3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The wisdom of Chesterton and Schall combined, May 14, 2010
This review is from: Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes (Paperback)
Schall is one of my favourite essayist - indeed it was Schall who reintroduced me to the essay as a form. In this book, we are given a collection of Schall's essays on Chesterton. I chose this book because whilst I have found some of Chesterton's work to be brilliant (his book on St Thomas Aquinas, for example), I have struggled with some of his other work such as "Orthodoxy" and "The Everlasting Man". I found the continuous play on words and obsession with paradoxes to be irritating.
Anyway, I was hoping that by reading Schall I would learn to get over my irritation with Chesterton - only time will tell whether the book has been successful but I think I better appreciate Chesterton's delight in being and his hunger for reality and I now see that "To think of Chesterton is to think of gratitude and joy". Anyway, it seemed to me that as I have great respect for Schall (I see him as a kind of teacher to me), I had hope that his respect for Chesterton as a teacher to him would be catching.
What one gets in this book (20 essays or so) is Chesterton distilled through Schall - one gets a kind of hybrid. Indeed, I was beginning to see as I read the book how deeply Chesterton had impacted on Schall. The strength of the book lies in the fact that we get nuggets of wisdom both from Schall and from Chesterton. What struck me though was how prophetic Chesteron was, in particular his attacks on:
(i) the idea that good and evil is not in the will but is to be found in political structures has become the new orthodoxy - see how politicians tell us how they are going to mend broken Britain, not realising that the healing of Britain lies substantially in the wills of its residents.
(ii) Determinism: this has become even more popular with the new atheists who in effect deny free will. For a study of this see the essays of Theodore Darylmple.
(iii) Abuse of language to disguise truth
(iv) The inhumanity of man caused by his paradoxical humanitarianism, compassion and "tolerance"
The kind of things that struck me were as follows:
"Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it" (Chesteron)
"For dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought" (Chesteron)
"Now Christmas is built on a beautiful and intentional paradox: that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home" (Chesterton)
In opposition to the determinist view of life or the over attribution of meaning to the subconscious, Chesterton notes: "The thing I call myself is the thing that wills and reasons and chooses and salutes God; and not the thing that dreams, or snores, or walks in its sleep."
"The purpose of the world depends on our purpose, not the other way around. The scientist on scientific groundshas to believe in the most extraordinary confluence of improbable probabilities even to maintain that his theory of chance is plausible" Schall reflecting on Ratzinger's book on creation.
"Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes" (Chesterton)
The Church is "the only attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws" (Chesterton)
"We need God to think straight" (Schall)
"The spiritual vice of pride consists in turning all our actions, including our vices, into aspects of self-admiration" (Chesterton). He refers to pride as a "devouring vanity"
"It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself" (Chesterton)
"truth has consequences. And, if truth has consequences, so does error" (Chesterton)
And the old chestnut: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried" (Chesterton)
"Aristotle remarks in a famous phrase in the Poltics that a small error in the beginning can lead to an enormous error in the end". (Schall)
"The state is in charge our errors and seeks to counter them by its own politics and authority" (Schall)
"So the modern spirit has descended to the indescribable mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves". (Chesterton) This has been the foundation stone of the nanny state!
"Nearly all newspapers and public speakers are now entirely occupied with finding harmless words for a horrible thing" (Chesterton)
"If you think wrongly about God, you will think wrongly about man" (Schall)
"The nation that has no gods at all not only dies but what is more, is bored to death" (Chesterton)
"Chesteron was struck with "the way in which people have become inhuman out of sheer humanitarianism"
"What the ordinary people are now asked to do is to deny that any difference exists between one form of conduct and another. We are asked to endure what is in fact most disgusting and call it culture. What began as sympathy for the abnormal ended up as hatred for the normal" (Schall)
"Plato thought on the contrary, that all political disorders originate in soul disorder" (schall)
"The test of all happiness is gratitude" (Chesterton)
A very funny one is when a newspaper asked readers to write in about what was wring with the world to which Chesterton replied: "Dear Sir: What's wrong with the world? I am. Signed. GK Chesterton"
So, if you are struggling with Chesterton and want to know why he is a big deal, well turn to Schall and I will be surprised if your appetite has not been whetted for Chesterton and no doubt for Schall as well!
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hitchens ain't no Chesterton, October 25, 2009
This review is from: Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes (Paperback)
This morning I finished reading Schall on Chesterton by James V. Schall.
http://www.amazon.com/Schall-Chesterton ... 191&sr=8-1
The epilogue (p. 226) begins:
"Chesterton (1874-1936), the great English essayist, journalist, and philosopher, was a man of singular good will, engaging charm, and broad interests. From all eyewitness reports about him, he never really had any enemies. He does not seem to to have loved those who hated him, for the singular reason that no one hated him. Even those who most disagreed with him on a given issue still had great affection for him and enjoyed his company. To be bested by Chesterton in an argument was a sort of badge of honor - that someone of Chesterton's stature would take another's arguments seriously even if he proved them wrong"
As I read these words I thought: He certainly has an enemy today, someone who hates him, a worthy opponent, and brilliant English essayist - Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is Not Great - How Religion Poisons Everything.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Rel ... 248&sr=8-1
I decided to go to Amazon, to "look inside" Hitchens' book (table of contents and index), to see what he said about Chesterton's arguments for Christianity. What did I find? Nothing. Amazing!
Hitchens mentioned C. S. Lewis. Why would he not even mention Chesterton? Perhaps Chesterton is too much of an intellect for Hitchens.
Schall on Chesterton is a delight.
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