by Vinicius
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a convert to Catholicism who can be relied upon in these times of confusion. His unrivalled imagination and wit was fruitfully placed at the disposition of the Church because he humbly received its authority and orthodoxy. He wholeheartedly defended the pre-Vatican II scholastic theology and philosophy denounced as narrow and “deadening” by high church modernists like de Lubac and von Balthasar (who had so much to do with the confusion that has reigned since that Council).
Chesterton uncompromisingly opposed false mysticism and animism, which are making a comeback today in the form of high church Modernism. This has adopted as patrons figures like Fr. Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, C. S. Lewis, Cardinal Newman (who might be a saint, but his Doctor of the Church was problematic because his ideas were unsound on important points1 and severely critiqued by contemporary Thomism) and Tomberg. All were were committed to “intuitive” methods of knowledge regarding the faith rather than so-called rational knowledge, and had obvious reservations concerning papal authority.
Chesterton could not have been more opposed to these kinds of views. Rather than follow those of his time who marketed ideas derived from secular ideologies under the banner of “returning to the Fathers of the Church” Chesterton militantly defended the continuing orthodoxy of the Church so well expressed by Popes like Leo XIII and St Pius X. Pope Pius XII continued this insistence that only the Church can authoritatively interpret its own past (including the Fathers)2.
Nature worship; the divinisation of matter
One would have thought that, with two thousand years of Christian rejection of pagan animism and pantheism, Catholic theologians would be immune to such things. Under the influence of de Lubac and von Balthasar however, then Cardinal Ratzinger authored texts (Spirit of the Liturgy, 2000) that were equivocal on the subject. He asserted that, because the Eucharist transubstantiates matter, all creation is “destined for divinisation”.
Likewise, because of the Incarnation, “matter is destined to bear the divine”; the liturgy and the sacraments, by employing matter, are involved in a “cosmic worship” of God where matter is united with the Creator. This ignores the obvious point that not all matter is employed in the sacraments or involved in the incarnation. Therefore matter per se is not sacred or destined for “divinisation” in this way. Ironically, certain Anglophone “traditionalists” have founded their polemics concerning pre-Vatican II ritual on this very untraditional Ratzingerian and von Balthasarian ideology, which was censured by the pre-Vatican II Magisterium.
The problem with assimilating all matter to the matter associated with the Church’s rites and sacraments, or with the Incarnation, is that it eliminates what is special and unique about matter in those sacred circumstances. Making all matter sacred does not raise the world to God; it reduces the sacred to the secular world.
Chesterton rubbished such ideas: “The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father… We have to admire, but not to imitate… To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister… to be laughed at as well as loved”.3
Saint Francis of Assisi is often portrayed as a kind of New Age pantheist. He has also been claimed by today’s high church Modernists. As Chesterton points out, this is a complete falsification: “St. Francis was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not. The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism… Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background… He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting”.4
Referring to the pagan antiquity now being rehabilitated by high church Modernism, Chesterton retorted: “The wisest men in the world set out to be natural; and the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did. The immediate effect of saluting the sun and the sunny sanity of nature was a perversion spreading like a pestilence”5; “The Early Church called the gods of paganism devils; and the Early Church was perfectly right”.6
God and creation are distinct
Chesterton was affirming the fundamental Christian distinction between God and creation. This was clearly expressed in the Scholastic view which the Church officially endorsed in the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses: “By reason of the very purity of His being, God is distinguished from all finite beings”.7
The Christian attitude towards the world, the cosmos, is summed up by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre:
“If it were a question of the things of this world in themselves, without reference to human beings, then there would be no reason to hold them in contempt. But it is because of their reference to us, because riches lead us into sin, because pleasure leads us into sin.
Unfortunately, all the things of this earth are occasions of sin for us; because of the malice that is in us, because of the disorder that is in us, the disorder of concupiscence, the wounds that sin leave in us even after original sin has been forgiven. Because of all these things we are attracted by the things of earth and so we must hold them in contempt in order not to fall into sin. This is the very essence of all spiritual asceticism; ‘discamus terrena despicere at amare cælestia‘.
What could be more beautiful than these words? ‘To despise the things of earth and to love the things of heaven’.
Why, these are the very words of St. Paul himself: ‘Quæ sursum sunt sapite, quæ sursum sunt quærite’. Every time that these words appeared in the prayers they were suppressed [in the post Vatican II liturgical reform]”.8
False mysticism; becoming God
Leading on from the divinisation of the world is a false mysticism that confuses participation in the divine by grace (the Catholic view) with the disappearance of the human person altogether while “becoming God”. This annihilation of the human person is abhorrent to Christianity.
Chesterton was clear on the matter:
“I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree”;
“Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say ‘little children love one another’ rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God”;
“According to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him”.9
In fact, phrases from some Fathers of the Church that seem to assert that men “become God” are explained by their authors as a participation through grace. Scholasticism provided even more precision to this subject, and the Church has endorsed its terms to express the faith on the subject. As Pope Pius XII warned in Humani Generis, to be orthodox, theologians must not despise the traditional expression of the faith in the name of “going back to the sources”: “Unfortunately these advocates of novelty easily pass from despising scholastic theology to the neglect of and even contempt for the Teaching Authority of the Church itself, which gives such authoritative approval to scholastic theology”.
G. K. Chesterton was a loyal son of the Church. He loved what it loved and despised what it despised. His works breathe Catholicism. His talents were innate, but the worldview he expressed so well was the Catholic faith, a universal template that, like him, anyone can accept and cherish.
- https://fsspx.news/en/news/john-henry-newman-doctor-church-53978 ↩︎
- “What is expounded in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs concerning the nature and constitution of the Church, is deliberately and habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving force to a certain vague notion which they profess to have found in the ancient Fathers, especially the Greeks… [however, writes Pius XII] history teaches that many matters that formerly were open to discussion, no longer now admit of discussion”; “God has given to His Church a living Teaching Authority to elucidate and explain what is contained in the deposit of faith only obscurely and implicitly. This deposit of faith our Divine Redeemer has given for authentic interpretation not to each of the faithful, not even to theologians, but only to the Teaching Authority of the Church”, Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 1950. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html ↩︎
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Lane, New York 1909, p. 205. ↩︎
- G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1923, p. 98. ↩︎
- Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, p. 28. ↩︎
- Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, p. 32. ↩︎
- In 1917, publishing the Canon Law, Pope Benedict XV ordered the method, doctrines and principles of St Thomas to be followed (Code, can. 1366, § 2) referring to the decree of the Sacred Congregation approving the Twenty four Theses. ↩︎
- Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Conference, Econe, 25/6/1981, https://vancouver.sspx.ca/en/liturgical-reform-part-three-49991 At this important conference Archbishop Lefebvre definitively set out his views on the Novus Ordo. ↩︎
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 242-244. ↩︎
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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