I
already have a Chesterton entry, under the title People’s Capitalism (posted
on this blog on April 8th, 2012) in the Contradiction section,
where it is well placed. But, considering that Chesterton’s credentials as an important
utopian are firmly established, I cannot deny him his rightful entry in this
section, even though it may be somewhat repetitive. To get this repetitiveness
out of the way, I will simply quote the next two paragraphs from my Contradiction
entry, as it would be kind of disingenuous to try to rephrase the same
thing, just as a pretense to novelty:
Gilbert Keith Chesterton is well known and loved, as a
delightfully original writer, heavily influenced by his Christian religiosity
and love for the paradox. George Bernard Shaw called him “a man of colossal genius,” and in this case he was not saying it
for fun. Chesterton was a consummate philosophizer, spiritually akin to the
Russian intelligent. He saw himself as an “orthodox” Christian,
in the sense that would be best conveyed by the word ‘consistent.’
Finding more orthodoxy in
Catholicism, he became a convert to it from the original Anglicanism, into
which he was born.
As befits any consistent Christian he questioned the
morality of capitalism and found it lacking. But he was not satisfied with the
morality of socialism either, seeing that under socialism the State becomes a
capitalist of sorts, whereas the people lose out just as much as under
capitalism. “Too much
capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” he famously quipped, and
according to his thinking, socialism was reducing their number to just one.
My
principal interest here is in Chesterton’s brand of wishful thinking, which was
undoubtedly influenced by his spiritual transition from a preoccupation with
the occult to sincere and reverent Christianity. There is no better way to
capsulate Chesterton’s idealism than by quoting a passage from his book Heretics,
where he has this to say for himself, in opposition to the opinions sprouted
by Oscar Wilde:
“…The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was
taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is
the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of
happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds
while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.”
(Looking
for his beloved Beatrice, Dante found not only his love, but also that great White Rose of Paradise that Chesterton is referring to, here.)
It
has been a pleasure for me to return to Chesterton, and I will leave the
reader with a recommendation to savor that last quoted passage for a while
longer.
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