The great literary figure Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a towering cultural influence for literate men in the first half of the 20th century and has continued to be so for devotees. Venerable Fulton Sheen considered him the strongest influence on his own writing. Chesterton himself, a true master of the English language, who wrote 80 books and about 4000 articles, has been proposed for beatification. Always a devout Anglican, he converted to Catholicism in 1922, after which he wrote many books on apologetics and religion, among the latter, short but extraordinary biographies of St. Francis (1923) and of St. Thomas Aquinas (1933). Ignatius Press published both in a single volume recently. The following is from Chesterton's Introduction to the Aquinas biography, and for those who have not had the pleasure of reading Chesterton before, an excellent introduction to his exceptional thinking, his fresh use of language, and his unique and vivid writing style.
Some time ago I wrote a little book of this type and shape on St. Francis of Assisi; and some time after (I know not when or how, as the song says, and certainly not why) I promised to write a book of the same size, or the same smallness on St. Thomas Aquinas.
The promise was Franciscan only in its rashness; and the parallel was very far from being Thomistic in its logic. You can make a sketch of St. Francis: you could only make a plan of St. Thomas, like the plan of a labyrinthine city.
And yet in a sense he would fit into a much larger or a much smaller book. What we really know of his life might be pretty fairly dealt with in a few pages; for he did not, like St. Francis, disappear in a shower of personal anecdotes and popular legends. What we know, or could know, or may eventually have the luck to learn, of his work, will probably fill even more libraries in the future than it has filled in the past.
It was allowable to sketch St. Francis in an outline; but with St. Thomas everything depends on the filling up of the outline. It was even medieval in a manner to illuminate a miniature of the Poverello, whose very title is a diminutive. But to make a digest, in the tabloid manner, of the 'Dumb Ox' of Sicily passes all digestive experiments in the matter of an ox in a tea-cup.
But we must hope it is possible to make an outline of biography, now that anybody seems capable of writing an outline of history or an outline of anything. Only in the present case the outline is rather an outsize. The gown that could contain the colossal friar is not kept in stock.
I have said that these can only be portraits in outline. But the concrete contrast is here so striking, that even if we actually saw the two human figures in outline, coming over the hill in their friar's gowns, we should find that contrast even comic. It would be like seeing, even afar off, the silhouettes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or of Falstaff and Master Slender.
St. Francis was a lean and lively little man; thin as a thread and vibrant as a bowstring; and in his motions like an arrow from the bow. All his life was a series of plunges and scampers: darting after the beggar, dashing naked into the woods, tossing himself into the strange ship, hurling himself into the Sultan tent and offering to hurl himself into the fire. In appearance he must have been like a thin brown skeleton autumn leaf dancing eternally before the wind; but in truth it was he that was the wind.
St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy.
St. Francis was so fiery and even fidgety that the ecclesiastics, before whom he appeared quite suddenly, thought he was a madman. St. Thomas was so stolid that the scholars, in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce. Indeed, he was the sort of schoolboy, not unknown, who would much rather be thought a dunce than have his own dreams invaded, by more active or animated dunces. This external contrast extends to almost every point in the two personalities.
It was the paradox of St. Francis that while he was passionately fond of poems, he was rather distrustful of books. It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books; that he lived the very life of the clerk or scholar in
The Canterbury Tales, who would rather have a hundred books of Aristotle and his philosophy than any wealth the world could give him. When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read."
St. Francis was very vivid in his poems and rather vague in his documents; St. Thomas devoted his whole life to documenting whole systems of Pagan and Christian literature; and occasionally wrote a hymn like a man taking a holiday.
They saw the same problem from different angles, of simplicity and subtlety; St. Francis thought it would be enough to pour out his heart to the Mohammedans, to persuade them not to worship Mahound. St. Thomas bothered his head with every hair-splitting distinction and deduction, about the Absolute or the Accident, merely to prevent them from misunderstanding Aristotle.
St. Francis was the son of a shopkeeper, or middle class trader; and while his whole life was a revolt against the mercantile life of his father, he retained none the less, something of the quickness and social adaptability which makes the market hum like a hive. In the common phrase, fond as he was of green fields, he did not let the grass grow under his feet. He was what American millionaires and gangsters call a live wire.
It is typical of the mechanistic moderns that, even when they try to imagine a live thing, they can only think of a mechanical metaphor from a dead thing. There is such a thing as a live worm; but there is no such thing as a live wire. St. Francis would have heartily agreed that he was a worm; but he was a very live worm. Greatest of all foes to the go-getting ideal, he had certainly abandoned getting, but he was still going.
St. Thomas, on the other hand, came out of a world where he might have enjoyed leisure, and he remained one of those men whose labour has something of the placidity of leisure. He was a hard worker, but nobody could possibly mistake him for a hustler. He had something indefinable about him, which marks those who work when they need not work. For he was by birth a gentleman of a great house, and such repose can remain as a habit, when it is no longer a motive.
But in him it was expressed only in its most amiable elements; for instance, there was possibly something of it in his effortless courtesy and patience. Every saint is a man before he is a saint; and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man; and most of us will choose between these different types according to our different tastes.
But I will confess that, while the romantic glory of St. Francis has lost nothing of its glamour for me, I have in later years grown to feel almost as much affection, or in some aspects even more, for this man who unconsciously inhabited a large heart and a large head, like one inheriting a large house, and exercised there an equally generous if rather more absent-minded hospitality. There are moments when St. Francis, the most unworldly man who ever walked the world, is almost too efficient for me.
St. Thomas Aquinas has recently reappeared
(in the 1930s), in the current culture of the colleges and the salons, in a way that would have been quite startling even ten years ago. And the mood that has concentrated on him is doubtless very different from that which popularised St. Francis quite twenty years ago.
The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.
Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need. This is surely the very much mistaken meaning of those words to the first saints, "Ye are the salt of the earth," which caused the Ex-Kaiser to remark with all solemnity that his beefy Germans were the salt of the earth; meaning thereby merely that they were the earth's beefiest and therefore best.
But salt seasons and preserves beef, not because it is like beef; but because it is very unlike it.
Christ did not tell his apostles that they were only the excellent people, or the only excellent people, but that they were the exceptional people; the permanently incongruous and incompatible people; and the text about the salt of the earth is really as sharp and shrewd and tart as the taste of salt.
It is because they were the exceptional people, that they must not lose their exceptional quality. "If salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" is a much more pointed question than any mere lament over the price of the best beef. If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.
Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most. St. Francis had a curious and almost uncanny attraction for the Victorians; for the nineteenth century English who seemed superficially to be most complacent about their commerce and their common sense.
Not only a rather complacent Englishman like Matthew Arnold, but even the English Liberals whom he criticised for their complacency, began slowly to discover the mystery of the Middle Ages through the strange story told in feathers and flames in the hagiographical pictures of Giotto.
There was something in the story of St. Francis that pierced through all those English qualities which are most famous and fatuous, to all those English qualities which are most hidden and human: the secret softness of heart; the poetical vagueness of mind; the love of landscape and of animals.
St. Francis of Assisi was the only medieval Catholic who really became popular in England on his own merits. It was largely because of a subconscious feeling that the modern world had neglected those particular merits. The English middle classes found their only missionary in the figure, which of all types in the world they most despised; an Italian beggar.
So, as the nineteenth century clutched at the Franciscan romance, precisely because it had neglected romance, so the twentieth century is already clutching at the Thomist rational theology, because it has neglected reason.
In a world that was too stolid, Christianity returned in the form of a vagabond; in a world that has grown a great deal too wild, Christianity has returned in the form of a teacher of logic. In the world of Herbert Spencer men wanted a cure for indigestion; in the world of Einstein they want a cure for vertigo.
In the first case, they dimly perceived the fact that it was after a long fast that St. Francis sang the Song of the Sun and the praise of the fruitful earth. In the second case, they already dimly perceived that, even if they only want to understand Einstein, it is necessary first to understand the use of the understanding.
They begin to see that, as the eighteenth century thought itself the age of reason, and the nineteenth century thought itself the age of common sense,
the twentieth century cannot as yet even manage to think itself anything but
the age of uncommon nonsense.
In those conditions the world needs a saint; but above all, it needs a philosopher. And these two cases do show that the world, to do it justice, has an instinct for what it needs. The earth was really very flat, for those Victorians who most vigorously repeated that it was round, and Alverno of the Stigmata stood up as a single mountain in the plain.
But the earth is an earthquake, a ceaseless and apparently endless earthquake, for the moderns for whom Newton has been scrapped along with Ptolemy. And for them there is something more steep and even incredible than a mountain; a piece of really solid ground -
the level of the level-headed man.
Thus in our time the two saints have appealed to two generations, an age of romantics and an age of sceptics; yet in their own age they were doing the same work; a work that has changed the world.
Again, it may be said truly that the comparison is idle, and does not fit in well even as a fancy: since the men were not properly even of the same generation or the same historic moment. If two friars are to be presented as a pair of Heavenly Twins, the obvious comparison is between St. Francis and St. Dominic.
The relations of St. Francis and St. Thomas were, at nearest, those of uncle and nephew; and my fanciful excursus may appear only a highly profane version of "Tommy make room for your uncle."
For if St. Francis and St. Dominic were the great twin brethren, Thomas was obviously the first great son of St. Dominic, as was his friend Bonaventure of St. Francis. Nevertheless, I have a reason (indeed two reasons) for taking as a text the accident of two title-pages; and putting St. Thomas beside St. Francis, instead of pairing him off with Bonaventure the Franciscan.
It is because the comparison, remote and perverse as it may seem, is really a sort of short cut to the heart of history; and brings us by the most rapid route to the real question of the life and work of St. Thomas Aquinas. For most people now have a rough but picturesque picture in their minds of the life and work of St. Francis of Assisi.
And the shortest way of telling the other story is to say that, while the two men were thus a contrast in almost every feature, they were really doing the same thing. One of them was doing it in the world of the mind and the other in the world of the worldly. But it was the same great medieval movement; still but little understood.
In a constructive sense, it was more important than the Reformation. Nay, in a constructive sense, it was the Reformation.
About this medieval movement there are two facts that must first be emphasised. They are not, of course, contrary facts, but they are perhaps answers to contrary fallacies. First, in spite of all that was once said about superstition, the Dark Ages and the sterility of Scholasticism, it was in every sense a movement of enlargement, always moving towards greater light and even greater liberty.
Second, in spite of all that was said later on about progress and the Renaissance and forerunners of modern thought, it was almost entirely a movement of orthodox theological enthusiasm, unfolded from within. It was not a compromise with the world, or a surrender to heathens or heretics, or even a mere borrowing of external aids, even when it did borrow them.
In so far as it did reach out to the light of common day, it was like the action of a plant which by its own force thrusts out its leaves into the sun; not like the action of one who merely lets daylight into a prison.
In short, it was what is technically called a Development in doctrine. But there seems to be a queer ignorance, not only about the technical, but the natural meaning of the word Development.
The critics of Catholic theology seem to suppose that it is not so much an evolution as an evasion; that it is at best an adaptation. They fancy that its very success is the success of surrender. But that is not the natural meaning of the word Development.
When we talk of a child being well-developed, we mean that he has grown bigger and stronger with his own strength; not that he is padded with borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make him look taller. When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat; we mean that he becomes more doggy and not less.
Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there is time to distinguish them and draw them out; and the point here is that the enlargement of medieval theology was simply the full comprehension of that theology. [FSSPX and Vatican-II 'spiritists', do you read this?]
And it is of primary importance to realise this fact first, about the time of the great Dominican and the first Franciscan, because their tendency, humanistic and naturalistic in a hundred ways, was truly the development of the supreme doctrine, which was also the dogma of all dogmas.
It is in this that the popular poetry of St. Francis and the almost rationalistic prose of St. Thomas appear most vividly as part of the same movement. There are both great growths of Catholic development, depending upon external things only as every living and growing thing depends on them; that is, it digests and transforms them, but continues in its own image and not in theirs.
A Buddhist or a Communist might dream of two things which simultaneously eat each other, as the perfect form of unification. But it is not so with living things. St. Francis was content to call himself the Troubadour of God; but not content with the God of the Troubadours. St. Thomas did not reconcile Christ to Aristotle; he reconciled Aristotle to Christ.
Yes, in spite of the contrasts that are as conspicuous and even comic as the comparison between the fat man and the thin man, the tall man and the short: in spite of the contrast between the vagabond and the student, between the apprentice and the aristocrat, between the book-hater and the book-lover, between the wildest of all missionaries and the mildest of all professors, the great fact of medieval history is that these two great men were doing the same great work; one in the study and the other in the street.
They were not bringing something new into Christianity; in the sense of something heathen or heretical into Christianity; on the contrary, they were bringing Christianity into Christendom.
But they were bringing it back against the pressure of certain historic tendencies, which had hardened into habits in many great schools and authorities in the Christian Church; and they were using tools and weapons which seemed to many people to be associated with heresy or heathenry. St. Francis used Nature much as St. Thomas used Aristotle; and to some they seemed to be using a Pagan goddess and a Pagan sage.
What they were really doing, and especially what St. Thomas was really doing, will form the main matter of these pages; but it is convenient to be able to compare him from the first with a more popular saint; because we may thus sum up the substance of it in the most popular way.
Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists.
But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth.
Let me add the other Ignatius special yesterday on St. Thomas Aquinas:
Introduction to GUIDE TO THOMAS AQUINAS
So bound up is the life of St. Thomas Aquinas with the thirteenth century that the year in which the century reached its mid-point, 1250, was likewise the mid-point of Thomas's life, though he was only twenty-five years old at the time and still sitting at the feet of Albertus Magnus as a student in the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Cologne.
The thirteenth century has been called the specifically "Occidental" century. The significance of this epithet has not always been completely clarified, but in a certain sense I too accept the term. I would even assert that the special quality of "Occidentality" was ultimately forged in that very century, and by Thomas Aquinas himself. It depends, however, on what we understand by "OccidentaIity." We shall have more to say on this matter.
There exists the romantic notion that the thirteenth century was an era of harmonious balance, of stable order, and of the free flowering of Christianity. Especially in the realm of thought, this was not so. The Louvain historian Fernand van Steenberghen speaks of the thirteenth century as a time of "crisis of Christian intelligence"; [1] and Gilson comments: "Anybody could see that a crisis was brewing." [2]
What, in concrete terms, was the situation? First of all we must point out that Christianity, already besieged by Islam for centuries, threatened by the mounted hordes of Asiatics (1241 is the year of the battle with the Mongols at Liegnitz) — that this Christianity of the thirteenth century had been drastically reminded of how small a body it was within a vast non-Christian world. It was learning its own limits in the most forceful way, and those limits were not only territorial.
Around 1253 or 1254 the court of the Great Khan in Karakorum, in the heart of Asia, was the scene of a disputation of two French mendicant friars with Mohammedans and Buddhists. Whether we can conclude that these friars represented a "universal mission sent forth out of disillusionment with the old Christianity," [3] is more than questionable. But be this as it may, Christianity saw itself subjected to a grave challenge, and not only from the areas beyond its territorial limits.
For a long time the Arab world, which had thrust itself into old Europe, had been impressing Christians not only with its military and political might but also with its philosophy and science. Through translations from the Arabic into Latin, Arab philosophy and Arab science had become firmly established in the heart of Christendom — at the University of Paris, for example.
Looking into the matter more closely, of course,
we are struck by the fact that Arab philosophy and science were not Islamic by origin and character. Rather, classical ratio, epitomized by Aristotle, had by such strangely involved routes come to penetrate the intellectual world of Christian Europe. But in the beginning, at any rate, it was felt as something alien, new, dangerous, "pagan."
During this same period, thirteenth-century Christendom was being shaken politically from top to bottom. Internal upheavals of every sort were brewing. Christendom was entering upon the age "in which it would cease to be a theocratic unity",[4] and would, in fact, never be so again.
In 1214 a national king (as such) for the first time won a victory over the Emperor (as such) at the Battle of Bouvines. During this same period the first religious wars within Christendom flared up, to be waged with inconceivable cruelty on both sides. Such was the effect of these conflicts that all of southern France and northern Italy seemed for decades to be lost once and for all to the corpus of Christendom.
Old monasticism, which was invoked as a spiritual counterforce, seems (as an institution, that is to say, seen as a whole) to have become impotent, in spite of all heroic efforts to reform it (Cluny, Cîteaux, etc.). And as far as the bishops were concerned — and here, too, of course, we are making a sweeping statement — an eminent Dominican prior of Louvain, who incidentally may have been a fellow pupil of St. Thomas under Albertus Magnus in Cologne, wrote the following in a significant homily:
In 1248 it happened at Paris that a cleric was to preach before a synod of bishops; and while he was considering what he should say, the devil appeared to him. "Tell them this alone," the devil said. "The princes of infernal darkness offer the princes of the Church their greetings. We thank them heartily for leading their charges to us and commend the fact that due to their negligence almost the entire world is succumbing to darkness." [5]
But of course it could not be that Christianity should passively succumb to these developments. Thirteenth-century Christianity rose In its own defense, and in a most energetic fashion. Not only were great cathedrals built in that century; it also saw the founding of the first universities. The universities undertook, among other things, the task of assimilating classical ideas and philosophy, and to a large extent accomplished this task.
There was also the whole matter of the "mendicant orders," which represented one of the most creative responses of Christianity. These new associations quite unexpectedly allied ihemselves with the institution of the university. The most important university teachers of the century, in Paris as well as in Oxford, were all monks of the mendicant orders.
All in all, nothing seemed to be "finished"; everything had entered a state of flux. AIbertus Magnus voiced this bold sense of futurity in the words:
Scientiae demonstrativae non omnes factae sunt, sed plures restant adhuc inveniendae - most of what exists in the realm of knowledge remains still to be discovered. [6]
The mendicant orders took the lead in moving out into the world beyond the frontiers of Christianity. Shortly after the middle of the century, while Thomas was writing his
Summa Against the Pagans, addressed to the
mahumetistae et pagani, [7] the Dominicans were founding the first Christian schools for teaching the Arabic language.
I have already spoken of the disputation between the mendicant friars and the sages of Eastern faiths in Karakorum. Toward the end of the century a Franciscan translated the New Testament and the Psalms into Mongolian and presented this translation to the Great Khan. He was the same Neapolitan, John of Monte Corvino, who built a church alongside the Impenal Palace in Peking and who became the first Archbishop of Peking.
This mere listing of a few events, facts, and elements should make it clear that the era was anything but a harmonious one. There is little reason for wishing for a return to those times — aside from the fact that such wishes are in themselves foolish.
Nevertheless, it may be said that in terms of the history of thought this thirteenth century, for all its polyphonic character, did attain something like harmony and "classical fullness." At least this was so for a period of three or four decades. Gilson speaks of a kind of "serenity." [8] And although that moment in time is of course gone and cannot ever again be summoned back, it appears to have left its traces upon the memory of Western Christianity, so that it is recalled as something paradigmatic and exemplary, a kind of ideal spirit of an age which men long to see realized once more, although under changed conditions and therefore, of course, in some altogether new cast.
Now as it happens, the work of Thomas Aquinas falls into that brief historical moment. Perhaps it may be said that his work embodies that moment. Such, at any rate, is the sense in which St. Thomas's achievement has been understood in the Christian world for almost seven hundred years; such are the terms in which it has repeatedly been evaluated.
Not by all, to be sure (Luther called Thomas "the greatest chatterbox" among the scholastic theologians [9]); but the voices of approbation and reverence have always predominated. And even aside from his written work, his personal destiny and the events of his life unite virtually all the elements of that highly contradictory century in a kind of "existential" synthesis. We shall now speak of these matters at greater length, and in detail.
First of all, a few remarks regarding books.
The best introduction to the spirit of St. Thomas is, to my mind, the small book by G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas. [10] This is not a scholarly work in the proper sense of the word; it might be called journalistic — for which reason I am somewhat chary about recommending it.
Maisie Ward, co-owner of the British-American publishing firm which publishes the book, writes in her biography of Chesterton [11] that at the time her house published it, she was seized by a slight anxiety. However, she goes on to say, Étienne Gilson read it and commented: "Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book."
Still troubled by the ambiguity of this comment, Maisie Ward asked Gilson once more for his verdict on the Chesterton book. This time he expressed himself in unmistakable terms: "I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on St. Thomas. . . . Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. . . . He has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas."
Thus Gilson. I think this praise somewhat exaggerated; but at any rate I need feel no great embarrassment about recommending an "unscholarly" book.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Fernand van Steenberghen, Le XIIIe siècle. In Forest, van Steenberghen, and de Gandillac, Le Mouvement doctrinal du Xle au XIVe siècle. Fliche-Martin, Histoire de l'Eglise vol. 13 (Paris, 1951), p. 303.
[2] Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1955), p. 325.
[3] Friedrich Reer, Europäische Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1953), p.147.
[4] Marie-Dominique Chenu, Introduction à l'etude de St. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris—Montreal, 1950), p. 13.
[5] Gustav Schnürer, Kirche und Kultur im Mittelalter (Paderborn, 1926), II, p. 441.
[6] Liber primus Posteriorum Analyticorum, tract. 1, cap. 1 Opera Omnia. Ed. A. Borgnet (Paris, 1890), tom. 2, p. 3.
[7] C. G. 1,2.
[8] Gilson, History, p. 325.
[9] Joseph Lortz, Die Reformation in Deutschland (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1939), I, p. 352.
[10] Heidelberg, 1956.
[11] Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York, 1943), p. 620.
Editor's note: Pieper's book was originally published in English in 1962 by Pantheon Books. The Ignatius Press edition was published in 1991.
Googling Chesterton led me to an interview I had not seen before, in which an Italian professor-author, who wrote a book last year about Benedict XVI's simple virtues, discussed the affinities between Joseph Ratzinger and G. K. Chesterton. It's almost a year old but timeless....
'Good sense, good life, good humor':
A Chestertonian reading of
Benedict XVI's Pontificate
By Paul De Maeyer
ROME, FEB. 7, 2012 (Zenit.org).- G.K. Chesterton and Benedict XVI have plenty in common, according to a professor of literature and Catholicism from the Pontifical Lateran University.
Andrea Monda will defend this perspective Saturday in Genoa at a conference titled "Common Sense Day. The Paradoxical Beauty of the Everyday. A Day for G.K. Chesterton."
Monda was to close the event -- dedicated entirely to the English writer and thinker -- with a talk on "Good Sense, Good Life and Good Humor: G.K. Chesterton and Benedict XVI."
In the course of his presentation, Professor Monda will provide some excerpts from his next book,
Benedetta Umilta (Blessed Humility about "the simple virtues of Joseph Ratzinger," described as a "Chestertonian" reading of Benedict XVI's pontificate (Lindau Publishing House, Mar 2012).
ZENIT spoke with the professor about his vision of the author and the Pontiff.
What relationship is there between Chesterton and Joseph Ratzinger?
Young Joseph Ratzinger read and appreciated several of Chesterton's books; in fact, here and there, whether before or after the papal election, direct or indirect quotations emerge from the work of the inventor of Father Brown.
However, what I tried to do in the book, and what I will do in Genoa, is not so much a philological reconstruction of these quotations, but an approach to the figures of the English thinker and the Bavarian theologian-Pontiff, on the themes that are at the center of the attention of the congress's organizers: good sense, good life and good humor.
In the collective and media imagination, Pope Benedict XVI is not associated with humor, right?
The truth is that Joseph Ratzinger is a mystery, a complex reality often poorly rendered by the image that prevails in the mass media. That is why I felt the need to write a book that gives weight and perspective to a picture that is otherwise trite and two-dimensional - the myth of the Pope of "No," the German Pope as staunch defender of the rigors of Christianity.
What is true in all of this is that Joseph Ratzinger is a serious person. However, be careful, says Chesterton, when he recalls, with his typical use of paradox, that "serious is not the opposite of amusing; the opposite of amusing is not amusing, but boring."
The Pope is obviously a serious person, who takes seriously the Gospel and every man he meets, but also an amusing person, who knows the value of good humor and of smiling.
Is this liking for paradox the point of contact between Chesterton and Benedict XVI?
Yes and no. Certainly yes: being two persons of great acumen and intelligence, their reasoning is not trite but sparkling, at times unsettling, which also calls for flexibility in the mind of the interlocutor. In other words, they require appropriate interlocutors, who are able to 'get' them.
At the same time, Chesterton and the Pope are not two intellectuals merely content to give us paradoxical phrases and wit. Their reasoning is ordered to create a dialogue - not to set off fireworks - but to have a relationship with the other (even with the one who is distant, who does not believe, who is an "enemy" of the faith) without ever betraying adherence to their faith which, in their case, is lived and practised, not just spoken about and preached.
How do you propose to show that the two figures both embody good sense, good life and good humor?
This is what I will talk about at Genoa's congress. All three aspects are connected, and they can all be seen in the two figures.
In regard to good sense: for Chesterton, it is verifiable even in children's fairy tales whose "morals" are still valid today, and he gives the example of Cinderella, which he says has the meaning of the line "He has exalted the lowly" in the Magnificat.
He opposed the contemporary thinking that good sense means overcoming the world of childhood, full of unreal pleasant fantasies, to enter into the world of reason and hopefully of experimental science, seen as the only source of truth (but, unfortunately, not of meaning).
Papa Ratzinger also goes against the current: for him good sense is what emerges from the Gospel and from the Christian faith, as well as the supreme paradox of giving one's life out of love. All this seems discordant in a world that has relegated Christianity to the same sphere as fairy tales, that is altogether superfluous when one attains maturity and autonomy.
And in regard to the good life?
The description I gave above of the Pope may seem to present him as a severe custodian of the truth, as someone who would use truth as a club against freedom. Instead, the dialectical relationship that guides Benedict XVI is not just that of truth/falsehood but also that of joy/boredom. For both Benedict XVI and Chesterton, the good life, as in the case of good sense, is that which flows from adherence to the Gospel.
This 'good life' is not in fact tranquil but rather something like a battle. The good life is the profound desire that animates and stirs the heart of every man. "No matter what type of man he is," writes Chesterton, "he is not sufficient unto himself, whether in peace or in suffering. The whole movement of life is that of a man who seeks to reach some place and who fights against something."
The Pope says, "Only the infinite fills man's heart." To live well does not mean being "respectable", but to live life as an adventure. The good life is not an easy compromise, it is not about having found the formula to have everything at the same time. The good life is to surrender to Christ, sign of contradiction. The life of faith is an adventure because it is not an encounter not with an idea, but with the person of Christ. Only an encounter with someone greater can make man happy.
And good humor? What do the two have in common?
In both cases humor has ts roots in humility. After all, at the etymological level, both words come from the root
humus, earth. He who does not raise himself in pride is well-grounded, and gifted with humor, because he knows irony and self-irony. Because he perceives, even if in a confused way, that a larger world exists beyond his own "I" , that there is Someone who is far greater than everything else.
From this point of view, the modern world is disturbing because instead of humor, there is anger; no irony but sarcasm; no sentiment but resentment. However, as Jacques Maritain said, a society that loses its sense of humor is preparing for its funeral.
In different times and ways, Chesterton and Ratzinger cry out against the madness that envelops the life of Western men, to remind everyone that there is a possibility for joy, not just for pleasure which is always transient and never enough. In the last page of his masterpiece
Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote: "Joy is the gigantic secret of Christianity."
And it is also the secret of Benedict XVI who, with his ready smile, with the strength of his ordered, clear, honest, quiet intelligence, and with the energy of a faith lived with the abandon of a child, daily challenges the temptations of contemporary man towards laziness and short cuts, towards ideologies and idolatries which flourish in spirits steeped in anger, bad humor and resentment.
Indeed, Benedict XVI can be described as the Pope of joy, which is perhaps the most recurrent word in his addresses after God and Jesus. As he said in the book-length interview
Light of the World: "All my life has been suffused by a guiding thread: Christianity gives joy, it widens the horizons."
Here, in one phrase, is the whole of Ratzinger and, of Chesterton. reason, faith, joy - good sense, good life, good humor.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2013 05:05]