R. V.

Young

CHESTERTON'S PARADOXES AND THOMIST ONTOLOGY

N overwhelming consensus of critics and scholars regard G. K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas as a masterpiece. What is more, Chesterton's command of his subject, the life and thought of the greatest Medieval Scholastic, is universally recognized as the result not of diligent scholarly labor, but of intuition and intellectual sympathy. Quentin Lauer is typical in suggesting that Chesterton's modest knowledge of the vast corpus of St. Thomas's writings was no impediment to writing a superb book: "What Chesterton foundand this says a great deal for the profundity of his own thinkingwas that, when he had thought his way through to a highly metaphysical view of the totality of reality, that view tumed out to resemble in highly significant ways that of Aquinas" (37). In other words, the brilliance of Chesterton's study of the Common Doctor of the Church comes from a flash of insight ignited by an innate philosophical affinity. Some such account of the matter is, I think, essentially correct; nevertheless, it is a curious view that merits more comment than it has received. Chesterton himself remarks that usually St. Thomas "was an eminently practical prose writer; some would say a very prosaic prose writer" (Aquinas 508); and he contrasts St. Thomas's style with that of St. Augustine, "who was, among other things, a wit. . . also a sort of prose poet, with a power over words in their atmospheric and emotional aspect" (Aquinas 540). Surely, one wishes to say, Chesterton himself was "a wit" and "a sort of prose poet" (as well as a gifted verse poet) and should have a greater affinity to St. Augustine than to St. Thomas. If the style of St. Thomas is marked, above all, by clarity and simplicity, then how is the vision embodied in that style shared by Chesterton? For the style of the latter could well be taken as a species of twentieth-century baroque prose: the puns and paradoxes, the witty antithetical syntax marked by balanced rhythm and alliterationthese are features of one phase of elaborate baroque rhetoric as described by Morris Croll (esp. 217) and George Williamson (231-39). In order to make sense of this apparent antinomy, it is necessary to discem in Chesterton's wit an appropriate response to the essential simplicity of the Thomist apprehension of being. Once this connection is made, the distinctive bond between the saint's luminous metaphysical insight and joumalist's sparkling wordplay emerges. The benefit is an enhanced sense of what is perennial about the perennial philosophy, and of why Chesterton is so effective in presenting it.
REN 49.1 (Fall 1996)

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RENASCENCE As Raymond Dennehy points out, Chesterton moves to the heart of Thomist thought by confining himself to an exposition of only three central tenets of the saint's philosophy: 1) St. Thomas' affirmation of the goodness of creation against the Manichean doctrine of its evilness, 2) his philosophical realism and consequent defense of common sense, 3) the primacy of the doctrine of being in Thomistic philosophy. When you understand these three points, you have grasped the essence of St. Thomas's thought. (414) These would seem to be three quite straightforward propositions, but fallen men are themselves, by definition, crooked and cannot easily see what is straight or proceed directly toward it. As John Donne says, the simple tmth is often what is most difficult to perceive: "...mysteries / Are like the Sunne, dazling yet plaine to'all eyes" (Satire III.87-88). The insistent paradoxes of Chesterton's account of St. Thomas, then, embodied in an arresting rhetoric of alliteration and balanced antithetical phrases and clauses, seek only to shock us into an awareness of what is simplicity itself. Very often Chesterton himself points out that his apparently extravagant rhetoric looks peculiar because so many of us in the modern world fail to see what is "plaine to'all eyes": In a word. Saint Thomas was making Christendom more Christian by making it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox but a plain truism, which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant by an Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by a Christian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered into the world of the senses. (437) Chesterton adverts here to what Dennehy calls "St. Thomas's affirmation of the goodness of creation," especially as it is restored by the Incamation. The Saint's Christian Aristotelianism "is not a paradox" precisely because the paradox of the Incarnation, though not "a plain truism," is still tme. Chesterton found his own full-blooded, romantic devotion to the physical fact of the Word made flesh at the heart of a philosophy commonly thought to be abstract, arid, "scholastic" in the worst possible sense. He may have been surprised; he was certainly delighted to find in the Angelic Doctor another shock to modem man's continual disappointment with the excessive earthiness of Christianityespecially Catholicism. In Chesterton's time religion was commonly expected to be "spiritual"; that is, vague, subjective, ethereal. The phrase "new age" and the current 68

YOUNG usage of terms like "mysticistn" and even "metaphysics" suggest that things have not much changed. It was on the issue of the Incamation, of Christ's transfiguration of matter, that Chesterton saw in St. Thomas an ally of St. Francis of Assisi: "Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom" (428). A paradox is an apparent contradiction that is, nevertheless, true. "Spirituality" is the "dreadful doom" of those for whom the Cross of the Incamate Christ is a sign of contradiction. The phrase "too paradoxical" is plainly to be accompanied by an implicit wink, and it is precisely Chesterton's "too paradoxical" language that makes him an indispensable commentator on St. Thomas. Chesterton's paradoxes give a striking verbal form to the wit that he finds latent in the plain, sober discourse of Thomas's Scholastic method, and the wit is the sparkling revelation of the wonder and vitality necessarily inhering in a truly accurate account of God's creation. Here is St. Thomas clearly and exactly setting forth the inherent goodness of being:
Respondeo dicendum quod omne ens, inquantum est ens, est bonum. Omne enim ens, inquantum est ens, est in actu, et quodammodo perfectum: quia omnis actus perfectio quaedam est. Perfectum vero habet rationem appetibilis et boni, ut ex dictis patet. Unde sequitur omne ens, inquantum huiusmodi, bonum esse. (1.5.3) [I reply by saying that every being, insofar as it is a being, is good. For every being, insofar as it is a being, is engaged in activity and is in some measure perfect: because every action is a certain kind of perfection. But what is perfect possesses an aspect of the desirable and good, as is clear from what has been said. Whence it follows that every being, as such, is good.] This style is careful, precise, almost cautious: the repetition of phrases in identical order is a mark of the saint's effort to deploy terms with unambiguous consistency. Chesterton undertakes to reveal the vibrant sense of joy within this framework of painstaking theological precision: Now nobody will begin to understand the Thomist philosophy, or indeed the Catholic philosophy, who does not realise that the primary and fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World. (483)

While St. Thomas offers a lucid demonstration that the material creation cannot be essentially evil, Chesterton dramatizes how that Manichean notion is an affront to a healthy sensibility, which is naturally delighted in 69

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the beauty and order of the universe. His profuse diversity of terms and proliferation of parallel and antithetical clauses and phrases reveal that within the abstract discourse of Thomist theology is an affirmation of the nomial response of ordinary men and women to the world they know through their senses. Chesterton also shows, however, that when a man thinks about the world as patiently and rigorously as St. Thomas, inexorable conclusions emerge that seem shocking to minds that routinely substitute cliches for actual thought. Thus St. Thomas, marshalling his usual precise terms and careful distinctions, demonstrates that there can be no first principle of evil as the counterpart to the first principle of good, because, while the first principle of good is essentially good, nothing can be essentially evil. He quotes Aristotle to the effect that something wholly evil would destroy itself (1.49.3). Chesterton expounds in bold, witty terms the surprising implications of this metaphysical proposition for the everyday moral life of human beings: Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh[,] have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual. (485) The last few lines, in particular, display a typically baroque technique of creating rhetorical suspense: the deployment of curt, asyndetic clauses and phrases that culminate in an epigrammatic "tum" or "point." Here the rhetorical surprise is once more the revelation of the comparative innocence of the "material" in relation to the "spiritual." While St. Thomas refutes the Manichees by proving that evil cannot be a real substance, Chesterton draws out the significance of this philosphical demonstration for everyday life by a feat of style. He skewers the Manicheeism of the popular mind, with its unthinking assumption that the source of evil is physicalthe body and its inclinationson the staccato rhetoric of a sententious but startling maxim: "The work of hell is entirely spiritual." Chesterton thus adds an immediacy and urgency to St. Thomas's calm logic. Since evil cannot be a substance, it can have only an intentional being rather than a real being. Hence the material creation is a good thing, perverted only by the evil intentions of the mind. Evil arises not in the normal predilections of the body, but in the feverish fantasies ofthe soul. It is "entirely spiritual."

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YOUNG The second Thomist principle that Dennehy specifies as central to Chesterton's exposition is "his philosophical realism and consequent defense of common sense" (414), and Chesterton himself proclaims, "The fact that Thomism is the philosophy of common sense is itself a matter of common sense" (513). Some explanation of realism is required, however, if the commonness of St. Thomas's common sense is to be altogether clear. In the context of medieval philosophy, "realism" refers to the doctrine that universals have real being; that is, abstract concepts exist substantially and independently just as we usually think of individual entities as existing. "Realism" in this sense thus derives from the philosophic "idealism" of Plato, who maintained that a particular object was only a crude, imperfect imitation or representation of its "idea," dwelling permanently and immutably in a transcendent ideal realm. The bed you sleep on is, according to this view, only an imitation of the idea of "bedness"; my wife's collie only a shadowy imitation of "dogness" (or is it "coUieness"this is one of the problems with extreme realism). The medieval opposite of "realism" in this sense is "nominalism," which developed with William of Occam and his followers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is the belief that universals are merely names with no real being or necessary relation to the world at all. These "names" are essentially arbitrary categories that human beings use to divide up the world for their own mental convenience. For example, "tree" is a term that we have chosen to apply to certain phenomena all having roots, trunks, branches, bark, and leaves. Not only is the concept "tree" not substantially real in the way the sycamore in my front yard is real; there is not even any necessity for gathering all the phenomena that we happen to call "trees" into a distinct category. The great divide that we draw between trees and herbaceous plants could just as easily be drawn between plants with white flowers and those with colored flowers. What of the distinction between plants and animals? you may ask. Or between living and non-living things? Surely these distinctions are in some reasonable sense "in nature"? At this point the problems with nominalism begin to emerge. Nevertheless, it has persisted in various forms and under different names in the materialism of Hobbes, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the pragmatism of William James, right down to our own day. Contemporary deconstruction is perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of nominalism, insofar as it holds not only that universals do not exist, but that even particulars do not existor at least not for us, since we can only know them through words, which are themselves universals. It is with these two extremes in mind that St. Thomas can be appreciated as the philosopher of common sense; for it is common sense

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RENASCENCE that tells ordinary men and women that my wife's collie, Tyler, holds an existential priority over the form or idea of dogness, while assuring them that there is nothing arbitrary about classifying Tyler along with Spot, Ruff, and Fido as dogs. Plato's idealism was, in some measure, a reaction to the materialism of so many of the pre-Socratics, which would reduce reality to some physical principle: water, fire, atoms. St. Thomas follows Aristotle's critique of Platonism: the integrity of the idea (or form or universal) is salvaged, but ideas are not allowed to assume a transcendent existence of their own that reduces the physical world to shadowy insignificance: St. Thomas is thus quite clear on the fact that only concrete substances, individual compositions of matter and form, actually exist in the material world. But though he is at one with Aristotle in denying the separate existence of universals. . . . he also follows Aristotle in asserting that the form needs to he individuated. The form is the universal element, heing that which places an ohject in its class, in its species, making it to he horse or elm or iron. . . . (Copleston 327) In other words, only the individual horse is real, but it is really a horse. ow Saint Thomas's treatment of such matters is generally quite technical and designed to answer objections that were current in the thirteenth century rather than the twentieth. As Copleston points out, we cannot expect to find "an epistemology in St. Thomas, in the sense of a justification of knowledge, proof or attempted proof of the objectivity of knowledge in the face of subjective idealism of one kind or another"; although he does allow that "the Thomist principles" could be developed to fumish such a defense (388). To Chesterton, however, St. Thomas's neglect of the epistemological question is itself the answer: Thus even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modem sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer the question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. (515) St. Thomas typically asks questions of this kind about human knowledge: "Whether the more universal is first in our intellectual

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YOUNG cognition?" "Whether we can understand many things at the same time?" "Whether our intellect understands by composition and division?" (L85.3,4,5). Here is the conclusion to the central argument of Article 3, in which St. Thomas sets out to prove that "the more universal is first in our intellectual cognition: Est ergo dicendum quod cognitio singularium est prior quoad nos quam cognitio universalium, sicut cognitio sensitiva quam cognitio intellectiva. Sed tam secundum sensum quam secundum intellectum, cognitio magis communis est prior quam cognitio minus communis. [It must therefore be said with regard to us that cognition of particulars is prior to cognition of universals, just as sensory cognition precedes intellectual cognition. But as in sense so in intellect, cognition of the more general is is prior to the less general.] Following Aristotle, St. Thomas maintains that complete intellectual knowledge must be knowledge of universal concepts; that is, there can be a science of "the dog," but not of Fido. In the quoted passage he is drawing a distinction between the temporal order in which we leam by first apprehending sensory particulars, and the logical order of actual, intellectual knowledge, in which we proceed from general to specific concepts: we understand the dog before the collie. Chesterton seizes upon St. Thomas's Aristotelian commitment to the necessary role of sensation in human knowledge to observe that the empiricism of Francis Bacon's New Organon is hardly so revolutionary as many intellectual historians have claimed. "I have never understood why there is supposed to be something crabbed or antique about a syllogism," Chesterton writes; "still less can I understand what anybody means by talking as if induction had somehow taken the place of deduction" (520). He is quite willing to concede that scientists have discovered an immense quantity of useful facts since the thirteenth century; however, the admirable scientific advances that have resulted have required the derivation of premises from the facts and the development of deductive theories based on these premises: But many modem people talk as if what they call induction were some magic way of reaching a conclusion, without using any of those horrid old syllogisms. But induction does not lead us to a conclusion. Induction only leads us to a deduction. (520) Thus to show that Thomism is not "unscientific" is an important element in Chesterton's enterprise, but he was well aware that the hardheaded scientific rationalist was no longer the real enemyafter all, he 73

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could be convinced by reasonable argument. "Indeed," he writes, "I think there are fewer people now alive who understand argument than there were twenty or thirty years ago; and St. Thomas might have preferred the society of atheists of the early nineteenth century, to that of the blank sceptics of the early twentieth" (499). By the 1930s the modem age was sufficiently decadent that a man with Chesterton's insight could already see postmodernism on the horizon. The rationalist enemies of the Church were already folding their tents and drifting away in the darkness; antirationalism and antihumanism were mustering their legions. Chesterton realized that the mentality of a Thomas Huxley was a minor annoyance compared to the threat represented by the madness of a Friedrich Nietzsche, and so the cmcial argument of Thomism was not one that had been mounted against any particular error but rather against the apotheosis of error as such. And here Chesterton fmds his task. He shows in the most vivid rhetoric he can manage, at once striking and homely, that the philosophy of St. Thomas, while it cannot save our souls, can save our reason, our human identity and place in the world, our common sense: Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they were ever eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority ofthe Senses, which is from God. (515) Of course the ontological status of eggs as such is not very important, but Chesterton realized that the man who cannot grasp the nature of eggs is likely to lose sight of the nature of other things, indeed of the idea of nature itself It is almost as if Chesterton were looking ahead to Michel Foucault, who celebrates the dissolution of the concept of human nature: "It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form" (xxiii). 74

YOUNG Hence the echoing of assonance and alliteration, the wordplay, and the almost boisterous tone that Chesterton often deploys are not the mere verbal display of a clever and self-indulgent rhetorician. These techniques highlight by means of witty style the ontological wit that Chesterton sees as a critical element in the philosophy of St. Thomas. For Chesterton resembles his baroque predecessors not only in the exuberance of his style, but also in his conviction that genuine wit is not just a matter of style. Rather, it involves an insight into the stmcture of reality. In Agudeza y arte de ingenio (XV), Baltasar Gracian thus praises the wit of St. Thomas's conceit, in O sacrum convivium, that the eucharistic feast is "our pledge of future glory" ("Etfuturae gloriae nobis pignus datur"). A pledge, he points out, is always worth double the obligation incurred. How, then, can communion with Christ in the Eucharist be twice as worthy as the beatific vision of which it is the pledge (pignus)! In the beatific vision, Gracian maintains, the divine presence is enjoyed without merit; "however, in this sacramental fruition, [the soul] both enjoys and merits; she always pledges more to God; it is a continual exchange; it is reward and merit together; and thus the eucharistic feast is rightly called a sure and certain pledge of glory" (307-08). Similarly, Chesterton urges that beneath St. Thomas's prose there is "the elemental and primitive poetry that shines through all his thoughts," and this poetry is "the intense rightness of his sense of the relation between the mind and the real thing outside the mind" (541). The poetic wit of Chesterton's account of St. Thomas is, then, an attempt to render justice to the "wit" and "poetry" that pervade his vision of the world; that is, to "the primacy of the doctrine of being in Thomistic philosophy"the third of the three points that Dennehy sees Chesterton expounding. "There is no doubt about the being of being," Chesterton maintains, "even if it does sometimes look like becoming; that is because what we see is not the fullness of being; or (to continue a sort of colloquial slang) we never see being being as much as it can" (530). The reason we do not see the fullness of being is that being is only complete in God, whose essence, St. Thomas argues, is the same as His nature (1.3.3) and also as his existence or being (esse1.3.4). Chesterton not only puts this in striking terms; he also spells out its implications for our world of becoming: "But the fullness of being is everything that it can be; and without it the lesser or approximate forms of being cannot be explained as anything; unless they are explained away as nothing" (530). Chesterton thus anticipates the musings of Jacques Derrida, who, rather than acknowledge the dependence of imperfect or contingent beings on "the fullness of being," consigns all being to the abyss of nothingness that he calls differance. "Since Being has never had a

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'meaning,' has never been thought or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in beings, then differance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) 'older' than the ontological difference or than the tmth of Being" (22). Derrida is most insistent on deconstmcting the concept of the etemal presence of the Logos ("meaning") that informs the Judaeo-Christian vision of God: Therefore it is the determination of Being as presence or as beingness that is interrogated by the thought of differance. Such a question could not emerge and be understood unless the difference between Being and beings were somewhere to be broached. First consequence: differance is not. It is not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal, or transcendent. It govems nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of differance, but differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. (21-22) The unity and simplicity of divine being are here denied, but that human meaning and purpose are lost along with God does not seem an excessive price to the postmodemist. Substitute differance for "change" and "mutability" in the following passage, and the continuing relevance of Chesterton's interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas will be completely manifest: Most thinkers, on realising the apparent mutability of being, have really forgotten their own realisation of being, and believed only in the mutability. They cannot even say that a thing changes into another thing; for them there is no instant in the process at which it is a thing at all. It is only a change. It would be more logical to call it nothing changing into nothing, than to say (on these principles) that there ever was or will be a moment when the thing is itself. (530-31) The "logic" of deconstmction, which underlies even those varieties of postmodemism that ostensibly repudiate it, is the remorseless denial that anything ever is or could be itself: there is not identity, not even any differences (something has to be the same for a difference to be conceivable), only differance. The genius of Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas lies in his unerring intuition that what makes the "perennial philosophy" tmly perennial is its capacity for anticipating each novel twist of sophistry by which intellectual pride attempts to evade the reality of God. The postmodem pathology currently afflicting universities is willing to sacrifice the meaning of humanity to be rid of the presence of Deity. St. Thomas argues that "He

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YOUNG who is" ("Qui esse") is the most appropriate name of God, finally, because "it signifies to be in the present: and this is most fittingly said of God, whose being has not known past or future" (1.13.11: "Significat enim esse in praesenti: et hoc maxime de Deo dicitur, cuius esse non novit praeteritum velfuturum"). Chesterton had the gift of putting the ultimate consequences of such abstract propositions in unforgettably concrete terms: "eggs are eggs." As a result he composed the antidote to the malaise that we now suffer more than sixty years ago.

Works Cited
Chesterton, G. K. St. Thomas Aquinas. 1933. Rpt. in C. K. Chesterton. Collected Works. Vol. II. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy. 1950. Rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Croll, Morris W. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm Essays hy Morris Croll. Ed. J. Max Patrick et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1966. Dennehy, Raymond. "Introduction" to St. Thomas Aquinas. In G.K. Chesterton. Collected Works. Vol. II. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986. 413-17. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Donne, John. The Complete Poetry of John Donne. Ed. John T. Shawcross. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. Rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Gracian, Baltasar. Obras completas. 3rd ed. Ed. Arturo del Hoyo. Madrid: Aguilar, 1967. Lauer, Quentin. G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio. New York: Fordham UP, 1988. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Cura Eratrum eiusdem Ordinis. 3rd ed. 5 vols. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961. Williamson, George. The Senecan Amble: Prose Eormfrom Bacon to Collier. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951.

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