The Mind of Chesterton -Christopher Hollis

- But this book.

- About the Author (Wikipedia)

- Chesterton Wikipedia page. 


   "It is curious that Saint Thomas should be saddled with the responsibility for those purely mechanical and demonstrative proofs of the existence of God i which modern metaphysicians from Kant onwards have been so ready to point out the insufficiences. It is of course true that you cannot demonstrate the existence of God by the mere assertion that it is a condition of thought to believe that everything must have a cause. What then, ask the objectors, can be the cause of God? Such questions may be of force against many of the later, debased scholastics, concerned only to produce the mechanical demonstration and to leave the lecture before a hearer can confront them with a question. They are of no force against Saint Thomas who showed himself as fully aware of such difficulties as any modern skeptic. As Chesterton shows, far from saying that the existence of a creating God was absolutely demonstrable he confessed that, were it not for revelation, he knew of no reason to prefer the belief that the universe was created by God to the belief that it had always existed.  But even supposing that it had always existed there must still, he argued, have been in it some inhabiting and creating spirit directing the developing forms which its objects took, and this, in any event true, is yet the more clearly true if, as we are now told, this universe is an expanding universe. Whence comes the expansion?  Matter clearly cannot be the creator of mind. The ultimate direction must be with a Mens Creatrix.
   Yet among the creatures of the universe Man is so obviously different in kind from any others, and has so much more obviously a moral nature that it is according to reason and not contrary to it to imagine that he has some share in the divine nature as other creatures do not possess. Christian teaching describes this share by saying that Man was made in the image of God and that God in the person of Christ became Man. The fact that these claims, if true, explains the universe as nothing else can explain it, does not in itself prove them to be true as matters of history. The Christian before he accepts his faith is under obligation to examine the evidence of Christ's life and to decide from it whether there is any other explanation that can account for the facts. In the same way, if there is nothing beyond this life or if the future is only the future of Buddha's Sorrowful Wheel, then this life in which we have such obstinate certainties of the value of virtue and of happiness as the end of man, and in which so often virtue does not lead to happiness, does not make sense.
   The nihilistic view which says that it does not make sense is tenable. The humanistic view which professes to find in this life alone a sufficiency is hardly in that form tenable. This world needs another world to make it sensible. That again does not in itself prove that the Christian promises are true. But it does prove that Christian explanations are the only explanations that give coherence to the story. The alternative is to accept that there is no explanation. It at least shows that reason is on the side of orthodoxy and that those who reject orthodoxy have to abandon themselves to a confessed relapse into unreason. This belief that the christian doctrine, and it alone, was the doctrine of reason was of course Chesterton's own belief and he was in no difficulty in showing that the subsequent revolts of Luther were revolts of unreason against reason. With saint Francis the Catholic religion, having purged itself and come of age, dared to annex to itself the delights of nature. With Saint Thomas the Catholic religion, having purged itself, dared to annex to itself the delights of reason. The lessons that Chesterton learned from saint Thomas were not, as we can see, for the most part new lessons. He had already in his youth and years before fought out for himself at the Slade School his battles against solipsism and nihilism and the nameless forces of perversion and had already about the time of The Man Who Was Thursday won for himself unaided the victory. Saint Thomas was to him not so much a new teacher as a confirmation. Just as the greatest of the pre-Christian thinkers had already for themselves come to the conclusion that the universe as we know it must of its nature be unfinished and that some further revelation was necessary if things were to make sense, so on this smaller plane Chesterton had already for himself reached the conclusion that existence had its meaning, and that at the end of his life Saint Thomas came to confirm him with his assurance that he was right."    (258-60)