires are banked, but still they burn
To write some more about the Don
That dared attack my Chesterton.
Dreyfus, of course, was innocent but long after he was cleared, the Dreyfusards had become a powerful and destructive force of knee-jerk opposition against the French military, the church and the government. Chesterton made this distinction between the Dreyfus case and the radical and fundamentally nihilistic movement that grew out of it. Pat Buchanan is patently antisemitic because he will lump George Soros and conservatives such as David Horowitz together and call it ‘the Jewish lobby’ which is laughable. Chesterton would never have made such a mistake.
Lumping George Soros and David Horowitz together does not make a man “patently antisemitic”. Hatred the Jews makes a man an antisemite, not the opinion that the Jews have a common culture or some tendency to common political or philosophical goals.
You utter an outrageous slander. Expect further comments along such lines to be deleted without notice or explanation.
You might as well say that the anti-Dreyfusard party carried the seeds of Petainism, Vichy, and of today’s Front National. The politician most identified with the Dreyfusard cause was Georges Clemenceau, the future “father of victory”, the man who was to World War One what Churchill was to World War Two. (Churchill, BTW, wrote a magnificent description of the fighting old man in his “Great Contemporaries”, and may well have been personally inspired in the stance he struck and the ways he encouraged the country to fight.) Conversely, you should remember that people like Maurras not only were Fascists before Fascism was invented, but that they were not Catholics. Maurras regarded the Catholic Church as a useful instrument for the – shall we say – “authoritarian” government he envisaged for France, but of course he was far too enlightened himself to believe any such fable. Oh, and while Clemenceau led the country to victory in WWI, Maurras ended his career by shamefully bowing before the (apparently) victorious Hitler. So who was the nihilist and the destructive influence?