Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

The Natural Home of the Human Spirit

The Natural Home of the Human Spirit In , Chesterton’s book The Catholic Church and Conversion was published. Belloc did the “Foreword” and Chesterton himself wrote his own “Introduction,” which he called, not without some amusement, “A New Religion.” Both short essays remain of considerable and refreshing interest. Belloc was the “bornCatholic ” of the two, so, as he remarks,“it is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the tremendous subject of Conversion.” The convert always has the aura of choice; the born-Catholic of tradition, of not having had to change anything , only fulfill the promise already his. As I was born the year following the publication of this book, also a “born-Catholic,” I find both of these essays, that of the born-Catholic and that of the convert, to be of considerable interest . I have always considered Belloc’s remark in The Path to Rome, I think, that “it is a good thing never to have lost the Faith,” to be a comforting one. Both to have the faith and not to have lost it, to be sure, are graces.We should not be so foolish as to attribute too much to our own powers.And yet, there can be no doubt that being born into the faith enables us to live in a much more ordered and, yes, delightful universe than we might otherwise have known. Born-Catholics, to be sure, often do not show that angst or earnestness about what they hold to be true as do converts. But this calmness is only because born-Catholics are more aware of and comfortable with the fact that things really do fit together, that ultimate quests are not merely prodding our souls but that these very quests are not in vain.There is an end to the journey that can be reached. Belloc did, to be sure, speculate on an experience that was no 21 doubt his, about how “born-Catholics” frequently do go through an analogous conversion experience.We are all aware, of course, that a gift given must sooner or later be a gift consciously accepted or else it is not a gift.And in the matter of faith, this acceptance will relate to the depths at which we choose to allow the faith, in its intelligibility, to speak to us. Belloc continued: Those born into the Faith often, I say, go through an experience of skepticism as the years proceed, and it is still a common phenomenon .l.l. for men of the Catholic culture, acquainted with the Church from childhood, to leave it in early manhood and never to return. But it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon—and it is to this that I allude—for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth to discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its various forms, that the transcendental truths they had been taught in childhood have the highest claims upon their matured reason .1 The second “conversion” in Belloc’s sense, thus, had to do with the sudden realization that the skeptical alternatives did not in fact make as much sense as what had been taught in youth, had we but been willing to learn and live it. Belloc’s approach was to remark on the many different sorts of men and women who came into the Church as converts from all sorts of backgrounds. We find the cynic and the sentimentalist, the fool and the wise man, the doubter and the man who does not doubt enough. Moreover, we find people entering the Church from all sorts of experiences and nationalities. “You come across an entry into the Catholic Church undoubtedly due to the spectacle, admiration and imitation of some great character observed. Next day you come across an entry into the Catholic Church out of complete loneliness, and you are astonished to find the convert still ignorant of the great mass of the Catholic effect on character.”2 Belloc remarked that “the Church is the natural home of the 22 The Natural Home of the Human Spirit Human Spirit.”3 This is a striking phrase, for the Church is not supposed to be the “natural” home of anything, unless, of course, our spirit is made for something that is not merely nature. Belloc found that these myriads of reasons for entering the Church converged because the reality to...