G.K. Chesterton: Vendor of Words

When one begins to read the works of G.K. Chesterton, the first impression is that the man has a way with words. If anyone claims any other first impression, it might very well signify that the person has not yet learned to read, for this much, at least, is obvious even to those who fervently disagree with him—who might claim that his competency masks his ignorance. He was the master, so it is said, of the epigram. He possessed the uncanny ability to take almost any phrase, turn it on its head, and make it dance; to take any idea, no matter how prosaic, and turn it to poetry. If a debate over some great issue ever turned into nothing more than a battle of clever phrase-turning (which, in fact, seems to be the case much of the time), there is little doubt that Chesterton would come out looking very large (pun very much intended, for Chesterton was a famously massive individual, both in terms of girth and in literary accomplishment), while making his opponent, or his opponent's ideas, seem very, very small.

While there is certainly something admirable about Chesterton's way with words, a certain clarification must be made: There is a very real difference between an accomplishment with words and an accomplishment of ideas, just as there is a difference between the concrete and the abstract. If there was no such distinction, I might be just as influenced in my ideas by Shakespeare, Shaw or Wilde as I am by Chesterton. But as much as Chesterton's ability to string together a fanciful sentence makes his words eminently readable, it is the heart of his ideology that make his words worth reading in the first place. Words may have some value on their own, but no words are more lasting than those that convey something true. This is why no mere nursery rhyme will ever have the lasting value of the Psalms, just as no romantic novel will ever compare to the Song of Solomon.

There are far more than words in many of Chesterton's works (I cannot say for certain that this holds true universally, as I'm not certain that even Chesterton has read his complete works; and the prolific nature of his writing certainly led to the occasional worthless essay or droning novel, worth little more than the paper on which it was printed). Hidden beneath the clever sentences and the endless epigrams is something missing from most eminent writers: there are often very real (and very consistent, which is no small achievement) ideas. Very important ideas.

There is nothing superficial, for example, about the steady progression of logical and reasonable leaps that make up Chesterton's seminal apologetic work, The Everlasting Man, which uses anthropology and history to show the futility of humanism. There is far more within the pages of Orthodoxy than clever sentences. 

Even much of his fiction is founded very much on truth, for one of the underpinnings of Chesterton's entire philosophy was that there was often more truth found in myths and fantasies than in “proper” history, for in fantasy the truth of the soul is revealed, while a book of history only says anything about a person's ability to perform some research. There is something truly human in fiction—even the most fantastic fiction—that is necessarily absent from even the most accomplished work of history. I, for one, have probably found far more value and inspiration in Chesterton's little-remembered novel The Ball and the Cross than from any work of theology. 

The Ball and the Cross is, in part, a work of pure fantasy, opening with a fanciful scene of a futuristic flying machine, driven by a demon, soaring over the streets of London and ends with the dramatic rescue of an angelic being from an insane asylum. There is never a sense that the events of the story are anything but an allegory, and yet, as is the hallmark of any good allegory, one cannot help but believe every word. Between these fantastic bookends is the story of two men, a devout Christian and a devout atheist, whose attempts to kill one another over their ideological differences leads to a tremendous friendship and the realization that the true enemy is a world that no longer cares; a message that has never stopped resonating. It is as searing an indictment against the apathy of our present world as against that of 19^th century London.

Not to be ignored are Chesterton's Father Brown stories and perhaps his most well known novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. The larger and more lasting themes of these works may be less overt, but they are there, certainly, hiding just beneath the wit and cleverness of the words.

It is fair to wonder why I should mention so much about Chesterton’s works and so little about his life or personality. When I wrote previously about Malcolm Muggeridge I wrote almost exclusively about his story and what it meant to his theology. The reason is simple: When I consider Muggeridge, it is as a man inseparable from his life; his theology was a direct result of the events that shaped them. With Chesterton, there is certainly a life there—and an interesting one—but when I think of Chesterton I do not think of his life; I think of his words.

Still, there are many similarities between Muggeridge and Chesterton, which others have described at length. Both were British. Neither was raised in a particularly religious home, both, after accepting the truths of Christianity, began as Protestants and later converted to Catholicism. Both were inveterate journalists, making their living as "Vendors of Words." Chesterton died before he had reason to know anything of Muggeridge though it is fair to say that Muggeridge was, at least in part, influenced by Chesterton (though his reviews of Chesterton’s works are often quite mixed). “The only time I ever saw him in the flesh,” Muggeridge wrote, “he was seated outside The Ship Hotel at Brighton shortly before he died. His canvas chair looked preposterously small, as did a yellow-covered thriller he was reading. It was a windy day, and I half-expected him to be carried away. Though so huge, he seemed to have no substance: more a balloon than an elephant.”

Muggeridge would have been the first to note that the differences between he and Chesterton were stark (though, somehow, without being contradictory): Muggeridge was, even at his wittiest moments, almost endlessly solemn, while Chesterton could make light of even the most serious of issues (as is evident in his book Eugenics and Other Evils). Muggeridge excelled in taking the things that humanity finds great—governments, pleasures, wealth—and made them appear very small and worthless, for he knew that all earthly kingdoms pales in comparison to the Kingdom of God, while Chesterton considered things that were seemingly small and insignificant and made them appear very big and important. 

The most perfect example of this tendency—which permeates almost all of his writings—is found in the collection of essays known, appropriately, as Tremendous Trifles. Chesterton explores all sorts of seemingly mundane things and shows his readers that they are really very important, for in them one can discover great truths, both about men and about God.

On trying to purchase a piece of brown paper on which to draw, he writes: “I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the north. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-colored chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.”

On the inviting prospect of drawing on his ceiling while lying in bed, he writes: “Nowhere did I find a really clear place for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! Like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged—never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights—and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it into charcoal has not been conceded... I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realised how the roof of the Sistene Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.”

This was all meant, obviously, in good humor—for Chesterton was tremendous at making light of things while at the same time ensuring that the world is loved and seen as the brilliant place it is. His purpose, always, was to remind his readers that: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” This is where Chesterton’s theology begins and ends: with hope and happiness and the knowledge that this place, as the creation of God, does not merely offer the occasional miracle, but is, in itself, one endless miracle that goes, far too often, overlooked. That is the truth that he was endlessly revealing through his words.

The same joy and wonder he found in the world around him, Chesterton found ten-fold in the person of Christ. Chesterton realized that Christianity is not, as so many have said, a religion of woe or mourning. It is not a religion that makes one dwell on their sins or compels them to reject all earthly pleasures. “Joy,” he begins the closing passage of Orthodoxy, “which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomats are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men who they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was mirth.”   

Malcolm Muggeridge: Apostle of Experience

If I am going to take some time to describe some of God’s Spies, it seems only fitting that I should begin, not just with the man who inspired me to do so, but with a man who served, not only as one of God’s spies on earth, but as a very real spy in very human terms, having been involved, during World War II, in espionage while serving with MI6, the British Secret Service.

In the case of Malcolm Muggeridge, there is something refreshingly concrete to the analogy.

Anyone familiar with Muggeridge’s faith or politics later in life—that is, after he became famous—is surely surprised to discover that he who was destined to provide a bold voice to the cause of conservative morality; who used the pulpit of the media to rail against the futile efforts of men, was raised into an environment of pure, unrepentant socialism. Malcolm’ father, Henry, was one of the founders of London’s Fabian Society—a group of wealthy Londoners who were sympathetic to communistic ideals—and a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party (when that still meant something).

It is worth noting, of course, that this was a time before the horrors of these utopian dreams, put into practice, was really known. There may have been debate over whether the tenets of communism were really ideal or not, but the concept had not yet been linked to the great human evils that became inevitable under such a system; even a critic of communism would have found it difficult to believe that the system, devoted to equality, would lead, not just to great inequality, but to the death of millions.

Muggeridge was raised to believe that man was imperfect simply because he hadn’t yet done enough to save himself; he was raised to believe that human societies could, with the right laws, create a true earthly utopia. He came to believe in these things just as others come to believe in the Virgin Birth. In fact, he was sufficiently devoted to socialist ideals that, after discovering a passion for writing, he obtained a position at the Manchester Guardian—an anti-bourgeois paper devoted to the cause of the worker—and soon enough married Kitty Dobbs, a niece of Beatrice Webb (one of Britain’s premier socialists). Their communist sympathies led the young Muggeridge family, in 1932, to depart the evils of British capitalism and join the pilgrimage of mainstream journalists to Moscow, where he sought to inform the world of the glories of the Communist revolution.

The glories of Communism were not, of course, as evident as many had hoped. Though many journalists allowed themselves to be deluded by the Russian Politburo into thinking that present horrors were only temporary, Muggeridge’s disillusionment was almost immediate, as no amount of government control or censorship could keep him from noticing the truth of the bread lines or the famine spreading across the country, driven by the control of the Communist stormtroopers. After escaping the terrors of Russia, Muggeridge dramaticized what he found in Russia through his novel Winter in Moscow, which followed a group of journalists who allow themselves to ignore the horrors of Russia—it was as much an indictment of western journalism as it was the Soviet regime, and as a result it was practically unpublishable.

The failures of Communism—man’s greatest attempt at building a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth—left Muggeridge, as World War II approached, in a state of despair. He had traveled the world, from Moscow to India to Cairo, but had found no means of fulfillment, either for himself or for humanity. What he had not found in Communism, he now sought in war. Though he was a bit older than most recruits, which nearly prevented his enlistment, in the end he was accepted into the Secret Service and was shipped off to Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, a post that allowed him to start a new life, to live as a stranger, to practice espionage. And though life in Mozambique carried many new adventures and experiences, Muggeridge was led him to such depths of despair that, in what would be another defining moment of his life, he attempted suicide.

“One particular night,” he wrote in the second volume of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, “after returning home, I lay on my bed full of stale liquor and despair; alone in the house, and, as it seemed, utterly alone, not just in Lournco Marques, in Africa, in the world. Alone in the universe, in eternity, with no glimmer of light in the prevailing blackness; no human voice I could hope to hear, or human heart I could hope to reach; no God to whom I could turn, or Savior to take my hand. Elsewhere, on battlefields men were killing and dying. I envied them; it was a solution and a solace of sorts. After all, the only bearable thing about war is the killing and the dying. That is its point. In the Blitz, with, as I thought, London falling about my ears, I had felt a kind of contentment; here in this remote, forgotten corner of the world, I fell into the final abyss of despair. Deprived of war’s only solace—death, given and received—it came into my mind that there was, after all, one death I could still procure. My own. I decided to kill myself.”

Muggeridge writes of swimming out into the ocean in an attempt to be swept away by the tide in order to drown in the Indian Ocean, never to be discovered. He swims far out, ready to do the deed, when suddenly he makes the mistake of looking back, of seeing the lights of town. “They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged. I must reach them. There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy. In some mysterious way it became clear to me that there was no darkness, only the possibility of losing sight of a light which shone eternally; that our clumsy appetites are no more than the blind reaching of a newly born child after the teat through which to suck the milk of life; that our sufferings, our afflictions, are part of a drama—an essential, even an ecstatic, part—endlessly revolving round the two great propositions of good and evil, of light and darkness. A brief interlude, an incarnation, reaching back into the beginning of time, and forward into an ultimate fulfillment in the universal spirit of love which informs, animates, illuminates all creation, from the tiniest particle of insentient matter to the radiance of God’s very throne.” He turned and swam back to shore.

Something in his heart had begun to change. There was, as indeed there had always been, a nagging sense of spirituality hovering around him; he may not yet have been a Christian, but he knew, certainly, that there was no hope to be found anywhere else.

Returning from the war, Muggeridge returned to journalism. He spent the following decades growing in stature and public profile, first as the editor of Punch Magazine, then as a commentator on the radio and on the growing medium of television. Muggeridge writes with a deep sense of loss of these years, as, not yet a Christian, he fell deeply into the momentary solace of alcohol and adultery. But, as is the case when God is in control, even the greatest immoralities would be used for good, for through time wasted and false pleasures sought after, the truth of human life was becoming clearer to Muggeridge. Seeking after momentary pleasures and passions brought no lasting satisfaction, and no matter how hard men attempted to organize themselves in order to create a more perfect society, their attempts were destined to end in failure.

As these things became more evident, Muggeridge grew more and more conservative in his personal views. The context here is important: the change in Muggeridge’s views were not the consequences of his upbringing, nor of his education. His views were not founded on any preconceived political allegiances (his time in Moscow had cured him of those); rather, they arose as the natural consequence of decades of life experience. He had tried Communism, but found the very opposite of utopia; he had tried war, and found only that, rather than bringing a reason to live, it made him want to die; he tried sensuality and debauchery, but found that any pleasure was momentary and led to even greater emptiness.  If Malcolm Muggeridge could be certain of anything, it was that there was no hope to be found in earthly pleasures, and that the governments of men were just as incapable of offering salvation than the men who made them.

It all seems very cynical, and indeed it is hard to read anything from Muggeridge without a pang of hopelessness, but this impression really could not be more false. Yes, there is a sense of despair, but the despair is only lasting for one who has no hope outside of men. For those who place their hope elsewhere, the despair is momentary, giving way to a startlingly beautiful revelation! After a life of great, unceasing despair, Malcolm Muggeridge discovered great hope!

The seeds were planted, but it was only in the 1960’s that the first real steps toward Muggeridge’s spiritual awakening began. In 1969, Muggeridge produced a television special on a little-known Catholic Charity worker in India. The result was, not just a television special, but an accompanying book—Something Beautiful for God—which brought the first bit of international attention to Mother Teresa, while proving instrumental in Muggeridge’s acceptance of Christianity.

There was no single moment, no exact date, in which Muggeridge’s path toward conversion reached its culmination. What is clear is that by the end of the 1960’s, when he published a collection of essays entitled, Jesus Rediscovered, Muggeridge, the former womanizer, was now an evangelical Christian. St. Mugg, some called him in derision. His was one of the most public, and most controversial, conversions of the twentieth century, for he took his faith seriously; it was to guide the entirety of his public life for his remaining years.

The true glory of Muggeridge’s conversion is that, because it was really only the next step on the trajectory of his life, there was nothing truly dramatic about it. It was not an about-face—he just began to realize that he had been turning for some time and now found himself facing in an unexpected direction. Muggeridge did not stop studying current events in order to study theology—current events defined his theology. Or, rather, they reinforced his theology. The truth is that Malcolm Muggeridge’s theology was never very refined, as far as theology goes. He was never destined to be the next Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards. He would never have been the sort of man likely to engage in a debate about the nuances of Calvinism or the essence of the trinity or even the differences between protestant and Catholic theologies (he did eventually join the Catholic church, but this was not exactly theological; it was, as he wrote, “the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion”). He was familiar with the scriptures, of course, but he always saw them, not as a matter of historical scholarship, but as a way of explaining the great and timeless struggle between God and Man. He saw them as representing beautiful spiritual truths rather than historical events (not that he disbelieved in their history; it simply wasn’t something he was concerned with).

The heart of Muggeridge’s theology (if it could be called that) was experiential. It was his first-hand observation (not faith) of the world. It was based on the failure of Communism, the futility of governments, the vapidity of sensuality. It was based on the continued, perpetual, persistent, failure of every one of man’s endeavors when they belong only to men. It was based, in short, on the truths of history, which are things not even the dourest of atheists could deny.

So there really is hope in Muggeridge’s theology, but it must begin with despair. The story of man striving after God is really the same story as Muggeridge’s own suicide attempt—for man, apart from God, really is one cosmic suicide attempt. Man seeks his own way until the moment he finally recognizes that he cannot do so any longer; and then he is faced with the choice: Life or Death. God is calling men to life. Muggeridge knew better than almost anyone what sort of death resulted when man made a conscious effort to abandon God and yet still try to achieve some sort of salvation. For Him there was nothing theoretical about any of it. There was no great leap of faith or shot in the dark. He simply arrived at a point in his life where he could no longer deny what had been patently obvious all along—he could no longer accept the desires of his flesh as the ultimate truth.

Muggeridge’s great contribution to Christian apologetics was to show that one needn’t strain themselves in an intellectual attempt to reason our way towards Christianity; not that Christianity is not reasonable, but that its truth is far more evident than we make it. When we struggle, intellectually, with Christianity, it is almost as if we are purposefully ignoring what the entire history of mankind (and the history of our own lives) has made obvious: we are, for whatever reason, trying to replace the perfect, joyous freedom of Christ with the freedom of man, which is really no different from slavery.

“A sense of how extraordinarily happy I have been,” Muggeridge wrote near the end of his life, “and of enormous gratitude to my creator, overwhelms me often. I believe with a passionate, unshakable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light, not darkness, of creativity, not destruction, of order, not chaos; that, since all life—men, creatures, plants, as well as insensate matter—and all that is known about it, now and henceforth, have been benevolently, not malevolently, conceived, when the eyes see no more and the mind thinks no more, and this hand now writing is inert, whatever lies beyond will similarly be benevolently, not malevolently or indifferently, conceived. If it is nothing, then for nothingness I offer thanks; if another mode of existence, with this old, wornout husk of a body left behind, like a butterfly extricating itself from its chrysalis, and this floundering, muddle mind, now at best seeing through a glass darkly, given a longer range and a new precision, then for that likewise I offer thanks.”