The Catholic blogosphere has been having a war over G. K. Chesterton, the late English writer and polymath. Some of it, were I not so tired and worn out, would be heartbreaking, as former fans of his, particularly converts, have discovered his anti-Semitic views and come around to condemning him. At the same time, hard right wing Catholics, whom are I supposing a separate interlocking circle that crosses over into the Trads and Rad Trads, but don't include all of those bodies by any means (I suspect most of them do not know who Chesterton is) may be over adopting him.
All this exists, moreover, in the bizarre context of our times in which the left doesn't see a biological or social construct that it doesn't want to attack, which makes in some ways Chesterton a perfect man for our times, as he warned of so much of this. That's why, to our recent surprise, we saw, and it caused a lot of comment, Giorgia Meloni quote the English writer to the effect:
Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.
She stated that in support of her hard right conservative views.
A lot of this debate over Chesterton, both from the right and the left, really misses the point, in my view.
Whenever dealing with a great man, we have to ask ourselves a series of questions. Ironically, in some ways, we have to ask one that has been recently examined by the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom. "Was he a saint?" But beyond that, do we require great mean with huge thoughts to be saints? And do we always require them to be right in order to consider these ideas?
In some ways, this is frankly why ancient philosophers get so much more of a pass than modern ones. We don't even think much of their private lives, really. We know that Socrates was married at least once, to Xanthippe, and might have had a second wife as well. We also know that Xanthippe might have been 40 years younger than Socrates, which would cause all sorts of Twitter twittering today, but we just don't think of it. And he's a philosopher that we know a lot about.
Chesterton, on the other hand, we know boatloads about, as he's a relatively recent figure. His cause for canonization, which failed, resulted in all sorts of commentary about him in various forms, including some people who claimed he couldn't be a saint as he was fat, so therefore he must be a glutton, and an "alcoholic", based on his exhibiting the typical English pub culture of the time. Much more serious, however, are his anti-Semitic utterances.
So let's start there.
They exist.
Now, I'm not able to really go into detail on them, as unlike true Chestertonians, I've read very little of Chesterton. Like a lot of people who fit broadly into his fan base, so to speak, I've read the various pithy quotes you are able to find, and up until a recent bizarre Twitter episode, I hadn't read any of the anti-Semitic ones. I'd heard them referenced, and excused, but I'm not going to try to do that as they seem to go beyond what we might expect, although at the same time a person can't really deny that there is evidence that cuts the other way as well. The year following his death, for example, you find American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, making this comment:
Indeed, I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist . . . I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!
That's hard to square with the claim that Chesterton was an unabashed anti Semite. In contrast, some point out that Chesterton said something like there was some good in Hitlerism and some of that was in Hitler himself. He both condemned Nazism while saying that part of the reason that it came about was because of a "Jewish problem", a fairly astounding claim from an educated man who should have known better, although that was a fairly widespread belief in Europe at the time, and it surprisingly still has much more retention in Europe today, in spite of everything, than it should. In some ways, Chesterton on this topic gives us a really odd example of a person really forcibly trying to take the middle ground by advocating both sides of it, on a topic in which there really is no middle ground.
But here's the thing.
Having bad, even horrible, views, doesn't discredit your other views which are not so tainted, and they don't define the person unless the person adopts them to the extent that they do.
Hitler was a tremendous opponent of smoking. He hated it. He was right to hate it, but beyond anything else, he hated cultures that he regarded as non-Germanic, with the Jews, followed by the Slavs hated to the point of murder. That's why Hitler and his followers are defined by their murderous beliefs, and not by their opposition to tobacco or their construction of the autobahn.
In contrast, I suppose, Thomas Jefferson wrote profoundly on the rights of man. At the same time, he was shacked up with his dead wife's half sister, who was an enslaved black woman. The relationship started, following his wife's death, when the slave was quite young, probably still in her teens. That's really icky. The children of that illicit union, we'd note, were held in bondage as well, which is exceedingly weird.
That latter example gives us an example closer to what we find with Chesterton. Jefferson was a brilliant man, and wrote in opposition to slavery, none of which kept him from having an illicit unmarried long-lasting and deeply strange relationship to his sister-in-law. Should we discount his writings?
Probably not.
And here I guess is the uneasy measure. People are full of vices, some of them exceedingly serious. Some people let their hatreds and vices define them. That is what they come to stand for, by their own actions. Hitler's perverted view of German superiority defined his political party and what it stood for, and came to define what Germany of the 30s and 40s stood for. Lenin and Stalin's malevolent view of the "class struggle", which lead to mass murder, came to define them.
Franklin Roosevelt's long-lasting extramarital affair did not come to define him, however. And while he's not now regarded as a good President, Warren G. Harding's two affairs have not come to define him. Actor Pat Morita's alcoholism did not define him. Jimi Hendrix's drug consumption, which helped kill him, didn't define him. Caravaggio's murdering a man over a tennis match has not come to define him. Django Reinhardt's alcohol consumption diminished his abilities over his lifetime, but that has not come to define him, nor has Richard Burton's alcoholism defined him. Churchill was known to have made utterances sympathetic to Mussolini prior to World War Two, and even after World War Two Churchill made a surprising remark about the rise of Hitler, which he warned against, having made sense in the context of desperate Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
It's problematic, of course, when we are faced with a character like Chesterton, who serous failing was in print and therefore not really possible to ignore and not legitimately subject to being excused. Nor are that a self-destructive personal vice, like alcoholism. It's much closer to Jefferson's bedroom hypocrisy. It's different from that, of course, in that Chesterton's views were openly stated, whereas Jefferson's actions were kept hidden. A person could debate which was worse, I suppose, in that context, but for a brilliant writer, that's all the more problematic.
Some of it was the context of the times and culture, to be sure. Anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in European culture and remains pretty potent today. But Chesterton actually stood principally against his culture, which makes this failing more difficult to accept.
So where to land?
Like Caravaggio's paintings, his works are too valuable to ignore. The adoption of them by fringe elements of the far right today, including the far right in religious circles, does not change that, and indeed chances are high that Chesterton would levy his sharp tongue against many of them today. It means, however, that he's a flawed hero, and in at least one serious way, which makes him a pretty typical hero at that. There are, to my layman's eyes, reasons not to canonize him which are both theological and political, none of which is to say that he did not find salvation. Indeed, we ought to be careful about our own souls, with many of the critics and readers of all kinds no doubt, like Jefferson, harboring secret or open vices.
So the troubling writings should not be excused or diminished. Not everything the man said or did was right. But by the same token, the writings of Jefferson's pen in aid of the infant United States are not rendered a nullity by his long-running bizarre home behavior. The character of the works must be measured in the main, with those that fail being noted as failures, even evil failures, which does not mean that the rest cannot be considered. It also does not mean that the man can be adopted in the main, safely, for those with modern radical causes.
The key may be the question whether the failings define the man, or are a horrific exception to his definition. Hitler's failings defined him. Jefferson's did not. Chesterton's, serious though they were, do not seem to define him either, which is not to excuse them.
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