Chesterton on Divorce

Oh, now this is good stuff…

G.K. Chesterton from The Well and the Shallows (Ignatius, 2006)

As in that one matter of modesty, or the mere externals of sex, so in all the deeper matters of sex, the modern will has been amazingly weak and wavering. And I suppose it is because the Church has known from the first the weakness which we have all discovered at last, that about certain sexual matters She has been very decisive and dogmatic; as many good people have quite honestly thought, too decisive and dogmatic. Now a Catholic is a person who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that somebody else may be wiser than he is. And the most striking and outstanding illustration is to be found in the Catholic view of marriage as compared to the modern theory of divorce; not it must be noted, the very modern theory of divorce, which is the mere negation of marriage; but even more the slightly less modern and more moderate theory of divorce, which was generally accepted even when I was a boy. This is a very vital point or test of the question; for it explains the Church’s rejection of the moderate as well as the immoderate theory. It illustrates the very fact I am pointing out, that Divorce has already turned into something totally different from what it was intended, even by those who first proposed it. Already we must think ourselves back into a different world of thought, to understand how anybody ever thought it was compatible with Victorian virtue; and many very virtuous Victorians did. But they only tolerated this social solution as an exception; and many other modern social solutions they would not have tolerated at all. My own parents were not even orthodox Puritans or High Church people; they were Universalists more akin to Unitarians. But they would have regarded Birth-Prevention exactly as they would have regarded Infanticide. Yet about Divorce such liberal Protestants did hold an intermediate view, which was substantially this. They thought the normal necessity and duty of all married people was to remain faithful to their marriage; that this could be demanded of them, like common honesty or any other virtue. But they thought that in some very extreme and extraordinary cases a divorce was allowable. Now, putting aside our own mystical and sacramental doctrine, this was not, on the face of it, an unreasonable position. It certainly was not meant to be an anarchical position. But the Catholic Church, standing almost alone, declared that it would in fact lead to an anarchical position; and the Catholic Church was right.

The above discourse on divorce began with Chesterton lamenting the cowardly non-decision of the 1930 Lambeth Conference that lead to the moral justification of using birth-control; hence the reference above to “Birth-Prevention.” Chesterton preferred this term to the more common term “Birth Control”, because as he says “it [birth control] is in fact, of course, a scheme for preventing birth in order to escape control.” Yep.

But I digress. Continuing the theme of divorce, Chesterton writes:

Any man with eyes in his head, whatever the ideas in his head, who looks at the world as it is to-day, must know that the whole social substance of marriage has changed… Some divorced persons, who can be married quite legally by a registrar, go on complaining bitterly that they cannot be married by a priest. They regard a church as a peculiarly suitable place in which to make and break the same vow at the same moment… Numbers of normal people are getting married, thinking already that they may be divorced. The instant that idea enters, the whole conception of the old Protestant compromise vanishes. The sincere and innocent Victorian would never have married a woman reflecting that he could divorce her. He would as soon have married a woman reflecting that he could murder her. These things were not supposd to be among the daydreams of the honeymoon. The psychological substance of the whole thing has altered; the marble has turned to ice; and the ice has melted with most amazing rapidity. The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule.

Chesterton the Catholic

The ever quotable G.K. Chesterton from The Well and the Shallows (1935):

At least six times during the last few years, I have found myself in a situation in which I should certainly have become a Catholic, if I had not been restrained from that rash step by the fortunate accident that I was one already. The point is not merely personal but has some representative interest, because our critics constantly expect the convert to suffer some sort of reaction, ending in disappointment and perhaps desertion. As a rule, the most that they will concede to us is that we have found peace by the surrender of reason; which generally means in practice that we pass the rest of our lives in interminable controversies with a perpetual appeal to logic. But, as a fact, it is in a rather peculiar sense, the other way about. The strongest sort of confirmation often comes to the convert after he has received enough to establish conviction.

Chesterton had already converted to the Catholic Church in 1922. Although, if you are familiar with Chesterton’s writing you know that it may be more aptly said that Chesterton officially recognized that he was a Catholic in 1922. There is nary a differnce between Chesterton’s writings pre-1922 (Heretics, Orthodoxy, What’s Wrong With the World, etc.) and post-1922 (Saint Francis of Assisi, The Everlasting Man, The Outline of Sanity, etc.). Chesterton wrote like a Catholic from beginning to end.

Chesterton Hath A School!

It’s been a while since I ventured over to the American Chesterton Society website, so I was caught a bit off guard this morning when I saw this logo in the lower left hand corner of the home page:

That’s right. There is a new high school starting up in Minnesota that will have a distinct Chestertonian flavor. Now, you can’t go wrong there. As I always say, we can’t get enough of Chesterton in this world. Some disagree, but those who do clearly belong to the number of the reprobate and are blinded by their own sin. May God have mercy on their souls.

The Academy is beginning with 9th and 10th grade this year, and will be adding 11th grade the following year, and 12th the year after. The school will obviously be a private school, but will also be independent of the diocese (sometimes a good thing). To begin with, the Chesterton Academy will be funded primarily by American Chesterton Society fund raising efforts, but the hope is to, at some point, spin the school off to be its own, self supporting entity.

Not surprisingly, the curriculum will be classical and Catholic. The website also notes that the Chesterton Academy will have an “Emphasis on General Knowledge – not  Specialization”; in other words, a liberal education – which is a good thing in high school (and undergrad too, for that matter). The website also states there will be a “Mixture of Socratic Method and Lecture format”. This seems to be a popular model for “classical” schools. From what I understand, this is the model adopted by Thomas Aquinas College in  Santa Paula, California. Although, TAC seems to take this model a step or two further, which is great for college, but may not be advisable in a high school environment.

The Academy’s current board of advisors include Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. of EWTN fame , Charles Rice – Professor Emeritus of Law at Notre Dame, and Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J – founder and Editor of Ignatius Press.

To learn more, visit the Chesterton Academy website.

Sweet Surrender

Continuing the tradition of posting my favorite poems from the latest issue of Dappled Things, here is one I particularly enjoyed from Amanda Griswold:

Gadarene

He did not get my soul without a fight,
But foaming, seething, reeling in my brain,
I bowed to darkness and emerged in light.

My mind was scorched by shadows grown too bright.
The demon smoldered and I roared in pain.
He did not get my soul without a fight.

I caught his throat and squeezed with all my might,
Then found it was my own. He wrenched my chain.
I bowed to darkness and emerged in light.

For years the fever blazed all day and night.
My melted mind picked up the false refrain:
He did not get my soul without a fight.

I wandered without memory or sight,
Through bloodshot moons and scalding desert rain,
I bowed to darkness and emerged in light.

Why should the God-son abdicate his height?
I shied from love too perfect to contain.
He did not get my soul without a fight.
I bowed to darkness and emerged in light.

From Dappled Things – Amanda Griswold is a college student at Grove City College and plans to graduate in 2009.

Abstracting God

I’ve been lagging much too much in my reading of the latest issue of Communio. Catching up a bit, I’m reading the first essay (embarrassing, I’m still on the first essay) dealing with the mystery of the Transfiguration by Jose’ Granados, assistant professor of theology and philosophy at The Catholic University of America. In section 3.1 of the lengthy essay, he makes an interesting point about the Old Testament prohibition against portraying God’s face:

In fact, the prohibition against making images can be read not only as a caution against materializing God, but also against excessively spiritualizing him. Let us recall what we said above about the human capacity to form images: it is based precisely on the separation between form and matter. If this capacity is absolutized, according to what we have called the pride of vision, the painting creates a split that isolates its object from the concrete world.

From this point of view the images of God are criticized in Scripture because they mistake the divine face for the abstraction of a painting. To paint a figure of the divinity means to make him alien to our reality and thus to transform him into a abstraction, a God of ideas who can neither hear nor see. God cannot be depicted because the image, when it is separated from the body, loses its truth and becomes a static abstraction: the idol of the concept. An image is not valid for representing the God of Israel, not because it connects him too much with the world, but precisely because it connects him too little.

Of course, Granados is not arguing for iconoclasm. He is pointing out the central reason for the Old Testament theology. Put too simply, in the Old Testament, the peole of Israel were not allowed to make an image of God, because God had not yet revealed his face. In the New Testament, God’s fufilling revelation to man, we have seen the face of God in the “Incarnation of the Logos.”

Omnipresence

The first Psalm from today’s Evening Prayer is taken from one of my favorite Psalms:

Psalm 139:1-18 (ICEL)

Antiphon: Lord, how wonderful is your wisdom, so far beyond my understanding.

O Lord, you search me and you know me,
you know my resting and my rising,
you discern my purpose from afar.
You mark when I walk or lie down,
all my ways lie open to you.

Before ever a word is on my tongue
you know it, O Lord, through and through.
Behind and before you besiege me,
your hand ever laid upon me.
Too wonderful for me, this knowledge,
too high, beyond my reach.

O where can I go from your spirit,
or where can I flee from your face?
If I climb the heavens, you are there.
If I lie in the grave, you are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn
and dwell at the sea’s furthest end,
even there your hand would lead me,
your right hand would hold me fast.

If I say: “Let the darkness hide me
and the light around me be night,”
even darkness is not dark for you
and the night is as clear as day.

Antiphon: Lord, how wonderful is your wisdom, so far beyond my understanding.

Our Shepherds Vow To Fight

Catching up on the news a bit, I saw this very intriguing headline from Fox News: Catholic Bishops Vow to Confront Obama Administration Over Abortion. Now that’ll get your attention. This is a great to see, and I was very impressed with the dozen or so Bishops that spoke out against Speaker Pelosi and Senator Biden this past summer. Let’s hope this vow to fight is carried out and is not all words in the end. I’m sure the Bishops will be respectful, as they always are (sometimes to a fault), but this is a batlle that our bishops, as our shepherds, must wage. Either we believe abortion is homocide or we don’t. If we believe it is, then we must forcibly speak out against it, with our bishops leading the way.

The Collapse of Rome

This from one of the many brilliant passages in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. 1 (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993):

… but if we except the inimitable Lucian, this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind. The beauties of the poets and orators, instead of kindling a fire like their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations: or if any ventured to deviate from those models, they deviated at the same time from good sense and propriety. On the revival of letters, the youthful vigour of the imagination, after a long repose, national emulation, a new religion, new languages, and a new world, called forth the genius of Europe. But the provincials of Rime, trained by uniform artificial foreign education, were engaged in a very unequal competition with those bold ancients, who, by expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already occupied every place of honour. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.

The time period Gibbon is speaking of here is the successive reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus as Emperors of Rome (117-161 A.D.). This period is often noted as the pinnacle of Roman Empire. These were the good days, so to speak; the days of decadence and luxury.

Gibbon’s point? The Roman Empire crumbled from within long before the barbarian tribes from the north kicked in the door.

And The Word Became Flesh

From Karl Barth, Credo (Wipf & Stock 2005):

But the object of divine action in the Incarnation is man. God’s free decision is and remains a gracious decision: God becomes man, the Word became Flesh. The Incarnation means no apparent and reserved, but a real and complete descent of God. God actually became what we are, in order to actually exist with us, actually to exist for us, in order, in this becoming and being human, not to do what we do – sin; and to do what we fail to do – God’s, His own, will; and so actually in our place, in our situation and position to be the new man. It is not in His eternal majesty – in which He is and remains hidden from us – but as this new man and therefore as the Word in the flesh, that God’s Son is God’s revelation to us and our reconciliation with God. Just for that reason faith cannot look past His humanity, the cradle of Bethlehem and the Cross of Golgotha in order to see Him in His divinity. Faith in the eternal Word of the Father is faith in Jesus of Nazareth or it is not the Christian faith.

Orthodoxy, Barth Style

G. K. Chesterton has his way of defending orthodoxy. Karl Barth has his. Chesterton was a literary fencer, thrusting and parrying his opponent with ease, as he deftly used words to inflict damage on his opponent. In my limited reading of Barth, he seems to much more of a middleweight boxer, theologically jabbing his opponent time and time again, with knockout punches thrown often at precisely the right moments. I greatly enjoy the masterful art of Chesterton’s writing, as readers of this blog know, but I am starting to warm up to the fighting style of the great Swiss theologian from Basel too.

As I stated earlier, Karl Barth – the 20h century Swiss Reformed theologian – was a mighty antidote to Liberal Protestantism that was en vogue at the time. In fact, he is a mighty antidote to liberal Catholicism as well. One of his main opponents seems to have been Paul Tillich, the standard bearer, so to speak, for Liberal Protestantism. Tillich’s theology is based very much on natural knowledge to the almost complete negation of revelation in any meaningful sense. In what I’ve read, Barth was instrumental in causing divine revelation to be taken seriously again in theology; revelation as in God actually became flesh and dwelt among us as Scripture reveals to us. This was otherwise known as a move back to orthodoxy. Here is an excerpt from his 1935 work Credo (Wipf & Stock, 2005):

Care should be taken to avoid regarding this presupposition of the Biblical witness (which after all Dogma does no more than make explicit), as a metaphysic superfluous and alien to Christian faith, and therefore getting rid of or emasculating it. The Theology of modern Protestantism has done that again and again. This modern Protestantism has punished itself with the most varied and disastrous relapses in to just those heathen religious views which the Church fathers of the first centuries rightly and successfully resisted. It can be asserted and proved with the utmost definiteness and accuracy that the great theological-ecclesiastical catastrophe of which the German Protestantism of the moment is the arena, would have been impossible if the three words Filium eius unicum [His only Son] in the properly understood sense of the Nicene trinitarian doctrine had not for more than two hundred years been really lost to the German Church amongst a chaos of reinterpretations designed to make them innocuous. This catastrophe should be a real, final warning to the evangelical Churches, and, especially to the theological faculties of other lands, where so far as trinitarian dogma is concerned, no better ways are being trodden. Christian faith stands or falls once and for all with the fact that God and God alone is its object. If one rejects the Biblical doctrine that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, and indeed God’s only Son, and that therefore the whole revelation of God and all reconciliation between God and man is contained in Him – and if one then, in spite of that, speaks of “faith” in Jesus Christ, then one believes in an intermediate being and then consequently one is really pursuing metaphysics and has already secretly lapsed from the Christian faith into a polytheism which will forthwith mature into further fruits in the setting up of a special God-Father faith and a special Creator faith; and in the assertion of special spiritual revelations. The proclamation of this polytheism can most certainly be a brilliant and a pleasant affair, and can win continuous widespread approbation. But real consolation and real instruction, the Gospel of God and the Law of God, will find a small and ever-diminishing place in this proclamation. The Church of Jesus Christ as the assembly of lost and rescued sinners will come less and less to be built by this proclamation. How could it be otherwise than that error at a crucial point makes it utterly impotent? It is just here that a circumspect Dogmatics will give warning. It will have to ask the whole Church to consider that the ground out of which it has sprung and out of which alone it is able to live, is the admittedly rigid and uncompromising recognition that no one knows the Son, but the Father, and no one knows the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him (Matt. xi. 27).

In the paragraphs immediately preceding the one above, Barth speaks of the neccesity of the revelation of Jesus Christ. We cannot come to a specifically Christian dogmatics through natural knowledge alone, or with natural knowledge at all, as Barth would say. In fact it is only in the light of Christ that the weight of our sin becomes fully realized. Only in the light of Christ’s sacrifice is the great chasm that separates us from God made known. If our sin is not really that bad, as we are want to think, then why did God have to condescend to become man and die for us? And we must recognize that Christ had to die for me because of my sins, not merely for others as the word “us” can mislead us to believe. Only in this light, is our metaphysical situation before God (to steal a phrase from Deitrich von Hildebrand) made known. And the fact that God died for us and for our sins is a matter of revelation, not mere philosophical reasoning. Revelation is indispensable for the Christian.