Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On the Nate of "Yes" in the State of Maine

On the Nature of “Yes” in the State of Maine Chesterton is often called amusing, mostly because he is. In a column on March , , he mentioned that he was also called an “Apostle of Unreason.” Needless to say, Chesterton never thought of himself as merely a humorist, a sort of Art Buchwald of his times. But he did enjoy a good laugh even when occasioned by a philosopher.Yet he was astonished to find himself called an Apostle of Unreason. Chesterton chronicled practically the whole of modernity from Bergson to James and Nietzsche. Every one of these philosophers advocated one or another form of unreason. Since Chesterton adamantly opposed them, how could anyone reasonably associate him with unreason? Was it his religion? he wondered. “We may really say that nearly all the people who consider themselves specially progressive , advanced, up-to-date, modernist, or futurist, are avowedly Apostles of Unreason. Practically, it comes to this, that the people who are now opposed to reason are practically all the people who are also opposed to religion.”This conclusion touched upon a disturbing theme that Chesterton was later to work out in his books on St. Francis and St.Thomas, namely, that when man sets out to be merely reasonable, he ends up in unreason; somehow it requires the openness of faith to keep our reason. Chesterton even noted that Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominci Gregis, at that time recently published (September , ), was itself a list of these same apostles of unreason.“Nearly all the Modernists who were condemned in the Pope’s Encyclical were condemned for being Pragmatists and Apostles of Unreason. Anyone who will read the Encyclical will see that I state the essential fact.” In these days when a spaceship can pass Jupiter and 26 Neptune, we find Chesterton noticing that George Brandes had “set the fashion of being the Apostle of Unreason” by asking, “Who knows that two and two do not make five in the planet Jupiter?” To this question, Chesterton simply but firmly in the name of common humanity responded,“I do.” It is not enough to say that the spacecraft that flew by Jupiter depended upon Chesterton’s affirmation, depended on the addition of two and two. What is important is that Chesterton saw that it was the function of the ordinary man to say that he did know certain things. Chesterton went on—how could he resist?—“The question seems to me quite as senseless as saying,‘Who knows that “yes” is not the same as “no” in the State of Maine?’”1 Chesterton affirmed that “thank God” he had “never even been to the State of Maine,” but “I know that ‘yes’ is not the same as ‘no’ anywhere .” Again, who knows this? Chesterton’s answer still rings in the name of common humanity—“I do.” The gentleman who had charged Chesterton with being an apostle of unreason, Mr.William Archer, had apparently based his position on an incident at Cambridge. Chesterton was both amused and a little put out at this accusation: “Well, I pass over what I cannot help calling the rather cheap part of the argument, which seems to consist in chaffing me with the little-known and carefully concealed fact that I cannot work miracles. Nevertheless , as Mr. Archer gloomily notes, I said at Cambridge that I thought it probable that some other people could.” Evidently, this latter remark was the origin of Chesterton’s being called an “Apostle of Unreason.” With amusing reference to his own considerable girth, Chesterton admitted that he himself could not “work miracles.” “I cannot move the Albert Hall from London to Paris; and levitation in my own case would probably be as difficult as in the case of the parallel structure of the Albert Hall.” And with this sally, On the Nature of “Yes” in the State of Maine 27 Chesterton concluded the philosophic point, that the fact that one or another person could not work miracles did not mean that no one could.And even Christ, who could, refused to do so on the Cross when called to perform one. If Archer was a monist in philosophical theory, Chesterton suggested, then no miracle was possible. But if he was a realist, which he wasn’t, then he might consult the evidence to see if miracles ever happened. “A miracle is, by definition, a marvel. That is to say...