Placed People

Rootedness in G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry

Harden

• Editore: Pickwick Publications
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498206716
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

Modern humans are given lots of labels. Some see humans as consumers: consumers of goods, services, and entertainment for the Economy. Some see humans as souls to be saved. Some say humans are destructive animals that must not think too highly of themselves at the peril of the planet. All of these often competing and contradictory labels beg the question: "What are people for?" This book locates the starting point for answering this question in a placed perspective, and examines what G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Wendell Berry have to show us in this regard. These authors' rooted perspectives challenge us to see our communities and ourselves differently.

1

homecoming and place

Departures and Returns in the Lives of Chesterton, Lewis, and Berry

Chesterton, Lewis, and Berry all experienced major returns in their lives, returns to roots and limits. “Return” refers to the way in which all three authors were born into families that were culturally Judeo-Christian, were then challenged as young adults by modern narratives of limitless progress to reject this tradition, but finally chose to reject these modern narratives in favor of something resembling a rooted orthodox Judeo-Christian worldview and the limits that go with it. These returns were brought about in ways unique to the authors, but one major commonality among them is that the returns happened when they discovered and chose to embrace an idea of “the Good” that transcended the merely material. Charles Taylor calls “higher-order goods of this kind ‘hypergoods’, i.e., goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, [and] decided about.”31 These “hypergoods” are the ideals that contribute to the wholeness of a place, including those who dwell in it. This concept of “wholeness” derives from the Judeo-Christian account of creation in Genesis—everything God created was deemed good and existed within an assigned place, but humanity rejected this order and thus broke apart the original “wholeness.” Therefore, the Judeo-Christian teleology includes consideration of an eventual restoration and return.32 These “goods” led these authors to various homecomings, categorized loosely as spiritual and physical. For Chesterton and Lewis, discovering and accepting a return to Christian beliefs helped lead them to an imaginative perspective rooted in place. For Berry, discovering and accepting his vocation as a placed farmer/writer led him physically back home to Kentucky early in his career where he was able to ask religious questions about place that allowed him to wrestle with his inherited Baptist faith.

As a young man, Chesterton rejected his religious cultural roots and set out on a journey to discover some new philosophy as a replacement. He, like many others at the turn of the twentieth century in England, was hoping to escape the stultifying Victorian values and the version of Christian religion that went with them. However, in setting out on a journey of discovery or progress, Chesterton ironically realized when he finished that he had actually returned past his Victorian upbringing and rediscovered orthodox Christianity. As he puts it in Orthodoxy, “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”33

What seeds of orthodoxy were planted in Chesterton’s childhood that made escape impossible when he tried to found, or discover, his heresy? Briefly, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May 1874 to Edward and Marie Chesterton. Chesterton’s parents were bohemian types34 who, as good Victorians, retained the Christian virtues while dismissing the Christian creed.35 Mocking modern psychology, he says in his Autobiography: “I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament . . . And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.”36

One of his earliest and most influential memories was of a toy theater his father built for him, which helped instill in him a love for limits: “Apart from the fact of it [the toy theater] being my first memory, I have several reasons for putting it first . . . All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window.”37 In chapter 4 I will address the issue of limits. Summing up his childhood, Chesterton states, “In a word; I have never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living.”38 He would have to journey through a period of psychological and spiritual hell in his adolescence and young adulthood before he “discovered” that his love for limits had helped him rediscover orthodoxy. This is not unlike the mission of the humanities, for which rediscovery is as important as discovery is to the sciences—a necessary task.

Chesterton refers to his adolescence as “the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin.”39 He further states, “I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship or the devil knows what.”40 This period is 1892 to 1894, during which Chesterton took a year off after finishing at St. Paul’s public school and then attended the Slade School of Art at University College, London.41 It was during this period that Chesterton dabbled in spiritualism, even using an Ouija board with his younger brother Cecil. He also learned about modern art at the Slade School, especially the then-popular Impressionism. His dislike of Impressionism (remember, he always loved “edges”) and the prevailing mood of pessimism he encountered during this period produced real internal turmoil.

This prevailing mood of pessimism primarily, for Chesterton, stemmed from Walter Pater’s “art for art’s sake” and his influence on a major emblem of the early 1890s, Oscar Wilde.42 Chesterton viewed this philosophy’s not-too-subtle motive to do away with morality and any external good to focus on immediate pleasure as a nightmare, because of the pessimistic mood that inevitably accompanied it. For Chesterton, Pater’s regard for temporal pleasure as the aim of art only leads to a never-ending pursuit of greater and greater pleasures—it is a pursuit that cannot be fulfilled, leading to despair, even of life itself.43 This despair of life was the ultimate evil of the fin de siècle for Chesterton. Disgusted, Chesterton fought against it:

But I was still thinking the thing out by myself, with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a ...