The Free Thinker

Book Review: St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dumb Ox, by G.K. Chesterton

Hagiography, or lives of the saints, is an underrated genre, or perhaps, rather, a genre for the niche audience of those who want to improve the way they lead their own lives by emulating certain figures of the past who were (are) eminent, not (merely) for their worldly success or historical accidents, but specifically for their practice of virtue and (a more difficult trait to define, and whose relationship to their will I understand less well) their holiness.  A common flaw in lives of the saints is that the accounts are terse and stylized, and, worse, pious in a sense of the word which means, among other things, inauthentic.  To be fair, since hagiography is, in part, history, it would not be appropriate to invent the personal details of thought and feeling which "bring" fictional characters "to life."  Despite these limitations, G.K. Chesterton manages to write a book which is vivid and engaging.  He does so, of course, through his inimitable blend of paradox and pun, humor and hyperbole, eagerly romantic historical imagination and pugnacious presentism.  One is never sure whether to call him erudite or not: he always professes humility (about himself; most emphatically not about the positions he takes!) and one feels that scholars in the fields he touches on-- and what doesn't he touch on! for his books dash dauntlessly from political and social history into art into philosophy, even into economics-- would not regard him as quite respectable.  And yet it would take a great deal of knowledge and study to write books as sweeping as Chesterton's, and one may learn a lot from them, though of course one must always regard his enthusiasms with due skepticism.

In short, I'm grateful for Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dumb Ox, and I wish I could find more books like it.  For an incorrigible scribbler and aspiring scholar like myself it is gratifying to discover such an intellectual saint, one for whom the pleasures of intellectual inquiry and debate turned out to be, not a temptation or a distraction, nor even an irrelevancy, but part of the essence of his sainthood.  I was most impressed by the character rather than the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.  I was duly inspired by certain episodes, such as: (a) when Thomas Aquinas, a high-ranking Italian nobleman, horrifies his family by joining, not the traditional monastic orders, but the friars, the new religio-social movement pioneered by St. Dominic and St. Francis, mendicant orders of men who embraced holy poverty and were supposed to lead lives of begging, and is kidnapped and imprisoned by his brothers who want to force him back, and (b) when, attending a large and magnificent banquet with St. Louis, the king of France, Thomas Aquinas suddenly pounded the table and shouted "And that will settle the Manichees!"  It makes me think: how could such a life be imitated today?  As far as worldly position is concerned, where is the best place for a good man to make his stand, or rather (since heroic crises typically punctuate lifelong commitment), to take up his post?  And what questions in our day are of such transcendental and urgent importance that, if one's meandering mind stumbles onto an important line of argument about them, they are worthy of full attention, even in the midst of a royal banquet?

Christ and the Grand Inquisitor (Washington Post, Christmas Eve, 2007)

The boldest meditation on the meaning of Jesus comes in the tale of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," in which Jesus is interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor. The crime of Jesus consists precisely in the affection that so many otherwise ignoble humans have for him.

How dare Jesus inspire such widespread trust? A relatively small number "of the great and the strong," the Inquisitor argues, can carry the burden of freedom, "while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee" cannot bear freedom's weight. Only an elite minority is worthy to manage the world. The rest, taken up with narrow concerns for bread and money, and consoled by miracles and mysteries, must live for subservience. The masses are to blindly meet their meager needs, while bowing before the authority of those few who are capable of higher aspirations.

The crime of Jesus was to say no to this. Dostoevsky sees in him an invitation addressed to every person, to regard himself or herself as capable of overcoming the limits of birth, circumstance, class, culture, and even time. That the Grand Inquisitor, an official in the movement that claims Jesus as founder, regards this invitation as an offense is Dostoevsky's way of pointing to the transcendent significance of Jesus, beyond Christian belief.

Indeed, the Jesus who rejects slavish authority for himself and others is the living critique of any institution, the church included, that asks less of humans, instead of more. It is in this universal call to self-surpassing that the radical appeal of Jesus can be found.

Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is reviled as a malign figure, but he was laden with good intentions. He simply valued humanity as is, for all that keeps it earthbound. Jesus loved humanity for what it might become. There is more to life than bread, money, and the satisfaction of meager needs. Indeed, satisfaction and aspiration are mutually exclusive.

The Inquisitor was right to see the threat in such a difference, for restlessness and even rebellion are built into the hope for something higher. When the followers of Jesus could not "let go of their affection for him," and then when masses of ordinary people felt ennobled by their connection to him, the authority of institutions, from empire to church, would never again be paramount.

That is why, finally, the Grand Inquisitor pronounced his verdict; "Tomorrow, I shall burn Thee. Dixi." Christ said nothing in reply.

One of the brilliant things about Dostoyevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" is that it is simultaneously a condemnation of the totalitarianism of the medieval and early modern Catholic Church, and also seems to be a prophecy of the looming totalitarianism of the socialist revolution.  Christ is on the side of freedom.

G.K. Chesterton on Democracy and Modernity

Chesterton, to quote again from Orthodoxy, links democracy and tradition as follows:

I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men...

And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common...  In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -- the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed...

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

All that seems sensible, but then what are we to make of the manner in which Chesterton perpetually attacks "the modern world?"  For to attack modernity is to attack tradition.  The labors, intellectual, political, technological, military, etc., of a hundred generations contributed to the heritage which we may call tradition, or, alternatively, modernity. 

If the phrase "modern" in Chesterton carries anything like its usual historiographical meaning, it includes everything since the 16th or 17th century.  So if Chesterton wishes us to respect the opinions of our fathers, well, our fathers were certainly moderns, so we will give short shrift to any attempt to comprehensively discard "modern" views.  And if Chesterton wants to appeal to the values of democracy and liberalism, he had better not attack modernity, for everyone knows-- this is as clear to the common people as to intellectual "aristocrats"-- that those values are peculiarly modern, and would have been regarded with suspicion in, say, the Middle Ages.

Perhaps that's not what Chesterton meant.  When he alludes to particular modern thinkers they are almost all his immediate contemporaries: Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, etc.  If by "modern" Chesterton only referred to the thought of his immediate contemporaries (he was writing in 1908), then he was right to lambast "the modern world," in his sense, for the times he was living in were full of pernicious ideas which would cause terrible calamities, and of foolish cynicism which would weaken the will of the better sort to resist.  In that case, it would be a mistake for someone reading Chesterton today to think that "the modern world" refers to the-world-in-2007, or even to the-world-in-1908-and-ever-since.  To attempt such a reading would make nonsense of Chesterton's argument, or at least of this part of it.

Malpractice in Fiction: That Hideous Strength

While re-reading That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, the word malpractice occurred to me.  Some word stronger than "flawed" is needed to describe what is wrong with this book.  Malpractice has the right connotations.  It suggests not a mere lack of skill, but a willful abuse of skill.  By its reference to professions such as medicine, it suggests that fiction is something more important than a form of amusement for one's leisure time: it is at once a sort of research, and a treatment applied to the soul and the will.  Narrative illustrates the virtues, but it can also be a vehicle of general philosophical thought.  Indeed, this can greatly enhance fiction, for two reasons: (a) the dialog genre in philosophy is especially interesting when the interlocutors are characters whom the reader has been induced to care about in a broader story, and (b) the characters' lives and actions can serve to illustrate how a person behaves who believes what they do.  The author may try to convince us of the falseness of a philosophy by showing how his beliefs makes a character's life empty, or his behavior foolish or wicked.  This is a valid method, I think, because our actions are certainly affected by our beliefs, and I think there is a truth in our inarticulate senses of meaning in life and of right and wrong that a worldview without room for these must be mistaken.  It is a dangerous method, however, because it allows for a type of ad hominem attack.  Look what characters who believe X do!  Belief X is bad!

In That Hideous Strength, there is a confrontation between two sides.  The bad guys represent C.S. Lewis's philosphical bugbears: a combination of materialism with a sort of postmodern blend of occultism, sociology, and a Nietzschean rejection of ethics; they conduct themselves like gangsters and are conspiring to seize total power in England. Experience shows that atheists in materialist countries don't really behave this way.  What do the good guys represent?  Christianity, but also a sort of paganism, for in this book, "the gods" of Greek mythology really inhabit the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc., and bear their names (though also other names).  In War and Peace, Tolstoy uses his narrative to launch into a philosophy of history which is interesting but probably has little truth.  At least, though, Tolstoy seems genuinely to have believed what he was writing.  D.H. Lawrence, too, fills his novels with a philosophy of life that is probably thoroughly false (I haven't read him in a while; perhaps there was something in it) but was at least sincere.  But C.S. Lewis knew that the theological cosmology of That Hideous Strength was quite false.  Fiction, like examples in economics and philosophy, uses false suppositions-- imaginary characters and situations-- to illustrate true principles.  What are we to make of a novel in which the false suppositions grow into entire philosophies of the universe?  How are we to distinguish the true principles we are supposed to take away from the falsehoods that are being written?

C.S. Lewis should have known better than to present a book like That Hideous Strength to the public.  Yet the book also has great merits.  Nowhere is C.S. Lewis's unique brand of moral-psychological character insight better honed than in certain passages of That Hideous Strength.  There are some good philosophical passages (sadly embedded in a false framework), and some wonderful passages of prose-poetry.  The book treats the theme of marriage thoroughly and well.  I wonder how much of the book could be profitably excerpted.  To read it is a bit like sifting through a garbage bin for diamonds that someone has dumped there.  At the same time, the book is a decent suspense thriller: once I start listening, it's difficult to stop until the end.

UPDATE: The "sifting through garbage" metaphor is too harsh, sorry.  I should say that page by page, That Hideous Strength is often sublime, often funny, often wise, almost always interesting.  But the whole is not merely less than the sum of its parts, but distorts them into an overall worldview that the reader is compelled to reject.

Book Review: Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

In Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, the penniless last scion of an ancient noble family, arrives in St. Petersburg by train from Switzerland, where he was treated for a mental illness that remains somewhat mysterious.  Prince Myshkin is meant to be a Don Quixote figure, as Dostoyevsky openly hints a few times during the book.  The novel attempts to be a devastating indictment of Russian high society at that time by showing that a perfectly good man could not survive in it and would be driven to madness; but the attempt is hardly successful.  In the brilliant Part I, which is self-contained enough that it could almost be a short story on its own, Dostoyevsky seems to be on his way to success.  Alongside the shiningly innocent Myshkin in Part I is the "lost woman," Nastasya Filippovna, an orphan from the provinces, raised for a time with the family of an aristocrat's steward until the aristocrat seduces her, after which she comes to St. Petersburg and blackmails him into letting her live in luxury... a striking, desperate character, to whom Myshkin is immediately drawn out of compassion.  But after Part I, Nastasya Filippovna's tormenting of Myshkin and another suitor makes it very hard to regard her sympathetically.  And Myshkin, too, becomes less impressive: his ongoing compassion for Nastasya Filippovna, for example, becomes a grotesque indulgence.

One of the best features of the later Parts of the book is that it's incongruously comic.  The extravagant sycophant Lebedyev, and General Ivolgin, an old man with a habit of romancing (lying) about his own past, are hilarious characters, and the Epanchins-- the respectable family who are at the heart of the society that Myshkin falls in with-- and even Myshkin are sometimes quite funny.  The most original character is Ippolit, a sickly young man who is dying of consumption and manages to take advantage of this fact to be by turns charming and repugnant, but almost always unexpected.  Dostoyevsky also writes some amusing satirical commentary on contemporary Russia and nature, in the author's voice rather than through the characters.  In a book meant to echo Don Quixote, perhaps humor is appropriate?  But then why does the book have to end with a gruesome and gratuitous, if not indeed implausible, murder?  If you know, or anticipate, that it will end like that, you can't wholeheartedly enjoy the humor; if you don't, and you start to think you're reading a hilarious satire, the ending will feel like a nasty shock and a sort of betrayal.

All in all, The Idiot is not a particularly successful book, though there are enjoyable parts and many signs of talent in it.  Certainly it's not the equal of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov.  Dostoyevsky doesn't succeed in executing his own concept for the book convincingly, and while the book sometimes seems to be evolving into something else, Dostoyevsky ensures that this evolution remains abortive by attempting to force it back to his original theme.

Thomas Nagel on Philosophy of Mind

In the field of philosophy of mind, Thomas Nagel is an oasis in the desert, who refuses to let the desire to astound the world with big, comprehensive explanations override his epistemic scruples.  The following quote, from his 1986 book The View from Nowhere, is an excellent statement of a position that harmonizes with the one I've been arguing for in the long philosophy-of-mind debate with Nato and others:

Powerful as it has proven to be, this bleached-out physical conception of objectivity encounters difficulties if it is put forward as the method for seeking a complete understanding of reality.  For the process began when we noticed that how things appear to us depends on the interaction of our bodies with the rest of the world.  But this leaves us with no account of the perceptions and specific viewpoints which were left behind as irrelevant to physics but which seem to exist nonetheless, along with those of other creatures-- not to mention the mental activity of forming an objective conception of the physical world, which seems not itself capable of physical analysis.