In my late teens, G.K. Chesterton was my boy. Indeed, I probably read him more than I read the Bible. In times where I was loosely clinging to my faith, I still could get a kick out of his penchant for turn-of-phrase. Still, as an adult wholly in love with God (Lord, you know that I love you) Chesterton has been removed to a much lesser throne. Still, the author’s wit and quirky whimsy, not to mention his skill at the describing paradox and beauty of Christianity have left a mark on my own writing and understanding of faith. Revisiting Chesterton more recently, especially in his biographies of the saints, I trust that much like his subjects it was primarily his love of “the God-man of the Gospels” that flamed his passion for so many Things. Indeed, it is this multifaceted love in the pursuit of the one Love that makes both Chesterton and his subject, Thomas Aquinas, so attractive.
That being said, as I’ve grown older I’ve also come to recognize the great faults of Chesterton the write and the man. He was a prolific and exuberant intellectual warrior throughout his years, and it is precisely this identification as a warrior that sometimes prevented him from being really intellectually humble. His tone can often read as overly adversarial at times and for modern readers it is oft mired in the controversies of the day which may have lost their original context. Perhaps his antagonism merited due to the rampant anti-Catholicism in much of the English-speaking world of his day. However, it can be extremely problematic if transported full stop to the 21st century without tempering or analysis.
Additionally, despite getting over many great prejudices in converting to Catholicism, he was also a man of his time, wont to express the bigotry of a Edwardian Englishman. Broadsides with racial overtones are unfortunately quite present in his works, and impede his goals as a writer.
Whether these faults turn a contemporary reader off to him or merely lead them to an intellectual machete in order bush wack towards the the El Dorado of Chesterton’s wisdom will vary depending on their patience and curiosity. As the first of his books I’ve read in a while, this disciple thought his Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox bears some review both as an introduction to the life and work of the saint and as an appraisal of Chesterton’s writing more broadly.
In many ways, Chesterton is not only a great poet but a masterful historian. This is especially true as he deftly charts the dynamic ebbs and flows of intellectual and cultural history. For example, take this line which exemplifies what is meant by a Living Tradition:
“Revolutions turn into institutions; revolts that renew the youth of old societies in their turn grow old; and the past which was full of new things, of splits and and innovations and insurrections, seems to us the single texture of tradition.”
Chesterton indeed successfully portrays his subject of Aquinas as a revolutionary figure, both for his decision to join the mendicant orders and in his advocation of a truly Christian Aristotelianism. Chesterton explains the subversive nature of both these moves to the conservative elements of medieval society. For example, take his description of Thomas’ decision to become a Dominican as a bomb rolled into the center of the noble house he grew up in:
“…the young Thomas Aquinas walked into his father’s castle one day and calmly announced that he had become one of the begging friars, of the new order founded by Dominic the Spaniard; much as the eldest son of the squire might go home and airily inform the family that he had married a gypsy; or the heir of a Tory Duke state that he was walking tomorrow with the Hunger Marchers organized by alleged Communists.”
This passage shows Chesterton immense talent at giving us the context of the times, in which Franciscan and Dominican orders were quite new and quite dangerous. This revelation is important, and helps us understand that heroic sanctity always requires a subversion of the world around them. As in his work on St. Francis and his own autobiography of his conversion to Catholicism, Chesterton here shows that sainthood is always punk. In fact, the action is so punk that Thomas is seized by his brothers and locked in a tower with a prostitute to try to dissuade him from his dream of becoming a beggar for God. In an uncharacteristic outburst, the young Thomas locked the confused woman away in a small room and branded the door with the sign of cross, forever signifying his devotion to the evangelical vows of Christ.
As for Thomas’ love of Aristotle, Chesterton notes that for many in European society any attempts to reconcile the Greek philosopher to the faith smacked of either Islam or heresy. Much work had been done by philosophers both Arab and European to reconcile Aristotle with the God of the biblical revelation, but none before Aquinas had done so in a way that jived so completely with Catholic orthodoxy. The strength of Aquinas here lay chiefly not in his intellectual prowess but rather his sanctity. As when he branded the sign of the cross on the door, Thomas consistently showed himself as devoted to God and the Church, such that few could challenge him even when resurrected a dead pagan and baptizing him like a bizarrely charitable act of necromancy.
Chesterton’s skill as a historian is also shown in his ability to remove the is skilled at the common prejudices of his society with surgical talent. One of the strongest areas he does this is by skewering the then-fashionable historiography which portrayed the Middle Ages as a tepid and static period. Indeed, we are today living in what can be called a golden age for medieval studies, and I don’t think we can rule out Chesterton as a trailblazer in the movement to appreciate the “Gothic” and turn back the notion of the “Dark Ages”. Take for example, Chesterton’s aside on medieval scientists:
“It is true that, in most other cases, there was a certain limitation to the data of medieval science; but this certainly had nothing to do with medieval religion. For the data of Aristotle, and the great Greek civilization, were in many ways more limited still. But, it is not really so much a question of access to the facts as of attitude of the facts.”
Be it the general attitude of superiority and misunderstanding of the Middle Ages at large or the more practical fear of the Mediterranean immigrant, Chesterton manages to show how the his society stands in need of both of these two more catholic spirits for its salvation. Indeed, he remarks that the saints are most attractive when the spirit of the age is their opposite. Thus, he comments about how the Victorian English, awash in industrialism and excess, were attracted to St. Francis, who loved nature and poverty. In this way, he says, the Protestant-Capitalist society had secretly affirmed that which they most disdained - “an Italian beggar”. He makes a similar claim in that Thomas Aquinas was being revived in his own day, though this reader is unsure which particular currents in society Aquinas proved to be a countercultural measure.
While in many places Chesterton is adept at pointing out the prejudices of others, he just as often outs himself as being in some ways narrow minded and subject to the biases of his time and place. Though his strengths as a writer of historical topics have been hitherto lauded, he can also make a poor historian in the sense that he is very wont to use generalizations. These can lead to very distracting and taxing asides which detract from his real goal of focusing on Thomas Aquinas.
Probably the most glaring example in this work is his disdain for anything “Asiatic”, which is called upon as an un-Christian specter in opposition to anything holy and orthodox.
Strangely, this word that he uses more often to refer to the very “Western” heresy of Manichaeism than anything actually from East Asia. In a similar form of externalization of faults, other writers of the era went on about “Oriental autocracy” when dictators like Hitler and Franco rose up in the heart of what most people would point to as “the West”. This blindspot is a big one, and hard to ignore in certain chapters of the book.
Overall, this overuse of the term Asiatic (or Oriental) betrays the ironically very Manichaean tendency to draw a strict line between “West and East” which I’ve written in brief about before. By calling Manichaenism “Asiatic” Chesterton implies a connection between the orthodox Catholic and the Western European cultural bloc, when there have in fact been very orthodox Korean saints and very unorthodox French heretics. This distaste for anything “Eastern” extends not only Manichaeism but also to Buddhism and even to Eastern Orthodoxy. The latter example is bemoaned as “flat” and “obscurantist” in reference to the beautiful art of iconography, and this reader can only consider this a great lack of charity on the part of Chesterton.
Indeed, as much as Chesterton goes on about “Eastern religion”, one gets the sense that he doesn’t really understand the points of dialogue between Catholicism and Buddhism. It would take other authors, more patient and less quick to dismiss the “Asiatic” to appreciate Buddhism and other philosophies in a Catholic context. After all, if Plato and Aristotle, whose beliefs were often equally un-Christian as those of Asian sages, can be brought into the intellectual life of the Church, so too can Lao Tzu and Confucius. In fact, this is exactly what many holy Chinese Catholics have done.
It is a great shame that Chesterton, who took up the task of showing how Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle, lived before the time in which Thomas Merton (not to mention John Paul II) baptized the Buddha. In writing effectively at length with what he describes the great humanizing and liberalizing revolution of Thomism, he is sometimes painfully in need of the equally great humanizing and liberalizing revolution of Vatican II.
To return to the strengths of the work, Chesterton successfully illustrates the life of Thomas Aquinas not only as revolutionary but also as romantic. Far from being a reclusive and cold intellectual, Chesterton describes very passionate parts of Aquinas that one does not often consider as we do in other saints:
“He had from the first that full and final test of truly orthodox Catholicity; the impetuous, impatient, intolerant passion for the poor; and even that readiness to be rather a nuisance to the rich, out of a hunger to feed the hungry.”
Aquinas in this portrait is above all a person in love with Things, not material things and possessions but the multitude of God’s creation, a love which he describes as “broad and virile appetite for the very vastness and variety of the universe.” Above all, his love is focused on the great Creator of all these wonderful things, an almost bashful mystical love affair with God. This blushing romance culminates in the saint’s sweet request to have the Song of Songs read to him at his deathbed. It is here that this reader really comes to better understand Aquinas as a saint and full person, rather than a book on the shelf. Thomas was once asked by Jesus what he desired in reward for his book on the Eucharist, and he responded, “Only You.”
I think given this devotion, he would be happy with this outline, which helps round out his deeply human and humane qualities in spite of his characterization as merely an intellectual force to be reckoned with.
Later chapters of the book seek out to overview Aquinas’ philosophy. There are many things in it which go over the head of this reader (I can only infer the many distinctions between Platonism and Aristotelianism based on the text) but there is a lot of things much more within my grasp which are greatly appreciated. In fact, as much as Chesterton focuses on the Angelic Doctor’s philosophy rather than his theology, he is at his best when touching on Jesus and Christian anthropology.
Take for instance, this line which is in reference to the aforementioned episode in which Christ appeared to Thomas:
“The point is that for him, when the voice spoke from between the outstretched arms of the Crucified, those arms were truly opened wide, and opening most gloriously the gates of all the worlds; they were arms point to the east and to the west, to the ends of the earth and the very extremes of existence. They were spread out with a gesture of omnipotent generosity; the Creator himself offering Creation itself; with all its millionfold mystery of separate beings, and the triumphal chorus of the creatures.”
It’s lines like these that remind one why it is worth reading Chesterton - his deep love of our incarnational reality and beautiful ways of describing it. He is also valued when describing Thomas Aquinas as a gifted anthropologist, less so in the modern physical sense and more so in the sense of thinking on humanity and who they are and where they are going:
“But it was this quality of a link in the chain, or a run in the ladder, which mainly concerned the theologian, in developing his own particular theory of degrees. Above all, it is this which chiefly moves him, when he finds so fascinating the central mystery of Man. And for him Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing under the earth; but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars.”
Chesterton elsewhere attempts to describe the central tenet of Thomistic philosophy in the concept of ens or being. In differing from many non-Christian (and some Christian) philosophies, this fundamental assertion that things really do exist is the core building block of Thomism. A bird is a bird, and not merely an illusion. A bird is different than a cow, and that difference matters, even if there are some broad senses which link the two. Chesterton describes Thomas as a “firm but moderate Realist”, a school which believed in this fundamental reality of reality as understood by an “intellect lit by the senses” to use another Thomistic phrase.
To this reader, is this sense of realism that allows Thomas' philosophy to coincide with modern science, which at its core requires a basic trust in the senses and in observable reality as reality. This certainly isn't the case with many philosophies that emphasize the enclosed world of the individual. That is not to say the subjective is not important, but it must bow to certain objective truths whether scientific or theological and is not absolute. For Thomas Aquinas, living within the boundaries of these objective truths were important whether as “lowly” as knowing grass is grass or as “lofty” as knowing God is God. I use quotations to show that according to Chesterton, these truths were both of near equal importantce to Aquinas. Though he moved up in down a ladder of near endless degrees, he never lost sight of the important of the “bottom” rungs.
At its outset, Chesterton describes the book he is writing as a sort of primer on the life and work of Aquinas and a jumping off point for picking up the Dumb Ox’s work itself to read. Does it succeed in this aim? For this reader and would be disciple, I think its prompted me to at least try. I’ve gotten a lot of Aquinas secondhand over the years, be it from YouTube or papal encyclicals. I can imagine a world where I’d pick up the Summa itself and read it, but that is far in the future. After all, I have to read all the other books in my house first.