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old indeed, for satire and stoicism have always been the symptoms
of senile decay. But even in his old age he never ceased to proclaim
the secret that the world was really radiantly young, if men would
only see it. He tried to show to a purblind race the brightest star in
all their firmament, standing up above a stable that housed a home-
less Child. He spent his life and poured forth his triumphing and
galloping music to point men to the sun that shone above them:

O light uplifted from all mortal knowing,

Send back a little of that glimpse of thee,
That of its glory I may kindle glowing
One tiny spark for all men yet to be.

Chesterton as a Philosopher

— The following piece by Dom Illtyd Trethowan was published in The

Downside Review, vol. LIV (1936), pp. 489-494.

[A]s the foregoing pages have shown it is impossible to write of

Chesterton at all without writing of him as a philosopher, and it is
proper to conclude by considering him formally as such. For in so
doing we are considering him in the most real sense as a man, and it
is precisely this conception of man as a philosopher that he himself
was chiefly concerned to propagate.

But has our subject already infected us with paradox? Is that

indeed the essential message of Chesterton—that it is the nature
of man to be a philosopher, to seek knowledge? Was not his aim
higher than this? It is only a misunderstanding of philosophy that
makes a difficulty here. Let us look at it in a fuller light. Chesterton
was a Catholic—that is his epitaph; and the motto of the Order
of Preachers is not for them alone but for Catholics in general ac-
cording to their measure—contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere.

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Chesterton then as he penetrated more deeply the truths of the faith

sought the more earnestly to throw open the path to others. Now
it seemed to him, as it seems to so many of us that a chief obstacle
in their way is a false conception of human nature. If you will it
is the reverse of the medal, for what it means is that man cannot
know God because he does not know himself. It is the work of the
theologian to teach man about God, the work of the philosopher
to teach man about man. To-day the theologian needs the philoso-
pher; Chesterton responded magnificently to that need. He is never
merely the entertainer, the artist even; never purely the savant; his
aim is always to dissipate the fog, to let in the fresh air of common-
sense, to restore a healthy habit of mind. Always he is the apologete.

The task of the Catholic philosopher is very largely negative—

to clear up the rubbish from the foundations that the New Jerusa-
lem may rise upon them. Chesterton would have liked to be called
God’s scavenger. But it is only in deference to his humility that we
do not call him a theologian. The apologete, even when his matter
is philosophy, is formally a theologian, and Chesterton’s thought is
Thomist and not merely Aristotelean. He knows that it is the duty
of philosophy to lead us to theology, and that the directive influence
of theology should be no mere external check but an integrating
and elevating. His philosophy then, although it is in one sense less
than academic philosophy (and in that sense he would not call him-
self a philosopher), is in another sense something infinitely greater.
It is less than academic philosophy in that it does not control a com-
plicated technical apparatus, does not examine the history of ideas
with the searching analysis of exact scholarship; it is greater than
most of the professional philosophy of to-day because it never loses
sight of the great metaphysical principles which are the common
property of men’s minds.

It becomes clearer perhaps why Chesterton’s greatness can

properly be described as philosophical. Simplicity and profundity
go together. The genuine stuff of true philosophy—the truth that
matters—needs for its perception an ascesis which is less detailed
but at the same time deeper than the ascesis of the scholar or the
scientist. But if general abstract principles are simple in themselves,
flowing as they do from the principle of contradiction, how is it

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that they are so often unrecognised? Partly it is that the mind’s spiri-
tual power is obscured by multiplicity—we have to weigh our Lord’s
words about the single eye; at the root of the modern disease, this
terrifying indifference to fundamentals, must be a want of will. This
disease Chesterton set himself to doctor.

In this conception of philosophy as the natural food of man’s

mind, as commonsense developing, there is nothing new. We cannot
sketch the development in a page or two or Chesterton’s presenta-
tion of it. A single sidelight upon his mind must suffice. The philoso-
phia perennis is often compared to a mountain which we may climb
by many paths. Our thought must lead us from created things to
God and from God again to created things. When we have reached
the top we have only to look steadily at the view. Let us consider for
a moment the straightest of these paths as Chesterton took it.

What we here touch is his objectivism. Again we find nothing

new; but if we fail to see it in Chesterton in all its clearness we do
not fully grasp what is essential in him. The commonsense which
is the basis of objectivism is so obvious that it seems hardly worth
stating, but it is necessary. Man then comes into the world possess-
ing a spiritual power, the mind. In a sense he is a pauper, for the
mind which makes him what he is not born with riches. But he is the
heir of all things. His mind is capable of a development to which
no term can be set. That is why life is supremely an adventure. We
recognise Chesterton in that word “adventure.” But why should it
remind us specially of him? Must not life be for all the great adven-
ture? The answer to the difficulty shows us what Chesterton had to
combat. The plausibility of subjectivism lies in this, that it appears
to offer man a nobler lot: man is born rich with a nature all his
own, with rights and privileges which he must claim and use. He
finds within himself materials with which he must shape his destiny.
He uses others, too, from the world around him, but he turns them
into his own mould. Here obviously there is a measure of truth. But
if we leave it at that we have the pagan philosophy of naturalism.
Pretending to give man more, it robs him of his rightful heritage.
Erecting his own nature into an absolute, it sets bounds to his free-
dom. Flattering his pride it drags him down to earth and seals his
eyes against the vision of his home in heaven. Chesterton’s part was

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to insist upon the fundamental paradox that it is only by an utter

subjection of ourselves to the object putting away all passion and
prejudice (those distortions and refusals which alone are ours exclu-
sively) that we can achieve ourselves. This path is indeed the great
highway of Thomism; it leads to a whole ethic, a whole aesthetic, a
whole theory of the spiritual life.

Objectivity, then, is the source of Chesterton’s characteristic at-

titudes. From it issues naturally that wholehearted acceptance of
life which brought him, humanly speaking, to the Church; he was in
the fullest sense a “yes-man.” It helps us to understand more clearly
his passionate detestation of half-truths, of shams and hypocrisy. It
is the meaning too of his optimism. If a man is to elevate himself
and his environment by an intellectual receiving, by a turning out-
wards to things, a voluntary submission to all the real, there must
be a real and it must be good. Chesterton was the enemy of those
who would shut us out from the fullness of life, of a pusillanimity
which leads and is leading to despair. One of his favourite themes
is that the world is a fairy tale, a wonder. Wonder, he reminds us,
is the source of all philosophy; it was the presence of it that made
the strength of the Greek mind, the absence of it that makes the
weakness of the modern. We cannot indulge in quotation, but one
passage from Orthodoxy must be given here:

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in nursery tales.

The man of science says, ‘Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall’; but
he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The
witch in the fairy tale says, ‘Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will
fall’; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the ef-
fect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given advice
to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not
lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head
until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and
a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads un-
til they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple
leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do talk as
if the connection of two strange things physically connected them
philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing
constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together

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make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white

answer.…When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall
in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would
answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her
clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is
magic.” (pp. 89, 90, 91).

We have mentioned Chesterton’s humility. The source of that

too is clear. Like all true humility it is mostly a hidden thing, but
when it betrays itself it has a rare beauty. For example, in the Ballad
of the White Horse the words of Alfred to our Lady:

“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,

“I am but a common King.
I will not ask what saints may ask
To see a secret thing . . .”

And it is just because he beats the big drum that he does not
blow his own trumpet. Perhaps it is not fanciful to see a connection
between what is thus hidden in Chesterton and what is most upon
the surface, the special mark of his genius by which he will always be
known and loved—his mirth. For this great gift of the English (and
here Chesterton is supremely English) is a sort of protection against
self-importance. But in Chesterton it has a deeper meaning. At
times perhaps he reminds us of Johnson leaning against the lamp-
posts shaking with that unquenchable laughter which so puzzled
Boswell. But we should rather think of a great phrase of Claudel’s,
le grand rire divin. For Chesterton’s mirth is not a bellowing over
beef and beer but the song of the sons of God shouting for joy.

To many of us, when we heard of his death, a fragment of his

poetry must have been recalled (it is the sum of his philosophy) in
which there is joy in a splendid peace:

“To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come . . .”

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