Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God

Notes

241 s Notes Preface 1 All biblical quotations will be taken from the King James Version since, in both memory and imagination, Chesterton was decisively shaped by it. Introduction 1 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936), 97–98. The word “nightmare” appears fifteen times in this late summing up of his life. 2 “Nightmare,” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 146. 3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1987), 89, emphasis added. It’s altogether typical of Chesterton that, even though he regards Carlyle’s work as issuing in a pernicious Nietzschean exaltation of undisciplined Will, he also praises the great Victorian for his service to English literature. As “the founder of modern irrationalism,” Carlyle understood, like Chesterton, that all reasoning proceeds from unquestioned axioms and unproven assumptions. This “mystical” conviction enabled Carlyle to deny “every one of the postulates on which the age of reason had based itself. He denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth century . Whether we were [morally] better than the people of the twelfth century according to him depended on whether we chose or deserved to be.” G. K. Chesterton, Twelve Types (1902; repr., Norfolk, Va.: IHS Press, 2003), 58. s 242 Notes to pp. 4–7 4 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906; repr., New York: Schocken, 1965), 23. Maisie Ward records similar sentiments that the young Chesterton expressed in his early Notebooks: “Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is though. This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it. What is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. Ha Ha Ha.” Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 57. 5 Evelyn Waugh, “Chesterton,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 558. 6 C. S. Lewis tells of a letter he received from a friend who, in having become Catholic, feared that her friendship with Lewis the Ulster Protestant was in jeopardy. Lewis replied, with great discernment, that in such a late time as ours, Christians who stand at the center of their own particular traditions will be drawn ever more deeply to each other, even as they will find themselves made distant from those who occupy the extremes within their own denominations. 7 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, in Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton , vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 143. 8 G. K. Chesterton, Saint Francis ofAssisi (1924; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1957), 12. 9 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; repr., San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 128. All citations from this edition are identified within the text as O. Chapter 1 1 Sayers was put off by the rather prim faith of her schoolmasters, and she objected strongly to being confirmed at age fourteen without her consent . She confessed, much later in life, that she might well have abandoned Christianity altogether had it not been for the vigorous example of G. K. Chesterton, especially as displayed in Orthodoxy. She found in him what she would come eventually to articulate herself: the conviction that belief in God should engender the supreme excitement and interest, never becoming an exercise in dullness and boredom. Hence her praise of Chesterton for demonstrating that the Christian faith is “one whirling adventure [. . . in which] the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” Qtd. in James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1981), 35. 2 Such praise of Orthodoxy has not been universal. After having been mandated for many years as a required text in freshman English at Marquette University, it was finally dropped only in the 1980s. The students are s Notes to pp. 7–9 243 reported to have then mounted a huge holocaust on the school’s main quadrangle, with but a single immolated victim for their gleeful burning: Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. 3 Qtd. in S. T. Joshi, God’s Defenders (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2003), 86. Mencken goes on to dismiss Chesterton as the purveyor of false comfort in such totally discredited illusions as “the influence of mind over matter .” “Not even Chesterton...