The Chesterton Review

proceeds from his life, and which is the working hypothesis of his exis-
tence.
To sum up, I suggest the following conclusions: The great mass of the
Russians will always believe in God; their religion is based on common
sense and experience. In order to express it and to practice it, they will
either be satisfied with what their Church gives them, or will express their
dissatisfaction with their Church by founding or belonging to a sect. The
mass of intellectuals, in spite of certain tendencies towards mysticism, are
dogmatically atheistic. As long as this lasts, they will have no chance of
influencing the popular masses. The secularization of the Church is largely
responsible for the growth of sects among the people and for the spread of
atheism among the intellectuals, because it had weakened and deadened
the spiritual authority of the Church.
Further, owing to the conservative element in the Russian nature,
which is especially manifest as far as customs and conditions are
concerned, the Russian of the lower class, whether religious or not, will
cling fanatically to the observance of ceremonial and ritual which has been
handed down to him from his forefathers. Finally, and apart from all this,
religion in Russia, as I have tried to point out, whether believed or not, will
always remain a part of patriotism; and as long as there is a Russian nation
there will be a Russian religion at the core of it.
_______________

Humour in Chesterton
— Joseph Sobran is one of the wittiest of modern Chestertonians. As his own
writing demonstrates, humor is always most effective in the service of
some deeper truth. The following piece was published in Volume 11, No.
12, December 2004 issue of Sobran’s, a newsletter published by the
author.
We’re always being told that laughter is good for us – good for our
mental and even physical health, as if humor were a drug to be prescribed,
like Prozac. Comedy has actually become a sort of separate industry, with
its own cable television network. Apparently, humor has become a thing
so distinct from the rest of American life that it has to be bottled, so that
we can make time for it in our schedules. To my mind, humor has always
seemed inseparable from sanity itself, something built into our sense of
reality rather than superadded to it. God made things funny. He made us
to laugh as well as to reason. That is part of what it means to be made in
God’s image. Only creatures with lungs and immortal souls can laugh. My
favorite controversialist, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), is known as a great
humorist (as well as a man of letters and Catholic apologist). But unlike

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most humorists, he never seems, to me at least, to be trying to be merely

funny; he is trying to tell the truth as robustly and vividly as possible. In a
way, his seriousness of purpose is what gives his humor its power. His
jests (why, by the way, has this fine old word fallen into disuse?) demand
thought; they also reward it richly. He brings a joyous spirit of sport to
religious debate.
His most serious writing on the most sacred subjects can be, without
warning, explosively funny. In Orthodoxy, his great defense of Christian-
ity, he suddenly says of a well-meaning socialist, “Mr. Blatchford is not
only an early Christian. He is the only early Christian who ought really to
be eaten by lions.” Even Mr. Blatchford must have roared at that. This is
one trait of Chesterton’s humor: his lack of malice. He rarely attacks; you
almost feel that his jokes are chiefly intended to amuse his targets, to share
with them his own amusement, not to isolate them from his other readers.
His humor even seems a form of charity. One of his favorite targets was
Bernard Shaw; it’s typical of both of them that they were always warm
friends.
Chesterton’s orthodoxy has worn better than Shaw’s “progressive”
views, which have become banal. Their friendly rivalry was portentous;
by now Shaw’s supposedly advanced opinions, on everything from eugen-
ics to free love to socialism, have been tried, with baneful or disastrous
results; whereas Chesterton’s Catholic views, though vindicated by time,
remain unfashionable. He genially defended most of the ancient things
Shaw satirized. (He once quipped that birth control involves neither birth
nor control; and even Shaw might have qualms about schools handing out
condoms to children.) Chesterton isn’t above a joke for its own sake, of
course; some readers find his wordplay tedious. I must say that there are
times when he loses me; he can be not only tedious but, I’m afraid, quite
obscure, and I don’t know whether he’s writing mysticism beyond my
comprehension or mere nonsense. I prefer to think I haven’t yet reached
his depths.
But for the most part, his wit is aimed at making us recognize truth in
a way that logical argument alone can’t do. He is greater master of the
English epigram than Oscar Wilde himself, because his witticisms are so
much more profound and prophetic than Wilde’s. Not all of them are
funny; some of them sum up deep reflection: “The old tyrants invoked the
past; the new tyrants will invoke the future.” He said that more than a
century ago, and it will serve as a remarkably accurate prediction of twen-
tieth-century history. The recent eruption of jingoism in this country
recalls Chesterton’s great observation, “The real American is all right. It is
the ideal American who is all wrong.” He abounds, almost dizzyingly, in

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such remarks: “In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism
did pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the
coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the
word that excuses it.” Again: “The morality of a great writer is not the
morality he teaches, but the morality he takes for granted.” Long ago he
noticed that “toleration…actually results in timidity. Religious liberty
might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In
practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”
Probably no English writer since Shakespeare has surpassed Chester-
ton’s gift for condensed expression. As with Shakespeare, it’s tempting to
quote him incessantly, since nothing you say about him can rival his own
eloquence: “For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are
already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-
point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful.
Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage
and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no
rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.”
Only Chesterton could have topped “a welter of exceptions with no rules”
with a brilliant pun. Chesterton’s incredibly fertile humor is as inseparable
from his style as his syntax. It’s essential to his total tone. He is always
alive to the latent comedy of a situation, the incongruity of his opponents’
positions, the self-contradictions of false philosophies. For him, error is
not only wrong, it’s uproarious. If you press it hard enough, its absurdity
will inevitably be revealed.
Truth itself begets humor. Chesterton himself explains why, in his
roundabout preface to The Pickwick Papers: To the vulgar Bible-debunker,
he says, it seems preposterous to say that God created light before the sun,
that “the sun should be created before the sunlight… To many modern
people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf;
it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born.”
To this Chesterton retorts with a “Platonic” reason: “The idea existed
before any of the machinery that made manifest the idea. Justice existed
when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was
oppressed. He then brilliantly attacks the “low priggish maxim” that “a
man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs
at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. In
the case of a man really humorous we can see humor in his eye before he
has thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at
his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before he
knows what it is… The last page comes before the first; before his
romance has begun, he knows that it has ended well. He sees the wedding
before the wooing; he sees the death before the duel. But most of all he

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sees the color and character of the whole story prior to any possible events
in it.”
Such is Chesterton’s defense of his beloved Dickens. It also describes
the way he himself brings a sense of the ludicrous to every error he refutes.
If it’s wrong, it must also be funny. Humor, like light, is inherent in the
nature of things. He likewise defends Dickens against the charge of having
no taste: “[He] really had, in the strict and serious sense, good taste. All
real good taste is gusto – the power of appreciating the presence – or the
absence – of a particular and positive pleasure.” Chesterton has good taste
to a superlative degree; an almost universal gusto and gift for expressing
his many appreciations, with wit, imagery, lightning logic, metaphor, anal-
ogy, puns, alliteration, inspired phrasing, fresh twists on old sayings, and a
good bit of sheer whimsy. Writers are a notoriously jealous lot, but proba-
bly no author has praised so many other authors as generously as Chester-
ton has. And who else would have had the subtlety to praise Shaw this
way: “With a fine strategic audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much
for what he permitted as for what he prevented?” Every time I try to track
down a saying of Chesterton’s I especially treasure, I find myself
distracted by dozens of others, equally fine. “Most men now are not so
much rushing to extremes as sliding to extremes; and even reaching the
most violent extremes by being almost entirely passive.” “If there were no
God, there would be no atheists.” “The Catholic Church is the only thing
which saves a man from the degraded slavery of being a child of his age.”
Above all, Chesterton refused to be “a child of his age.” His humor
was a mode of his detachment from the modern world and its fashions.
It’s said that a mark of the saints is their hilaritas, and in Chesterton’s
inexhaustible hilarity we find something akin to sanctity. He saw that
error naturally leads to comic as well as tragic extremes; he also saw
where truth leads – to health and holiness. I close with two of Chesterton’s
most profound remarks, which are stunning rather than amusing. One,
from Orthodoxy, states the doctrine of the Incarnation better than I’ve ever
seen it stated outside Scripture: “Christianity is the only religion on earth
that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone
has felt that God, in order to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as
well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the
virtues of the Creator.”
The other, from The Everlasting Man, makes short work of the notion
that Christ’s words are outdated: “Whatever else is true, it is emphatically
not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but
are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his
time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.” These are heart-stopping
words. Only the greatest of humorists could say things so witty, yet so far

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beyond mere laughter. For Chesterton, humor points to something that

transcends mirth: the divine mystery itself.
_______________

Religion in American Society and Politics

— Philip Jenkins’s analysis of the politics of religion in contemporary Amer-
ica appeared in The American Conservative, June 2005 under the title
“Prophets on the Right – and Left”. Dr. Jenkins, is a member of the
Editorial Board of The Chesterton Review and a frequent contributor to
our journal.
It all began with a car rental that should never have happened.
“Though the man had a fine car of his own, just that day, for no reason he
could think of, he decided to rent a car for his trip. And that’s where I met
him, at Avis. I was in despair about finding a building for my new church.
And right there, that man spoke a word of prophecy to me. He told me the
part of town where I would find the building, and he told me I would find
it in April. And on the very last day of that April, I signed the lease.” To
hear the story, prophecy was no rare event in the speaker’s life, any more
than finding an interesting movie or hitting a series of green lights on the
way to work.
The storyteller was a powerful black urban pastor, deeply charismatic,
articulate, and nobody’s fool, and he was emanating total confidence in a
highly interventionist God who would have been instantly recognizable to
John Wesley and probably to St. Paul. By fortunate confidence – or was it
coincidence? – I heard this story as I was reading Jim Wallis’s book God’s
Politics, which has created a sensation among liberals still shell-shocked
after the 2004 presidential election.
Wallis’s thesis is that American society and politics are as God-
haunted today as they have ever been and that individuals like the pastor
represent, if anything, the mainstream in American life. Yet despite our
saturation in religious ways of though and speech, the mass media present
a ludicrous image of active, passionate religion as the sole preserve of the
white Right, of stereotyped evangelicals who count no day complete if
they have not chipped away at the rights of women or deprived the widow
and orphan of their inheritance. But as my pastor friend illustrates, reli-
gious and particularly evangelical rhetoric has historically been as preva-
lent on the liberal or radical side of American life as among conservatives.
I doubt whether the reverend has many Republicans in his large congrega-
tion or indeed whether many of his followers have met a Republican
recently.

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