Chesterton and Paganism

Michael O'Brien

MICHAEL O'BRIEN IS a Canadian artist living near Ottawa, much of whose art
deals with religious themes.A number of his paintings hang in Mount Angel
Abbey in Oregon.

The sheer weight of Chesterton's intellectual genius has tended to ob-

scure a basic fact about his nature: he was fundamentally an artist. There
has always been, of course, an abundance of evidence that he was a lover
of visual imagery, ranging from boyhood doodles through a lifetime of
humorous cartoons depicting the foibles of his contemporaries, to the
cardboard characters which he created in later years for his toy theatre.
There is also the fact that, when his friends went on to Oxford and Cam-
bridge, he chose to attend an art school at St. John's Wood and later the
Slade School of A r t . The real evidence, however, lies in the v i v i d
metaphors and ingenious parallels produced during his career as a writer.
They were drawn from a seemingly inexhaustible store of observed detail.
He was a man who looked, and looked deeply, one who gradually came to
understand the mysterious epiphany of meaning continuously uttered in
creation. I f he is more widely known as a philosopher at large, it is be-
cause the bulk of his creative output lies on the side of the printed word.
"Words—alas, my trade is words!" he once said. During his lifetime, the
press was the dominant medium of social communication. Chesterton was
primarily concerned with the communication of Truth, and one suspects
that had painting, for example, been the primary means of communication
in his society, he would have thrown his weight into the development of
that gift.
The philosopher and the artist are close in their loves and in their
aims. Both are intimately concerned with seeing things as they are. But art
divorced from philosophy becomes an exercise in narcissism. And the
language of philosophy all too often becomes a dead husk when it loses
its incamational elements, namely, those forms which art can give to the

A Midland Valley

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invisible absolutes. Because human art is not a mimicry of nature but a re-
flection of the divine creativity, truth and goodness must always press for-
ward towards an incarnation in beauty. In describing their relationship,
Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the metaphor of sisterhood:
Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least
as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she
will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two
sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of myste-
rious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name
as if she were an omament of the bourgeois past, can no longer
pray and soon will no longer be able to love.^

When beauty is removed from the home, from places of work, and, worst
of all, from places of worship, and when every level of culture is invaded
with utilitarianism, the disintegration of the human person begins in
earnest. Where and how did this process begin in Western civilisation?
Until the late Renaissance, the art of the Church had been a principal
shaper of the Christian sense of reality, and of man's understanding of his
identity. Art had expressed the uniquely Christian vision of an integrated
sense of the human and the divine: the worth of the human person was
founded on the imago Dei, the image of God in which he was created (cf.
Genesis 1:27). But the Renaissance began a re-examination of man's
place in the order of the cosmos. In a climate of liberal materialism, some
new dignity was given to his person, yet increasingly he was to search
for his sense of self apart from the identity given to him by Christianity.
In the mind of Western man, the concepts of the human and the divine
began to draw apart. During the ensuing centuries, a plethora of false
dichotomies came f r o m that p r i m a r y rupture: Reason—Faith,
Truth—^Love, Law—Spirit, could henceforth be considered at odds with
each other, thus generating the climate which produced first the Reforma-
tion, then the Enlightenment, and finally that climax of extremes known
as the Modem Era.

One of the effects of the fragmented Christian cosmology was the de-
generation of art. After the Renaissance, art survived on the dwindling
capital of Christian culture. The new humanism was able to sustain art for
a time by enthusiasm for new possibilities in human subject matter, and
also by the challenges provided by the liberation of technique. But as sub-
sequent history was to prove, a humanism which rejects, or simply drifts
from, its foundation in absolutes eventually betrays the ideals which origi-
nally fostered the liberal revolution. The religious, intellectual, and artistic

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life of Europe was severed not only from its foundations but from the
community necessary to authentic culture. By the nineteenth century the
visual arts had declined, by and large, into theatrical effects; its emotion-
alism was perhaps a subconscious attempt to find, in sentiment, traces of a
lost sense of the spiritual. The Pre-Raphaelites, for example, frequently
explored religious themes in the style of realism, but it was a realism seen
through the lens of a certain rosy form of Romanticism. This and other
movements of the time were by no means lacking in genius, but essential
elements of a whole vision of man were absent. The Impressionists had
abandoned religious themes but had sought a revitalised sense of the sa-
credness of the material world through focus on the beauty of light as it
played in matter. Yet they too exemplified elements of the anti-incama-
tional nature of the broken vision, in that their impressions of a subject
were dominant over perception of its essential meaning, its being. Visu-
ally and philosophically, there was a blurring of distinctions, as all things
tended to dissolve into one another. Individual being was sacrificed to a
vision of the universe as one vast organism—which is really the ancient
pagan worldview of monism. The cost of this error was revealed in the
following generations of artists in whom the vision worked out its conse-
quences.
The modernist movements in art were a disparate group of aesthetic
philosophies related more by their spiritual sterility, their growing creative
exhaustion, and their inability to address fundamental human questions,
than by any technical similarities. The startling invention of the camera
had recently interjected an additional component into culture. Photogra-
phy called into question the role of realism in art, for i f a mechanism
could reproduce nature with so much more precision and efficiency than
could a painting, was art perhaps now obsolete? Artists were forced to re-
examine the true function of art as vision into the essential meanings in
creation, and not as a mere mimicry of nature. Technology forced artists
to choose to plunge deeper into the mystery of being or to turn away into
a world of abstractions. A large majority drifted in the latter stream. They
were convinced by theorists, and by charismatic figures in the avante
garde, that the only credible choice lay along the line of rejection of figu-
rative imagery. Not all, of course, rejected identifiable subject matter (one
thinks of the Surrealists and Dadaists). The common element in the work
of figurative and abstract work alike was a headlong rush in the direction
of subjectivisation. Henceforth, an individual's feelings and mental states,
no matter how distorted by misreadings of experience, were considered to

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be the ultimate criteria of artistic good. Eventually, even the concept of a

good in art came to be considered oppressive. The created order, in all its
splendour and complexity, was rejected as an exhausted image-bank. The
mystery of being was abandoned, and as a result, one after another human
faculty of seeing, hearing, and reflection declined, and in many places
closed down altogether.
The modern artist turned away into his interior universe, and for
some artists it was so totally a subjectivised world that language itself dis-
integrated into disconnected forms, and then into silence. In a meaning-
less, broken universe, it was no longer considered necessary to make one-
self intelligible. Faith and Reason were jettisoned from the lives of a large
number of makers of culture. They assumed that creativity would be suffi-
cient unto itself; they had not anticipated that this would be the fast
method of destroying the very thing they loved most dearly. Without
philosophical reflection or a spiritual life, perception itself waned and its
light came close to being extinguished in culture. Into the vortex of this
colossal tragedy, G.K. Chesterton was bom. Curiously, he decided to be-
come an artist.
Perception is never more radiant than when an artist, or simply a
lover of beauty, is at the same time a philosopher and a saint. Reason-
Faith-Creativity are reunited in a living witness to the Incamation. Re-
garding Chesterton, we must leave the title of Saint to the judgement of
the Church, which would, perhaps, be forced to develop an entirely new
branch of hagiography for this Leviathan. I f the Lord created him for fun
and sport. He also created him for grave purposes. Chesterton's ability to
generate intellectual and spiritual delight through a humorous, imagina-
tive style was the exterior form of a relentless interior quest for the very
nature of reality. Chesterton showed that Tmth is the greatest adventure of
all, and that any joumey to the interior must not have its foundation in
negations of the exterior world. He was fundamentally different in this re-
gard from the great intellects of his time, because his quest was never a
gnostic seizure of knowledge, with all the seductions to pride and power
which that entails. It was a quest for Sophia, holy wisdom. That so much
of his work is permeated with an extraordinary light and humility is an in-
dication that he underwent a largely hidden growth in personal holiness.
This is itself a matter for a separate study, but it begs the question: how
was Chesterton fomied into this most rare kind of man out of the rough
and fairly common material of the stereotypical dreamy artist?

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Chesterton had a good mind from the beginning, but he was not a
scholar. Throughout childhood and youth, he was undisciplined at studies,
and was often to be found in a semi-detached state of inner preoccupation.
On occasion, he could dazzle his teachers with deep insight into the sig-
nificance of the facts that he so often failed to memorise. Yet poems, epic
imaginary battles, and other inner dramas kept him focused on the theatre
of the imagination. This apparent weakness became one of his greatest
strengths, for the mature writer later produced biographies of saints and
poets which, although they were inaccurate in minor details, nevertheless
penetrated to the hidden heart of the matter. Etienne Gilson, this century's
foremost Thomist, says of Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas that it is the
finest work ever written about the saint, a work which he, Gilson, could
never have produced. The quintessential artist in Chesterton created the
book. Powerful intuitive leaps bypassed the long and careful examinations
which a scholastic mind would have applied to a subject. Where the
scholar walked, Chesterton flew. They both arrived at the same place,
Chesterton having missed a few of the details of the landscape along the
way. But he was able to speak about the joumey and the destination from
an entirely different vantage point. He could describe vast horizons and
the shape of the world.

His temperament naturally taught him that the purely academic eye
was only half-seeing. As he matured, he came to understand that undisci-
plined genius, in its own way, was also incomplete. Only a sanctified, ed-
ucated imagination could take him beyond the boundaries of the self; with
the right formation, it could take him to the hidden heart of things. It was
precisely this lack of formation in his youth which led him into serious
trouble. " I did not very clearly distinguish between dreaming and wak-
ing," he said of this period. The highly creative person in the embryonic
state is very vulnerable. Usually he is an unquestioning lover of creation
and an imbiber of the raw material of experience. He needs an exceptional
clarity of mind in order to read correctly some ominous signs upon the
face of creation. Chesterton did not then have the spiritual equipment to
do so, for he was dominated by the intuitive faculty. This is not to say that
his intellect was inactive, for it was always developing, and indeed would
develop until the world's image of him was determined by its view of him
as a great thinker. But his intellect was always a servant to his intuitions.
It was Faith which later liberated intellect and intuition in his life and inte-
grated them into a powerful unified force. During his youth, however, he

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was not yet a Christian, though even then he had intimations about good
and evil. He writes:
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a
tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from
Crusoe's ship—even that had been a wild whisper of something
originally wise, for according to Christianity we were indeed sur-
vivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down
before the beginning of the world.^

But instinct alone is not enough to preserve the good, nor to defend an un-
formed consciousness against an entire cultural configuration growing
hostile to the original good. At this point in his life, Chesterton stood an
excellent chance of becoming exactly like so many creative personalities
of his times, disbelieving, cynical, and eventually despairing both of natu-
ral creation and of man. Perhaps he would have become like Shaw and
Wells, and formed with them a truly devastating triad. But that is specula-
tion. What is certain is that, for a period of his youth, he was submerged
in darkness, and came very close to being lost.
Chesterton describes his youth as a "period full of doubts, and mor-
bidities, and temptations." In his autobiography, he says that this experi-
ence fixed forever in him a certainty about the objective reality of sin. It
was several years before he gave it its proper name. He learned painfully
that the divine order of the cosmos was not only damaged in some ab-
stract manner, a mere theoretical disharmony; but that it was, in fact, suf-
fering from a deep, perhaps fatal, wound. Furthermore, his own nature,
drifting and in turmoil, exhibited more than a little damage:
it is true that there was a time when I had reached the condition
of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of
Wilde, that "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than
the thing I am." I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation
to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imag-
ine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more
normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpow-
ered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of the imagination.^

During the Slade years, he filled a notebook with horrible drawings which
prompted friends to ask i f he was going insane. At the time, he was a
sceptic, experiencing radical existential doubt, wondering i f he had "pro-
jected the universe from within." It may be that an overpowering sense of
cosmic isolation goaded him into spiritual experimentation as an attempt
to break through to a larger universe. He did not yet understand that the

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course which he chose was actually a plunge into a totally subjective uni-
verse. At this point, he was very much the undisciplined artist, idle, direc-
tionless, searching about in the irrational for the fires of experience.
This experience was his first encounter with evil as a conscious pres-
ence. He was, of course, quite familiar with the ordinary folly and im-
morality indulged in by humanity. But his dabbling in Spiritualism was
exposure to evil of a different order, an extreme moral, intellectual, and
spiritual danger. It was "a deadly poison," he said. Of his experiences with
the ouija-board, he recalled that preternatural communications occurred,
but he recognised them as lies. These sessions left him with headaches
and "a horrid feeling—with what I can best describe as a bad smell in the
mind." Though he had little or no familiarity with Christian discernment
about the occult, his natural honesty gave him some protection. At this pe-
riod of his life, it was a semi-dormant faculty just crudely awakened by
the sense of danger; it had not yet matured into what Belloc called
Chesterton's appetite for Tmth. His intellect was darkened and his will
was weak. The world seemed to him a bleak place indeed.
Von Balthasar points out what can occur to societies and to artists
who are badly formed in their love of beauty:
In a world without Beauty. . . man stands before the good and
asks why it must be done and not rather its altemative, evil. For
this too is a possibility, and even the more exciting one: why not
investigate Satan's depths?"^
Chesterton engaged in little or no evil other than that which can be exer-
cised on the screen of imagination. But he was skirting the edge of an
abyss, and the company he kept had gone some way into it. In a Daily
News article he recalled a student with whom he had taken up at the time.
Chesterton called him "the diabolist." Spiritualism was a door into a much
darker world. Chesterton had paused at the door, recognising the smell of
fire, "even hell-fire." The diabolist told him what lay beyond the door.
"Shall I not find in evil a life of its own?" the student asked, "What you
call evil I call good."^ Chesterton was shocked most of all by the other's
faimess of mind. His companion recognised the truth of Christianity, but
it made no difference to him. Chesterton had been raised in a family of
vaguely theistic Unitarians, and he had a disposition to the good; but
when he was confronted by someone with a disposition to evil, he found
himself ill-equipped to provide an argument. In this brilliant young man,
Chesterton encountered one who aspired, as did a growing number in his
generation, to go "beyond good and evil." Yet the diabolist was not so far

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A gleam before the stomi

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Chesterton and Paganism

beyond good and evil that he could not pause upon the lintel of a doorway
into deeper darkness. Chesterton overheard him refuse a temptation to
some unknown, ultimate outrage with the words, " I f I do that, I shan't
know the difference between right and wrong." There was something still
redeemable in the diabolist. Later, however, he committed suicide.
There is a note of profound sadness in the anecdote. One can feel
Chesterton's helplessness, his lack of words to stop a man who was deter-
mined to drown in darkness. I f the encounter had occurred later on in his
life, those words would have taken shape spontaneously. But as yet, he
himself was only just clinging to the deck of a raft that seemed a frail
remnant of the great shipwreck. Recoiling in horror from the evil, he
turned back towards life. His main contact with reality was the Junior De-
bating Club. This society of friends eventually helped to restore his equi-
librium, and he was grateful for them. Their foolery, the parry and thrust
of debate, and the comfort of that love which is friendship, drew him back
into sanity. It would be an error to depict Chesterton at any time as an in-
troverted isolationist, but he had survived a most painful dichotomy of be-
ing. The exterior, the social man, had gone through the motions of a more
or less Bohemian existence, while the interior man had been a conscious-
ness adrift in the cosmos. Returning from that strange dark joumey he told
his friends, "You should not look a gift universe in the mouth."^

Just how deeply into darkness he had gone will perhaps never be
known, for the autobiography is vague on that point. But there is a tension
to the few pages in which it is discussed. Years later, in The Man Who
Was Thursday: A Nightmare, he portrayed a character who denies and de-
fies the good with full knowledge. In this and in other works, he testifies
to the reality of extreme evil, "not because I had leamed it from the mil-
lions of priests whom I had never met, but because I had leamed it from
myself."^ He had plunged in "deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual sui-
cide," and emerged with a new consciousness of good and evil. There was
a battle going on in the cosmos, and it raged within himself. This aware-
ness was the beginning of a liberation that cost him a conscious effort,
possibly a total effort of the will:
When I had been for some time in these the darkest depths of the
contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to re-
volt; to dislodge this incubus and throw off this nightmare.^
The encounter with evil was the generator of a remarkable search.
The lifelong sense of urgency which characterised that search is an indica-

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tion of how radical the encounter was for him. The urgent tone was mod-
erated by humour and art, but it permeated practically everything that he
wrote thereafter; even the jokes had points, for simply everything led ei-
ther in the direction of life or of death. He was not, however, so naive as
to think that the battle was a clear-cut choice between an obvious good
and an evil which always revealed itself as monstrous. He knew that sub-
tlety was the major tactic of the enemy, and that the greatest battles might
be fought in twilight. Gradually he came to see that his task was to throw
as much light as possible onto the arena of combat.

The publication of Heretics in 1905 was an early indication that he

recognised the academic and literary sophists of his day as agents of an
intellectual pall cast over what he called the "Modem Mind." In Heretics
he writes:
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about some-
thing, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons de-
sire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Mid-
dle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the
arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my
brethren, the value of Light. I f Light be itself good—" At this
point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people
make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten min-
utes, and they go about congratulating each other on their un-
mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out
so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because
they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old
iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds
were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too
much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal ma-
chinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And
there is a war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So,
gradually and inevitably, today, to-morrow, or the next day, there
comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and
that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what
we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must dis-
cuss in the dark.'^

The new heretics were not for the most part purveyors of bizarre sects;
they were rather fugitives from a decaying Protestant liberalism. They
were groping about in the dark trying to strike lights from their own
minds and the effort could appear heroic. The exaltation of the agnostic
rebel was really a romantic illusion. At the time, it did not appear to be a
great evil in itself, but it was the breeding ground for an apostacy which

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would spread throughout the entire Western world. Each succeeding gen-
eration would be fed by a growing pantheon of literary lights who would
make disbelief seem credible: Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, and
a large cast of like-minded artists—able and well-intentioned, each at-
tempting in his own way to come to terms with the slow collapse of civili-
sation. They were also diverse in ideology and temperament, each inflat-
ing some part-truth into a cosmology (a working definition of heresy).
There is a new level of intensity in Chesterton's writings after Heretics, as
if he had sharpened his sense of what lay ahead for the world. He saw that
culture is a primary instrument of forming a people's concept of reality.
Western culture was in a major crisis, dominated by gifted men who were
increasingly hostile to Judaeo-Christian absolutes. Chesterton spent a
good deal of effort attempting to show them that, having sloughed off reli-
gion, they were by no means freed to be objective. They merely opened
themselves to new or old mythologies. When men cease to believe in
God, he observed, they do not then believe in nothing; they will then be-
gin to believe in anything.

In the 1903-1904 controversy with Robert Blatchford, Chesterton re-

vealed that he had come to belief in the doctrines of the fall of man and
the Divinity of Christ. The accusation was made that Christ was a myth
which it had been necessary to invent; after all, did not every culture pro-
duce some form of mythological Christ-figure? Chesterton's reply was
brilliandy simple:
If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the
human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian
God? I f the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not people
far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? I f we are
so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it so odd that
Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?
The Blatchford position really amounts to this—that because a
certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely
or necessary, therefore it cannot be true. And then this bashful
being, veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched G.K.C. of
paradox.'^

Against the artifice of the secular mind, Chesterton brought the art of
parables and paradoxes which were so rooted in reality and good sense
that they were true teachers. The use of two apparently contradictory
ideas would point towards a third and hidden reality. Here was the artist
and his medium. Chesterton, a master of the image, communicated Tmth

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in piercing, incontrovertible and beautiful mental forms drawn from the

truths written into all creation. His opponents, the intellectually honest
ones, were often so surprised that they were disarmed. It should be noted
here, as well, that Chesterton took great pains to express respect and at
times affection for the personhood of his opponents, though he was merci-
less with their ideas.
Having already discerned the contours of the battle to come, even in
the half-light of a dark century, Chesterton saw that the revolt must take
the course of an attack upon the nature, the role, and the person of Christ.
The revolt was only just gathering momentum then. Inroads had been
made into wide circles of English society by the ideas of the occult Spiri-
tualist, Madame Blavatsky, and her disciple, Annie Besant. Their Theo-
sophical Society was a major instrument in providing a hot ersatz religion
to f i l l the vacuum left by the cold rationalist gnostics of the English intel-
ligentsia. This two-pronged assault upon a weakened post-Catholic soci-
ety was most effective. In fact, the English pagan revival was to provide a
model, as well as many of the leading "prophets," of the global occult rev-
olution now emerging in our times as the New Age Movement. Then and
now it was a syncretistic blend of European individualism, ancient gnosti-
cism, and the monistic religions of the East, principally Hinduism.
Chesterton prophesied that the last and greatest battles of civilisation
would be fought against the religious doctrines of the East.^^ This was an
odd prophecy, for at the time, India, for example, birthplace of both Hin-
duism and Buddhism, was an impoverished, subjugated colony with little
prospect of influence on any level of world affairs. Yet, within a century,
we find a great many educated people following the ideas of Jungian psy-
chology. Carl Jung, more than any other figure, has been responsible for
injecting Hindu mythological concepts into the mind of Western man.
His cosmos is represented by the Hindu mandala, a four-sided diagram of
the universe. The "Christ-myth" is true, Jung believed, but it is under-
standable only in the context of a divine "Quatemity"—a fourth dimen-
sion of God, the "dark side" of His face. According to Jung, this other
face of God has mistakenly been called Satan or Antichrist. Jung's fasci-
nation with the occult is consistent with such ideas. The occult move-
ments themselves have spread similar concepts, to the point that large
numbers of Britons and North Americans, for example, now believe in
reincarnation and karma, and desire to communicate with the spirits of
"Ascended Masters." What was once called "necromancy" has now be-
come "spiritual evolution." Millions of people are being fed on the spiri-

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tual teachings of seers whose esoteric doctrines advocate the total destruc-
tion of Judaism and Christianity. The cry of the rationalist revolt, epito-
mised by Voltaire's epithet against the Church—"Crush the infamous
thing!"—is now the rallying cry of irrationalists. They are a large army of
devotees awaiting the emergence of a "New Age Christ" who will attempt
to replace Jesus Christ. These are now mainstream cultural ideas. Ortho-
doxy at any time would recognise them as the doctrines of an antichrist.
The Church is a timeless society. Membership makes it possible to
step outside of the contemporary milieu, at least mentally, and to measure
it against something infinitely better and ultimately more real. But this is
not possible for those locked into a de-spiritualised cosmos. Rejection of
the idea of evil, coupled to belief in progress and the self-perfectibility of
man, blocks awareness that the worst may be happening, a blindness rein-
forced by the fact that every person tends naturally to experience his own
times as normal. Even believers can be blinded by the psychology of de-
nial—consider the attitude of most Christians and Jews in Germany dur-
ing the 1930s. As events become more and more extreme, the temptation
grows to bury oneself in escapist dreams or in the distractions of comfort.
The critical faculty is lulled to sleep. "To stay awake and watch," de-
mands energy and the willingness to persist in a state of chronic tension.
It is so much easier to be "optimistic." Chesterton was neither an optimist
nor a pessimist. He had been rudely awakened by his encounter with evil.
It is uncertain whether, in the early years of his conversion, he attached
apocalyptic significance to the occult revival from which he had barely
been saved. But he saw a great danger looming.
He was employed for a brief period with a publisher of occult books,
and there he encountered the false doctrines on the lips of disoriented ma-
trons and eccentric gentlemen. It is to his credit that he was able to foresee
the shape of the future in what was then only one of many seemingly
harmless fringe groups. He saw that mysticism was on the rise, and he
recognised it as an unfocused craving for spiritual experiences, one more
appetite which the materialist wanted filled. After several decades of ob-
serving the progress of this undefined movement, he wrote in a 1930 con-
troversy with C.E.M. Joad:
. . . you say that it is indeed necessary that religion should exist,
but that its essence is Mysticism; and this does not need to be or-
ganised. I should answer that nothing on earth needs to be organ-
ised so much as Mysticism. You say that man tends naturally to
religion; he does indeed; often in the form of human sacrifice or

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the temples of Sodom. Almost all extreme evil of that kind is

mystical. The only way of keeping it healthy is to have some
rules, some definitions of dogma and moral function.*^

Similarly, a nation robbed of spiritual order could produce monsters. Ger-

many, for example, had not only produced Hegel and Nietzsche; it had
been formed by them. The result was what Chesterton called "Prussian-
ism." He recognised (along with Belloc) that the "Servile State" was ev-
erywhere in the modem world, but Germany offered a clear example of
the pagan state taken to its logical consequences. Its new pantheon was
more dangerous than the ancient Teutonic deities, for it was dominated by
the "superman," the apotheosis of humanism, a foremnner of the new oc-
cultic humanism which was to come. By his very nature, the superman
must make war upon the "new man" in Christ. And make war he did. The
life-span of such a myth might be no more than a century, but the damage
that it would cause would be immeasurable in terms of human misery.
Chesterton saw that the self-divinisation of man was not so much hope for
a new kind of man as it was "another name for despair of man," and man
in despair becomes capable of any kind of outrage.

How did this happen in one of the most civilised Christian nations of
Europe? In his memoires. Inside the Third Reich, Hitler's Architect and
Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, recalls the mentality of the German
people as Hider rose to power. Divided by the Reformation, undermined
by the new philosophies of the previous century, suffering from social
chaos and artistic decadence, many Gemians had come to believe in the
need for a secular messiah. Speer points out that most Germans disliked
the "darker" side of National Socialism; but, in a spirit of optimism, they
focused on the positive promises made to them by Hitler. They were con-
fident that once he attained the dignity of the nation's highest office, he
would leave his more unpleasant ideas behind. It is important to note here
that Protestant Germany ensured the election of Hitler, while only a small
minority of Catholics voted for him.

Chesterton lived long enough to see Hitler gather about himself the
magnetic darkness of a romanticised, spiritualised tyranny. It is uncertain
whether or not he was sufficiently apocalyptic to identity Hitler as An-
tichrist, but surely he would have identified him as a type of antichrist.
Apocalypse was in the air of the times. In the previous century. Cardinal
Newman had written and preached powerfully about the coming of An-
tichrist. The appearance in 1907 of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's

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novel, Lord of the World, had stimulated an awareness of the real possibil-
ities for Antichrist's rise to power. The Russian religious thinker,
Vladimir Soloviev, had also published (1900 in Russian, 1915 in English)
his masterpiece. Three Conversations, which included "The Antichrist," a
prophetic parable about the imminent incamation of evil in history. A l l
three were converts to Catholicism (although Soloviev's conversion is still
debated by the Russian Orthodox). A l l three were highly conscious of the
dissolution of the old order of things. They said, in literary forms, what a
number of Catholic saints, mystics, and apparitions had already wamed:
that the twentieth century would be the arena of an ultimate conflict with
the powers of darkness. To this list of inspired protestors should be added
the names of Gilson and Belloc, both of whom did not hesitate to say that
the times were dominated by the spirit of "anti-Christ." A l l were agreed
that evil is the power of the lie and that it was capable of seducing even
the elect. Only a virile, orthodox Christianity would have the strength to
withstand the coming storm.

Until his conversion to CathoUcism in 1922, Chesterton remained an

Anglo-Catholic. But he saw that the Anglican Church was much weak-
ened in doctrine and discipline. At the same time, Tyrrell and Loisy were
spreading Modemism in the Catholic Church, to be only just checked by
the 1907 papal encyclical, Pascendi, and by the 1910 oath required by the
Church against Modemism. Chesterton saw a great apostacy brewing ev-
erywhere, one that has empted in the present generation with a vengeance.
In fact, it is Modemism which has done most to discredit reflection on the
Apocalypse in any real depth. Modemism is immanentist, in that it under-
stands God primarily as a divine principle in man, in a linear historical
process, and in the plane of the material universe. It cannot grasp the
Christian vision of apocalypse, which it tends to dismiss as irrational,
morbid, fundamentalist, and pessimistic. Orthodoxy maintains that the es-
chaton, the culmination of history as a climax of sin and error, will be re-
solved only by the interjection of the transcendent God breaking into his-
tory in an extraordinary manner. By contrast, the new theologians attempt
to "immanentise the eschaton," as a purely historical process. In bmshing
aside consideration of the real meaning of the Book of Revelation, they
deny that the new Jerusalem will be given by God after the devastation of
the world by human folly. The New Jemsalem of neo-pagan theologians
is to be created by man, here and now. This reveals an extremely opti-
mistic view of human nature.

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Chesterton and Paganism

Chesterton, readmg the despair in much of modern optimism, fre-

quently argued against pessimism and optimism. They bore no relation-
ship to authentic Christian hope, which must always have the courage to
see things as they really are. Christian realism is apocalyptic, for it stands
ever waiting and watchful for the hour when the Bridegroom will arrive.
But hope is a delicate virtue, developed by a process of maturing in faith.
In an era when despair is never far below the surface. Christian apocalyp-
tic reflection mns certain risks: on one hand, a temptation to overfocus on
the darkness of apocalypse, and on the other hand, an inclination to neu-
tralise it by calling it a myth. Both reactions reveal a thinly-veiled, largely
subconscious despair. It must always be remembered that the Apocalypse
will be the deliverance of the world; and, altemately, that i f it displays
some of the elements of myth, it is a myth which will actually come to
pass. The Book of Revelation is the antithesis of mythology, a tmth which
Modemist demythologisers fail to understand.
Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) was more than a reaction to the de-
mythologisers and to their counterparts, the new pagan mythologisers. It
was a geography of his mind's Odyssey to orthodox Christianity. In con-
trast to the two main branches of the new paganism, rationalistic scien-
tism and irrational cultism, he posited, with characteristic playfulness, the
"ethics of elfland." It was his childlike way of saying that the world was
charged with a real "magic" far greater than the occultic arts; and that it
was infused with a sanity more vast than the mechanisms of limited hu-
man reason. He saw the modern philosophers using thought to negate
thought, a form of self-destmction. He saw the parallel degeneration into
cultic paganism as the desperation of a people starved for a spiritual life in
a desacralised age. Without a transcendent God, the cosmos was curiously
flat, and an unexpected by-product was that its citizens felt dehumanised
without knowing why. Thus, spiritualities of any sort, especially those
which promised (and delivered) strong visceral content and no account-
ability to God, looked very attractive to the Modem Mind.
The Modem Mind was not then a large portion of the populace of the
Westem world, but it had grasped power in Art and Politics, and its ideas
were spreading everywhere. The mass of men remained imbued with
some basic assumptions given them by Christianity. It was still, on the
surface, a Christian society, though it was Protestantised (that is, subjec-
tivised) and cmmbling rapidly. Even atheists saw the shape of the future.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) outlined a society in which lit-
erature and religion had been neutered, humanity genetically engineered

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and drugged by soma, a narcotic named after a drink used in Hindu Vedic
ritual. It was a world which had perfectly synthesised technology and pa-
ganism. Thirty years later, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wamed
that the world which he had foreseen is developing much more quickly
than he had anticipated, and it is materialising before our very eyes as a
new "non-violent totalitarianism." He suggested that, more and more, we
will be "painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social engi-
neers."^^ This kind of totalitarianism is the worst of all, impossible to
throw off, because it never appears to be what, in fact, it is. The Roman
Catholic Church was, and remains, the one body capable of resisting the
dissolution; but it is precisely the body considered most objectionable to
the modem mind. In the case of England's rejection of orthodoxy, Caryll
Houselander has discussed the role played by unacknowledged and unre-
pented guih:
So it is with the Englishman's fear of Catholicism. Whether he is
good or bad, Catholicism is in his blood. Few if any of us are not
descended from apostates. Few i f any English families were not
once Catholic: and Catholicism, even in the blood, is stronger
and more ineradicable than drink. Our forefathers, if they were to
endure going on living with themselves and with their children,
had to justify their infidelity. Therefore, they built up a sinister
picture of Catholicism, which has been handed down the years,
and has set up a conflict between the irresistible attraction and
the bogey lurking just below the surface of memory.

These are hard words. But it must be remembered that Catholicism is in

the blood of all the Western world. Chesterton himself was forced to
wrestle with that bogey in order to make the leap to Catholicism. Most
men in the modem world could not make the leap, and unacknowledged
guilt must be seen as part of the handicap which they faced. Their failure
bred the climate which has fostered the luxuriant growth of the pagan re-
vival. John Coates has pointed out that Edwardian society suffered from a
loss of logic and clarity. The movement away from ethics towards aes-
theticism as a preoccupation with technique left the culture vulnerable to
ideological invasion. He writes:
The moral and intellectual equipment inherited from the late
nineteenth century had been faulty and was now, in important re-
spects, disintegrating. The Victorian compromise, "a balance of
whims," having begun to lose its confidence and energy, its al-
ways latent irrationalism began to feed on increasingly sinister
sources.

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Chesterton and Paganism

False prophets appeared everywhere, and our present generation is now

reaping the harvest of their labours, the harvest of ignoring true prophets
such as Chesterton. A new generation of false prophets exercises uncanny
skill in creating alluring images of cosmos and history. A revived panthe-
ism, for example, is offered in pleasing disguises as a replacement for the
neglected incamational spirituality of genuine faith. Heterodox cosmol-
ogy has invaded several levels of the Christian community, ranging from
many a Catholic university, parishes and centres of spirituality, to episco-
pal offices. Simultaneously, orthodoxy is called into question everywhere
in the Westem world. The "mysticism" of materialism is becoming a new
"orthodoxy." Chesterton had had all that, and he knew it to be illusion, the
myth of man-made Utopia, a very old idea. Authentic Christianity he
found to be etemally young, etemally leaping out of the tomb, just at the
moment when it seemed beyond hope:
This is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. People have fallen
into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something
heavy, humdmm, and safe. There never was anything so perilous
or so excidng as orthodoxy. It is sanity: and to be sane is more
dramatic than to be mad.'^

By 1922 Chesterton was standing on solid rock, and the publication

of The Everlasting Man (1925) was the ensuing elucidation of his Chris-
tology. It was also his full-scale confrontation with paganism. In it, he
writes:
In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a
recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry
sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place, with a most dark and
deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. So far
could the lonely imagination lead, and we must tum later to the
lonely reason. Nowhere along this road did the two ever travel
together.

The pagan is always in flux and never comes home. His reason and imagi-
nation are always at cross purposes. The attempt to meet divine reality by
one or the other alone is doomed to failure. Chesterton said that "the
rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle until
they meet in the sea of Christendom." The sanity of the world is saved be-
cause the divinity of Christ "met the mythological search for romance by
being a story, and the philosophical search for tmth by being a tme story."
Conversion, however, could never be a matter of paganism simply evolv-
ing into Catholicism. He maintained that it was always a break, a case of

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repentance. Of his own conversion, he wrote:

I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan and
Dionysus and not from Luther and Laud; that the conversion I
understand is that of the Pagan and not the Puritan; and upon that
antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know. It
is a transformation more vast and tremendous than anything that
has been meant for many years past, at least in England and
America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division. On
the height of that ancient empire and that intemational experience
humanity had a vision. It has not had another; but only quarrels
about that one. Paganism was the largest thing in the world and
Christianity was larger; and everything else has been compara-
tively small.

The Catholic Church continues to call modem man to the fullness of con-
version, and to find his place in the visible and the invisible world. She
maintains the delicate balance between transcendence and immanence.
She is the Church of the Incamation. The Catholic can love creation pas-
sionately because it is beautiful and good and tme, a reflection of its Cre-
ator. Unlike the Puritan, he does not fear it or ignore it. Unlike the pagan,
he has no need to worship it or to attempt to transcend it by negations of
reality. Christianity is sanity because it finds transcendence by entering
into creation so completely, with a vision of restoring it to its original
unity, by loving it so well, as did its God, that His hidden face emerges
through it and His likeness is restored in the human soul.
If that likeness has been badly defaced in the soul of modem man,
the Christian is not permitted to despise him or to despair of him. We
must take hope that the image of God remains alive in him. It is tme that
the new pagan is a being different from the old pre-Christian classical pa-
gan who, through his myths and philosophies, attempted to crawl out of
darkness towards the distant light. The new pagan is a more lost creature,
for he wishes to go back down into the abyss, dragging an entire civilisa-
tion after him. It must be remembered, however, that Chesterton himself
was for a time that very man. He tells us:
I have said that my morbidities were mental as well as moral; and
sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental scepticism
and solipsism. And there again I found that the Church had gone
before me and established her adamantine foundation; so that
even madmen might hear her voice; and by a revelation in their
very brain, begin to believe their eyes.^^

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Chesterton and Paganism

1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1 (San Francisco, 1982), p.
18.
2 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco, 1986), p. 283.
3 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography (San Francisco, 1988), p. 96.
4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1, p. 19.
5 Daily News article, undated, quoted in Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton
.(London, 1945), p. 45.
6 Letter quoted in Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 48.
"7 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 104.
8 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 96.
9 G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York, 1919), p. 24.
10 G.K. Chesterton, The Blatchford Controversies (San Francisco, 1986), p. 347.
11 Cf. Chapter V, "The Escape From Paganism," in G.K. Chesterton's The Ever-
lasting Man (San Francisco, 1986), pp. 364-381, for Chesterton's ideas about the na-
ture of a pagan Europe which would have appeared had Christianity not prevailed in
the rise of Westem civilisation.
12 Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 511.
13 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York, 1958), p. 34. Huxley's
analysis of the West's slide into totalitarianism is prescient, yet it remains flawed by
monotonous repetition of his prejudices against organised religion. The historical
Church is repeatedly lumped together with tyrannical systems such as Marxism and
Nazism.
14 Caryll Houselander, Guilt (London, 1952), p. 12.
15 John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, 1984), p. 29.
16 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco, 1986), p. 305.
1"^ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London, 1926), p. 126.
18 G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (New York, 1926), p.
90.
19 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 330.

Westminster, showing the Abbey, Westminster Hall, and the old

Houses of Parliament (c. 1830), Peter de Wint, 1784-1849

201