Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On Looking Down at the Stars

On Looking Down at the Stars I do not recall now when I first read Chesterton’s The Defendant . It was one of his earliest books, from , basically a revised series of essays from a journal called The Speaker. Until Christmas, I did not have a copy of this book, but John Peterson somehow dug up a copy—the  Dent fourth edition.As ever, such thoughtful gifts are just that—thoughtful, things that make us think. This particular book, I noticed, had three previous ownermarkings on it.The first is a kind of sticker on the inside front cover on which there is an owl enclosed in a wreath.The shield is divided diagonally into a black and white sector; in the center of each division is a smaller owl, no doubt the symbol of wisdom . At the bottom, there is a Latin inscription that reads:“Ratione NonVi.” Evidently, this phrase is intended to mean that we should proceed by reason and not by force. I could write a whole book on the qualifications and understandings that we ought to have before we accept this otherwise very Aristotelian position. Aristotle would have said that if we proceed by force, as we must sometimes do, we should do so with reason. He would also have maintained that the purpose of force, even of punishment, is to establish and protect reason. The second marking is on the page opposite to the inside cover with the Three Owls. It says: “St.Vincent de Paul Missionary Cenacle, North th Street,Harrisburg,Penna.”As there is no Zip Code of any kind on this stamped identification, I will presume that this book was in this, I imagine, seminary library, before the invention of Zip Codes.Then on the Table of Contents page there is another stamped inscription: “Blessed Trinity Juniorate.” 55 The books’s number in this library was evidently “.” On the inside of the back cover there is also one of those old library “Date Due” forms. What is of interest to those who see doom everywhere in seminaries is that this particular book was apparently never checked out, as there are no dates due on the slip. Well, I want to talk here rather about one of the essays, that entitled “In Defense of Planets.” It seems that the young Chesterton had come across a book of a man by the improbable name of Mr. D.Wardlaw Scott who claimed to have discovered that “the earth is not a planet.” Chesterton could hardly contain himself about the man’s logic—“This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp,” he wrote of ‘Terra Firma’: The Earth Is Not a Planet. But what interested Chesterton was not the science part of this strange theory but its poetic aspects. Men of science have claimed that the Bible is not based on any true theory of astronomy . But if it had been, Chesterton remarked, “it would never have convinced anybody.”1 What bothered Chesterton was that if we take the theories of Copernicus or Newton seriously (and a pari almost any scientific theory) we would never write any poetry. Take for example, Chesterton reflected, the case of a thoroughly scientific man who had a proper picture of the twirling Earth. Suppose we have “an aggressive egoist” who is vigorously maintaining his philosophic position.All the while he is making such absolute claims, we see him with proper astronomical theory. In fact, he is “announcing the independence and divinity of man” while he is seen to be actually “hanging on to the planet by his boot soles.”2 Chesterton had great fun with this imagery. In spite of everything , Chesterton thought that Mr.Wardlaw Scott would never teach us to speak romantically of “early earth-turn” instead of “early sunrise.”And even more amusingly, the scientific poet will have really an awful time in “speaking indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or looking down on the stars.” It took me a bit of 56 On Looking Down at the Stars time to catch the humor of this remark. If we recall the man hanging on to the planet with his boot soles, we will see that in truth, looking at us as we actually are, the man standing fixed to the Earth when he looks at the stars is looking down, not up, and when he looks...