Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Equal with the Souls of Hildebrand and Shakespeare

Equal with the Souls of Hildebrand and Shakespeare In our childhood home in Iowa, we had two rather special books, as I recall it now, books my father often used to talk about with some earnestness, books I remember reading with distinct awe as quite a young boy.They were by an English priest by the name of Owen Francis Dudley. One book was called The Shadow on the Earth and the other Will Men Be Like Gods? Just what their plots were, I cannot now recall. But they had to do with themes that remain quite modern, the questions (a) of whether men by themselves can continue even to be men and (b) in what men’s choice to substitute themselves for God might consist. I suppose when I read these books I had little idea what they were about, except I do recall being quite alarmed by their implications. The Chesterton Review for August , much to my astonishment , reproduced Chesterton’s Introduction to the  edition of Will Men Be Like Gods? It was with some interest that I read this unknown essay. I was so taken with it in fact that I immediately read it out loud to a friend. As I think of it now, Chesterton ’s Introduction seems quite the most extraordinary insight into the very question of our making ourselves to be like God, itself no doubt a theme from Genesis. Indeed, I had just finished talking about this issue in class, on Genesis’ teaching that the location of evil is not to be found in a second god, or in nature, or in things, but in that aspect alone in creation that is good but which can be otherwise by its own power, in our will, that is. Chesterton—I wonder if that Introduction was in the edition I read long ago?—merely wanted to comment on a couple of themes in Dudley’s argument about the insufficiency of humanism . Dudley thought that contemporary humanitarianism was 32 connected with hedonism, but he doubted whether this had “very much to do with happiness.” Chesterton thus wondered, “Would the world even be happy if it gave up [as the humanist proposition argued] all that has been counted holy?” At this point, Chesterton first queried whether the study of any merely humanist utopia, even though “interesting,” could really be called “exhilarating? Does anyone feel those descriptions to glow in his memory like the real memories of human enjoyment ?” Chesterton here touched on a theme that was often in his writings, namely, that the visions of a perfect world, such as humanisms propose, lack the real delight and wonder we find in the actual world about us.The atmosphere in Utopia, of whatever vintage, is in fact less fascinating than the atmosphere of any tavern in which we might find a Dickens character like Mr.Tony Weller.What is wrong with the manmade ideals of the utopias is that by hypothesis they are limited to merely human things, something even Aristotle warned us not to do. If we take an irreligious mankind to be itself a utopia or a religion , if we eliminate, that is, what mankind has called “holy,” we immediately leave out most of the things that have caused the most noble words and deeds of actual human beings. Is mankind enough for itself? In truth, actual “mankind has never felt it enough to be enough.” If the theoretical limit of humanity is a manmade utopia, what is missing is what most of us really long for.“The spiritual hungers of man are never merely hungers for humanity.”Thus, if we are left to ourselves as children, we long for something beyond ourselves, we long for “fairyland.” Poets especially make bad agnostics because they will necessarily seek something beyond themselves, almost in spite of themselves. The second point that Chesterton made concerning Dudley’s thesis was that “it is more possible to love men indirectly than to love them directly.”What Chesterton meant by this paradox was that we simply do not notice the ultimate reality of what an ordinary man or woman we meet is really like.“Few are fired with Equal with the Souls of Hildebrand and Shakespeare 33 a direct individual affection for the five people sitting on the other side of a railway-carriage.”These odd sorts will be doing all kinds of vulgar or pedestrian things—powdering a nose...