On this I agree with Saint Paul:
If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
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Actually, it’s just the opposite. He’s saying that for every detractor who criticized Christianity for being something, he found a detractor who criticized it for being the exact opposite.
Eric’s quote is from Orthodoxy chapter VI, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”. Also in that chapter, he says:
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.
I’m a little confused–I thought Mr Holloway said that it was sometimes one and the same; not that it matters, I guess. . I recall Father Brown making a crack about Jesuitical reasoning once 
. I still think Chesterton mixes up the converse reasoning here–the fact that many disagree with him from many different angles doesn’t mean he’s uniquely true. Many others who take a stance have the same experience. Believing and standing for anything will naturally result in such a response, as many mutually exclusive belief systems have found.
In a way, this quote is true: but in a way, it’s not. There may be no such belief of the kind he wants to hold on to. Searching for one and holding on to it, and getting criticism from other sides for it, doesn’t mean he’s right. (though I do hold to Christianity, myself). I agree with Chesterton; but I don’t see his path to getting to his conclusions. Thanks.
I guess all I can say is that while people call Orthodoxy a work of apologetics, I don’t think that’s quite right. Orthodoxy is autobiographical. GKC isn’t putting forward an argument for Christianity, really. He’s describing how he came to believe that Christianity was true. In the chapter on the paradoxes of Christianity, he’s not claiming that the contradictory nature of the criticisms of Christianity mean it’s right… But that chapter is about how he came to be suspicious of the criticism. He uses the key and lock imagery frequently, where his observations about the world are like a lock, and he slowly comes to see Christianity as the key that fits it. This isn’t “evidence that demands a verdict”. It’s more “finding a story that makes sense of his experience”.
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Thanks. Alister McGrath commented that C S Lewis’ discussion of reasoning from morality is like that–it’s how he would have thought morality would work if God exists, not a direct proof. Well put.
Actually, I think Lewis’ “argument from desire” more closely parallels Chesterton’s experience. From my reading, I see three things that really drove GKC to Christianity. One is his experience of evil. Before he came to believe in the existence of God, he became convinced of the existence of evil. But the existence of evil suggested the existence of good… Another is his intuition of gratitude, which he felt suggested that there was Someone to thank in the first place. A third was his wife Frances. I think he was a theist already by the time he met her, but her faith and character drew him into Christianity. (Though it was he who drew her into the Roman church.)
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So the more I thought about it the more I thought there might be some overlap between Chesteron and Twain (Samuel Clemens), and so they did if only over one topic. I found this at a website called The Imaginative Conservative
I’m afraid I haven’t yet found any direct reference by either Chesteron or Twain about the other. But in this article the topic is Joan of Arc of all things and the author, Stephen Masty, finds Twain to be uncharacteristically a serious admirer of that Joan of the middle ages. It begins with a long quote by Twain and includes another by Chesterton, both of which I’ve cut short. Nothing particularly note worthy or pity IMO but thought I’d share the find:
“There’s an illustration, gentlemen—a real illustration,” he said. “I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years, and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. They drew a picture of a peasant. Her dress was that of a peasant. But they always missed the face—the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful girl. She was only 18 years old, but put into a breast like hers a heart like hers and I think, gentlemen, you would have a girl—like that.”
The humorist looked toward the door, and there was absolute silence—puzzled silence—for many did not know whether it was time to laugh, disrespectful to giggle, or discourteous to keep solemn. The humorist realized the situation. Turning to his audience he came out of the clouds and said solemnly: “But the artists always paint her with a face—like a ham.”
He quickly regained his composure and delivered the expected wise-crack, but for a moment the old cynic, who rather doubted saints, thought that he beheld one and it stopped him in his tracks.
For an explanation we can turn, typically, to G. K. Chesterton who was Twain’s contemporary albeit a generation younger. Chesterton contrasted Saint Joan to Tolstoy and Nietzsche:
Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts.
Chesterton gives us a valuable insight that would be accessible to any Christian mystical poet, to the Zen masters analysed by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, or to devotees of the Chinese Tao. That is the nature of being and doing which is clear to anyone of faith or deep spiritual understanding. It would be immediately understandable to Our Lady, who upon receiving the Annunciation had to decide if she was mad or, if not, to just get on with it.
Saint Joan’s decision can be reached by faith or analysis, but modernity offers greater chance for prevarication and dithering. Her surety and action expressed to Mark Twain a reality partly denied to those lacking faith and the Grace that conveys it; to those overly reliant upon reason to the exclusion of all else.
We might benefit from faith and reason as she did, just get on with it and do what we ought. Those who do win nations, save belief from its enemies, and do so with power brought from far beyond our paltry selves.
It may be that, for Mark Twain and for us all, the ever-active Maid and the Holy Spirit intercede for those who just get on with it, and even those who can only admire it in others.
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Thanks for that! I also love Twain. I’ve never read his book on Joan, but according to that article Twain liked it best of all his books. Now I have to read it.
Twain died in 1910, and GKC wasn’t even published until right around 1900. I don’t know what his fame was like, or how likely it would have been for Twain to have run across him. GKC, however, knew Twain, and in 1910 (apparently on Twain’s death) published an article on him. It was collected in a later volume called A Handful of Authors, which can be found online. I don’t think I’d ever read this piece, until your post sent me hunting it. Chesterton clearly admired Twain a great deal. A choice bit:
A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain’s wit. Not a few dishonest people felt it.
EDIT: fixing the date of the publication of GKC’s article.
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I like Will Rogers. Did he ever quote Twain or GKC? 
Of course, he was such an original he didn’t need to quote anyone else.
Regarding antimaskers:
There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
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Who would GKC vote for? I think Kanye.
Amazingly insightful. Thank you!
I can’t agree if this is about current life in the West. Can you?
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I appreciate this reference. However, while I think Chesterton is correct that we sometimes blame those who stand for something as being the cause of the kerfuffle (it doesn’t take two to make a fight; sometimes people fight you for no good reason), taking a stand is not always the right thing. The quote, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” sometimes is mistaken. Sometimes, we see evil where there is none. Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind,” which I’m starting to listen to on Audible, has some good insight here
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
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We’ll just see who reaches the end first. I was genuinely enjoying reading Haidt when I accidentally left it in the car. Just for that evening I reached for my next novel, An Unnecessary Woman, a story about a woman in her 70s living in Beirut who was married off as an adolescent, never had children with her older husband who therefore divorced her. It is her childlessness and divorced status which motivates the title, but I was surprised to learn the author is a man. So apparently no woman was even necessary to write the story. The good news is it is an interesting read. The bad news is poor Jonathon Haidt is due back at the library in a few days. So I’ll return it and immediately place another hold on it myself. With any luck it will become available again before my convalescence is over. More good news: my knee replacement is on again and scheduled for two weeks from this Monday. Hopefully this third scheduled date will be lucky and no further postponements! I have holds on three other novels as well: How should a person be?; The Last Samurai; and Dept. of Speculation. That should get me by, especially if the Righteous Mind makes it back to me soon.
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Oh, geez. I have no idea what GKC would make of what we Americans have allowed our federal government to come to. Chesterton had an undying faith in the common sense of the common man… and in this I’m afraid he may have been too optimistic. I think a disturbing percentage of the American populace has lost its common sense. Our primate brains aren’t built to function in the datasphere in which we find ourselves, and I fear that “common sense” has become one of the casualties.
On politicians in general, GKC said (in the Cleveland Press in 1921, while on a tour of the US):
The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
Which, of course, is itself a moral judgment.
Nobody can stand above the fray. The person who criticizes the way a conflict is being carried out is himself levelling his own moral judgment at the combatants. The question isn’t about what morality is doing to us; it’s about which morality are we adopting. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” And I would add (and I think Foster would agree): that choice is important because you become like what you worship.
(Edited for grammar.)
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My friend, I see no Chesterton titles on your reading list. 
When I need my spirits lifted (as I would convalescing), my go-to authors are Chesterton, Twain, and P. G. Wodehouse. Although I do not recommend Wodehouse if recovering from abdominal surgery… the laughter could be painful. (And if you aren’t in a position to read Wodehouse, then I highly recommend getting hold of the brilliant TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Actually, even if you are in a position to read Wodehouse, you still should get hold of the series. Forever when I read Wodehouse now I see “a bit of Fry and Laurie” in my mind’s eye…)
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Thanks.
I’m not sure what this means here. Maybe we are discussing different subjects.
It depends, doesn’t it?
Gulliver’s Travels illustrates it well, doesn’t it? --with the war between the two midget kings over which way to break an egg. It illustrated the religious wars of Europe, I think, didn’t it? Was Gulliver taking a moral stand by not taking a side on egg breaking?
I love that quote by Wallace–the only experience I’ve had with him, but I think I read it in Christianity Today.
I enjoyed the quote by GKC about how few politicians are hung–reminds me of Twain, too.
I’ve also heard that he championed an economic idea called “collectivism” [“distributivism” - thanks for that correction below, @Ron_anon ] (worker-owned land and capital) - which is not to be confused with communism.
Something tells me that Chesterton would have had liberal disdain for both the proud left and the proud right. But I don’t think he would easily be brought to disdain the commoner. But maybe that would just be because he hadn’t seen today’s “commoners”. Something tells me though (a Chestertonian bird whispering in my ear), that it is a mistake to think the people of any generation are somehow different than all the others. Indeed, reading through Heretics as I now am, it often sounds like he could be describing today’s United States. Which is both depressing and also maybe encouraging.
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Absolutely. He was taking the stand that it’s immoral to go to war over how to break eggs.
It’s been some time since I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, but as I recall Gulliver in fact intervenes and steals the entire fleet of the Lilliputians’ enemy nation (forget the name). Clearly, he felt he was morally justified in deploying his greater power to affect a dispute that he deemed trivial. Just because he could.
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