Guest post by Kieran
In the latest Atlantic magazine there is a previously unpublished article by Christopher Hitchens. As far as I know, the book due out this year, Mortality, is composed of previously published essays. Last month Vanity Fair published a piece on Dickens so the piece in The Atlantic represents the very last piece he wrote.
It’s a book review of two tomes on G.K. Chesterton; one an edited collection of his work and one a biography by Ian Ker. The Hitchens article is available here.
Hitchens is a devout sceptic when it comes to GKC. Incredulity is his response to Ker’s attempt to build up the reputation of GKC:
[F]or him to show that his hero was the protagonist of a superior form of English democratic virtue, Ker would have to meet me where we are at agreement: on the high quality of Chesterton’s poems. It’s at exactly this sublime point, though, that he comes undone.
The poem that begins Hitchens’s analysis is Lepanto, Chesterton’s commemoration of the naval battle of 1571, a European effort to resist an Ottoman naval invasion of Europe. The Turkish Armada was only resisted by a Catholic Alliance, symbolically headed by the Pope, cobbled together by the navies of Genoa and Venice.
Now it entirely impossible to understand Chesterton unless you also consider his friend and ideological soul-mate Hilaire Belloc. These twin apologists for Catholicism were considered so disturbing by George Bernard Shaw that he conceived of a monster named the ChesterBelloc. Both considered that the Reformation had been a disaster for Europe, above all in the sense of its unity. Indeed this the theme of the poem which stressed the ability of Catholic Europe to make common cause to foil an Ottoman invasion of Europe, contrasting this with the Protestant nations who refused to get involved. Belloc actually argued that the reformation replaced genuine Christianity with the worship of the state, the inevitable precursor of militarism. This virus was at its worst in northern Protestant Europe, where it had created Europe’s two most warlike states: England (or Britain) and Germany, all this leading inevitably to the catastrophic wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.
(If this sounds like it is inevitably leading to the subject of European unity and the EU I would suggest you study the Schuman Declaration [1950], the founding document of the EU. This joined the coal and steel industries of France and Germany in an indissoluble union, to make it materially impossible for the two nations to go to war ever again. The only trouble with this, however, is that it contains no provisions for the eventuality of war breaking out between Europe and an external power. For instance, what happens if war breaks out between Europe and Iran? It’s a bit like barricading your front door against burglars when they might be actually breaking in through the back door.)
Getting back to the poem, Hitchens seems to believe it has a universal narrative which extends across the centuries:
[T]he finer aspects of Christendom detach themselves from the frigid dogmas of the Reformation, and reproclaim the magnificence of the Crusades.
This leads onto the notorious accusation that GKC equivocated when it came to condemning the 20th Century’s gravest evil. He belonged to:
some rather strict Catholic intellectuals: intellectuals who were later to get themselves on the wrong side of Europe’s most important quarrel by being shady on the question of Fascism.
The evidence for this, exhibit A, is to be found in the following lines from the poem The Secret People:
Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
But the squire seemed stuck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain.
He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
This is what leads Hitchens to christen GKC as “The Reactionary,” the title of the piece. Hitchens considers that GKC was a Conservative, which is rather strange because Chesterton considered himself a Liberal. Perhaps he is simply attaching to much importance to labels. It should be remembered that Belloc ran for and won, seats in Parliament twice, once on a Liberal and once on an independent ticket. All this is rather strange coming from someone who welcomed labels as varied as Trotskyite and Neo-Con.
In fact, the major political philosophy Chesterton’s name is associated with is “Distributism,” which envisioned a Britain of small holdings and small businesses, breaking the stranglehold of monopoly capitalism. It had a lot in common with the economic system envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as the ideal future for the American Republic: a nation of small self-reliant farms. However Chestertons’ political philosophy was far from universally benign. Relates Hitchens:
[H]e traveled to Rome and saw Mussolini and formed the verdict that while Fascism could be criticized as hypocritical to the point of flagrance, the same could surely be said of liberal democracy.
A liberal democracy, at any rate in the British sense, might be described as country that had exchanged the divine right of kings for the divine right of majorities. It was always doubtful whether someone as religious as Chesterton could accept “the divine right of majorities.” Here the idea of a constitution must be invoked for, as Thomas Paine correctly perceived, a constitution was what governed a government.
Indeed, this is the direction in which Hitchens steers the argument; The American Constitution and the moral grandeur of the First Amendment. Any nation whose Congress is forbidden from passing a law respecting the establishment of religion occupies a moral high ground in his view. Chesterton, Hitchens argues, was trying to establish a monopoly of thought via the Catholic Church, an organisation which did all the official thinking. One wonders what would Chesterton or indeed Hitchens thought about the Second Vatican Council, which abolished the Index of Forbidden Books.
The subject of Chesterton’s fiction is briefly touched on. The Man Who Was Thursday, a tightly plotted thriller with an intriguing metaphysical/surreal ending, an example really of Chesterton ending, rather than beginning with a paradox. Hitchens credits it as being an influence on Kafka. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is less successful, largely because it is a novel which celebrates war, regardless of the causes in which wars are fought. Indeed as a novel it is redolent of the sort of attitudes which led to the First World War. Kingsley Amis described The Man Who Was Thursday as the most thrilling book he had ever read. But Amis was capable of seeing the appalling abuses of power the Catholic Church was capable of, a point he illustrated in his novel The Alteration. By contrast, both Chesterton and Belloc were so in love with what they regarded as the perfect theology of the Catholic Church that they were incapable of seeing its very real flaws as an organisation.
Chesterton made statements about “the Jews” that can still provoke a wince. He regarded their history as a series of remarkable “wanderings of which the world has not seen the end.” Hitchens regards GKC as someone who thought:
Jews were a foreign nation and should have a state of their own. GKC was more of a Christian Zionist than an anti-Semite, let alone an exterminationist or eliminationist one.
The quotation from Lepanto, with its “cringing Jew,” definitely provokes a wince. Chesterton managed to evolve some bizarre views on German nationalism in both world wars. In the first he considered Germany to be synonymous with 19th century Prussia and its Protestant ethos. In the second he wrote that Norse gods such as Thor were usurping the place of Christianity. According to Hitchens, he also believed that the theory of a “master race” was, in fact, derived from Judaism’s “chosen race” (a sentiment also voiced by a character in a play by George Steiner, incidentally). Hitchens comes to the following conclusion:
The verdict one must pass on GKC, then, is that when he was charming, he was also deeply unserious and frivolous (as with the pub revolution to set off the Distributist revolution); when he was apparently serious, he was really quite sinister (as in calling Nazism a form of Protestant heresy and Jews a species of conspicuous foreigner in England)…
As regards the pub revolution, is Hitchens here referring to the novel The Flying Inn which envisions a Britain of the future, ruled by Sharia Law? The revolt is begun by a man who rolls a barrel of rum round the country, offering people a drink (strange to think that Hitchens might have missed the point of a novel largely dedicated to the pleasures of booze). But on a more serious note, I think you have to question the assertion that Chesterton’s fellow Distributists all equivocated when it came to condemning Nazism. Belloc wrote a book called The Catholic and the War and I include a quotation from it here:
The Third Reich has treated its Jewish subjects with a contempt for Justice which even if there had been no other action of the kind in other departments would be a sufficient warranty for determining its elimination from Europe… Cruelty to a Jew is as odious as cruelty to any human being, whether that cruelty be moral in the form of insult, or physical… You may hear men saying on every side, ‘However, there is one thing I do agree with and that is the way they (The Nazis) have settled the Jews’. Now that attitude is directly immoral. The more danger there is that it will grow the more necessity there is for denouncing it. The action of the enemy toward the Jewish race has been in morals intolerable. Contracts have been broken on all sides, careers destroyed by the hundred and the thousand, individuals have been treated with the most hideous and disgusting cruelty… If no price is paid for such excesses, our civilisation will certainly suffer and suffer permanently. If the men who have committed them go unpunished (and only defeat in war can punish them) then the decline of Europe, already advanced, will proceed to catastrophe. [pages 29ff.]
I have referred above to a mild rebuke Chesterton slung in the direction of Nazism. He rejected a society whose mythology was to be paganised and de-Christianised. Here I have to admit that my knowledge of Chesterton has its limits and that my extensive readings have not uncovered a condemnation of Nazism as forthright as that of Belloc’s. To fully redeem Chesterton’s reputation I would have to find a quotation analogous to Belloc’s, something I have yet to find.
