G.K. Chesterton, RIP

So last Friday night, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our Greater Wichita Chesterton Society local chapter (including residents of Derby, St. Mark's, Hutchinson and Newton) met in The Ladder to finish our discussion of Joseph Pearce's biography of G.K. Chesterton. As you might expect, the last event in Chesterton's life to be discussed was his death, 85 years ago today (June 14, 1936).

There were two very beautiful anecdotes about Chesterton's decline and death. One was that he had memorized the Sequence for the Feast of Corpus Christi (having published his great work on St. Thomas Aquinas just three years before in 1933). Pearce quoted the last two stanzas of Lauda Sion, with its prayer to see God face-to-face at the Heavenly Banquet:

Bone pastor, panis vere,

Jesu, nostri miserére:

Tu nos pasce, nos tuére:

Tu nos bona fac vidére

In terra vivéntium.

Tu, qui cuncta scis et vales:

Qui nos pascis hic mortáles:

Tuos ibi commensáles,

Cohærédes et sodáles,

Fac sanctórum cívium.

Amen. Alleluia.

He also cited the last words of Verbum supernum prodiens, reflecting on Heaven as being in patria (our true native land!). For a man who loved England so much, this was remarkable statement.

UPDATE: I think that the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated on Thursday, June 11 in 1936. (Easter was on April 12; Pentecost on May 31, and Trinity Sunday on June 7.)

The other anecdote was that Pope Pius XI sent telegrams to Frances Chesterton and Cardinal Hinsley, referring to Chesterton as a "Defender of the Catholic Faith". The telegram was read at a memorial Requiem Mass celebrated at Westminster Cathedral on June 27, 1936. The British press would not publish the pope's telegram because it gave Chesterton the title which, in its view, belonged only to the King of England, Edward VIII. (Edward VIII had not been crowned yet and never would be because he abdicated in December of 1936 because he could not reign "without the help and support of the woman" he loved.)

Since he had not been crowned or anointed, or sworn his coronation oath to defend the faith, the future Duke of Kent was not really the Defender of the Faith at that time at all! 

I wonder what Chesterton would have made of all the ironies of Edward VIII's abdication in his column for G.K.'s Weekly.

Pearce reminded us, of course, that King Henry VIII had received the title "Fidei Defensor" from Pope Leo X "shortly before the King had rebelled against the Church". It was actually in 1521, about six years before Henry started seeking an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. We could date his rebellion against the Catholic Church and Papal authority to 1532, so perhaps not that "shortly before". Pearce also comments that Chesterton had little in common with the king, "except perhaps the size of their girths."! (p. 485)

You may see a digitized image (showing the damage incurred in a fire) of the Papal Bull of Pope Leo X proclaiming Henry VIII the Defender of the Faith at the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog, reminding us why he received that title:

Henry was given the title Defender of the Faith in recognition for his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments). Possibly written in consultation with Thomas More (b. 1478, d. 1535) and Cardinal Wolsey (b. c. 1473, d. 1530), Henry’s principal statesmen at this point in his reign, this theological treatise acted as a response to the pronouncements of the German theologian Martin Luther (b. 1483, d. 1546), whose ideas helped to shape the Protestant Reformation movement during the 16th century. . . .

Henry’s positive relationship with the Papacy did not last. Only a decade after Leo X issued the papal bull, Henry decided to break away from the Church of Rome, following Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul his marriage to his first wife Catherine of Aragon (b. 1485, d. 1536). He also distanced himself from the Assertio, claiming that he had been manoeuvred into writing it by his bishops. His actions ultimately resulted in his own excommunication by Clement’s successor Paul III (b. 1468, d. 1549) in 1538 and he was stripped of the title Defender of the Faith.

However, towards the end of Henry’s reign, in 1543, the English Parliament passed an act that restored the title for him and his successors. Since then, it has continued to be used as part of the styling of British monarchs (including the reigning Elizabeth II) to indicate their role as Head of the Church of England. It even features on coins of the realm, with the Latin Fidei defensor appearing in its abbreviated form F.D beside the Queen’s portrait.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Defender of the Catholic Faith, Rest in Peace in Our True Native Land!

Book Review: Joseph Pearce's Biography of G.K. Chesterton

It seems like I've been reading this book forever! We started reading it in our local Chesterton Society group late in 2019 I think, three chapters at a time, although we sometimes only got through two chapters during our monthly discussions. Then because of COVID, we had to skip several meetings, both in the spring of 2020 and particularly at the end of the year. My late brother and I were both in the hospital in December; then Steven died on the second day of January and we met on the second Friday of that month to pray a Rosary for the repose of his soul, and then it was bitterly cold in February so we cancelled. A smaller group of us finally met in March this year, and a larger group gathered on the Friday in the Octave of Easter this month. 

We determined then we'd all read the last four chapters, hope to get through two of them in May and finish our discussion of this book in June! Next month we'll decide what to read next: we're leaning toward either Chesterton's study of Charles Dickens or his book about Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm in favor of either, but we'll vote so that Eighth Day Books may obtain the book for us and we'll start discussing it in July!

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton is an excellent biographical study, combining the narrative of Chesterton's life with a comprehensive review of his works, their reception at the time, and their influence on other writers like C.S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many others. Pearce's vivid description of the Chestertons' (Gilbert and Frances) domestic life is well-matched by his recounting of their travels to the Holy Land, the U.S.A., Ireland, etc.

One theme we did comment on several times, because we had previously (in 2016) read Nancy Carpentier Brown's The Woman Who Was Chesterton, was how Pearce's biography was considerably more favorable toward Chesterton's sister-in-law, Ada Chesterton (his brother Cecil's wife/widow) than Brown's view of her in the context of Frances' life. In Pearce's narration, she seemed more sympathetic to Chesterton and his work, while Brown highlights Frances' negative reaction to Ada's biographical work The Chestertons.

There was one error I spotted: one page 381 in the chapter "Rome and Romance" Pearce mentions that the Chestertons were in Rome for the "Beatification of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales"--that's incorrect: 136 Martyrs of England and Wales were beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI. Twenty-nine of those beatified in that group would be canonized among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

It was difficult for me to read the last pages, describing Chesterton's death and Frances' grief--too close to my own feelings; I had to put the book down for a day before I could finish it.

I think this biography is one of Joseph Pearce's greatest achievements. Highly recommended.

One Good Book Leads to Another: Chesterton on the Victorians

Our local Chesterton Society is reading Joseph Pearce's biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence. Next month we're going to conclude our discussion of a chapter  in which Pearce introduces us to one of Chesterton's works of literary criticism, The Victorian Age in Literature.

Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society offers some background for the book, which is out of print:

In 1913 the Home University Library published Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature. But the editors emphatically declared that the book was not being offered as “an authoritative history of Victorian Literature” but only as Chesterton’s “personal views” on the subject. Apparently someone with personal views cannot write an authoritative history. In other words, an author cannot be an authority.

In spite of this handicap, the book was hugely successful, with multiple reprintings. One reviewer, however, while admiring the book, still expressed his irritation at “Chesterton’s obsession with religion.” (Again, authors should not have opinions, though critics may.) The reviewer’s irritation enabled him to miss the whole point of the book: that we cannot understand the Victorian writers without reference to their traditions and creeds – especially the traditions and creeds that they have rejected. Chesterton says religion “was the key of this age as of every other.” . . .

We cannot really understand the Victorian era unless we go back to the breakup of Catholic society. The multiple heresies that pulverized Catholicism were not merely religious but cultural and political and artistic. The old order was never replaced with a new order, but only with continued reactions against the old order. Chesterton says the later Protestant-types kept the Protestantism but did away with the Christianity. The Victorian Age began under the godless philosophy of Utilitarianism; it ended in the god-defying philosophy of Decadence, where men engaged in vile behavior not because they did not know it was wrong but because they did know it was wrong. “The decadents utterly lost the light and reason of their existence.” . . .

When I began reading the on-line edition of Chesterton's study I was happy to see his mention of St. John Henry Newman as a writer:

A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his individuality: men are never individual when alone.

And in the first paragraph of the first chapter Chesterton cites Newman again:

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other, we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

Chesterton identifies the Oxford Movement as one of the three great trends of Victorian thought along with Utilitarianism and Romantic Protestantism, and he summarizes his view of Newman's leadership of the Oxford Movement and his Catholic career after he left it thus:

But the greater part of all this happened before what is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia.  In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done with them for ever. His Lectures on the Present Position of English Catholics, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in ours.

More of Chesterton's appraisal of Newman's style may be found here (also highlighting Newman's Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England).

At our last meeting, we ended our discussions in the midst of chapter 12, "Brothers in Arms" as Chesterton has confessed to Father O'Connor (the model for Father Brown) in the spring of 1912 that he wants to become a Catholic but is waiting for his wife Frances. Pearce's description of Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature will be part of our reading next month as we finish up chapter 12 and move along to chapters 13 through 15. In the meantime, I'm reading Chesterton's evaluations of the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Browning, Barrett Browning, et al.