When I am Dead: The After Life

G. K. Chesterton

This uncollected Chesterton piece was published in the November 22,

1925 issue of The Weekly Dispatch. The article was written as part of a
series answering a question concerning the after-life, and it appeared
three years after Chesterton's reception into full communion with the
Catholic Church. In September of 1925, Chesterton published The Ever-
lasting Man, a work which many Chesterton critics regard as his greatest
book. Later that same year, he also published his study of William Cob-
bett. Still other of his works published in 1925 were Tales of the Long
Bow and a pamphlet entitled The Superstitions of the Sceptic.

"When I am dead, what will happen to me?" I answer the question

here asked with some reluctance; for, on a great many points on which
people writing in the papers seem to be very positive, a Catholic is an Ag-
nostic. Indeed, a Catholic is almost the nearest thing to an Agnostic, left
amid the random and irrational religious and irreligious of our day. A
Catholic agrees with Huxley about the duty of "following his reason as far
as it will go"; and he is still doing it, while most of the followers of Hux-
ley are now followers of Bergson, followers of Bernard Shaw, followers
of Coue, followers of Conan Doyle, followers of the great Yogi-man from
the Yam banana country, or followers of Mrs. Boom, of the Alabama
Balm in Gilead Movement, which may be described as very balmy.
The Catholic also agrees with Huxley in thinking that his reason does
not go far enough, unaided, to solve some of the problems that men want
most to have solved; such as the fate of the soul. But he believes that rea-
son is aided (not thwarted) by revelation; or, in other words, that when we
have followed our reason as far as it will go it is met half way, so to

St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney was consecrated on St. Andrew's Day

1868 and is tiie oldest cathedral in AustraHa. The foundation stone was laid
by Governor Macquarie in 1819 and was relaid at the present site on 16th
May 1837 by the Governor, Sir Richard Bourke.

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speak, by an education from above; which completes the results of reason

with certain truths essential to conduct. In that sense he does go on to
something more than reason. But he is not content with anything less than
reason, as are most of the amateur mystics of our time. They are content
at the best with mere emotionif not mere affectation. Now in nothing is
this contrast between Catholicism, on the one side, and the fashionable re-
ligion and irreligion, on the other, more marked than in the attitude to-
wards Death. Following his reason as far as it will go, and facing his feel-
ings as they are, the Catholic feels first of all about death what the mass of
mankind has felt. The Catholic is actually still simple-minded enough to
present himself as an ordinary human being.

Death is a terrible and menacing mystery; and a threat to which only

idiots could be indifferent. We fear death; but we do not fear to say that
we fear it. We fear death; and, as the brave soldier said in the battle, if you
feared it as much you would run away. Taking "You" in the sense of the
Yogi gentleman and his friends, I may say with all politeness that you do
run away. You take refuge either in self-deception or in mere oblivion.
Anyhow, to men thus fearing yet facing the fact of death, there comes a
piece of good news, a gospel, that is something which is good but is also
new; something they could not have got for themselves. It tells them defi-
nitely, though in no great detail, that the secret of God is a sealed-up jus-
tice and mercy, and that for those who fight bravely there is a victory be-
yond the grave. The Catholic holds (generally for other reasons, supported
by confirmation in a hundred other fields and facts) that the authority thus
consoling him is a real authority; and he is therefore consoled. But he
does not altogether lose, or pretend to lose, his human and natural dread
of that dreadful alteration; that place where the pagan poet Swinburne said
"God has bound for a token the darkness that maketh afraid."

Now, when we turn to the talk of the "modems," they do not seem to
us to be talking like men. They do not talk as the pagans talked, as the po-
ets talked, as the ordinary people really talk. The modem spokesmen di-
vide themselves into two types. First, you have the modern materialist,
who always insists on explaining that he does not want immortality. He
says with desperate bravado, as an unfortunate ex-priest did the other day,
that he knows he will die like a dog in a few years and does not care.
Here, as in so many things, Huxley, the father of agnosticism, would have
read a very sharp lesson to the agnostics. Huxley, with his realism and
sincerity, said again and again that he did very much want immortality;

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that he did very much dread the idea of extinction; but that he did not see
that his wishes had anything to do with the settlement of his fate.

But the moderns cannot rise to this manly and stoical attitude. They
will tell us again and again that death is the end of everything we care
about; and then that we need not care whether it comes or not. They pro-
fess in some absurd fashion that priests and creeds have invented the emo-
tion that makes a cat run away from a dog. They pretend that men will
lose nothing when they lose everything. This is absurd; and certainly it is
not agnosticism. It is not paganism. It is not what Homer meant by saying
it was better to be a hind toiling in a field than famous as king of the dead.
It is not what Huxley meant by saying, about extinction, " I had rather be
in hell by a long chalk." Secondly, we have the other modem type, who
says just the contrary, but is equally comfortable, and for us equally de-
void of comfort. A "psychic" atmosphere produces a general type of spiri-
tual optimist and idealist who takes immorality as something immediate
and obvious. He is quite as confident of being an astral body as the other
man is content with being no more than a corpse. Spiritualists and psychic
persons of this sort tell us that death is nothing at all. They call it merely
"passing over." They say it is only like "going into the next room." Again
and again people are assured by the messages at the seances that there is
really no separation, no difference, no reason for self-questioning at all. A
man asked the spirits whether it was wrong to destroy the lives of ani-
mals, and only received the buoyant reply: "You can never destroy life."
As a matter of morality, it seems doubtful whether the moral is that it is
wrong to shoot a tiger or that it is right to shoot a tax-collector. But, as a
matter of philosophy, it was a typical example of the invariable tone. Man
is not only immortal, but obviously immortal; life is not only continuous,
but continuous practically witiiout a break. Indeed, the tone of the Spirits
and the Spiritualists is very like that in which my friend, Mr. E. C. Bent-
ley, meditated upon Wordsworth in an immortal though I believe unpub-
lished fragment:

It seems a pity certainly

That two such men as we
By such a trifle as The Grave
Should separated be.

But what he said with a graceful irony these people really do say with a
solid and colossal solemnity.

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Collins Street, Melbourne.

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Now, to a Catholic instinct both those things ring false. I do not say
they are deceptions, save in the sense of self-deceptions; but I say they are
affectations. Both these men are posing. They are showing off, whether
they pretend to be indifferent to mortality or pretend to be satisfied about
immortality. They do not start naturally feeling like that; they do not in
their inmost hearts feel like that at all. Put a pistol suddenly to the scep-
tic's head and he will not be indifferent to the idea of dying like a dog.
Tell the Spiritualist husband on his honeymoon that his bride has just
"passed over" by falling over a cliff, and he will not feel as i f she had only
gone into another room. Therefore our religion, which is realistic above
all things, refuses to accept these comfortable simplifications. It sympa-
thises with all the secret sorrows and the secret fears. But it also faces
them. It has no fear of Fear. Therefore its typical operation is not that of
rattling on a table or a tambourine that everything in the next-door-gar-
den is lovely, or telling a dying man with a cheerful nod that he is only
moving next door: any more than it is consoling him by telHng him he is
dying like a dog, to illustrate the great cosmic principle that every dog has
his day. It is represented rather by that passageI think in one of Harold
Frederic's novelsin which some poor nameless and negligible Irish
bricklayer has fallen off a scaffolding; and the sceptical author stands still,
in a sort of awe or astonishment, at the ritual unfolded around the dying
man to match the awful heroism of the thing required of him; as the
Mother of God bends down from heaven and the captain of the heavenly
hosts marshals all the angels that answer the signal of the trumpet and the
sword; and the Cherubim and the Seraphim and the saints and the martyrs
and the whole divine universe becomes the mountain or burning pyre of
prayer, to help Pat Murphy to die.
And, just as Catholicism is candid about the fear of death, so it is re-
alistic about the idea of judgment. It must always be remembered that the
Reformation, the real original Puritan attack on the Church, has quite lit-
erally been knocked head over heels. That is, it has been turned topsy-
turvy; it is like something returning to the fight standing on its head, be-
cause it has not a leg to stand on. In other words, what such people say
now is a flat contradiction of what they said then. What they said then was
that Hell awaits and gapes for every single person who is not immediately
fitted for Heaven. And they said that anything that seemed to them even
to savour of the notion of a second chance, a further education, a place for
repentance or a room for improvement, was a sentimental superstition of
the Papists; "a fond thing vainly invented."

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 In those days, in short, they said that the one thing they could not be-
lieve in was Purgatory. Nowadays they believe in nothing else except Pur-
gatory. They believe in nothing but an eternal Progress; which means an
eternal Purgatory. The Church was first ordered by the reformers to drop
Purgatory and stick to Hell; and she is now ordered by the new reformers
to drop Hell and stick to Purgatory. A mere trifling alteration: and she is
used to it. Similarly, doubtless, some future sect will command her to
abolish the Cherubim but retain the Seraphim; and later on (by an af-
terthought) to abolish the Seraphim and retain the Cherubim; for this is a
sport of which the world never wearies. But though we believe in progress
or education beyond the grave, and were abused for believing it when our
critics had a fancy for denying it, we do also believe that there is a final
goal, that a man may finally reach it, and that he may finally refuse to
reach it. And i f it be asked why a Catholic believes in potential perdition
(especially for himself), the answer is in the words with which I began:
Because he believes in following his reason as far as it will go; and be-
cause, so far as it does go, it points in a direction which the authority of
the Church continues.

I believe that evil is real; I might say I know it is real. I am not proud
of knowing it; quite the contrary. I am ashamed of it, for the same reason
that I am sure of it; because I have found it in the person I know best.
And, having known evil as it is in myself, I know it quite well enough to
know that it might have pointed towards the complete destruction of
good, i f my reason follows that process as far as it will go. I can remem-
ber a period of morbid breeding and imaginative distortion in my youth,
which might easily have ended in mere diabolism i f I had followed my
imagination as far as it would go. It will suffice to say here that I saw
quite enough of that trend to think all the optimistic denials of the possi-
bility of it quite contemptibly shallow. And in what I have seen of the
world since, there is evidence of a "worst" of which these good people are
ignorant. None of them understands, for instance, that diabolism is not
merely the pursuit of evil, but is the profanation of good to the service of
evil.

The diabolist does appreciate good, and even the goodness of good,
as something he has pleasure in parodying or tormenting or defiling. It is
not necessarily, therefore, of any use merely to offer him more good to
parody or torment or defile. Remember this and then read, for instance.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's recent story about a "dark spirit" being con-

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verted by a Spiritualist clergyman who assured him of the power of Love,

and I think you will know what I mean by shallowness. I f the spirit had
only been darkened for want of a kind clergyman to "say a few words," it
does not seem that it can have been very dark. The reverend gentleman
might have poured oil on some sort of troubled waters; but to talk like that
to a mocking spirit would be very precisely to pour oil on a flame. I f you
or I , who are not (let us hope) demons, might sometimes smile or even
yawn at such sermons on Love, what would a really dark spirit say to it?
He would probably say to Sir Arthur, i f a little languidly, "Do send me
another of those funny clergymen."
Following our reason as far as it will go, therefore, we see that the
extension of life might possibly be the extension of evil as well as good,
and this does give a different tone to our own hopes of extending it for
ourselves and others in the form of good; i f it be of purgatorial and pro-
gressive good. There is a little more humility in our hope, and a little
more thankfulness in our faith, than there can be in those for whom there
seems to be no real danger from dark spirits; whose dark spirits are so
very easily brightened up. But, while we live in a moral atmosphere that
treats death as a fact and evil as a fact, and have not the advantage of any
fad that will persuade us that either of them is a fancy, we have the advan-
tage of feeling our faith also as a fact; a fact far too old to be mistaken for
a fashion. Based below on the square foundation-stones of reason, and ris-
ing above them into the towers of authority, it can lift a man high enough
to see, very far off indeed, as a faint outline, but not a mirage, the shore of
another world.

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