The Chesterton Review

G. K. Chesterton, Thomism and Certainty

—  The following article by Alison Milbank was published in the August

23, 2013 edition of ilsussidiario.net. The Chesterton Institute was a
co-sponsored the Chesterton exhibit at the 2013 Rimini Meeting.

It is easy to portray Chesterton as too positive and certain a writ-

er, with an easy optimism and equally easy orthodox faith but the
truth is far different. His initial Christian conversion came only after
a period in a kind of skeptical hell and, as Borges has demonstrated,
his writing always trembles on the brink of nightmare. Chesterton’s
attraction to Aquinas, I would argue, is due to the fact that the struc-
ture of each of the questions in the Summa Theologiae similarly puts
every certainty into question, with a skepticism in the objections to
every positive assertion—such as “Does God exist?”—that puts ev-
erything in doubt until Thomas moves to re-establish certainty on a
reasonable basis. Dionysius the Areopagite was a strong influence on
Thomas and his mystical via negative proceeds in a similar way, with
positive assertions about the divine names negated, but in order to
come to a deeper understanding of their meaning.

Chesterton wrote a brief but brilliant book, originally entitled,

Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, in 1933. He locates the core of
Thomas’s philosophy in what is often called “the intuition of being”
whereby a child looking out of a window knows he sees something:
that there is an Is. Existence exists and without this there can be no
certainty about anything and no bridge between mind and reality.
From this point Chesterton goes on to show how Thomas argues
for a contingent and created world of variety and potentiality, and
from there he reaches the need for God himself, as the complete
reality to which our incompletion testifies.

It is because there is an Is outside our own mind, whether grass

or God, that reality can challenge us in its otherness, and allow
the mind to move beyond itself to experience communion with the
object. There has to be something outside in order for there to be
something with which unite. Certainty comes therefore from this
mystical encounter with a word beyond the self, so that it is a gift
and not a possession. Life, Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, has the
quality of something saved from a shipwreck.

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News & Comments

It is often asserted that people read detective fiction to gain a

sense of certainty: that all is right with the world and moral or-
der—eventually—holds sway. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories,
however, put the reader through the same dark night of doubt as
the articles in the Summa. We begin with a situation, a crime, which
seems impossible, which forces a question. Then we are in doubt
while various answers are attempted by the story’s characters. Fi-
nally, as Thomas with his “I say that. . .” we have Father Brown’s
resolution of the problem, which answers all the objections.

In “The Invisible Man,” a man disappears from a building un-

der surveillance and his murderer leaves a trail of footprints, yet
no-one came in or out. This situation leaves us in a dark night of
utter doubt and uncertainty. What kind of world could produce a
situation so impossible? As usual in Father Brown stories, it is the
materialists who lose their reason and reach for a supernatural ex-
planation. It takes the priest to find the prosaic answer and he gives
the explanation of a postman. With his sack of letters, he is so ordi-
nary and unregarded that he is truly invisible and is not counted as
a person by the watching sentinels.

The effect of this story is not to deflate us once we know the

solution to the mystery. The weight of mystery, the aura of the sus-
pension of certainty does not go away. Instead, we look at the man
or woman who brings our letters and parcels in a new way. The
world is more not less wonderful and mysterious than before. We
have certainty but it comes with an inexhaustible depth that opens
knowledge and does not close off exploration like modern funda-
mentalism.

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