The New Yorker Takes On G.K. Chesterton

Rod at Crunchy Con had a good piece at Gopnik loves G.K. Chesterton, but is troubled which comments on a piece n New Yorker magazine.

Let me say that Chesterton is something I know I need delve into more. In fact Rod exactly shows where I stand currently. Rod says

Anyway, I'm the sort of person who likes people who like Chesterton, though I just can't tuck into his writing with enthusiasm. (I feel the same way about Walker Percy's fiction, and the people who love it).

LOL, and of course I am the same way about Walker Percy. I know I should read more Walker Percy and yet I have not quite got him. But I love people that love Percy so I have an inkling I will love Percy a LOT one day. Same with Chesterton.

I also avoid Chesterton at times because often the discussion turns into Chesterton Economics or what is called Distributism. I do find the concepts interesting but I doubt unless something dramatic takes place like a plague that wipes out 60 percent of the planet we shall be returning to some sort of guild system. As I hear this explained how it would work in the real world all I can think is there is no way in hell my neighbors would go for that.

Anyway Chesterton is someone I know I need to try to dig into.

It is a interesting essay and Rod invites comments by those that know Chesterton better. The writer is indeed most critical of Chesterton's writings on Apologetics. Now perhaps the New Yorker writer got this wrong but I have to admit I found this funny because I see me in this

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves.

The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

As Rod points out
Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer's apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church).

Guilty as Charged here. Now as one commenter pointed out that this was perhaps not his viewpoint. And I think her comment is worth reprinting (Almost in full because this is where I think many of us Catholics Converts by God's Grace are lucky to come too

I must disagree completely with Gropnik's notion that Chesterton writing about the Church is like a man writing about the post office. Chesterton himself would have laughed at the idea, I think (and an audio recording of him which I heard once revealed that he had an infectious, boyish giggle). If the post office has any mystery and miracle about it at all it is not because letters are sent in the advertised manner; it's that people, in the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and so forth, in the midst of wars and terrors and chaos and emptiness and division and abandon and careful, cruel virtue still cared enough about each other to stand in line and pay for a stamp for the privilege of letting Aunt Emily know that her never-fail teething powder had done the trick for Baby David's sore gums, and that Edward was thought of highly by his firm and likely to be promoted, and that while Clare and Eliza were diligent at their lessons Jack was sadly less studious owing to his much-praised skill on the football field, something which Dear Aunt would no doubt recognize as a trait of Jack's namesake, our beloved departed Uncle John for whose soul's repose Jack still nightly recites fond prayers. And hoping her begonias have begun to perk up, and worrying about her arthritic hands which have given so much trouble, and love to Cousin Jane and of course, all the Pembrokes...

And you know what? There is something of mystery and magic in that, in a busy wife and mother donning a careful overcoat and hoisting a far-too-dashing umbrella for their suburb, and standing on a damp floor of a rather dingy post office in an indiscriminate line with her weekly missive to Aunt Emily thwarted in its accustomed round for want of a penny stamp.

The Church Chesterton writes about is a familiar one; I don't think he glamorizes her at all. Certainly he isn't shy about admitting that there are times when Holy Mother Church appears in garb less like an ethereal vision of truth, beauty, and goodness, and more like a plain-faced librarian with pince-nez concerned about the influx of noise and traffic into the echoing halls of grace. There's a reason that the Church is spoken of not only as the Bride of Christ, but as our Mother; as we sometimes do with our human mothers, we might on occasion think our Mother Church should spruce herself up, bend a bit to the prevailing fashions, and not embarrass us by such forthright speech about matters one wishes one's mother wouldn't discuss, especially not in public, especially not in front of one's friends. But if our human mother changed to become everything we would want in a perfect world, she would quite likely no longer be our own mother; and this is no less true for the Church.

Now, I'm not a convert, so I can't speak to some of what Rod is saying here. But I have always thought, and still think, that those who love the Church based on some unreal romantic illusion of who and what she is are just like a man who loves a woman from afar, seeing in her all beauty and perfection, and counting himself blessed beyond belief the day she finally agrees to go out with him: only to be crushed by disillusionment and disappointment when his progressing relationship with her reveals the flaws and cracks and mundane reality of the woman herself, in all her true worth. Some men, reaching this point, mature beyond their childish illusion of a princess on a pedestal and begin to love with even greater fervor the real human woman they never let themselves see before; but for many, the death of the illusion is the death of love, because they never loved what was true, but only the illusion--finding it destroyed, they can only curse the destruction of their love, and some of them, the wickedness and baseness of all women as well.

Amen to that!! I have to admit I love the Church with all heart and soul. However as Pope Benedict pointed out in his earlier work Introduction to Christianity there is this mystery of this "Unholy Holiness" we must deal with and we deal with it we love the Church more.

Anyway I thought Chesterton fans might keep a eye for this article when it comes online and again the comments are good as to the post at Rod's place.

Hopefully I might try to pick up more GKC as a fall project