Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

The Only Virtue

The OnlyVirtue Volume III of the Collected Works () includes a book known as The Well and the Shallows ().The book ends with two short essays, one of which was a Letter Chesterton wrote to The Catholic Herald entitled “Why Protestants Prohibit.” Chesterton had evidently been asked to give an address on the BBC in the context of a series on “Freedom.” He was asked to speak on freedom as it related to Catholicism. (I do not know if this address still exists on tape somewhere). Evidently Chesterton’s talk produced a myriad of not always complimentary responses. I bring these essays up in the context of whether we can really speak the truth in this or any other republic . We are so much under the influence of the idea of tolerance , the one virtue, that we are not allowed to suggest that any idea or institution can be described in terms of truth. Needless to say, there is a problem of logic, of contradiction even, at work here. If tolerance itself is the only “truth,” the only virtue, then the only vice is “intolerance.”And what exactly is not to be tolerated in this context? It turns out to be the very claim to truth. When tolerance is elevated to a theoretic principle, we are left, in the political order, with the inability to call anything at all wrong or evil. The logic of the “only virtue” was the background of Chesterton ’s responses to his critics who complained about his talk about liberty. Chesterton’s fault against the only virtue, it seems, was his remark that the Protestant notion of freedom was “wrong.” Such a remark on the BBC was by definition offensive and intolerable. Chesterton was not asked to prove his position, but to state it and explain it. He was not so much faulted on the 175 truth of his position as on bringing it up in the first place. His view was not wrong, but it was uncivil. People do not like to hear that their view is considered wrong. No discourse at the level of soul-searching is therefore possible. “If, indeed, in this free country where (I am assured) all views can be expressed,” Chesterton justly reasoned,“it is unpardonable to suggest that the Protestant view of Freedom is wrong, some responsibility must be shared by those who ask the Catholic to explain why the Catholic view is right.”1 The only other alternative , the one more prevalent perhaps in this country, is never to have an objective position about a serious topic made in the first place in the public media. I should not, moreover, fail to point out here the delicate subtlety of Chesterton’s position. If a country really is “free,” this should imply that one has the obligation to state what his position is as he holds it. But if, at the same time, the very stating it “offends” someone and this “offense” is grounds for prohibiting the speech, then we cannot have it both ways.The end of liberty and its discussion is no liberty. The end of tolerance is intolerance . Chesterton confessed his personal difficulty in dealing with all of these views forthrightly:“For the peculiar diplomatic and tactful art of saying that Catholicism is true, without suggesting for one moment that anti-Catholicism is false, is an art which I am too old a Rationalist to learn at any time of life.”2 Again this sentence is worthwhile spelling out. It is not here a question of the truth of Catholicism, but the truth of logic, of the mind. If one is invited to state his position and to affirm its truth, if this explication is the purpose of the discussion, then it is necessary , and by implication not at all “intolerant,” to suggest that something at variance with this truth is false. Whatever one might think of Chesterton’s exposition of Catholic liberty, which he was, in the name of freedom, invited to present, it is impossi176 The OnlyVirtue ble not to recognize that positions opposed to it are not the same.This is not a question of religion but of thought. It has no alternative but the cessation of thought. Chesterton had made this same point in TheThing (same volume of Collected Works), in an essay entitled “Some of Our Errors .” Chesterton was discussing whether it was necessary and possible to...