When a New President Began His Christmas Address by Quoting G.K. Chesterton

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Good man

Yes, it was Ronald Reagan in 1981:

G.K. Chesterton once said that the world would never starve for wonders, but only for the want of wonder.

The actual line, which Reagan or his speechwriters slightly changed, is from Chesterton's Tremendous Trifles (1909):

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

Reagan continued a few sentences later:

Yes, we've questioned why He who could perform miracles, chose to come among us as a helpless babe. But maybe that was His first miracle, His first great lesson, that we should learn to care for one another.

Intentionally or not, this echoes another theme from Chesterton, one that he most memorably articulated in his classic The Everlasting Man (1925). Chesterton writes of the Nativity, with the infant Jesus perhaps gesturing towards one of the animals:

. . . the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded . . . [T]his is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. . . . for [the Christian] there will always be some savor of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. [But] it is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature.

For Chesterton, the point wasn't that this illustrated the virtue of caring for each other per se, since all religions do that, at least in one form or another, but that an all-powerful God would not only suffer and die for us as a man but would also be born for us - literally and physically born as all men are born.

This is one of the things that makes Christianity unique, though it is at the same time difficult for many Christians to see. Christmas has made the idea seem so normal.

Muslims, for example, view the idea as a blasphemy - a grotesque insult to God's omnipotence and divinity - and I suspect that many religious Jews may feel similarly, though perhaps without the same degree of vehemence.  

But I, as if suffering from a case of bad Chestertonitis, digress.

I think Reagan's speech was very good. You can grinch about the, as it were, ecumenism of it. But it was the address of an American president not of, say, a Roman pope. Like it or not, Reagan wasn't elected to defend Christian theology. But in this case I think a basic Christian spirit shines through. And he did begin by quoting Chesterton . . .

Indeed, we might contrast the obvious joy and goodwill of the speech and the man with the joyless hectoring of our current Pope, for whom Christmas is merely an opportunity to get in another Marxist nag at "materialism" or whatever.

Or we might contrast it with the recent Christmas address of the Obamas - two grinning ghouls making bad jokes and bragging about their political "accomplishments."

Reagan was often criticized for being too "feel good." I admit I used to sort of agree with that. All Reagan said, three years later was "it's morning in America" and, voila, landslide! or so it may have seemed.

But as my daughter might say, oh man. After three years of Bergoglio and eight years of Barack, I could use a little morning.

When a new president told us it was okay to feel good about our Christian faith and to feel good about America . . .

Rare Film of G.K. Chesterton at Holy Cross College, Massachusetts: "I Can Only Say That I Am Not Much of a Crusader but at Least I'm not a Mohammedan"

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Note the general laughter that follows the remark.

Now, if Chesterton had been alive today and said that sort of thing he could have had his publishing contract dropped and the rest of his lecture tour cancelled. He might have been banned from entering (or re-entering) the UK. Or, since the speech was uploaded to YouTube, it's possible he would have been charged with a hate crime violation.

Of course, even in 1931, Chesterton and his Catholic and Christian friends were somewhat out of step with the Zeitgeist. But the film shows just how far we have come. Chesterton was being made an honorary member of the Holy Cross Crusaders, after all. What would Bishop Barron think of that?

By the way, I too first thought he was holding a microphone. But in fact it's a walking stick, or rather, one of two walking sticks.

Enjoy!

H.L. Mencken on the Traditional Mass

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The two greatest American skeptics of a century or so ago--Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken--are famous for their anti-religious, anti-Christian and anti-Catholic posturing. Yet, in their I think sincere quest for righteousness and truth they were occasionally more reverent and spot on about religious things than many a faithful Catholic.

Twain penned one of the greatest biographies of Saint Joan of Arc. It has long been a feature of Catholic book clubs, and the otherwise cynical Twain counted it as his most important work.

Mencken defended the Traditional Mass.

I love Mencken. I own ten or so of his books, which is only about 3.5% (or whatever) of his output. Like Chesterton he was a journalist who wrote 10,000 words a day--most of them after three steins of beer and at least ten sausages.  When I am stranded on a desert island, I will finally read all of the Mencken and Chesterton that I own (if they wash up with me on shore). Or perhaps I will read them in Heaven.

Ignore Mencken's opinions on Nietzsche. He was wrong there. (It's a German thing and we're not supposed to understand.) And also ignore many of his wrong opinions on Christianity in general. But here he is on the Mass (from The Smart Set, 1923):

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring [!], despite its occasional astounding imbecilities [Ha!], has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous... 

Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. 

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. 

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

I don't agree completely with the tenor of this. Catholicism has always been a religion of reason (though, Mencken would probably laugh at that) and it is a slander to say that it has withheld the Bible from the people. As well, of course, we should all bawl against Darwin.

But he gets much of it right. We go to the Altar of God to worship Him in awe, not to sell Him as a self-help scheme or, equally bad, pitch Him as a dippy hippy who likes to niggle us about sharing.

The creators of the New Mass designed a liturgy that was less than a puerile intellectual exercise. The New Mass is merely puerile, as childish as a camp meeting led by Mencken's caricature of a minister with sweaty shirtsleeves--but frumpier and not as charismatic.

If anything, it is the Modern Church that wants to keep the Bible from us, just as it wants to keep Christ from us.

Cupichism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be celebrating the Traditional Mass.

When God Looked on God–in His Mother's Eye

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Once, God walked among us as a man. But he didn't arrive here in a heavenly chariot or suddenly appear in a blast of smoke. Rather, He chose to be born as all of us are. And so God the creator of the universe had a human mother, and for a period of time was a growing infant in her womb and then a helpless child, nurtured by her.

Though, of course we know this. I'm not sure many of us have really thought about it as much as it deserves to be thought about. I certainly haven't. We contemplate His death and resurrection as of course we should. But too often perhaps we think of His birth as a kind of eternal snapshot with Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men gathered around an angelic looking creature wearing a halo.

But He wasn't an angel and there was no halo.

He was fully God, but He was also a fully human baby with a fully human mother, Mary.

G.K. Chesterton wrote often on this. He felt that it, as much as anything else, gave Christianity its character.

In his wonderful poem "A Little Litany", he imagines the baby Jesus climbing up from His mother's lap and seeing His reflexion in one of her eyes. I say "imagined", but surely it must have happened.

And I mean really happened. Slightly more than 2,000 years ago, a few thousand miles away from where I am now writing, in a place now called "Israel", God looked on God–in His mother's eye.

A Little Litany (1926)

When God turned back eternity and was young,
Ancient of Days, grown little for your mirth
(As under the low arch the land is bright)
Peered through you, gate of heaven—and saw the earth.

Or shutting out his shining skies awhile
Built you about him for a house of gold
To see in pictured walls his storied world
Return upon him as a tale is told.

Or found his mirror there; the only glass
That would not break with that unbearable light
Till in a corner of the high dark house
God looked on God, as ghosts meet in the night.

Star of his morning; that unfallen star
In that strange starry overturn of space
When earth and sky changed places for an hour
And heaven looked upwards in a human face.

Or young on your strong knees and lifted up
Wisdom cried out, whose voice is in the street,
And more than twilight of twiformed cherubim
Made of his throne indeed a mercy-seat.

Or risen from play at your pale raiment's hem
God, grown adventurous from all time's repose,
Or your tall body climbed the ivory tower
And kissed upon your mouth the mystic rose.