love and family

 

There is no doubt that among the major themes in Chesterton's inspiration and writings, love and family, as well as women and marriage, are particularly noteworthy.

In 1990, Alvaro Silva published Brave New Family in San Francisco, a collection of G.K.'s essays on these subjects, which was published in Spanish in 1993 by Rialp under the title El Amor o la fuerza del sino (Love or the Force of Fate) and reissued in 2017 by Espuela de Plata.

I would like to highlight the careful introduction he makes to this collection of essays, which reflects his admiration for the English writer and is in itself a fascinating incentive to approach Chesterton's work.

I have taken the liberty of posting it on the blog without having been able to locate Mr. Alvaro, from whom I hope to receive his benevolence, and I hope that this entry will contribute to the dissemination of his book and the extensive and exciting work of G.K. Chesterton.

David Fernández

 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) once referred to the family as something “that is never mentioned now in respectable circles,” and if the brilliant writer had this anthology of his essays on the subject, he could well say that, at the present time, the family is mentioned everywhere. When this collection appeared in English, there was already talk of a plurality of family models. There is talk of the crisis and the disappearance of the home, at least in societies of extraordinary economic wealth, but nostalgia for family values is evident everywhere. Feelings and behaviors typical of that small universe, such as unconditional appreciation, trust, respect, freedom, and mutual aid, appear recycled in the offerings of the all-powerful marketing that loudly advertises any commercial product, from a villa to shampoo; and truths that seemed self-evident have to be scientifically proven.

Today, anthropology assures us that without instinctive trust (and before the emergence of language in our species), there would be no humanity, no peoples, and no cultures—a mutual faith that has been essential in the long evolution toward Homo sapiens. 2 On the other hand, for biblical or religious fundamentalism, the idea of an invention of the family, and of an evolution and history over thousands of years, sounds like the worst heresy³. But marriage and the family have their history, and the “revolution of love,” or the intense and decisive change in perception that took place in Western culture a couple of centuries ago, has made it inconceivable for such a union to exist without loving feelings between the spouses. Human beings now appear, more than ever, as “loving animals,” in the apt expression of Jean-Luc Marion.

 Chesterton never distrusted that natural force of love, nor the common sense of a healthy humanity against the fury of fate in whatever form it may take:

"When all the promises of mere traffickers have been broken by force, when all the praises of mere business have been forcibly turned into a joke, when everything that was called practical has ended up as a joke, and everything that was called modern lies in ruins more useless than those of Stonehenge—then there is a real psychological possibility that men will think of forgotten things: property, private life, piety in its old meaning of reverence for human sanctities—for the family, from home to death."

His praise of home, neighbors, and the neighborhood itself—that is, of small, everyday things—is not a defense of conservatism, much less religious fundamentalism. I have just quoted a text published in 1933, and some may think that almost a century later, the “psychological possibility” that the English writer spoke of has come to nothing. But that is not the case.

The family landscape, like the best natural or painted landscapes, whether medieval or modern, traditional or liberal, peasant or capitalist, proletarian, and even spiritual (as in religious communities), has always been one of light and shadow, light and dark, blue skies or cloudy skies or threatening storms, drought and fertility, the advances and setbacks of any life, and who knows how many are approaching or brushing up against or living through the great catastrophe, even if it is not precisely like that of the Bundren family portrayed by the genius William Faulkner in his novel As I Lay Dying. What Chesterton emphasized is that both the pessimist and the optimist are often hopelessly blind because they have no hope and do not know what it is, and are only capable of mere propaganda statements. He suspected that the sense of home as something sacred was being lost, and that there would be no shortage of those who would seek to get rid of the family as an impediment to their happiness.

The texts in this anthology were written in the early decades of the 20th century (except for the magnificent story that closes it, written in 1896), but they are not antiquated except for a few embellishments that are irrelevant to their plot. Chesterton did not write about abortion (although there are some references), polygamy, or same-sex marriage, but all the other themes are as old as humanity itself. Some think that certain societies are approaching the conditions depicted by Aldous Huxley in his famous futuristic horror novel Brave New World, published in 1932. Lenina, the young protagonist, feels, for example, that the word “father” is an eschatological indecency, while the word “mother” has gone from being a joke to an obscenity, two words that no educated person mentions seriously, much less with laudatory intent.

This is how Huxley described the precision of language in the “brave new world” of his fiction: “To say ‘father’—with its connotation of something so close to repulsive disgust and the deviant morality of childbirth—was not so much obscene as simply rude, more scatological than pornographic.” And like garbage, motherhood escapes into the sewers in that world: “To say that someone was a mother—that went beyond a joke: it was obscene.” Lenina “had never seen anything so indecent in her entire life as young women breastfeeding their children,” and the somewhat ambiguous title of a recent book makes fiction a reality. This woman with a test-tube baby and a plastic heart had never seen a family, not even her own.

A scholar has reminded us once again with a bold “defense of ideals” of the invasion (of solipsism, the unhealthy obsession that goes so much against love and family as it does against friendship and society). For Chesterton, love and family were natural and sacred realities. If he appears conservative in his defense of the home, it is not because he wants to preserve the “traditional” or “Christian” family that he criticized with the same lucidity, but because he wanted to preserve it as a universal and indispensable work of art of humanity itself. Along with his often characteristic paradoxical humor, these essays and newspaper articles stand out for their praise and defense of the family for its own sake, the domestic society that unites and shelters parents, children, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and within it the righteous and sinners, the healthy and sick, the rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, socialists and anarchists, and perhaps the occasional helpless communist.

 In a poem, Chesterton put these words in Noah's mouth: “I don't care where the water goes, as long as it doesn't spoil the wine.” It is comical to imagine the legendary Noah in the midst of a forty-day and night flood worrying about his wine cellar, but who is so foolish as to not understand him? This is how it is with the family in Chesterton's philosophy. That is why he opposed both Huxley's pessimism and the optimism of other prophets of his time.

Neither of the two extreme philosophies could satisfy any sensible citizen “because human beings know that there is something within them that can never be overestimated, and also that there is something within them that can never be hated too much; and only a philosophy that emphasizes both, simultaneously and violently, can restore balance to the brain.”

The great proponent of distributism was one of capitalism's most formidable enemies, but the cruelties of consumer society are minor compared to the radical imperfection of human beings, who tend to let loose precisely in the privacy of their homes, a paradox not invented by Chesterton. Marcela, a character in Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano, says that “the most merciful punishment for two people who love each other is to marry them.” The phrase requires a strong drink or two, but it is clear and obvious. For Chesterton, disaster always begins with oneself in a lethargy of the spirit, in boredom and frivolity, in the absence of a redemptive imagination that leads men and women to despair of the family because they already despair of themselves.

He repeatedly asserts that life does not come from outside but from within. Home is not small, but our spirit is stunted and sometimes petty. No lover feels love as something small or ridiculous, even if over time home becomes too big for them. For Chesterton, that is precisely the best reason to defend those realities born of love: because they are greater than oneself. Otherwise, neither would be worthwhile, neither the feeling nor the institution. “Let no one boast that he abandons his family for the love of art or science,” he wrote elsewhere, “he abandons it because he flees from the disconcerting knowledge of humanity and the impossible art of life.”

For the English poet and essayist, it is the “I” sheltered in its selfish shell, often childish or puerile, that is incapable of accepting the wonder of home, incapable of seeing the greatness of such a generous epic, tragic, and comic composition in the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom or children's room, and one that human beings must play a leading role in if they do not want to strip themselves of their own humanity. To paraphrase an expression by Teresa of Ávila, one could say that if we do not find ourselves “among the pots and pans in the kitchen, we will never find ourselves.”

Among external enemies, Chesterton saw greed and consumer society, so flashy on the outside and empty on the inside, as the number one enemy. “The danger,” he wrote almost a hundred years ago, “is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.” The enemy was not only socialist collectivism but also, and above all, individualism, the unhealthy obsession with the self that fosters a childish selfishness incapable of seeing beyond its own nose: “And if there is one thing in the world I hate more than being a communist, it is being an individualist.” Collectivism that harms the family also appears in domestic attitudes and practices that subtly or violently penetrate and destroy the good of marriage and the home under all kinds of “kind” excuses.

In his biography of Robert Browning, when discussing the poet's marriage to the poet Elizabeth Barrett, Chesterton described her father's house as “that of a madman” who treated his daughter “as if she were one of the pieces of furniture in the house and in the universe,” because "the worst tyrant is not the man who rules by terror; the worst tyrant is the one who rules by love and manipulates others as if he were simply playing the harp." The natural and unquestionable authority of parents can create such an oppressive atmosphere that the home ends up being a sentence in prison or a concentration camp.

Paternalism is not a virtue but a disease of parenthood, and always fatal; the other extreme, permissiveness, can be equally harmful. Both attitudes or behaviors are perverse because they go against freedom, and they do so precisely in the place that should be the cradle, school, and glory of freedom.

Reading and rereading for this anthology, I seemed to glimpse that family is the thread that weaves together all of Chesterton's work. Of his conversion to Catholicism in 1922, he said that he had felt like someone finally returning home, “the home of humanity” as he called it, surprised to find that the madness of the Gospel was the only sane thing in the world. “The madhouse has been a house to which, century after century, men have returned as if returning home,” as he wrote in his magnificent conclusion to The Everlasting Man. His praise is valid, but it is not of a family that has never existed (like that “ideal family” of Christian militancy) and which is nothing more than a nightmare, but of our everyday home, a reality no less imperfect in itself than those who build and compose it.

In The City of God, Saint Augustine forgave the Romans' belief in the divinity of Romulus, saying that “it did not originate from a love of error but from an error of love” (De civitate Dei, xxii, 6). I think that some error of love has to do with the situation of the family in some modern societies, although sometimes it is not as easy to excuse as the belief in the divinity of the founder of Rome.

On the other hand, Chesterton believed that the decline of the domestic sphere was not due to a lack of traditional morality or simple human weakness, but rather to the emergence of an entire doctrine against the family, a conviction that led him to counterattack and defend a cause that he considered the greatest of all, since the family was at stake in terms of freedom from totalitarianism and the fulfillment of the citizen as a person, not to mention the intimate and almost domestic character of the Christian God, who believes in the divine presence in a newborn in the Jewish village of Nazareth.

Often, when reading these essays, the reader imagines Chesterton raising his flag and ready for battle: "We fight for the guild and the rendezvous of two lovers; for memories that never die and for the possible encounter between human beings; for everything that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honor and memory; for everything that can lift a human being above the quicksand of their own emotional states and give them dominion over passing time." I have never read anything about the vows or promises exchanged by bride and groom in private and in public as profound and sublime as Chesterton has written. The truly romantic does not appear here as “falling in love” or an ever-easy and theatrical “honeymoon” (an appropriate gift from consumer society) but rather the construction of love above emotions and feelings that come and go.

For the same reason, he accepted the tragedies of marriage as one accepts a mountain or a storm. His own experience could well have turned him into a man who viewed love, women, or marriage with resentment and bitterness. After a long courtship, Chesterton married the woman he loved, Frances Blogg. In her book about the Chesterton siblings, Ada Jones referred to the somewhat disastrous experience that marked the beginning of Gilbert's married life.

In addition to delicate health and back problems, his wife had a physiological difficulty that prevented her from enjoying physical intimacy. The young couple wanted to have many children; they adored children and childlike innocence. However, they were unable to have even one. I mention this adversity here not to indulge in curiosity about something so intimate, but because it reinforces what Chesterton wrote about sexual relations, marriage, and family. Despite this contradiction in his first union of love, there is not the slightest sign of bitterness or resentment in his articles and essays on marriage, but it must undoubtedly have been a cause of great sadness and heroic resignation.

Chesterton considered the family to be one of the “holy things of humanity,” and not only a reality more sacred than the state, but also holy before it was established as a Christian sacrament. Only on the strength of a “sacred” commitment are both reform and rebellion possible. “The Christian view of marriage,” he wrote, “conceives of the home as having self-government in a manner analogous to an independent state; that is, so that it can include internal reform and even internal rebellion, but in the cause of the union, not against it.” It is therefore fitting that this anthology includes a couple of essays and poems about Christmas written when the traditional holiday had not yet succumbed to the commercial imperatives of consumer society. For Chesterton, this was not a defense of religious sentimentality but the result of his conviction that “human beings are not merely an evolution but a revolution” and have a pressing need for someone to remind them of this at least once or twice a year.

The anthology ends with a short story, the tale of White Wynd, who left his family to search for his home, that is, his place in the world and in life. Chesterton wrote it in 1896 when he was twenty-two years old. Tired and disillusioned with himself, Wynd projects his existential irritation onto his family, a woman and children who were “five of the most beautiful faces on earth.” We excuse such flight from home in those who embrace the great endeavors of art or science, professional careers, politics, religion, and perhaps the monastery. We are wrong, and that Chesterton would have understood this at the age of 22 is no less extraordinary.

Of the many hours I spent in Widener Library, Harvard University's magnificent library, searching through books and magazines for material for this anthology, my fondest memory is of having done the work inspired by the spirit with which Chesterton wrote in his book about the great poet of The Canterbury Tales: “What matters is not books about Chaucer, but Chaucer himself.” So let it be noted here. What matters is not books about love and family, but love and family.

REFERENCES: 

1. «On Education», en All I Survey, Nueva York, 1933, p. 196.

2. John S. Allen, Home: How Habitat Made Us Human, Nueva York, 2016.

3. La historia de la familia como especialidad historiográfica es muy reciente. El libro de Philippe Ariès sobre la niñez, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, se publicó en 1960. La bibliografía sobre la familia es enorme. Preparando la edición original de esta antología me encontré con la sorpresa del libro de Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Londres, 1982, y disfruté su lectura porque Chesterton también vio en la familia un carácter subversivo y una expresión de la libertad de la persona.

4. Le Phénomène érotique (2003). No menos iluminadores son sus ensayos (en particular, los dos últimos) en Prolégomènes à la charité (1986).

5. «The Day of the Lord», en G.K.’s Weekly, 14 de enero de 1933. p. 299.

6. Sidelights, en The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 21, San Francisco, 1990, p. SII.

7. Además de las prohibiciones eclesiásticas inmemoriales, bajo Enrique VIII se aprobó en 1533 la ley contra la sodomía, conducta castigada con pena de muerte que sólo cesó en 1861; la pena de prisión persistió hasta 1967.

8. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Nueva York, 1932, p. 180. Mi traducción.

9. Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, Harvard University Press, 2016. Huxley fue un escritor brillante componiendo un libro deprimente y con razón Chesterton vio en él algo del espíritu de Jonathan Swift.

10. Cfr. Mark Edmundson, Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals, Harvard University Press, 2015.

11. «But I don’t care where the wáter goes if it doesn’t get into the wine». El poema se titula «Wine and Water», en Wine, Water, and Song, Londres, 1915.

12. «The Spirit of the Age in Literature», en Sidelights of New London and Newer York (1932).

13. «The Other Questions», en G. K.’s Weekly, 8 de octubre de 1932, p. 71.

14. Robert Browning, Londres, 1903, pp. 73 y 74

15. The Everlasting Man, 1925. p. 339

16. Ada Elizabeth Jones, The Chestertons, Londres, 1941. La autora era la esposa de Cecil Chesterton, hermano de G. K. Chesterton.

17. The Everlasting Man, p. 6.

SOURCE: This article was originally published in Spanish at chestertonblog.com © Some Rights Reserved,  <https://chestertonblog.com/2020/11/06/el-amor-o-la-fuerza-del-sino/> and translated with a little help of free version of DeepL