Chesterton's Thomist Ontology

7/28/2019 Chesterton's Thomist Ontology

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R. V. Young

CHESTERTON 'S PARADOXES AND THOM IST ONTOLOGY

A N overw helm ing consen sus of critics and scholars regard G. K.Chesterton's St. Thom as Aquinas as a masterpiece. What is more,Chesterton's command of his subject, the life and thought of thegreatest Medieval Scholastic, is universally recognized as the result not ofdiligent scholarly labor, but of intuition and intellectual sympathy.Quentin Lauer is typical in suggesting that Chesterton's modestknowledge of the vast corpus of St. Thomas's writings was no impedimentto writing a superb book: "What Chesterton foundand this says a greatdeal for the profundity of his own thinkingwas that, when he hadthought his way through to a highly metaphysical view of the totality ofreality, that view tumed out to resemble in highly significant ways that ofAquinas" (37). In other words, the brilliance of Chesterton's study of theCommon Doctor of the Church comes from a flash of insight ignited byan innate philosophical affinity.

Som e such account of the matter is, I think, essentially correct; never-theless, it is a curious view that merits more comment than it has received.Chesterton himself remarks that usually St. Thomas "was an eminentlypractical prose writer; some would say a very prosaic prose writer"(Aquinas 508); and he contrasts St. Thomas's style with that of St.Augustine, "who was, among other things, a wit. . . also a sort of prosepoet, with a power over words in their atmospheric and emotional aspect"(Aquinas 540). Surely, one wishes to say, Chesterton himself was "a wit"and "a sort of prose poe t" (as well as a gifted verse poet) and should havea greater affinity to St. Augustine than to St. Thomas. If the style of St.Thomas is marked, above all, by clarity and simplicity, then how is thevision embodied in that style shared by Chesterton? For the style of thelatter could well be taken as a species of twentieth-century baroque prose:the puns and paradoxes, the witty antithetical syntax marked by balancedrhythm and alliterationthese are features of one phase of elaboratebaroque rhetoric as described by Morris Croll (esp. 217) and GeorgeWilliamson (231-39). In order to make sense of this apparent antinomy, itis necessary to discem in Chesterton's wit an appropriate response to theessential simplicity of the Thomist apprehension of being. Once this


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RENASCENCEAs Raymond Dennehy points out, Chesterton moves to the heart ofThomist thought by confining himself to an exposition of only three

central tenets of the saint's philosophy:1) St. Thomas' affirmation of the goodness of creation against theManichean doctrine of its evilness, 2) his philosophical realism andconsequent defense of common sense, 3) the primacy of the doctrineof being in Thomistic philosophy. When you understand these threepoints, you have grasped the essence of St. Thomas's thought. (414)

These would seem to be three quite straightforward propositions, butfallen men are themselves, by definition, crooked and cannot easily seewhat is straight or proceed directly toward it. As John Donne says, thesimple tmth is often what is most difficult to perceive: "...mysteries / Arelike the Sunne, dazling yet plaine to'all eyes" (Satire III.87-88). Theinsistent paradoxes of Chesterton's account of St. Thomas, then,embodied in an arresting rhetoric of alliteration and balanced antitheticalphrases and clauses, seek only to shock us into an awareness of what issimplicity itself.Very often Chesterton himself points out that his apparentlyextravagant rhetoric looks peculiar because so many of us in the modernworld fail to see what is "plaine to'all eyes":

In a word. Saint Thomas was making Christendom more Christian bymaking it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox but a plain truism,which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant byan Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by aChristian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, ormost obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes thatdeity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered into the world ofthe senses. (437)

Chesterton adverts here to what Dennehy ca lls "St. Thom as's affirmationof the goodness of creation," especially as it is restored by the Incam ation.The S aint's Christian Aristotelianism "is not a para dox " precisely becausethe paradox of the Incarnation, though not "a plain truism," is still tme.Chesterton found his own full-blooded, romantic devotion to the physicalfact of the Word made flesh at the heart of a philosophy commonlythought to be abstract, arid, "scholastic" in the worst possible sense. Hemay have been surprised; he was certainly delighted to find in the Angelic


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YOUNGusage of terms like "mysticistn" and even "metaphysics" suggest thatthings have not much changed. It was on the issue of the Incamation, ofChrist's transfiguration of matter, that Chesterton saw in St. Thomas anally of St. Francis of Assisi: "Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical tosay that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom"(428). A paradox is an apparent contradiction that is, nevertheless, true."Spirituality" is the "dreadful doom" of those for whom the Cross of theIncam ate C hrist is a sign of contradiction.The phrase "too paradoxical" is plainly to be accompanied by animplicit wink, and it is precisely Chesterton's "too paradoxical" languagethat makes him an indispensable commentator on St. Thomas.Chesterton's paradoxes give a striking verbal form to the wit that he findslatent in the plain, sober discourse of Thomas's Scholastic method, andthe wit is the sparkling revelation of the wonder and vitality necessarilyinhering in a truly accurate account of God's creation. Here is St. Thomasclearly and exactly setting forth the inherent goodness of being:

Respondeo dicendum quod omne ens, inquantum est ens, est bonum.Omne enim ens, inquantum est ens, est in actu, et quodammodoperfectum: quia omnis actus perfectio quaedam est. Perfectum verohabet rationem appetibilis et boni, ut ex dictis patet. Unde sequituromne ens, inquantum huiusmodi, bonum esse. (1.5.3)[I reply by saying that every being, insofar as it is a being, is good.For every being, insofar as it is a being, is engaged in activity and isin some measure perfect: because every action is a certain kind ofperfection. But what is perfect possesses an aspect of the desirableand good, as is clear from what has been said. Whence it follows thatevery being, as such, is good.]

This style is careful, precise, almost cautious: the repetition of phrases inidentical order is a mark of the saint 's effort to deploy terms withunambiguous consis tency .Ch esterton und ertakes to reveal the vibrant sense of joy within thisframework of painstaking theological precision:Now nobody will begin to understand the Thomist philosophy, orindeed the Catholic philosophy, who does not realise that the primaryand fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise ofBeing, the praise of God as the Creator of the World. (483)


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the beauty and order of the universe. His profuse diversity of terms andproliferation of parallel and antithetical clauses and phrases reveal thatwithin the abstract discourse of Thomist theology is an affirmation of thenomial response of ordinary men and women to the world they knowthrough their senses.Chesterton also shows, however, that when a man thinks about theworld as patiently and rigorously as St. Thomas, inexorable conclusionsemerge that seem shocking to minds that routinely substitute cliches foractual thought. Thus St. Thomas, marshalling his usual precise terms andcareful distinctions, demonstrates that there can be no first principle ofevil as the counterpart to the first principle of good, because, while thefirst principle of good is essentially good, nothing can be essentially evil.He quotes Aristotle to the effect that something wholly evil would destroyitself (1.49.3). Chesterton expounds in bold, witty terms the surprisingimplications of this metaphysical proposition for the everyday moral lifeof human beings:

Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with goodintentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. Butit is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and goodthings, like the world and the flesh[,] have been twisted by a badintention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; theyremain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone wasmaterial; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirelyspiritual. (485)

The last few lines, in particular, display a typically baroque technique ofcreating rhetorical suspense: the deployment of curt, asyndetic clausesand phrases that culminate in an epigrammatic "tum" or "point." Here therhetorical surprise is once more the revelation of the comparativeinnocence of the "material" in relation to the "spiritual." While St.Thomas refutes the Manichees by proving that evil cannot be a realsubstance, Chesterton draws out the significance of this philosphicaldemonstration for everyday life by a feat of style. He skewers theManicheeism of the popular mind, with its unthinking assumption that thesource of evil is physicalthe body and its inclinationson the staccatorhetoric of a sententious but startling maxim: "The work of hell is entirelyspiritual." Chesterton thus adds an immediacy and urgency to St.Thomas's calm logic. Since evil cannot be a substance, it can have only


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YOUNGThe second Thomist principle that Dennehy specifies as central toChesterton's exposition is "his philosophical realism and consequentdefense of comm on sense" (414), and Chesterton himself proclaim s, "Th efact that Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter ofcomm on sense" (513). Some explanation of realism is required, however,if the commonness of St. Thomas's common sense is to be altogetherclear. In the context of medieval philosophy, "realism" refers to thedoctrine that universals have real being; that is, abstract concepts existsubstantially and independently just as we usually think of individualentities as existing. "Realism" in this sense thus derives from thephilosophic "idealism" of Plato, who maintained that a particular objectwas only a crude, imperfect imitation or representation of its "idea,"dwelling permanently and immutably in a transcendent ideal realm. Thebed you sleep on is, according to this view, only an imitation of the ideaof "bedn ess"; my w ife's collie only a shadowy im itation of "dogn ess" (oris it "coUieness"this is one of the problems with extreme realism).The medieval opposite of "realism" in this sense is "nominalism,"which developed with William of Occam and his followers in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is the belief that universals are

merely names with no real being or necessary relation to the world at all.These "names" are essentially arbitrary categories that human beings useto divide up the world for their own mental convenience. For example,"tree" is a term that we have chosen to apply to certain phenomena allhaving roots, trunks, branches, bark, and leaves. Not only is the concept"tree" not substantially real in the way the sycamore in my front yard isreal; there is not even any necessity for gathering all the phenomena thatwe happen to call "trees" into a distinct category. The great divide that wedraw between trees and herbaceous plants could just as easily be drawnbetween plants with white flowers and those with colored flowers. Whatof the distinction between plants and animals? you may ask. Or betweenliving and non-living things? Surely these distinctions are in somereasonable sense "in nature"? At this point the problem s with nominalismbegin to emerge. Nevertheless, it has persisted in various forms and underdifferent names in the materialism of Hobbes, the utilitarianism ofBentham and Mill, the pragmatism of William James, right down to ourown day. Contemporary deconstruction is perhaps the reductio adabsurdum of nominalism, insofar as it holds not only that universals donot exist, but that even particulars do not existor at least not for us,since we can only know them through words, which are themselves


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RENASCENCEthat tells ordinary men and women that my wife's collie, Tyler, holds anexistential priority over the form or idea of dogness, while assuring themthat there is nothing arbitrary about classifying Tyler along with Spot,Ruff, and Fido as dogs. Plato's idealism was, in some measure, a reactionto the materialism of so many of the pre-Socratics, which would reducereality to some physical principle: water, fire, atoms. St. Thomas followsAristotle's critique of Platonism: the integrity of the idea (or form oruniversal) is salvaged, but ideas are not allowed to assume a transcendentexistence of their own that reduces the physical world to shadowyinsignificance:

St. Thomas is thus quite clear on the fact that only concretesubstances, individual compositions of matter and form, actuallyexist in the material world. But though he is at one with Aristotle indenying the separate existence of universals. . . . he also followsAristotle inasserting that the form needs to he individuated. The formis the universal elem ent, heing that which places an ohject in its class,in its species, making it to he horse or elm or iron. . . . (Copleston327)In other words, only the individual horse is real , but it is real ly a horse .

N ow Sa in t Thomas ' s t r ea tment of such mat ters is genera l ly qui tetechnica l and des igned to answer objec t ions tha t were current in thethir teenth century rather than the twent ie th . As Coples ton po in t s out, wecannot expect to find "an ep i s temology in St. T h o m a s , in the sense of ajus t if icat ion of knowledge , p roof or at tempted proof of the objectivi ty ofk n o w l e d g e in the face of subjective idealism of one kind or ano the r" ;a l though he does al low that "the Thom is t p r inc ip le s " cou ld be deve lopedto fumish such a defense (388) . To Ches ter ton, however , St. T h o m a s ' sneglec t of the epis temologica l ques t ion is i tself the answer:

Thus even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomismin other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at allwith what many now think the main metaphysical question; whetherwe can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real.The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so manymodem sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a manmust either answer the question in the affirmative, or else never


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YOUNGcognition?" "Whether we can understand many things at the same time?""Whether our intellect understands by composition and division?"(L85 .3,4,5). Here is the conclusion to the central argumen t of Article 3 , inwhich St. Thomas sets out to prove that "the more universal is first in ourintellectual cognition:

Est ergo dicendum quod cognitio singularium est prior quoad nosquam cognitio universalium, sicut cognitio sensitiva quam cognitiointellectiva. Sed tam secundum sensum quam secundum intellectum,cognitio magis communis est prior quam cognitio minus communis.[It must therefore be said with regard to us that cognition ofparticulars is prior to cognition of universals, just as sensorycognition precedes intellectual cognition. But as in sense so inintellect, cognition of the more general is is prior to the less general.]

Following Aristotle, St. Thomas maintains that complete intellectualknow ledge m ust be knowledge of universal concep ts; that is, there can bea science of "the dog," but not of Fido. In the quoted passage he isdrawing a distinction between the temporal order in which we leam byfirst apprehending sensory particulars, and the logical order of actual,intellectual knowledge, in which we proceed from general to specificconcepts: we understand the dog before the collie.Chesterton seizes upon St. Thomas's Aristotelian commitment to thenecessary role of sensation in human knowledge to observe that theempiricism of Francis Baco n's New Organon is hardly so revolutionary asmany intellectual historians have claimed. "I have never understood whythere is supposed to be something crabbed or antique about a syllogism,"Chesterton writes; "still less can I understand what anybody means bytalking as if induction had somehow taken the place of deduction" (520).He is quite willing to concede that scientists have discovered an immensequantity of useful facts since the thirteenth century; however, theadmirable scientific advances that have resulted have required thederivation of premises from the facts and the development of deductivetheories based on these premises:

But many modem people talk as if what they call induction weresome magic way of reaching a conclusion, without using any of thosehorrid old syllogisms. But induction does not lead us to a conclusion.Induction only leads us to a deduction. (520)


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RENASCENCEcould be convinced by reasonable argument. "Indeed," he writes, "I thinkthere are fewer people now alive who understand argument than therewere twenty or thirty years ago; and St. Thom as m ight have preferred thesociety of atheists of the early nineteenth century, to that of the blanksceptics of the early twentieth" (499). By the 1930s the modem age wassufficiently decadent that a man with Chesterton's insight could alreadysee postmodernism on the horizon. The rationalist enemies of the Churchwere already folding their tents and drifting away in the darkness; anti-rationalism and antihumanism were mustering their legions. Chestertonrealized that the mentality of a Thomas Huxley was a minor annoyancecompared to the threat represented by the madness of a FriedrichNietzsche, and so the cmcial argument of Thomism was not one that hadbeen m ounted against any particular error but rather against the apotheosisof error as such.

And here Chesterton fmds his task. He shows in the most vividrhetoric he can manage, at once striking and homely, that the philosophyof St. Thomas, while it cannot save our souls, can save our reason, ourhuman identity and place in the world, our common sense:Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on theuniversal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian maysay that an egg is really a hen, because it is part of an endless processof Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only existas a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the causeof the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist maybelieve that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting thatthey were ever eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But nopupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately toaddle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking ateggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see anew simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylightof the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggsare not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but thingsattested by the Authority ofthe Senses, which is from God. (515)

Of course the ontological status of eggs as such is not very im portant, butChesterton realized that the man who cannot grasp the nature of eggs islikely to lose sight of the nature of other things, indeed of the idea ofnature itself It is almost as if Chesterton were looking ahead to Michel


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YOUNGHence the echoing of assonance and alliteration, the wordplay, andthe almost boisterous tone that Chesterton often deploys are not the mere

verbal display of a clever and self-indulgent rhetorician. These techniqueshighlight by means of witty style the ontological wit that Chesterton seesas a critical element in the philosophy of St. Thomas. For Chestertonresembles his baroque predecessors not only in the exuberance of hisstyle, but also in his conviction that genuine wit is not just a matter ofstyle. Rather, it involves an insight into the stm cture of reality. In Agudezay arte de ingenio (XV), Baltasar Gracian thus praises the wit of St.Thomas's conceit, in O sacrum convivium, that the eucharistic feast is"our pledge of future glory" ("Etfuturae gloriae nobis pignus datur"). Apledge, he points out, is always worth double the obligation incurred.How, then, can communion with Christ in the Eucharist be twice asworthy as the beatific vision of which it is the pledge (pignus)! In thebeatific vision, Gracian maintains, the divine presence is enjoyed withoutmerit; "however, in this sacramental fruition, [the soul] both enjoys andmerits; she always pledges more to God; it is a continual exchange; it isreward and merit together; and thus the eucharistic feast is rightly calleda sure and certain pledge of glory" (307-08). Similarly, Chesterton urgesthat beneath St. Thomas's prose there is "the elemental and primitivepoetry that shines through all his thoughts," and this poetry is "the intenserightness of his sense of the relation between the mind and the real thingoutside the mind" (541). The poetic wit of Chesterton's account of St.Thom as is, then, an attempt to render justice to the "w it" and "poe try" thatpervade his vision of the world; that is, to "the primacy of the doctrine ofbeing in Thomistic philosophy"the third of the three points thatDennehy sees Chesterton expounding. "There is no doubt about the beingof being," Chesterton maintains, "even if it does sometimes look likebecoming; that is because what we see is not the fullness of being; or (tocontinue a sort of colloquial slang) we never see being being as much asit can" (530). The reason we do not see the fullness of being is that beingis only complete in God, whose essence, St. Thomas argues, is the sameas His nature (1.3.3) and also as his existence or being (esse1.3.4).Chesterton not only puts this in striking term s; he also spells out its imp li-cations for our world of becoming: "But the fullness of being iseverything that it can be; and without it the lesser or approximate formsof being cannot be explained as anything; unless they are explained awayas nothing" (530).Chesterton thus anticipates the musings of Jacques Derrida, who,


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RENASCENCE'meaning,' has never been thought or said as such, except by dissimu-lating itself in beings, then differance, in a certain and very strange way,(is) 'old er' than the ontological difference or than the tmth of Bein g" (22).Derrida is most insistent on deconstmcting the concept of the etemalpresence of the Logos ("meaning") that informs the Judaeo-Christianvision of God:

Therefore it is the determination of Being as presence or as beingnessthat is interrogated by the thought of differance. Such a questioncould not emerge and be understood unless the difference betweenBeing and beings were somewhere to be broached. Firstconsequence: differance is not. It is not a present being, howeverexcellent, unique, principal, or transcendent. It govems nothing,reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is notannounced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom ofdifferance, but differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom.(21-22)The unity and simplicity of divine being are here denied, but that humanmeaning and purpose are lost along with God does not seem an excessiveprice to the postmodemist.Substitute differance for "change" and "mutability" in the followingpassage, and the continuing relevance of Chesterton's interpretation of St.Thomas Aquinas will be completely manifest:

Most thinkers, on realising the apparent mutability of being, havereally forgotten their own realisation of being, and believed only inthe mutability. They cannot even say that a thing changes into anotherthing; for them there is no instant in the process at which it is a thingat all. It is only a change. It would be more logical to call it nothingchanging into nothing, than to say (on these principles) that there everwas or will be a moment when the thing is itself. (530-31)The "logic" of deconstmction, which underlies even those varieties ofpostmodemism that ostensibly repudiate it, is the remorseless denial thatanything ever is or could be itself: there is not identity, not even anydifferences (something has to be the same for a difference to beconceivable), only differance.The genius of Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas lies in his unerring


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YOUNGwho is" ("Qui esse") is the most appropriate nam e of God, finally, because"it signifies to be in the present: and this is most fittingly said of God,whose being has not known past or future" (1.13.11: "Significat enim essein praesenti: et hoc maxime de Deo dicitur, cuius esse non novitpraeteritum velfuturum"). Chesterton had the gift of putting the ultimateconsequences of such abstract propositions in unforgettably concreteterms: "eggs are eggs." As a result he composed the antidote to themalaise that we now suffer more than sixty years ago.

Works CitedChesterton, G. K. St. T homas Aquinas. 1933. Rpt. in C. K. Chesterton. Collected Works.Vol. II. San Francisco : Ignatius, 1986.Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy. 1950. Rpt.New York: Doubleday, 1993.Croll, Morris W. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm Essays hy Morris Croll. Ed. J. Max Patricket al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966.Dennehy, Raymond. "Introduction" to St. Thom as Aquinas. In G.K. Chesterton. CollectedWorks. Vol. II. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986. 413 -17.Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1982.Donne, John. The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Ed. John T. Shawcross. Garden City,NY: Doubleday, 1967.Foucault, Michel. The O rder of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970.Rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.Gracian, Baltasar. Obras com pletas. 3rd ed. Ed. Arturo del Hoyo. Madrid: Aguilar, 1967.Lauer, Quentin. G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio. New Y ork: Fordham UP,1988.Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Cura Eratrum eiusdem Ordinis. 3rd ed. 5 vols.Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961.Williamson, George. The Senecan Amble: P rose Eormfrom Bacon to Collier. Chicago: Uof Chicago P, 1951.


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Chesterton's Thomist Ontology

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