closed minds

Peter Conrad:

Hillier compares Chesterton to Dr Johnson, whom he physically resembled thanks to his dropsical belly and rolling gait, and whom he often impersonated in pageants. But Johnson's gruff dismissals – of Scotland, of opera, of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and of anything or anyone who irritated him – were the expression of quirky prejudice; unlike Chesterton, he never pretended to papal infallibility. Johnson prevailed by bullying Boswell, but Chesterton threatened anathema, as when he disposed of the Enlightenment by announcing: "I know of no question that Voltaire asked which St Thomas Aquinas did not ask before him – only St Thomas not only asked, but answered the questions." There speaks a man with a closed mind, a neo-medievalist who abhorred Jews and pined for the return of an agrarian feudal economy in which with every man would be allocated "two acres and a cow".

Once someone says that Johnson — a man who by his own admission “talked for victory,” and was labeled "The Great Cham [Khan] of Literature" (by Oliver Goldsmith) for good reason — “never pretended to papal infallibility,” you need to be on your guard when he says anything else. Though Johnson is the incomparably greater writer, he and Chesterton manifested a similarly complex balance of confidence and vulnerability. And only a very closed mind — or a very ill-informed one — could deny that Aquinas did indeed anticipate and respond to the key questions posed against the Deity by Voltaire. One may not agree with the Angelic Doctor’s answers to questions Voltaire and his admirers thought unanswerable, but they are there.

Chesterton in that passage is merely trying to point out that our ancestors did not believe as they did merely out of ignorance. They thought about many of the same issues Whiggishly self-congratulatory late-moderns think about, but often came to different conclusions. And it’s actually rather instructive to discover what those conclusions are, and how they reached them. Aidan Nichols’s Discovering Aquinas is quite helpful in this regard.

a Christmas Eve thought

From G. K. Chesterton:

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is. Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday. At the next moment your heart leaps up and your soul and body dance together like lovers; for in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice. If, on the other hand, you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the same explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday. But I say that whatever the day is that is to you festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should be a quite clear black line between it and the time going before. And all the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. Especially it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines. The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.

And a blessed Christmas to all!