Writers to Read

Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf

Douglas Wilson

• Editorial: Crossway
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781433545863
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

If books are among our friends, we ought to choose them wisely.

But sometimes it's hard to know where to start. In Writers to Read, Doug Wilson—someone who's spent a lifetime writing, reading, and teaching others to do the same—introduces us to nine of his favorite authors from the last 150 years, exploring their interesting lives, key works, and enduring legacies. In doing so, Wilson opens our eyes to literarymentors who not only teach us what good writing looks like, but also help us become better readers in the process.

1

G. K. Chesterton

A WRITER’S LIFE

G. K. Chesterton was baptized as an infant in the Church of England in 1874. He died sixty-two years later, in 1936. Quite a number of wonderful books were produced in the interval.

Chesterton is usually thought of as a Victorian figure, which is certainly when he came of age—Queen Victoria died in 1901, when Chesterton was twenty-seven years old. At the same time, most of Chesterton’s real contributions were in the twentieth century. His debates with men like George Bernard Shaw are justly famous, but he also debated men more closely associated with the post-Victorian era, men like Bertrand Russell.

In Surprised by Joy C. S. Lewis mentions the impact Chesterton had on his own return to the faith through the book Everlasting Man. But he usually speaks of Chesterton as though he was from another era, even though their lives overlapped considerably. Lewis was thirty-eight when Chesterton died, and he was brought back to the faith five years before Chesterton died. And The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis’s first Christian book, was published three years before Chesterton died.

Generations overlap, and though I find no indication that Chesterton and Lewis ever met, maybe they walked past each other in a train station once. Someone should write a one-act stage play about that. There certainly was a meeting of the minds between the two and—I would argue—a passing of the baton. Lewis had numerous books by Chesterton in his library, all marked up. The intellectual legacy that Chesterton established was well kept and well tended by Lewis.

As mentioned earlier, Chesterton’s parents had him baptized in the established Anglican church, but they themselves tended toward Unitarianism. Chesterton attended the Slade School of Fine Art and took classes in both art and literature. But true to type, he did not finish his degree. Given the times and the way things were, Chesterton spent some time slumming around in free thought before he returned to the Christian faith.

His description of this in Orthodoxy is quite amusing. He developed his own philosophy from scratch, and when he was done, he discovered that it was orthodoxy. It was like a great explorer sailing the briny deep in order to discover a new land, and when he had found one, he planted the flag on the beach, and he discovered that his newfound land was a place full of Englishmen.

Chesterton married Frances Bogg in 1901. He was wildly, desperately in love with her, and he stayed that way throughout all their years together. Their chief sorrow was their inability to have children, which was particularly difficult as they both loved children. The closeness of their relationship might seem to be belied by Frances’s absence from his autobiography, but she is missing there at her request. Perhaps she knew that if he were allowed to write about her at all, he would write about nothing else.

He was sympathetic to the Roman communion through his many years in the Church of England and was eventually brought into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922. He took that step apart from Frances, who stayed in the Anglican communion a few years before she eventually joined him there.

Chesterton made his living as a writer, and it was the lash of journalism that made him write for deadlines. He was a scattered genius, pieces of him everywhere. He once telegraphed his wife, “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” But I think that it can be fairly said that his absentmindedness was due to his great presence of mind. He was all in.

He was a jolly contrarian though not at all irascible. But nevertheless he found himself, again and again, standing against the popular tide. Sometimes it involved literary taste, like his appreciation of Dickens after Dickens had gone out of style. People can be forgiven their foibles and quirks on literary appreciation. But Chesterton also had the ability to oppose the establishment on things that mattered a great deal, as with his opposition to the Boer War, or his valiant opposition to eugenics, or his economic views (called “distributism”).

Standing at six feet four inches and weighing almost 290 pounds, Chesterton was renowned for his size. P. G. Wodehouse, in one of his epic expressions, once referred to a large noise as when G. K. Chesterton falls on a sheet of tin.

He was a big man in every sense of the word.

DIGGING DEEPER

Chesterton once said that a paradox is truth standing on its head to get attention. He was a master of paradox in this sense, having an adept way of turning everything upside down so that we might be able to see it right-side up. Chesterton’s great gift is that of seeing, and being able to get others to see it the same way also. In a world gone mad, a dose of bracing sanity is just what many of God’s children need to get them through yet another round of the evening news. He bends what is bent so that we may see it straight.

When Chesterton writes about anything, each thought is like a living cell, containing all the DNA that could, if called upon, reproduce the rest of the body. Everything is somehow contained in anything. This is why you can be reading Chesterton on Dickens and learn something crucial about marriage, or streetlights, or something else.

The world is not made up of disparate parts; the world is an integrated whole. God sees it all together and united. When men see glimpses of it as all together and united, we say they are prophetic. We call them seers and poets. Chesterton was this kind of man. Not one of us can see it all, but a handful have been gifted to act as though the “all” is actually present there.

It is tempting to call this kind of thing a “worldview,” but that seems too structured and tidy somehow. It smells of the classroom, of the right answers checked on a multiple-choice test. A worldview is a good thing, but it is too narrow a word to describe what is happening with Chesterton. When worldview thinking came into vogue in evangelical circles a few decades ago, it has to be admitted that this was a lot better than what had come before that, which was the odd juxtaposition of various inconsistent ideas rattling around in a multitude of Christian heads. Worldview thinking is better than jumbled thinking, but worldview thinking is not the high-water mark.

In church history, occasionally, like a blue comet on holiday with no schedule to keep, a lonely figure will appear who appears to function fluidly in all three realms [those of prophet, priest, and king], making it look easy. Chesterton was like that. Worldview thinking radiated from him like heat from a stove. This is what systematic thinking should look like, but it hardly ever does.¹

The problem is not with the word worldview. The problem is with what we naturally tend to think of as our eyes. Of course, blindness is not a worldview, and it is an improvement if we move from that blindness to coherent thoughts that we think. A brainview is better than blindness. But the real organ that we must view the world with is the imagination.

Imagination, as Napoleon once remarked, rules the world. One of our great problems is that we have relegated imagination to various artsy ghettos, there to let it play. But imagination, including—especially including—artistic imagination, has to be understood as a practical science. It must govern everything, and if it is detached from the praxis of life and then uprooted, it goes off to the art museums to die.

For Chesterton, an indispensable aspect of the divine imagination is the inclusion of fun. Play, laughter, joy, and mirth are necessary not only for good art but for human well being in all its dimensions. G. K. once said that “in anything that does cover the whole of your life—in your philosophy and your religion—you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.”²

One of the reasons why Chesterton is such an encouragement to us is that he understands the role of imagination. This is not the same thing as comprehending imagination itself, for no man gets that, but Chesterton does understand the important role that imagination must play. He truly gets it, and he practices what he understands.

So when Napoleon said that imagination rules the world—a great aphorism if ever there was one—he was simply giving us some material to work with. In what sense might this be true? In what sense might we get all tangled up in what we falsely think of as imagination?

We should see a distinction between the throne of imagination—the human heart and mind—and the realm of imagination—made up of everything else. One of the central reasons we are languishing in our public life is that we have allowed a divorce between the throne and the realm. Artists are assumed to be the custodians of the imagination, but because of their insistence upon autonomy, they have become like a mad king who has the run of the throne room and nothing else. And out in the mundane realm of ho-hummery, imagination is assumed to be irrelevant.

What this means—when Christians finally wake up to the real state of affairs—is that we are actually besieging a city with no walls and no defenses. If imagination rules the world, perhaps we should focus on getting ourselves some.

Chesterton is famous for paradox, as noted above, but this is an imaginative exercise. Aristotle noted that the use of metaphor was a mark of genius, and I would argue that Chesterton’s odd inversions and juxtapositions should be grouped under the broad heading of metaphor.

Chesterton knew that loving and fighting go together. Loving something while being unwilling to fight for it would be better categorized as lust. And at the same time, a man who sees the world in wisdom knows that loving the world means that he must be willing to fight the world. Loving the world means fighting for the world, and loving the world also means fighting the world.

His wisdom made Chesterton a true fighter who rejected the silliness of today’s philosophers who want to separate loving and fighting, putting them into separate camps. This attitude is well represented by the glib placard of the sixties, urging us all to make love, not war. This false juxtaposition is trying to hide the fact that it is always both.

Either you make love indiscriminately and make war on the resultant offspring, or you make love to one woman for life and fight to protect her and the children you have fathered. If you determine that it is too militant to fight in the latter way, then the love you have chosen in the former way is simply lust.

We can see that this is how it is unfolding in the West. Lunatic wars and lunatic lusts go together. So do chivalric wars and chivalric romances. The pacifist who doesn’t want to fight the dragon for the sake of the lady is actually in the process of becoming a dragon himself. This reality is sometimes obscured by the missing nostril flame and hidden claws, but there is a ready explanation. Pacifists are just passive-aggressive dragons.

Near the end of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis said this about originality, and it is striking how well it describes Chesterton:

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.³

Chesterton was a fierce defender of the common man and common things. He defended this so well and ably, and in the way that Lewis describes above, that this made him singularly uncommon. His defense of mundane things was out of this world. His apologetic for the supernatural was the most natural thing in the world.

He once said, speaking of those who like to accommodate themselves to the trends of the times, that “at its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.”⁴ It is not that hard to spook a herd. The trend apparently is that things are trending. The buffalos set up a self-authenticating feedback loop, and the plan of action seems obvious to them all and remains such, right over the cliff.

But there are contrarians who don’t think matters through any more than the stampeders do, and it doesn’t much matter what the fad in question is. It might be iPhones, or N. T. Wright fan clubs, or the election of a welterweight like Obama, or a Taylor Swift concert. Some contrarians are accidentally right when the herd is accidentally wrong, or accidentally wrong when the herd is accidentally right. That’s no good either. We need thoughtful contrarians—when the house of immovability is built on the foundation of pigheadedness, that house is filled with endless quarrels. When the house is built on the foundation of well-spoken conviction, the home is filled with laughter and joy, though storms may rage outside.

In that same place (speaking of those sociologists who wanted to accommodate themselves to the trend of the time), he noted that in any given moment, the trend of the time at its best consists of those who will not accommodate themselves to anything. Athanasius had to stand contra mundum, and it is he who is the representative man from that era and not the whole world he had to contend against. Transit gloria mundi, with the exception of that courageous glory that is willing to stand up against the glory of all the regnant poobahs. Take Chesterton himself: he hated the insufferable self-importance that lusts to dictate to others what they must do in all the ordinary choices of life. He shows us the path we must take if we want to accomplish the crucifixion of all such coercion.

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.⁵

The writer Rene Girard calls this kind of social condition a time of sacrificial crisis. Nothing coheres, nothing tastes. One of the reasons societies in this state (as we very much are) start to disintegrate is that while drumbeat demands for deeper and greater sacrifice come more rapidly and are insistently louder, the law of diminishing returns has ki...