The Ball and the Cross, or My First Meeting with Chesterton

"For the world of science and evolution is far more elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare" (1).

The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton begins with this dichotomy, one that seems to turn the chief argument of most modern skeptics on its head. As people of faith in a secular society, we have become accustomed to acknowledging before those who would oppose us that religion is indeed akin to poetry and other "abstractions," that it is mysterious and therefore confusing, and somehow out-of-reach, like a dream - but as Chesterton points out, such an admission is utterly untrue. The truth of our Catholic faith is more solid and more certain than any "new" science, and any ideology that denies the existence of absolute truth. (One might also note that good poetry, like true religion, cannot be called abstraction - truly good poetry is specific, concrete, intelligible and enduring, like dogma.)

In a witty and entertaining allegory, The Ball and the Cross chronicles the adventures of James Turnbull, the editor of an athiest newspaper, and Evan MacIan, a young Catholic who wishes to fight a duel with Turnbull because he has blasphemed the Blessed Mother. In a hilarious turn of events, the two men become fugitives from the law by mutual agreement, and on the fantastic adventure that ensues, they find time to discuss all manner of subjects: ethics and morality, tradition and progress, and of course, the place of the Church in the modern world.

In his characteristically matter-of-fact tone, Chesterton challenges his readers to hold fast to the unpopular truth that the Catholic faith has always been more stable and more certain than any other ideology, even if its enemies argue that it is too incredible to be believed. As MacIan explains to Turnbull in "The Last Parley":

"The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. ... That is the only real question - whether the Church is really madder than the world. Let the rationalists run their own race, and let us see where they end. If the world has some healthy balance other than God, let the world find it. Does the world find it? Cut the world loose ... Does the world stand on its own end? Does it stand, or does it stagger? ... We cannot trust the ball to be always a ball; we cannot trust reason to be reasonable. In the end the great terrestrial globe will go quite lop-sided, and only the cross will stand upright." (168)

Though I started quoting him years ago, The Ball and the Cross was the first book of Chesterton's that I read in its entirety, and it's convinced me that old G.K. and I are going to be good friends. I found that the 1995 Dover edition (pictured above) handled nicely - just the right thickness, just the right size font - but the introduction by Martin Gardner was awful. Don't bother with it - if you haven't yet read the novel, it will spoil it for you by dissecting the allegory. And if you have read the novel before you tackle the introduction, you will probably be forced to conclude, as I was, that Gardner doesn't sound as if he knew what Chesterton was getting at, at all. The only bit of his commentary that I appreciated was his inclusion of a short poem which Chesterton wrote in the copy of The Ball and the Cross owned by Father John O'Connor, the model for the author's famous Father Brown. Chesterton was ultimately unsatisfied with The Ball and the Cross, and expressed his sentiments to his friend as follows:

This is a book I do not like,
Take it away to Heckmondwike,
A lurid exile, lost and sad
To punish it for being bad.
You need not take it from the shelf
(I tried to read it once myself:
The speeches jerk, the chapters sprawl,
The story makes no sense at all)
Hide it your Yorkshire moors among
Where no man speaks the English tongue.

While I understand that most great writers aren't satisfied with their work, I don't think the author's criticisms are entirely true. Perhaps the speeches do jerk a bit, but the story is clearly meant to be an allegory, so we can forgive him that. The chapters do sprawl, but it seems that most of Chesterton's chapters do, so that's not really a very valid criticism for this work specifically. And the story doesn't make much sense, but that was perhaps the thing about it that delighted me the most: its whimsical quality. It's refreshing every once in a while to read fiction that's truly imaginative and well-written. While I realize that in the author's opinion this wasn't one of his finer works, I enjoyed it immensely, and if I could be half the writer he was, I would be quite satisfied with my work, indeed.

Thanksgiving: "It is right to give Him thanks and praise."

The Angelus (1857-1859), Jean-François Millet

Next week, I’ll conclude my three-part post, “God Desires Our Human Love and Its Perfection.”

On this Thanksgiving Day, I must first give thanks to God for the Parousians – for the community we have been blessed with, for our friendships, for our intellects and talents, for the gift of our education, for the intercession of our patrons, for Holy Mother Church, for our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, for all the priests who have made the Sacraments available to us, and most of all, for our salvation, for Christ's presence in the Eucharist, and for God’s grace and His good work in us that He has promised to bring to completion (Philippians 1:6).

God has blessed us abundantly, indeed. As we affirm each time we attend Mass, "it is right to give Him thanks and praise." Absolute gratitude, offered in humility, is the only appropriate response to the perfect love we see on the Cross and in the Blessed Sacrament.

I’ll leave you with these quotes about gratitude from some of our favorite saints and writers. In all humility, let us thank God with them for His many blessings.

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” – G. K. Chesterton

“In all created things discern the providence and wisdom of God, and in all things give Him thanks.” – St. Teresa of Avila

"I sing praise to You, my Lord, for all You have made, especially for Brother Sun, who brings the day and through whom You give us light." – St. Francis of Assisi (Canticle of the Sun)

“As part of the spiritual worship acceptable to God (Romans 12:1), the Gospel of Life is to be celebrated above all in daily living, which should be filled with self-giving love for others. In this way, our lives will become a genuine and responsible acceptance of the gift of life and a heartfelt song of praise and gratitude to God who has given us this gift.” – Pope John Paul II (Evangelium Vitae)

“God has been wonderful to all of us. He has given us so many beautiful opportunities to put our love for God in living action. So let us show our gratitude by loving one another, as Christ loved each one of us.” – Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

“Gratitude is characteristic only of the humble. The egotistic are so impressed by their own importance that they take everything given them as if it were their due. They have no room in their hearts for recollection of the undeserved favors they received.” – Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

"O my God, let me remember with gratitude and confess to thee thy mercies toward me. Let my bones be bathed in thy love, and let them say: 'Lord, who is like unto thee?’ (Psalm 35:10). Thou hast broken my bonds in sunder, I will offer unto thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving (Psalm 116:16-17). And how thou didst break them I will declare, and all who worship thee shall say, when they hear these things: 'Blessed be the Lord in heaven and earth, great and wonderful is his name’ (Psalm 8:1)." – St. Augustine (Confessions)

“I give thanks to You, Holy Lord, Father almighty, everlasting God. Not through any merit of my own, but only through the goodness of Your mercy, You have considered me – a useless servant – worthy to be nourished with the precious Body and Blood of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

“We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is ‘good,’ because is it good, if ‘bad,’ because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world, and the hope of our eternal country.” – C. S. Lewis

“For here we do not have a lasting city, but we are seeking the city which is to come. Through Him, then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.” – St. Paul (Hebrews 13:14-15)

A Month of Sundays--A Continuing Discussion of The Man Who Was Thursday

Last week I wrote about the character of Sunday, the President of the Central Anarchist Council and a Police Chief, in The Man Who Was Thursday. Sunday is a man whom Chesterton meant to exemplify the idea of a god who is willfully elusive, both good and evil, and a general enemy of mankind. Towards the end of the novel, Sunday leads his band of six detectives on a bizarre chase through the English countryside, during which he throws them meaningless notes such as “The word, I fancy, should be pink” (161), and “Fly as once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known” (157). I believe Chesterton meant these nonsense “clues” to illustrate how many believe God works: by throwing us confusing and nonsensical tidbits designed, not to bring us closer to Him, but to further alienate us from Him. This is, of course, contradictory to the Catholic understanding of God as one who wishes to lead us to Him and help us use our reason to understand something of His mysteries.

Contradictions abound in this man/god-hunt, especially when the detectives begin to describe their views of Sunday. (A reminder: physically, Sunday is grotesquely large and inspires fear and wonder in those who look upon him.) For example, Monday perceives him as cruel because, when he met Sunday, Monday asked him serious questions that only elicited laughs from the President, who shook like “a base body,” or "protoplasm." Monday speaks about how awful it was to be “laughed at by something at once lower and stronger than oneself.”

Wednesday says that the awful thing about Sunday is that he is absent minded. He maintains that, “absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can’t think of a wicked man who is honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren’t think of a wicked man alone with himself. An absent-minded man means a good-natured man. It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologize. But how will you bear an absent-minded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty” (167).

After each man has described his opinions of Sunday, Thursday says, “Each man of you finds Sunday quite different, yet each man of you can only find one thing to compare him to—the universe itself” (168). He goes on to describe his impression of Sunday from the back as a beast and from the front as an archangel, and that he is always certain that, whether he looks at his back or front, he is viewing Sunday’s true self. He explains himself by saying, “bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained” (169). He then goes on to say what could sum up the idea of the entire book (so read and think carefully!):

Listen to me. Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—

The above passages warrant careful consideration: how are these views different from the Catholic view of the Lord and His creation? It is the crux of the whole novel (which I highly recommend you read!) and important questions for our faith as well.

The Ghoul Who Was Sunday

I am feeling heroic today, so I will attempt to summarize the plot of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Here it goes:

Gabriel Syme is a police detective in a city plagued by political turmoil and threatened by anarchist plots of destruction. By happenstance, he becomes an undercover agent in the Central Anarchist Council, which consists of seven members, each named for a day of the week. The Council is led by Sunday—a mammoth of a man terrifying in his intensity and deadly purpose. While desperately hiding his identity, Syme discovers that each of the other members of the council is also a disguised undercover policeman working AGAINST anarchy. They eventually join forces against Sunday, whom they all fear and despise. They then discover that Sunday is the very same man who, in a room so dark they could not see his face, had recruited them to be policemen in the first place. The plot culminates in a long and exciting chase that leads them to Sunday’s vast country estate, where they discover that Sunday is not a man at all, but, in his own words, is “the peace of God.”

Unfortunately, even a quite good summary of this novel (and I must say, this one is not that bad) excludes the philosophical asides, witty observations, and poignant comments about society and humanity. Many of these lovely tidbits regard the character of Sunday, an elusive and confusing man whom Chesterton meant to exemplify the “mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order” who is a “sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre” who would have inhabited the “world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing” at the time the book was written (these quotes were taken from an article Chesterton wrote for the Illustrated London News in 1936). This can be seen in the entire title of the work, which is, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Sunday is described as a huge man—very tall and very fat, to the extent that he looks unnatural and frighteningly inhuman. His dual roles as police chief and President of the Central Anarchist Council are in opposition to each other. Strangely, he openly acts as an anarchist in broad daylight but acts as a police chief only in darkness. He even holds the anarchist council meetings on a balcony during the day to discuss their plans, for he believes in concealment by not being secretive; in other words, because they are open with their dissention, they will not be taken as serious threats.

When the policemen (formerly members of the anarchist council) confront Sunday, he says,

You want to know what I am, do you? […] Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. […] Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have not been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.

True to his word, Sunday then leads the policemen in a bizarre chase around the English countryside that ultimately leads them to his estate and then to a final unveiling of Sunday’s dualist nature, the nightmarish view of God that Chesterton was trying to expose as fallacy. I would like to continue about this particular aspect of the novel next week, so I will end on a discussion of the above quote.

The idea that God does not wish to be discovered or understood at all is horrific; it is the crux of Agnosticism and completely contrasts the Catholic ideas of faith and reason leading men to salvation. Belief in a god who amuses himself by playing cat-and-mouse with his creation would drive anyone away from faith—many people alienate themselves from the Church because they believe that God wills everything about it to be incomprehensible. We must not fall into the mire of despair about ever reaching communion with Him due to this folly. Growing in wisdom and understanding about our faith is one of our greatest tools to reaching salvation, and the history of great intellects in the Catholic Church makes this possible. We must actively participate in the search for Truth, a participation that has been sadly neglected among Americans and the youth of the world.
(Shameless Parousians plug!)

The Beauty of Order from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

What is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s mere vomiting.

This passage, from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, rubs its proverbial elbows with other equally distinguished bits of wisdom within that text. In this novel, which is one of my favorites, Chesterton attacks what he described as the, “logic, or lunacy” of the popular opinion that “the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf” in an article he wrote for the Illustrated London News in 1936. I will not attempt to summarize the plot, but I do encourage you to read the book or at least find a summary online.

I am refraining from a rehashing of the story because of its complexity and because, when taken out of context, it can seem rather fantastical. It comprises many themes--anarchy is just one in this book, which is rife with metaphor, beautiful logic, and subtle theology—in fact, the themes in the novel could provide fodder for a frenzy of blogs (and it just might!). The novel begins with a meeting of “The Two Poets of Saffron Park” (which is the title of the first chapter). The two wordsmiths argue about the place of anarchy in poetry; the resident poet, Lucian Gregory, claims that chaos and rebellion are poetic in themselves and that “an artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only.” The second poet, Gabriel Syme (our hero!), counters that there is nothing poetic about anarchy; rather, “chaos is dull…it is things going right that is poetical.” (Note the symbolism of the names—Lucian/Lucifer, Gabriel/…Gabriel—the first poet expresses the twisted views of a fallen light-bearer, whereas the second proclaims truth.)

Another notable passage from Gabriel defends his position by describing his passion for, of all unlikely things, a train reaching its destination.

I tell you…that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloan Square on must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria', it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam.

This quote exemplifies one of the notable notions in this book: Gabriel’s idea of the romance of order. Attributing high adventure and mystery to the order that Lucian views as prosaic is one of our greatest tools as Catholics. We see the romance of a life devoted to fully utilizing our freedom to live well according to the qualities of dignified and fully realized human persons—the only true freedom we can have. We are free to be as wonderful as the Lord meant us to be and can see the beauty and romance of this. As Chesterton wrote in another great work, Orthodoxy, “The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say, "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”

Our victory as sons and daughters of Adam is to embrace the power our free will gives us to act in accord with truth and goodness. To say that we are imposed upon because there are guidelines to living well is erroneous; we have all been told the most valuable things are those we work for, and repetition has not made it false. We work to live up to certain standards, which only help direct our efforts. (Standards for beauty, for example, are even found in nature in the golden ratio, which has been found to describe the proportions of what is most pleasing to the human eye.)Most worthwhile things are done according to plans—buildings are built from blueprints, novels written (and rewritten) from outlines, paintings result from countless sketches…so embrace order and truth! To use a slightly corny metaphor, we are given the blueprints for living to our highest potential as human beings and will remain standing for eternity if we fashion ourselves according to them! [I apologize for the corniness!]