ChesterCast

“A common hesitation in our day touching the use of extreme convictions is a sort of notion that extreme convictions, specially upon cosmic matters, have been responsible in the past for a thing called bigotry. But a very small amount of direct experience will dissipate this view. In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no conviction at all. The economists of the Manchester school who disagree with Socialism take Socialism seriously. It is the young man in Bond Street, who does not know what socialism means, much less whether he agrees with it, who is quite certain that these socialist fellows are making a fuss about nothing. The man who understands the Calvinist philosophy enough to agree with it must understand the Catholic philosophy in order to disagree with it. It is the vague modern who is not at all certain what is right who is most certain that Dante was wrong. The serious opponent of the Latin Church in history, even in the act of showing that it produced great infamies, must know that it produced great saints. It is the hard-headed stockbroker, who knows no history and believes no religion, who is, nevertheless, perfectly convinced that all these priests are knaves …. Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.”

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“There is nothing, for instance, particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. It may be wrong, but it is not unfraternal. In a certain sense, the blow or kick may be considered as a confession of equality: you are meeting your butler body to body. You are almost according him the dignity of a duel…..The thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say, as so many modern humanitarians say, ‘Of course one must make allowances for those on a lower plane.’ All things considered, indeed, it may be said, without undue exaggeration, that the really undemocratic and unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler downstairs.”

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“When we come to the last test of a nationality, the test of art and letters, the case is almost terrible. The English colonies have produced no great artists; and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists. And that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? No; the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakeable as the cry of a dying man.”

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“The first rate great man is equal with other men, like Shakespeare. The second rate great man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate great man is superior to other men, like Whistler.”

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“We may put the matter in this way. The main point of modern life is not that the Alhambra ballet has its place in life. The main point, the main enormous tragedy of modern life, is that Mr. McCabe has not his place in the Alhambra ballet….We are miserable moderns and rationalists. We do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty; we actually love ourselves more than we love joy.”

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“In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man, but bad literature tells us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.”

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“It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage however, n the small state, the city, or the village, which only the willfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us….There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.”

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“Of this great spiritual coherence, independent of external circumstances, or of race, or of any obvious physical thing, Ireland is the most remarkable example. Rome conquered nations, but Ireland has conquered races. The Norman has gone there and become Irish, the Spaniard has gone there and become Irish, even the bitter soldier of Cromwell has gone there and become Irish. Ireland, which did not exist even politically, has been stronger than all the races that existed scientifically…Nationality in its weakness has been stronger than ethnology in its strength. Five triumphant races have been absorbed, have been defeated by a defeated nationality.”

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“The real difference between Paganism and Christianity is perfectly summed up in the difference between the pagan, or rational, virtues, and those three virtues of Christianity which the Church of Rome calls virtues of grace…which are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be….Whatever may be the meaning of the contradiction, it is a fact that the only kind of hope that is of any use in the battle is the hope that denies arithmetic. Whatever may be the meaning of the contradiction, it is a fact that the only kind of charity which any weak spirit wants, and which any generous spirit feels, is the charity that forgives sins that are like scarlet. Whatever may be the meaning of faith, it must always mean a certainty about something we cannot prove.”

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“Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena to a god in human form in order to explain them. . . because by this explanation they were made more reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of philosophy is to walk down a lane at night. Any one who does so will notice that men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible, but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she has no power with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall on our faces.

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I have a nice buffer going now. I have just finished recording chapter sixteen of Heretics, so I should not have any more late podcasts. This makes me about a month ahead.

I am thinking the next book will be either Orthodoxy or Saint Francis of Assisi. If you have any opinion in the matter, drop me a comment.

I’ve subscribed for a paid account on PodBean and applied to have Chestercast added to the iTunes Store’s podcast list, so I hope that gives me more listeners.

The chapters were short, so they were combined into one file.

The Moods of Mr. George Moore is Chesterton’s account of George Moore, an writer who attacked Christianity.

“The more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man. Stevenson understood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot understand Stevenson…The weaker a thing is, the more it should be respected…Thackery understood this, and therefore Mr. Moore does not understand Thackery. Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up chivalry and energy. The Christian tradition understands this; therefore Mr. Moore cannot understand the Christian tradition.”

And in On Sandles and Simplicity, Chesterton attacks the a backwards view of the ’simple life’ :

“This complaint against them stands, that they would make us simple in the unimportant things, but complex in the important things. They would make us simple in things that do not matter — that is, in diet, in custome, in ettiquette, in economic system. But they would make us complex in the things that do matter — in philosophy, in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance, and in spiritual rejection. It does not so much matter if a man eats a grilled tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a grilled mind.”

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Chapter 8 from Heretics, “The Mildness of the Yellow Press”.

Chesterton talks about the yellow press of his time, but, as always, finds his way around to other, related topics.

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A bit late, and a short chapter. This quote from the chapter says it all:

“Dionysius made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Omar Khayyam makes wine, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts, because life is not joyful; he revels, because he is not glad. ‘Drink,’ he says, ‘for you know not whence you come or why. Drink, for you know not when you go or where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, and nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.’ And so he stands, offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand is also the cup of the vine. ‘Drink,’ he says, ‘for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this is my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.’ “

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Merry Christmas, and in honor of the glorious day, I’ve pushed ahead to do the chapter on Christmas, the Salvation Army, and the philosophy of Comte.

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The conclusion to GK Chesterton’s chapter on HG Wells.

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Today, after a long wait while I lived in China and catechism, I have finally been baptized into the Catholic Church in Suwon, South Korea.

If you are interested, you can follow the link for photos:: http://www.flickr.com/gp/11179904@N06/UyUf0f

Our fifth podcast from Heretics by GK Chesterton. The Heretic this week is science fiction writer HG Wells, and the heresy is the hero worship that, in the old story of Jack and the Beanstalk, has us rooting for the giants.

This was a long chapter, so it is divided into two podcasts, each about sixteen minutes in length. Please forgive the background noise. I’m going to try and buy a unidirectional microphone soon, and hopefully that will cut down on it.

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Sorry for that delay and thanks for your patience. Things are back and track. I recorded the fifth chapter of Heretics (HG Wells) over the last hour or so, but it’s midnight here in Korea, and cleaning up an episode tends to take between one and two hours of my time (yes, I make that many mistakes when I read), so I’m going to get some sleep. The next chapter will be uploaded sometime in the next 24 hours.

I know I said I would upload an episode today.

However, I just had a wisdom tooth extracted, and so I really don’t feel like sitting down and reading outloud.

It’s final exams week, but I’ll still record and upload the next chapter, probably on Tuesday. It’s a long chapter (HG Wells), so I might split it in half.

Also, Therese asked that the show be cast in mp3. All old episodes have been updated to use mp3 instead of m4a files. So hopefully they will work with a wider range of players now. Sorry it took so long for me to upload them.

Tell your friends where they can get free GK Chesterton audiobooks!

Our fourth podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton.

This chapter is the heresy of George Bernard Shaw, which begins with relativism and proceeds to a form of Nietzschean thought.

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I figured I should lay out what I expect my schedule to be.

I intend to release at least one cast a week, between 15 and 25 minutes in length, for as long as I have source material to read from. I put a heavy emphasis on at least. I will try very hard to release at least one cast per week, but if I feel like doing more, I will feel free to post them, so I’ve posted three casts so far, and recorded one more that will be posted as soon as I clean it up a little bit.

If there is ever a week when I don’t have any GK Chesterton to read from, I will read from some other, related, public domain books, most likely something by Belloc. Frankly though, I have enough Chesterton to last at least a few months, and can obtain years worth from the Internet.

The podcast will always be readings from public domain audio books related to Chesterton, and never stuff about me. It’s ChesterCast, not WalkerCast. If I have anything to say myself, I will write it as text right here.

Of course, comments and emails, even negative comments provided they are not abusive, are very welcome. If there is some little detail about the podcast that grates you, you do me a much bigger favor by letting me correct it than you could cause me injury by pointing out that an amateur broadcaster is actually an amateur who has a lot to learn.

Plus, it’s a wonderful feeling to know that I’m not putting hours into this only to toss my voice off into an empty void.

Someone asked me in email if GK Chesterton played a role in my conversion (I am a former atheist), so I suppose I can share my answer here also, though a bit expanded because I’ve thought of more I’d like to say since then:

Short answer: No, I was already Christian when I read my first Chesterton book (Orthodoxy). But he did have a lot of influence on the type of Christian I became. When I converted, I had something like the Quakers in mind, and I only attended Catholic church because it was the only church available in Beihai, China, and when you are attending church service in a foreign land, a strict liturgy is very helpful also.

Longer answer: Probably the most influential writer in converting me to Christianity was CS Lewis in Mere Christianity. That’s overstating it a bit, because it really was a whole series of things happening one after the other. I became acutely aware, all at once, how angry many of my atheist friends were compared to my Christian friends, and how it had rubbed off on me.

Which inspired me to go read the New Testament and bits of the OT to see if it could really be as bad as I had always taken it to be, and while doing so I had what I can only describe as a “born again experience”. I know that’s a term generally used by evangelicals, but I don’t know of any other term for what I experienced. To be honest, at that point I assumed it was something of a hysteria, until I read CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which kind of laid the intellectual framework for me accepting Christianity rationally as well.

At that time, however, what I had in mind was the Quakers. I may have been a Christian, but I wasn’t about to believe a single word that I couldn’t verify with my own reason. Stuff about Mary being swept up into Heaven on a cloud was definitely right out.

GK Chesterton (Orthodoxy) *did* play a big role in making me Catholic, and seeing orthodox Catholicism as a good thing.

I’m not sure which bits of Orthodoxy really worked best, so much as I think needed to see things from the other side of the fence. I’m a young man ( 27. Nintendo generation, and if anyone is interested in hearing my “Defense of Nintendo”, you need only ask, and I will write you a book on the subject. ), and I think I never had the case for a ‘traditional’, ‘conservative’ view really made to me, but I had all sorts of people in my life, especially teachers, who, looking back, wanted very much to turn me into a ‘free spirit’.

GK Chesterton made that case to me, and suddenly a great many things that had always frustrated me and infuriated me and even confused me about the world made sense. I could always see what people were doing, but I could never really see what they were trying to do, especially conservatives.

And when Chesterton gave me a vision of what the Catholic Church has, historically, in her good times and bad times, been trying to do, I felt that it fit my image of what we should be trying to do a lot more than Protestantism or my former atheism.

For that matter, when Belloc said that my atheism was a logical consequence of the Reformation having run its course…I couldn’t help but agree with him (though I have a great many Protestant friends who are in a very real sense closer to Christ than I am and who are probably very angry to read that).

I wrote a great deal more than I needed to (and I’ve actually cut a great deal out that meandered to far off topic), so I will stop here.

I will post chapter four, on Mr Bernard Shaw, in the next few hours, as well as upload MP3 versions of the first two chapters.

This is our third chapter from GK Chesterton’s Hertics, written in 1905. From now on, uploads will be in MP3 for enhanced compatibility. MP3 versions of the earlier chapters will be posted soon also. Our Heretic for this chapter is Rudyard Kipling, and the heresy is how Kipling’s cosmopolitan worldliness caused him to miss a very important detail: the world itself.

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Our second podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton.

In the second chapter, “The Negative Spirit”, GK Chesterton discusses the problems with “realism” in morality. Chesterton uses the work of Henrik Ibsen, a late 19th century playright, as his example of “realist morality”, however what he says can be applied to most modern media.

On a technical note, I think I have gotten rid of alot of the background noise that existed in the first chapter. Let me know if you have any advice or comments.

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This is our first podcast from the book Heretics, written in 1905 by GK Chesterton. Forgive some of the background noise, this is my first podcast. Please enjoy, and comments are welcome.

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Welcome! In the next few days, I will begin casting readings from Heretics, a book written in 1905 by Catholic apologist G.K. Chesteron, a writer who has had great influence on me, and I hope to share him with you. I hope to go through the entire book in the next month or so.

Chesterton wrote Heretics at the turn of the century in order to explain why he felt many popular attitudes of the time were unwise, and many of the attitudes are prevalent today. The book is grouped into chapters, each one about a “heretic” and his heresy. Chesterton explains what he means when he refers to a close friend, George Bernard Shaw, as a ‘heretic’:

“I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive. I am concerned with him as a Heretic — that is to say, as a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong. I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done.”