Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God

2--Patriotism and the True Patria: Distributism, Hymns, and Christendom in Dublin

39 s Distributism, Hymns, and Christendom in Dublin Patriotism and the True Patria 2 It is the final sign of imbecility in a people that it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon—and is very particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong: that is the definition of decadence. The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in rather than to let things out. . . . Even the newspaper editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression “golden silence.” The expression “brazen silence” is the only adequate phrase for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, and wordless nightmare, we must awake with a yell. G. K. Chesterton, “The Nameless Man” (1912) In her still unsurpassed biography of Chesterton published in 1943, Maisie Ward declared that the three great loves of the great man’s life were “his wife, his country and his Faith.”1 Ward’s capitalizing of the final word seems to make clear that Chesterton had rightly arranged his central loves, with his Christian convictions properly subordinating the other two. Yet Julia Stapleton’s study of Chesterton’s politics reveals, on the contrary, that Chesterton’s patriotism was stitched inextricably together with his Christianity so as to form a seamless, 40 Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God s virtually undifferentiated whole. Chesterton’s “ancestral disposition toward patriotism was instrumental in guiding him to the Christian fold,” she claims, “one that he then sought to justify and strengthen in Christian terms. Henceforth his patriotism, Englishness, and Christianity were mutually dependent and reinforcing.”2 In sum, Chesterton’s religious belief and political practice were integral and inseparable.The aim of this chapter is to trace the sunny rise and nightmarish fall of Chesterton’s Liberal politics. As he became increasingly disenchanted with the British electoral system, he became ever more devoted to his program for land allocation called Distributism. The darkest of Chesterton ’s disillusionments led to a more fully Christian understanding of the political sphere, especially the place of the Church within it. This change is revealed not only in his two great hymns but also in a muchneglected work titled Christendom in Dublin. Chesterton the Radical Who Became a Liberal Many of Chesterton’s advocates and opponents will be surprised to learn that his essential political stance was neither right nor left but radical. As the word’s etymology reveals, he wanted to delve down to the radix, the root of things, so as to fathom the antecedent causes of social evils and thus to propose consequent remedies that would result in real reform. He thus complained that early nineteenth-century Liberals failed to grasp the cockney radicalism that Dickens so powerfully embodied in his fiction and that, for Chesterton, was the essential English quality: That spirit of his was one of the things that we have had which were truly national. All other forces we have borrowed, especially those which flatter us the most. Imperialism is foreign, socialism is foreign, militarism is foreign, education is foreign, strictly [speaking] even Liberalism is foreign. But Radicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.3 Chesterton could make perceptive links between ancient and current events because his knowledge of the world was as democratic as his politics. He was a veritable polymath, having read almost everything and forgotten almost nothing. Such wide and deep mastery of books and ideas made him a Liberal in the etymological sense of the Latin liber, or “free.” Though it originally referred to those who were not slaves, s Patriotism and the True Patria 41 liberal gradually came to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, “free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted.” The Liberalism of Chesterton’s parents decisively shaped his political convictions.4 They were such free-spirited souls that Chesterton never became smug about his own Liberalism. Asked to contribute to a symposium whose aim was to answer the question “What’s wrong with the world?” Chesterton replied, “I am.” He regarded humility, along with the courage it enables and the joy it...