Chesterton and Freedom

Dermot Quinn

DERMOT QUINN is Professor of History at Seton Hall University. He

serves on the American and UK Board of Directors of the Chesterton
Institute for Faith & Culture, and is a member of the Editorial Board of
The Chesterton Review. The following article was delivered on January
19, 2013 at The New York Encounter.

Thank you for those kind words of introduction which are both un-
deserved and unexpected. Undeserved because I am not nearly as distin-
guished as you have suggested. Unexpected because, until two days ago,
I had no intention of being here at all. You came to listen to a reading
of The Invisible Man and the Invisible Man—it turns out—is Father Ian
Boyd who, even as we speak, is engaged in some tussle with the passport
office in Edmonton, Canada. I am not Father Boyd. I am not even Mon-
sieur Flambeau—a master of disguises masquerading as Father Boyd. I
am merely a modest substitute for the main attraction. Invisibility is what
you came for and invisibility is what you are getting. I am reminded of
that verse used in Robert Hamer’s film Father Brown in 1954:

Yesterday upon a stair

I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Actually, I wish he would come back and perhaps, in the next few
minutes, you will entertain the same wish yourself. My remarks on
Chesterton and Freedom are more or less impromptu and open to the
criticism that they are as rambling as the English country road that

Killarney Lake, Ireland

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Chesterton himself so famously celebrated. I ask for your forgiveness

in advance. Please address all notes of censure to Father Boyd and the
passport office in Edmonton, Canada.

The good news is that it is easy to talk about Chesterton and Free-
dom. That is also the bad news. In a sense, all of Chesterton is about
Freedom—its uses and abuses, its dangers and delights. Open any page
of his writings and you will find some reflection, insight, or turn of
phrase that suggests that, for him, liberty in one form or another was the
central preoccupation of his life. At one level, this was as much a matter
of temperament as of philosophy. He was a man who enjoyed liberty,
who celebrated it, who seems—in his own life—to have been a free man.
The Chesterton of the popular imagination—beer-drinking, always in
the company of friends, intensely in love with ordinary people and or-
dinary things, impatient with interferers and busy-bodies and the nanny
state—seems almost to personify a peculiarly English kind of freedom.
And yet, at another level, he was also a man for whom Freedom—as in
“Free Thought,” “Free Expression” “Free Love”—represented a prob-
lem, not a solution. He knew freedom’s power and its limits. He knew its
creative and destructive capacity. He knew that it could make or break
us. The task of his life—the task of all our lives—was to know when to
embrace freedom and when to leave it alone.

None of this is surprising. Chesterton combined in uneasy tension

a fundamentally liberal trust in human nature as essentially good and a
fundamentally Tory recognition of the reality of Original Sin, a doctrine
he defined in his 1905 book Heretics as a belief in “the permanent pos-
sibility of selfishness which comes from fact of having a self.” Liberty
was thus for him both the distinguishing glory of human beings made in
the image and likeness of God but also a responsibility that, improperly
exercised, could banish us from paradise. He had intense awareness of
the drama of the moral life, at the heart of which is freedom:

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads [he

wrote in Orthodoxy]…. Will a man take this road or that?—that
is the only thing to think about if you enjoy thinking. The aeons
are easy to think about, anyone can think about them. The instant
is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the
instant that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theol-

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ogy dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy’s book: it
is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of similarity between
popular fiction and the religion of the western people.

“The life of man is a story” he later wrote: “an adventure story:

and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God.” And we
should not presume that the story must end happily. It may end very
badly indeed. “Free Will,” he said “or the moral responsibility of Man:
upon this sublime and perilous liberty hang heaven and hell, and all the
mysterious drama of the soul.”

Sublime and perilous liberty: there is the problem in a nutshell. Free-

dom as a blessing or a burden—as the gift that could lead us to heaven
or hell—was Chesterton’s theme. “I did not really understand what was
meant by Liberty,” he wrote in his Autobiography in 1936, “until I heard
it called by the new name of Human Dignity. It was a new name to me;
though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old.” “Liberty
is the god in man,” he wrote in an essay called The Free Man, “or, if you
like, the artist.” “Liberty is only another name for sanctity,” he wrote
in The Independent Review 1905, “for Liberty is altogether a mystical
thing.” This notion of liberty as divine spark, as sub-creation, as human
participation in the life of God, is hardly unique to Chesterton—as he
said, it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old—but it was
profoundly important to him, as it should be to all of us if we are to
take seriously our dignity as children of God. The difference between
freedom from and freedom for runs like a thread throughout his writing
and, in the end, there is no mistaking that Chestertonian freedom is not
the mere absence of constraint but is a rich, textured, creative thing. He
was valiant in defense of our freedom not to be bothered by bureaucrats
and bosses and finger-waggers—how he would have despised Mayor
Bloomberg and his containers of soda almost as big as himself—but
he deplored nannyism because he knew what freedom is really for. In
his charmingly entitled essay, “Babies and Distributism,” he offers one
application of the idea:

A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is

a fresh free will…he is something his parents have freely chosen
to produce and which they freely agree to protect. He has been
born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a cre-

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ation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to

creation. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures to such a
miracle are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs
of life to the first fountains of life.

The free man as an artist—as a kind of painter of the world—was

important to him, not least, perhaps, because Chesterton himself was a
talented draftsman and designer. “God did not give us a universe,” he
said, “but rather the materials of a universe. . . . The world is not a pic-
ture but a palette. [It is we] who turn this splendid chaos into a cosmos.”

From this affirmative and celebratory notion of freedom, this con-

fidence that the common man could always be trusted and that popular
ideas were almost always correct, it was a short step for Chesterton to
deplore materialist philosophies that denied human dignity by denying
human freedom. He was a determined anti-determinist, a sworn enemy
of Destiny or Darwinism or any other kind of anti-human defeatism.
He once reviewed a book called The Necessity of Communism by say-
ing that he had much more sympathy with the communism than the
necessity. The idea that human beings are mere puppets of the Forces
of History struck him as a form of nihilism that—paradoxically—made
history itself meaningless. “The materialist theory of history, that all
politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fal-
lacy,” he argued. “The thing most present to the mind of man is not the
economic machinery necessary to his existence, but rather that existence
itself. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood and that
is life.” “Ancient Calvinism and modern Evolutionism,” he said, “are
essentially the same things. They are ingenious modern blasphemies
against the dignity and liberty of the human soul.”

So much for sublime liberty: what of the perilous kind? Original Sin,
the Old Adam, the selfishness that comes from possessing a self: here,
too, was freedom; here, too, was an exercise of the will. But this freedom
was destructive and disastrous because, self-evidently, it was the will ren-
dered as mere willfulness, a kind of “ultimate unreasoning insolence”
that objected to any limit as such. “The Fall [of man] is a view of life,”
Chesterton said. “It holds that we have misused a good world, and not
merely been trapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use
of the will.” “In Eden,” he continued, “there was a maximum of liberty

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and a minimum of veto; but some veto is essential even to the enjoyment
of liberty.”

This is not only philosophically but also psychologically obvious.

Sensible people need rules. They like them. They go mad without them.
Chesterton himself (as a matter of fact) very nearly went mad without
them when, as a young man, he tried to invent some cosmic rules of his
own—a new religion—and discovered, as he wrote in Orthodoxy, that
those rules already existed and were called Christianity. That argument
of that book, in essence, is that it is better for God to be God than
for Chesterton to be God. True freedom—the freedom that really liber-
ates—requires limitation. It requires an act of humility, an act of accep-
tance, an act of recognition that the physical and moral structures of the
universe are discovered by us, not invented by us. The greatest sonnet
cannot be more than fourteen lines. The finest symphony requires sym-
phonic form. The rules of chess are the game of chess.

To forget the veto, to ignore the limit: that was how Eden was lost.
Chesterton was an anarchist who liked rules. Indeed, he was an anar-
chist because he liked rules. Only with rules could the anarchy be en-
joyed. “The whole point of a holiday,” he once wrote, “was to be, within
certain rational restraints, irresponsible.” Without the rational restraints
it was not a holiday—a holy day—at all.

Irresponsibility comes in many forms, of course. The kind of “ulti-

mate unreasoning insolence” that Chesterton identified in Adam—the
pride that went before the fall—was also evident in the various kinds
of progressivism and free-thinking that marked his day—all of them
attempts, he thought, to celebrate the end of limits as, somehow, a mor-
ally worthy end in itself. Nothing much has changed since then. What he
wrote in his 1905 book Heretics could have been written today:

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in

order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking
about “liberty;” that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discuss-
ing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress;” that is
a dodge to avoid discussing what is good…The modern man says,
“Let us leave all of these arbitrary [religious] standards and em-
brace liberty.” This is logically rendered, “Let us not decide what

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is good but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says,

“Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This,
logically stated, means “Let us not settle what is good; but let us
settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in reli-
gion nor in morality… lie the hopes of the race, but in education.”
This, clearly expressed, means, “We cannot decide what is good,
but let us give it to our children.”

…We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute

pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress—that is to say, we
meet every proposal of getting something we know about with an
alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows
what. Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless
he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals.

For Chesterton, of course, that definite creed and cast-iron code of

morals was to be found in orthodox Christianity and, ultimately, in the
Catholic Church. It was only in the Church, with its dogmas, its con-
straints, its apparent impediments, that real freedom was to be found.
“The more I considered Christianity,” he wrote in Orthodoxy, “the more
I found that while it had an established rule and order, the chief aim
of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.” When he
became a Catholic, he said, he did not leave off thinking: he discov-
ered how to think. His friend Bernard Shaw—an otherwise incorrigible
rationalist—intuited some of this when writing to the cloistered nun,
Dame Laurentia MacLachlan: “Let me see behind your prison bars to
glimpse your world of freedom.”

That remark, from someone almost envious of a beatitude he could

not share, recalls another from some who could and did share it. “The
Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit,’ wrote Hilaire
Belloc to Chesterton when the latter was received into the Church in
1922. “The odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaning-
less puzzle at first, seen from that one standpoint, takes a complete order
and meaning.” The same idea was even more eloquently expressed by
Chesterton’s other great friend, Maurice Baring. It seems an appropri-
ate note on which to end:

I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909

and it is perhaps the only act in my life I have never regretted. Ev-

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ery day I life, the Church seems to me more and more wonderful;
the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice
of the Church, her liturgy, her liturgy, her rules, her discipline, her
ritual, her decisions in matters of faith and morals more and more
excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and her children
stamped with something that those outside her are without. There
I have found Truth and reality and everything outside her is to me
compared with Her as dust and shadow…. Space and freedom:
that is what I experienced on being received; that is what I have
been most conscious of ever since.

That, surely, is the only liberty worthy of the name. I wish it for all
of us.

Killarney scene with mountains reflected in lake, Ireland

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