Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On the Discovery of Things Whose Existence Is Impossible to Deny

On the Discovery ofThingsWhose Existence Is Impossible to Deny Somewhere along the line, I acquired Chesterton’s little book on the English painter George Frederick Watts. This book was originally published in . I have a  Duckworth edition, printed in Edinburgh, a gift from John Peterson. One Saturday in March, I decided to read this book, only to find by the markings in the book that I had already read it. I vaguely recall thinking that this book did not contain many good Chestertonian insights , but on rereading it, I found it, not entirely to my surprise, full of very interesting and indeed wonderful things. Let me recount some of them. The book starts off with a most contemporary issue, now that we have ended the twentieth century, about whether a century can be considered a philosophic statement as well as a mere arbitrary unit of time—“the mind of the eleventh century” sort of thing. Chesterton thought that perhaps the nineteenth century, which had just ended and during which Watts flourished, could be considered a kind of unit of thought. Chesterton recalled that the nineteenth century was populated by agnostic intellectuals who, even in claiming that they could know little or nothing, still retained a passionate, if on principle illogical, interest in “caring” about whether they knew anything. “Men were in the main, agnostics: they said,‘We do not know’; but not one of them ever ventured to say,‘We do not care.’”1 If they care, they must think implicitly that they know something that is important.Their actions contradict their words, their logic . After all, how could agnostics properly know enough about caring itself to care about it? 203 What struck me on the very first page of this book, however, was something that must almost be considered a heresy today, even though it is something as old as Plato.The modern heresy is that nothing exists unless it is political. Plato thought, on the contrary, that all political disorders originate in soul disorders, not the other way around. In our time, however, sin or evil must be located in some public place or institution, so that all reform is political or legal reform. Thus, personal sin or evil does not much exist or matter. Contrary to this position, however, Chesterton remarked that “the greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity; poets, like bricklayers, work on through a century of wars, and Bewick’s birds, to take an instance , have the air of persons unaffected by the French Revolution .” No, I confess I do not know “Bewick’s birds,” though I assume that partridges survived the French Revolution just fine. The elevation of politics to central importance is often accompanied by the idea that political heroes are the only heroes. I believe this view to be quite contrary to the NewTestament. Ultimately every life, even those of poets, unknown bricklayers, and other ordinary folks, grounds the ultimate drama of humanity. “The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad.”2 This is but another way of saying that at all times we will find sufficient evil for the day, that daily life is where the drama of civilization exists, where ordinary people encounter it.The French or any other Revolution will not leave us free of our encounter with evil, with ourselves, our own souls before God. As if to get at what he meant, Chesterton contrasted Watts, who was something of a stoic, with the Celt. In this comparison, Chesterton, I think, put his finger on the reason why we do not 204 ThingsWhose Existence Is Impossible to Deny have to go to some Revolutionary Paris to find the true drama of human existence. “To the Celt, frivolity is most truly the most serious of things, since in the tangle of roses is always the old serpent who is wiser than the world.”3 Notice that this is not a criticism of frivolity, but a praise of it.The danger of ordinary things is a reflection of their intrinsic glory.The old serpent is indeed wiser than the world, but not wiser than what the world is ultimately about.The...