by Chris Alexion, Copyright May 27, 2006, all rights reserved. 349 views
For all Chesterton's wit and brilliance–perhaps no one could match his descriptive genius–the man had his flaws. One particular black dog of his left its muddy pawprints over various points of his work, especially his fiction. I mean Chesterton's total inability to extend any sort of fairness to Calvinism. GKC's continually bitter and unreasonable quibbles went beyond mere, even hearty, theological disagreement. And the unfortunate remarks that pepper his pages are really not worthy of the man.
I'm not going to catalog these literary put-downs, but several of them come to mind readily enough. He mentions, for instance, that the old "puritanical nursery tales" are "immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because Puritanism is wrong." GKC labels his opponents' views as a "mental sickness," though he allows that it "is too human or too mortal a sickness to be called solely a superstition." How kind.
The Father Brown stories are fertile sources of this kind of anti-Calvinist sentiment. Says Brown of one character: "His Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven. Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." And Reformed theology is apparently morbid as well as cocky: One character's optimism "made it hard to believe, somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a dram-drinker or a Calvinist."
And yet this is where Chesterton is blindest to the tendencies of his own Catholicism. How, we might ask, does Calvinism pander to the pride of man, when it so heartily exalts the free, unmerited, grace of God in saving him from utter spiritual helplessness? Rome, on the other hand, insists that, while man fell, he didn't fall all that far; he just slipped back to a state of neutrality. Man without God is dead, but, like something out of a Monty Python sketch, he's "not completely dead. Though he's not at all well."
And Calvinism is morbid? Again, you might at first be tempted to look for morbidity in a religion in which the crucifix is emphasized to the point of obscuring the Resurrection. Or a faith that reserves special status for those who seek seclusion in order to mortify their flesh. Or one that requires members to confess sins regularly to an earthly mediator. Chesterton seems unaware of the robust, life-affirming, transformational nature of Reformed piety.
But a second thought reminds me that that's not entirely GKC's fault. Over the centuries, Protestants–Reformed and non-Reformed alike–have done a good job of obscuring the poetic, even romantic, vitality of Calvinism. Modernity has made its inroads, and today we pay the price. To his credit, Chesterton revolted against this modernistic trend, showing, in some queer paradox, that he could be more Reformed than the Calvinists. And as David Henreckson writes, "[W]e can read into Chesterton's poeticism and love of life our own theology. We can enjoy his work in a way complementary to him, and enriching to our theology. We could use a good heaping dose of Chesterton. And if we can swallow our pride and then take the medicine, we will be a healthier church."
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