Theologies of History

in G.K. Chesterton's
The Everlasting Man and in
David Jones's The Anathemata
A d a m Schwartz

A D A M SCHWARTZ received his Ph.D. in History from Northwestern Uni-

versity in December, 1996. A scholar of modern British Christian
thought, he has written in various journals on authors including G.K.
Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, David Jones, CS.
Lewis, and T.S. Eliot. He has also contributed introductions to reissued
editions of Rousseau s The Social Contract and Burke's Reflection on the
Revolution in France.

"If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an

element of poetry in every historical account of the world." -
Hay den White, Tropics of Discourse.

Jacques Maritain once commented that the best historian is a poet.

T.S. Ehot, whose own poetry buttresses Maritain's claim, further defined
this principle in his discussion of the "historical sense" which he beheved
all art requires: "a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of
the timeless and of the temporal together." ^ Both Maritain and Eliot were
echoing Aristotle's behef that "poetry is more philosophical than history
because history is nothing but the pattemless succession of particulars." ^
The two modern critics claimed history as the poet's province in their
time because of what they perceived to be the abdication by modernist
historians of the responsibility to fuse the particular and the general, the
matter and meaning of history, into a coherent pattern. Under the influ-
ence of positivism and of the Rankean injunction to write history "as it

Drawing of David Jones, by Desmond Chute, 1926

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 The Chesterton Review

happened," contemporary historians took as their models such authors as

Hume and were content to chronicle events "objectively" without feeling
obliged to comment about their metaphysical significance, being passion-
ately opposed, in fact, to such musings.^ Chesterton joins the criticism of
such an approach when he writes in The Everlasting Man that "so long as
we reject this subjective side of history, which may more simply be called
the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation on that sci-
ence which can be better transcended by art. So long as the historian can-
not do that, fiction will be truer than fact." ^
One poet whose work embodies this historical sense is David Jones.
Particularly in his masterpiece. The Anathemata, Jones seeks to demon-
strate the unity of all history and to assess its significance against an eter-
nal backdrop. Such is also Chesterton's intention in The Everlasting
Man.^ Though it is a work of prose about history, it escapes the perceived
pitfalls of modem "scientific" history by being decidedly anti-modern and
un-"scientific" (or at least un-scientistic) i n its assumptions and
arguments. 6 Rather than neglecting the subjective and timeless elements
of history, Chesterton makes them essential to his interpretations. More
specifically, an examination of these two works reveals that Chesterton
and Jones share a theology of history arising from their Cathohcism, a
hermeneutic centered on Christ and His Crucifixion, the pivotal person
and event in history to them. This belief provides a focal point to which
they relate all other persons, events, rites, and myths. In making these
connections, the two writers simultaneously defend the values of tradition
and continuity while stressing the qualitative difference made by Christ.
In addition, their view of history explains the eternal youth of the Catholic
Church as well as its ability to persist historically. Finally, their common
contention that all things rhyme in Christ leads them to assert the unique
abihties of Christianity to synthetize reason and imagination as well as to
limit the scope of historical subjects while simultaneously expanding their
substance. In short, Chesterton's and Jones's Catholicism leads them to
agree with Eliot, contrary to Aristotle and his modernist successors, that
history is a pattern of timeless moments, a pattern that takes its shape
from Christ's Redemptive sacrifice. Their shared view of history demands
attention, since it is a characteristic of Chesterton's and Jones's faith-
based rebellions against the intellectual assumptions and opinions of
modernity.'^
Throughout most of their lives, both Jones and Chesterton believed in
the importance of a theology of history. Rejecting the modernist assump-

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tion that history teaches nothing, both Chesterton and Jones argued that
continuity with the past was possible and indeed vital for a complete un-
derstanding of human nature and possibilities. ^ As John Coates observes
in discussing Chesterton (and his words apply to Jones as well) history is
pointless unless it removes us from local circumstances and enlarges ex-
perience by imagination. "History is a recovery of a blurred sense of hu-
man nature, of the scale of man's achievements and degradation, of the
qualities which the modern man shares with the remotest period." ^ Yet,
they believed, such continuities cannot be made sense of solely from
within time. Because people are destined for eternity, even while rooted in
the temporal, their lives and actions have a dual significance which only a
theological position can clarify: "A theology of history is precisely the re-
liance on a theo-logic, that is, the 'whole' story is neither completely
caused nor measured by men." Moreover, as Jones maintains, a theolog-
ical outlook is the only guarantee that this story will have a happy ending,
for

It is a kind of cowardice to look on history and not to despair if

we confine ourselves to the natural order. . . . [Optimism] can be
objectively "all right" only if we presuppose an "other-world" or-
der. . . . [I]f we open all the cupboards and bring out all the skele-
tons and consider the frustrations which all history past and pre-
sent offers as a "pattern" [we] are compelled, i f we wish to
presume to a shadow of optimism, to point to the necessity of
other-world values. *i
Both Chesterton and Jones derive those transcendent values from their
Catholicism since, as Jones's close friend, Christopher Dawson, put it,
"every Christian has his 'philosophy of history' given in his religion; he
cannot make a new one for himself."
In The Anathemata and The Everlasting Man, Jones and Chesterton
express this common outlook in remarkably similar terms. Given their de-
sire to establish continuity, they need to demonstrate that there is some
trait that all human beings have shared in all times and places. Not sur-
prisingly, for two former art students, both writers focus on the human ca-
pacity for art, for "making." Both use cave paintings as evidence that,
from the earliest days of the species, peopleand only peoplehave
sought to re-present nature under other forms. Chesterton claims that "we
hail a certain kind of free-masonry whenever we see it, in savages, in for-
eigners, or in historical characters," because "Art is the signature of
man," ^ ^ and this cave art is

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testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs

to man and to nothing else except man; that is a difference of
kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does not draw
clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of
representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does
not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin
to begin to do it at all. A line of some kind is crossed before that
first faint line can begin.
In The Anathemata, Jones also stresses the representational manner of the
Lascaux drawings and argues in a footnote that "the making of such forms
belongs only to man." He continues:
And see how they run, the juxtaposed forms
brightning the vaults of Lascaux; how the linear is wedded
to volume, how they do, within, in an unbloody manner,
under the forms of brown haematite and black manganese on
the graved lime-face, what is done, without,
far on the windy tundra
at the kill
that the kindred may have life.
Because people alone possess free will, and are thus liberated from the de-
termining power of instinct, they can uniquely express gratuitous inten-
tion, which is the foundation of all art. They alone can choose to make
something beautiful, for the sole purpose of delight, rather than merely
making what is needed in efficiency's sake. For human beings, hunting
can be ritualistic and iconic rather than being a mere animal act of subsis-
tence.
As this passage and analysis imply, Jones sees the natural artistic
sense that all people share as being closely connected to a religious, sacra-
mental purpose, a belief that Chesterton shared. For Chesterton, the im-
pulses behind art and religious worship are essentially the same and they
exist only in human beings since, "for some reason or another these natu-
ral experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line that
separates them from creative expression like art and religion in any crea-
ture except man. . . . It was unique and could make creeds as it could
make cave-drawings." Jones makes the link between art and sacrament
(left latent in The Anathemata) more explicit in his later prose writings,
declaring that, "the art of man is essentially a sign-making or 'sacramen-
tal' activity." He writes, in an unpublished note, of
the principle implicit in the making of a work that is essentially
extra-utile, a signum or re-presenting of something other; the em-

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ployment of corporeal, material things as a signification of some-

thing, quite apart from utilitarian values, the very essence of the
'artists' job, is clearly also the principle pre-supposed in the
sacraments of religion.
This common showing forth of the invisible realities behind visible signs
is something that human beings, since they are unique composites of spirit
and matter, are alone equipped to produce: "The incorporeal intelligences
(angels) are incapable of Ars and the animals are incapable of Ars. It is we
alone of all creation that are capable of Ars, of sign, of sacrament."
Practice of the visual arts was only the foremost common human
characteristic in which Chesterton and Jones shared a belief. In addition,
they also thought that people have the distinctive trait of celebrating cer-
tain rites. For example, both see burial of the dead as a solely human ac-
tivity, an activity charged with rehgious and artistic significance. More-
over, both authors point to agricultural and fertility rituals, sacrifices, and
cults, such as those of Demeter, Ceres and Cybele, as expressions of a
deeply religious and distinctively human need to propitiate the "unknown
powers" ^3 of nature. The ever-enduring quality of these forms strength-
ened Chesterton's and Jones's beliefs in continuity as well as in the essen-
tially artistic-sacramental nature of humanity. Furthermore, they thought
that explaining the rationale for these artistic endeavors and rites through
myths is another common, yet uniquely human, trait shared by all people
and cultures. Because only human beings have the powers of speech and
fancy, only they can tell stories and attempt to explain their world imagi-
natively. Like any art form, this one also has a religious function. Chester-
ton and Jones both argue that most myths, whether they be ancient fertil-
ity sagas, classical Greek epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Virgil's
Aeneid, the tales of Ovid, or Malory's rendering of the Arthurian legend,
have had the common purpose of explaining the ways of the divine to hu-
man beings and have often involved the salvific death of a god or heroic
god-figure. Chesterton asserts that "all people have beheved" that the "Di-
vine Street" has "sometimes broken bonds and surged into our world,"
and Jones's panoramic inclusion of most human mythology in his poem
testifies to his concurrence in this belief.
Both writers, then, accept a notion akin to C.S. Lewis's idea of the
Tao, "the common will and common reason of humanity . . . branching
out as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of applica-
tion." 25 Holding to this belief in universal human traits which transcend
time and space requires its adherents to reject the modernist, historicist as-

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sumption of the mutability of human nature, something which both

Chesterton and Jones do indeed reject in stark and striking terms. For
Chesterton, pre-historic men were "exactly like men and men exceedingly
like ourselves . . . just as human and ordinary as men in a mediaeval
manor or a Greek city"^^ or, he might have added, in an English pub.
Jones sums up this same belief even more succinctly: "We were homo
faber, homo sapiens before Lascaux and we shall be homo faber, homo
sapiens after the last atomic bomb has fallen." This belief in a Tao, in an
essential human nature, is particularly important for Jones, whose purpose
in re-enfranchising our ancestors is to bring them within the salvific orbit
of Christ's Redemptive Sacrifice. In The Anathemata, Jones writes:

For all WHOSE WORKS FOLLOW THEM

among any of these or them
dona eis requiem.
(He would lose, not any one
from among them.
Of all those given him
he would lose none.)

Yet neither Jones nor Chesterton believes in the heresy of universal

salvation. Both agree with Lewis that the Tao needs "a single center"
which for them is Christ Crucified. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton
writes: that "the cross is the crux of the whole matter" since it "centres
all the many human activities of history." A study of Chesterton's note-
books reveals that the Crucifixion fascinated him from his youth onwards,
frequently being the subject of his sketches and poems. Furthermore,
Hugh Kenner points out that
the paradox of the dying God gains greater and greater intensity
for him throughout his life, until ultimately it occupies the centre
of his thought as the central mystery of the relation of God to
man . . . the dying God slaying Himself with His own hand for
the love of men.^^
Similarly, Jones explains that "In the course of writing The Anathemata, I
had occasion to consider the Tree of the Cross as the axile beam round
which all things move."^"^ The implications of that premise for Jones's
(and for Chesterton's) interpretation of history is described bracingly by
Guy Davenport: "The purpose of the evolution of the world was to raise
the hill Golgotha, grow the wood for the Cross, form the iron for the nails
and develop the primate species homo sapiens for God to be bom a mem-
ber of." 35

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Theologies of History

Christ, His Cross, and the Eucharist which bloodlessly re-creates and
re-presents His Passion become the meeting-point for all human history,
people, events, myths, and rites. These are the standard by which redemp-
tive inclusion in the Tao is determined. For example, both Chesterton and
Jones consider Virgil "a Christian before Christ." In particular, both re-
gard his Fourth Eclogue as prophetic of the Incarnation, as Jones illus-
trates through an ingenious mixture of Virgilian and Scriptural rhetoric:

Time is already big by sacred commerce with the Timeless

courses. Fore-chose and lode-bright, here is the maiden. Equity!
The chthonic old Sower restores the Wastelands. The First-Be-
gotten, of the caer of heaven (which is a long way off!), would
bring his new orient down for our alignment.

Furthermore, both Jones and Chesterton see the tales of a dying God or
hero whose sacrifice is ultimately fruitful and redemptive as prefiguring
Christ, be they the agricultural deities of the Eleusinian tradition or the
comparatively recent literary figures such as Hector, Arthur, and Roland.
Moreover, they also emphasize rites of commemoration involving natural
products such as bread and wine. In particular, Jones uses Melchizedek's
sacrifice to assert that the New Covenant of Christ was present even be-
fore the Old one had been made with Abraham: "Levites! the new rite
holds is here / before your older rites begin." Yet suggestive of Chris-
tianity as all these forerunners are, Chesterton and Jones insist that they
cannot be considered equivalent to Christianity. Virgil was "almost a
Christian" but only "almost," and "There is no comparison between
God and the gods,"^^ for the latter are only partial truths, hints of what is
fulfilled in Christ: "They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion;
and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of
the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man
with a calendar, they do not provide him with a creed." The pre-Chris-
tian myths and rites are not wrong; they are just insufficient. It is in Chris-
tianity that the "completion of the incomplete" is achieved. ^2 To Chester-
ton and Jones, myths are an "imaginative outline of truth," ^3 an
extra-revelational body of tradition," ^4 because "what in pre-Christian
times was 'mere' myth becomes, when Christianised, the revelation of
mystery."

This qualitative change occurs because of the unique nature of Christ,

and of the Church that He founded. Because Christ is God rather than a
god. His Incarnation closes the deposit of revelation. As Chesterton said.

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Christ's Gospel is Truth, the last word on all subjectsafter Him. "no-
body else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has
any news."^^ Thus with Christ the purely human part of history ends and
its final stage or Last Age, the progression to the eschaton, commences.
Additionally, Christ's sacrificial death is followed by His Resurrection.
Whereas other lords, such as Cronos, Owain, and Arthur remain asleep,
entombed in their "efficacious asylums," ^8 the Lord has risen. Christ is
the true once and future king, since He has not only harrowed Hell, but
He has defeated it and brought the souls of the just with Him as ransom. ^9
Furthermore, the Mass and the Eucharist which He institutes are not
merely commemorations but actual re-creations of His Passion. In each
Mass, Christ is Really present, just as He was in the Cenacle or on Cal-
vary. He is, as Jones writes, "at once the sacrifice and the feast," making
"oblations permanent, kindly, acceptable, and valid," His continuous in-
teraction with time following His Ascension to eternity. Finally, the
Church itself also lives in a permanent state of what Jones calls "now-
ness" as though its founding had just happened. In a sense it has just oc-
curred, since each Eucharist re-presents the Church's foundational act.
When Christ becomes directly present as He was in 33 A.D., eternity in-
terpenetrates and temporarily suspends history, giving the Church its
timeless sense of time, the pattern by which it weaves the timeless mo-
ments of history. By belonging to another world, the Church can be in this
world but not of it, thus avoiding the decay that all purely natural things
suffer. Chesterton argues: "It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of
thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs . . . the
Church grows younger as the world grows old."5i

That eternal youth of the Church is further dramatised by its remark-

able persistence. At the beginning of The Anathemata, Jones describes a
priest celebrating Mass in World War I I Britain as "This man, so late in
time, curiously surviving," in the post-Christian world. Chesterton
thinks that it is not a question of survival, but rather a matter of revival,
for the Church "has not survived: it has returned again and again in this
western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing." ^3 It
has died many times but not remained dead, for it is founded on Life Him-
self, the One who could not be killed and Who conquered death"it had
a God who knew the way out of the grave." ^4 It endures because it is con-
stantly being re-bom. Moreover, the Church's resilience also owes some-
thing to another aspect of its Founder's identity. His Tmth. Although the

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Theologies of History

Church often appears to die under the threat of fashionable heresies, its
Truth persists long after each partial truth masquerading as the whole has
been abandoned. Orthodoxy gives it the ability to respond to the needs of
any age by embracing all aspects of being and keeping each in its proper
proportions. Chesterton writes:
It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds
of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of
depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between real and unreal
marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about
hard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination
about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy
platitudes of most ancient or modern moral philosophy. In a
word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think
about; it gets more out of life.

And all of this is so because it is more literally life-like: "it is like life." ^6
Its participation in the eternal which makes it forever young also gives it
indefatigable wisdom by providing a comprehensive, constant perspective
on every facet of life. Adherents to this theology of history, therefore, do
not fear change, since they praise what persists. As Jones writes in The
Anathemata:
The adaptations, the fusions
the transmogrifications
but always
the inward continuities
of the site
of place. 57

These substantial differences caused by the "revolution" of Christ,

this Christian view of history, produce critical cultural consequences. In
particular, Chesterton and Jones emphasize two principles which they find
unique to Christianity, one of integration and one of limitation. Initially,
they believe that Christianity united philosophy and mythology for the
first time. Whereas in the ancient world, myth and religion were consid-
ered one thing and philosophy quite another, Christianity because of its
history rhymed these two roads to truth. As C. S. Lewis put it, only in
Christ did "myth become fact." ^9 Jones points out the revolutionary impli-
cations of this shift from mythological to historical consciousness by
declaring that Christ and Christianity "reverse the normal process of folk-
memory, which, we know, tends to mythologise history; now it is rather
the mythological pattern that is embodied in historical fact. It is also the

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 The Chesterton Review

very reverse of the old rites." None of the pagan myths claimed to be
histories, but the Gospels ground their validity in being accurate accounts
of actual events. The myths are stories that contain tmths, but only the
Gospel is a true story, because it combines the philosophical search for
truth with the mythological desire to tell tales:
The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realiza-
tion of both mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that
sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a phi-
losophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it
is a philosophy like life.
Jones is receptive and friendly to natural myths but always implies that
only the Christian myth is fully sufficient and true.^^ Yet he is "glad that
Christianity is a Hellenistic as much as a Judaic religion, and the task of
seeing Yahweh and the Logos as the same God he is content to leave to
the theologians." This fusion of philosophy and mythology help to pro-
vide the pattern for history that Aristotle lacked and one that was essential
to the Thomistic synthesis and reinterpretation of Aristotie. Yet this bal-
ance was a tenuous one, and much as Chesterton sought to preserve it by
defending "philosophy against mythopoeic insult as he buttressed myth
against intellectual contempt," ^nd Jones both witnessed what they
saw as a modern reversion to the pre-Christian split in the forms of ratio-
nalism and romanticism. It was this fissure that gave rise to Maritain's
and to Eliot's fears for the discipline of history, which they thought had
become hopelessly imprisoned in positivism, the philosophy of what
Jones calls "the fact-man, Europa's vicar" Pontius Pilate, who asked
"what is truth" and heard no reply.^^
Even as Christianity's historicity provides an integrative and expan-
sive view of truth for its adherents, that same quality set limits on its sub-
ject matter. Whereas a myth could be about anything, the Gospel is about
one thing, the life of Jesus Christ as He lived in a particular place and at a
particular time.^^ Jones illustrates the effects of Christianity's commit-
ment to the limit of events in his description of the Christmas liturgy's
Gospel reading. At the word voluntatis, which ends the reading, the dea-
con, "however much he would wish to continue proclaiming his wonder-
tale, he must break off the recitation of this true historia and be silent."
No embellishment of this wonderful tale is allowed, for that would violate
its integrity as a true history. While this fidelity to fact may appear need-
lessly restrictive, both Chesterton and Jones thought that limits were liber-
ating. Both these visual artists would have found wisdom in Chesterton's

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Theologies of History

assertion that "the most important part of a picture is the frame." In this
particular case, Chesterton argues that limiting the Gospel to this one
man's story actually fosters a universal tale because Christ "spoke of his
own humanity as in some way collectively and representatively human;
calling himself simply the Son of Man; that is, in effect, calling himself
simply Man." In a further paradox, this limit makes the Gospel expan-
sive enough to meet the twin demands of philosophy and mythology. Be-
cause Christ is the archetype made typical, he touches both sides of the
human mind and covers "that abyss that nothing but an incarnation could
cover, a divine embodiment of our dreams. . . . That is why the ideal char-
acter had to be a historical character. . . But that is also why the historical
character had to be the ideal figure." Thus Chesterton and Jones find the
historical character of Christianity to be crucial both in expanding their
horizons and in limiting their vision. A Christian theology of history gives
both authors a defined pattern with which to stitch the various elements of
the Tao together into a many-coloured yet seamless garment, a whole
greater than the sum of its parts. As Garry Wills writes: "The union which
the Church effected was not a dilution. It united the worlds of poetry
and philosophy; it leagued the natural and the supernatural against the
anti-natural; and all the components were strengthened by the combina-
tion."
Hence even though Jones may have stressed the role of the Incarna-
tion in ensuring the continuity of all things whereas Chesterton stressed
the qualitative difference in all creation brought about by the Incarnation,
each was sensitive to both of these elements of the Christian view of his-
tory. They understood that such differences are distinctions of emphasis
and not of content. In fact, three of the four passages that Jones marked in
his personal copy of The Everlasting Man were those stressing the trans-
forming effect of Christianity, and some of the poems in Chesterton's
youthful notebooks as well as some of his early letters to Frances accent
the unity of Christ and Christianity with other religions, heroes and myths.
The views of Jones and Chesterton are compatible because all things can
"rhyme in Christ" because He is unique. Since He alone is Truth, His
presence purifies all the partial mythical truths (outside the Tao) of what-
ever falsehood, either of omission or commission, that they contain. In
fulfilling His prophetic types. He transforms them. Once this fulfillment
of the prophecies has occurred, it is possible to conclude with Jones:
What did he do other
recumbent at the garnished supper?

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 The Chesterton Review

What did he do yet other

riding the Axile Tree?
As Jones explains, "both the Supper and Calvary are in different ways
other from what the traditional rite demanded."
Adopting this Christian theology of history put Chesterton and Jones
out of the cultural mainstream of their times, a position of which both
men were highly aware. Both saw their works as being conscious acts of
intellectual and cultural rebellion against modernity. The Everlasting Man
was Chesterton's culminating direct response to, and attempted refutation
of, the progressive, evolutionary secularism of H. G. Wells's Outline of
History. For his part, Jones saw The Anathemata as a repudiation of the
cultural consequences of what he termed the modernist "break" with tra-
dition and what he considered to be its devastating implications of that
"break" for art and r e l i g i o n . p ^ j ^ of t^at renunciation was an anti-pro-
gressivism similar to those of Chesterton. Yet in dissenting from what
they regarded as the modem norm, Chesterton and Jones were affirming
another standard, one founded on what they beheved to be the permanent
things: Christ, His Cross, His Eucharist, and His Church.

Adhering to this outlook permitted Chesterton and Jones to affirm

their heart-felt devotion to tradition, to the continuity and integrity of hu-
man events, myths, and rites, while simultaneously expressing their belief
in the quahtative difference made by Christ and by Flis act of redemptive
love, what Chesterton called the: "one real crack across that pavement [of
time] that came from the earthquake of the Cmcifixion." Their shared
theology of history explained to them the unique character of the Roman
Catholic Church and its remarkable historical persistence. The etemal per-
spective of this world-view gave them a broadening synthesis of reason
and imagination, as well as a means of limiting the matter of history while
expanding its meaning. The order that they found in Christianity and used
as the standard to judge modemity met their need for a rational, all-em-
bracing cosmology, and satisfied a deep-felt psychological yeaming that
they could neither surrender nor f i n d satisfied in modernitywhat
Chesterton calls: "a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that
there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees."^^ Jones, in terms
Chesterton would have applauded, explicitly links this need and its f u l f i l l -
ment to a Christian idea of history and to an appreciation of tradition:
"Humanly speaking it may well be that for some of us it was a longing,
and a deep need, not to lose connection with these historic origins that, in

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part, caused us to [enter the Cathohc C h u r c h ] . " ^ \ \ these factors illus-

trate the vitality that Jones and Chesterton found in Catholicism and help
to explain why they would have deliberately chosen to accept a faith that
was socially marginalised and considered intellectually irrelevant by the
cultural mainstream of their day. As Chesterton writes: " A dead thing can
go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." Their con-
versions helped them to be rebels by giving them a dynamic cause.

The crisis of meaning that Chesterton and Jones found solved by the
Catholic Church persists. It was behind the lamentations of Maritain and
Eliot, who perceived a renewed divorce between mythology and philoso-
phy. To all these critics, the modernist sundering of what Christianity had
brought together ended a fruitful union and laid the land waste. I f George
Steiner is correct in saying that realistic "re-mythologization in a time
which has found agnostic secularization more or less unendurable may, in
the future, be seen as the defining spirit of the age," and if Jeffrey Perl is
right in saying that "personal fictionsprivate solutionsare by defini-
tion tentative, piecemeal and partial," the unity and transcendence of the
Christian theology of history, that myth which is a fact, that story which is
a true story, may help ask the questions upon which the restoration of the
living waters depends. Perhaps, as both The Everlasting Man and The
Anathemata claim, it will also answer them. For as Newman put it:

To Him must be ascribed the rich endowments of the intellect,

the irradiation of genius, the imagination of the poet, the sagacity
of the politician, the wisdom (as Scripture calls it), which now
rears and decorates the Temple, now manifests itself in proverb
or in parable. . . . Anticipations or reminiscences of His glory
haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and of the pagan devo-
tee; His writing is upon the wall, whether of the Indian fane, or
the porticoes of Greece. . . . He condescends, though He gives no
sanction, to the altars and shrines of imposture, and He makes
His own fiat the substitute for its sorceries. . . . He is with the
heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny,
and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the
unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow
and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water
or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is
beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect
or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as
material, comes from Him.
Everything truly does hang on the Axile Tree.

77
 The Chesterton Review

1 T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Essays, 1917-1932

(New York, 1932), p. 4.
^ Aristoe cited in Garry Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York, 1961), p.
199.
^ The question of how historians have practiced their profession in modem times
has been dealt with in fascinating, and often brilliant terms by Peter Novick in That
Noble Dream: The ''Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988). See also Hayden White, "Religion, Culture, and Westem CiviHza-
tion in Christopher Dawson's Idea of History," English Miscellany, 1958, pp. 247-249
for the English side of this question. For a spirited and thoughtful defense of modernist
history, see the recent work of Gertrude Himmelfarb: e.g., The New History and The
Old (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); "Telling it as You Like It," Times Literary Supplement
(October 16, 1992), pp. 12-15; On Looking Into the Abyss (New York, 1994).
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925) in G. K. Chesterton, Collected
Works, vol. 2 (San Francisco, 1986, pp. 137-407, p. 271.
^ There is no direct evidence, however, that Jones's poem was specifically influ-
enced by The Everlasting Man. Jones notes on the flyleaf of his copy of The Everlast-
ing Man, that he acquired it as a gift in March, 1961, which was nine years after publi-
cation of The Anathemata. He certainly could have read it before obtaining this copy,
but there is no positive evidence in his published writings, letters, or personal papers
that he did so. Moreover, Jones had a habit of not reading books until years after their
publication or his acquisition of them. He was a long-time admirer of Chesterton's
work, though, so it undoubtedly helped shape his general outlook, even if this specific
text only attracted his attention years after the completion of his poem. His annotations
of the 1961 copy of The Everlasting Man reveal that, if nothing else, its arguments re-
confirmed the views of history he presented in The Anathemata. Jones's personal l i -
brary, as it stood at the time of his death, is held in the David Jones Collection, The
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Its catalogue, edited by Huw Ceiriog Jones,
was pubHshed in 1995.
^ From early in his career, Chesterton condemned the efforts of the "craven scien-
tific historians of today" to understand history without reference to the subjective or
the transcendent. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913; Oxford,
1946), p. 40.
^ Surprisingly, there has been almost no comparative scholarship done on Jones
and Chesterton. William BHssett's The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones
(Oxford, 1981), makes references to Jones's admiration for Chesterton, but close com-
parative textual analysis of any kind is so far absent. This is probably due, in large part,
to the need for further exegesis on Jones's work, but thanks to the fruitful efforts of
scholars like Blissett, Thomas Dilworth, Rene Hague, Kathleen Henderson-Staudt,
John Breslin, Vincent Sherry, and others, the next level of Jones scholarship is now
possible. The Hnks between the two texts discussed here excludes much fertile ground,
such as the use of cave-imagery by both writers, their common veneration of Mary, the
metaphor of Christ as a joumeyer, attitudes toward imperialism, and the contemporary
subtext involved in analogies to the Roman Empire, to name just a few of the more
salient issues awaiting analysis in these two works alone.
^ In the G. K. Chesterton Archives of the Manuscripts Department in The British
Library, for example, there is an essay on "History" penned by Chesterton when he
was no older than fifteen which contains many of the themes developed throughout his
adult career, especially in The Everlasting Man.
^ John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (HuH, 1984), pp.
101-102.

78
Theologies of History

Russell Hittinger, "The Metahistorical Vision of Christopher Dawson," in The

Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes, ed. Peter
Cataldo (Landham, Maryland, 1984), p. 12.
11 David Jones, "Art in Relation to War" (1942-3, 1946), in The Dying Gaul
(London, 1972, 1978), pp. 154-155. This comment mirrors in some respects Chester-
ton's remark that the basis for his optimism was his belief in original sin.
1^ Christopher Dawson to John J. Mulloy, August 22, 1953, quoted in Russell Hit-
tinger, "The Metahistorical Vision of Christopher Dawson," p. 14.
1^ G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 184.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 166.
1^ G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 177. Chesterton had held this view
for much of his career. See, for example, his reference to "the artist Man" in What's
Wrong With The World (1910), in G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. 4 (San Fran-
cisco, 1987, pp. 33-224), p. 166.
1^ David Jones, The Anathemata (London, 1952, 1972), p. 60. Jones makes clear
in his Preface that "the spacings are of functional importance; they are not there to
make the page look attractive" (p. 36), so all quotations from the poem will follow
their textual form.
"For David Jones, art is, in its essential nature, a 'religious' activity." Neil Cor-
coran, The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones (Cardiff, 1982),
p. 10.
18 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 181-182.
1^ David Jones, "Art and Sacrament" (1955), in Epoch and Artist (London, 1959),
p. 161.
David Jones, untitled May 2, 1966 manuscript, David Jones 1985 Purchase.
Group C, Box 15. The National Library of Wales.
^1 David Jones, undated draft of "Poets and Mystics," a letter to the press (proba-
bly The Times or the Tablet), David Jones 1985 Purchase, Group C, Box 1. The Na-
tional Library of Wales.
See G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 404-405; and David Jones, The
Anathemata, p. 61, footnote 2; and The Anathemata, p. 76, footnote 1.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 242.
^ G. K. Chesterton, quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York,
1943), p. 201.
25 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947; New York, 1955), p. 86.
2^ G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 184.
^'^ David Jones, quoted in Rene Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of
David Jones (Toronto, 1977), p. 29.
28 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 65. Rene Hague makes clear in his commen-
tary that the argument expressed here, and elsewhere throughout the poem, "is that
primitive man, and woman, is as much entitied to the state of 'blessed' as post-Messiah
man." Hague, p. 74.
2^ C. S, Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 96.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 266.
^1 Garry Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask, p. 198.
^2 Chesterton's still extant notebooks are held in the G. K. Chesterton Archives,
Manuscripts Department, The British Library.
Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton (London, 1947), pp. 86, 102.
David Jones, Epoch and Artist, p. 39.

79
 The Chesterton Review

^5 Guy Davenport, "In Love With A l l Things Made," The New York Times Book
Review (October 17, 1982), p. 9.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 225.
^'^ David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 213. For Chesterton on the Fourth Eclogue,
see The Everlasting Man, p. 307.
^8 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 230. In his "Dedication" to "The Ballad of the
White Horse," Chesterton also links Melchizedek to Christ, but emphasises that, being
divine as well as human, victim as well as priest, Christ is both united with
Melchezidek yet qualitatively different from him: "The sign that hangs about your
neck/ Where One more than Melchizedeck/ Is dead and never dies." (Emphasis added).
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 288.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 231.
41 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 24L
42 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 308.
43 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 162-163. Emphasis added.
44 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 40, footnote 1. Emphasis added.
45 Rene Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones, p. 9.
46 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 401.
4"^ For their endorsements of the Augustinian idea that Christ inaugurates the last
stage of history, see G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 248; and David Jones,
The Anathemata, p. 211.
48 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 55.
4^ Rene Hague notes in his commentary that "the harrowing or harrying or inva-
sion of Hell by Christ to release the souls of the just who died before the Redemption is
an article of the creed which is seldom given the emphasis it receives from D[avid
Jones]. . . . The descent into Hell is essential to D.'s theme, for it makes 'credaT the ef-
ficacy, by pre-application, of the pre-Christian sign making." pp. 235-236.
50 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 230. See also G. K. Chesterton, The Everlast-
ing Man, p. 380.
51 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 401.
52 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 50.
53 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 384.
54 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 382.
55 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 382.
56 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, pp. 380-381. In more succinct terms,
"The philosophy of the Church is universal," The Everlasting Man, p. 311.
5"^ David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 90.
58 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 365; David Jones, The Anathemata,
p. 86.
5^ C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?" (1945) in The Weight of Glory and Other
Addresses, ed. Walter Hooper (New York, 1980), p. 84.
60 David Jones, undated manuscript, David Jones 1985 Purchase. Group A, Box
V/15. The National Library of Wales.
61 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 378.
62 See Angela Dorenkamp, "Time and Sacrament in The Anathemata'' Re-
nascence, Summer, 1971, p. 187.
63 William Blissett, The Long Conversation, p. 136. Interestingly enough, C. S.
Lewis uses much the same terminology as Chesterton and Jones in an extensive discus-
sion of this topic in an October 18, 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves: "Now the story of

80
Theologies of History

Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but
with this tremendous difference that it really happened . . . it is God's myth where the
others are men's myths." They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur
Greeves (1914-1963), ed. Walter Hooper (London, 1979), p. 427. Emphasis in original.
J. R. R. Tolkien similarly maintains that "this story is supreme and it is true. Art has
been verified. . . . Legend and History have met and fused. . . . The Evangelium has not
abrogated legends; it has hallowed them." "On Fairy Stories," in Poem and Stories
(Boston, 1994), p. 180.
64 See G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 309-310 as well as, of course,
Chesterton's St Thomas Aquinas (1933). The rational appeal of Catholicism was espe-
cially important to Chesterton and Jones throughout their careers. See, e.g., Jones, The
Anathemata, p. 202, footnote 2; and The Anathemata, p. 213; Chesterton, The Everlast-
ing Man, p. 363; and G. K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic (1929), in G.
K. Chesterton, Collected Works, vol. 3 (San Francisco, 1990), p. 281.
65 John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, p. 167.
66 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 239.
6"^ Myths, according to Chesterton, are "not bound in booksor bound in any
other way." The Everlasting Man, p. 397.
68 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 220.
69 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 337.
^0 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 380.
^1 Garry Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask, p. 198. "Christendom is larger than
creation, as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there;
it also included the things that had been there." Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.
309.
^2 David Jones, The Anathemata, p. 243. Chesterton expressed a similar idea in
"The Dagger With Wings," which was probably written contemporaneously with The
Everlasting Man: "it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left
had never felt so much alive." G. K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown
(1926; New York, 1982), p. 146. William Lynch summarizes both authors' views well:
"For he [Christ] has subverted the whole order of the old imagination. Nor is this said
in the sense that he replaces or cancels the old; rather, he illuminates it, and is a new
level, identical in structure with, but higher in energy than, every form or possibility of
the old." William Lynch, Christ and Apollo (New York, 1960), p. 192.
^3 David Jones to Desmond Chute, February 23, 1953, in Inner Necessities: The
Letters of David Jones to Desmond Chute, edited and introduced by Thomas Dilworth
(Toronto, 1984), p. 56. Emphasis in original.
^4 Chesterton had already advanced some of the arguments and even used some of
the same language in his 1922 essay Where All Roads Lead (Originally published in
the November, 1922 issue of The Catholic World and reprinted in G. K. Chesterton,
Collected Works, vol. 3 [San Francisco, 1990], pp. 26-58). Compare especially pp. 51
58 of Where All Roads Lead with pp. 214-232 of The Everlasting Man. The earlier
essay, written very soon after Chesterton's reception into the Roman Catholic Church,
is in many respects a germinal version of The Everlasting Man.
David Jones, The Anathemata, pp. 15-16.
^6 Jones condemned the "fond, but sustaining belief of most men" in progress,
"popularly voiced" by Wells and others, in a November 18, 1970 letter to Harman
Grisewood. This epistle is reprinted in Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones
in his Letters, ed. Rene Hague (London, 1980), p. 229. See also Neil Corcoran, The
Song of Deeds, p. 10 for anti-progressivism as an essential part of The Anathemata's
"myth of history."

81
 The Chesterton Review

'''' G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 365.

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 294.
''^ David Jones, undated manuscript, David Jones 1985 Purchase. Group C, Box
10. The National Library of Wales.
80 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 388.
81 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, 1989), p. 221.
82 Jeffrey Perl, The Tradition of Return (Princeton, 1984), p. 255.
83 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852; London, 1923), pp. 65-

March

82
Theologies of History

APPENDIX

Some references to Chesterton and Belloc and Distributism in the David

Jones Archive at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Jones and Chesterton

In one of his notebooks, Jones wrote: "The men that rule in England /
in solemn conclave met / Alas! Alas! for England / They have no graves as
yet." Jones was quoting (probably from memory) the last stanza of Chester-
ton' s "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." Jones substitutes "The men" in open-
ing line for "And they" in the original and "solemn" in second line for
"stately" in the original."
In a draft of May 19, 1955, in a letter to Robert Speaight, Jones wrote:
"What a long long way off all that Beney-Belloc-Chesterton world now feels
to be."
Jones had the following books by Chesterton in his library at the time
of his death:
The Everlasting Man "Given me by Len W. Harrow, March, 1961"
four passages marked, all from "The God in the Cave" chapter.
Orthodoxy "CSCA Sketch Club Prize, 1919"a fair number of anno-
tations. "The Ballad of the White Horse"^"given me by Douglas Woodruff,
June, 1961"most heavily annotated of all the Chesterton texts he owned.
"Wine, Water and Song"very wornno record of when he acquired it,
and no annotations.
December 23, 1936Jones's father sends him a book by Chesterton,
but the title not given.

Jones and Belloc

undated letter fragment of Jones's about Belloc: "the polemic, argu-
mentative thing that makes so offensive a great deal of his work."
An earlier draft of Jones's important essay "The Myth of Arthur"
originally appeared in For Hilaire Belloc, ed. Douglas Woodruff (1942), pp.
174-218.

Jones and Distributism

draft of December 22, 1954 letter from Jones to a friend called Peter
whose last name is not given: "It's good to think of you living the real life of
the landan 'apprentice peasant'what could be more foundational, how-
ever trying in some results. You chose well."

83