Pints With Aquinas - 5 Reasons to Love G.K. Chesterton | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: August 10, 2024

Father Pine talks about how Gilbert Kieth Chesterton lead him deeper in his faith. He talks about why you will want to read his books too. Support The Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pine to the Quinas. I'd like to talk a little bit about GK Chesterton because I am deeply indebted to GK Chesterton or I'm super grateful, super appreciative for what he has done for me. Why? Well, kind of like as part of my own ongoing conversion, I had to discover that the church's

intellectual life is something rigorous and vigorous, that the church has reasons for her belief and that those reasons are well articulated, well argued, and that they're beautiful. And it was really Chesterton who helped me to see that for the first time. So I want to give you five reasons for which I love GK Chesterton as a way to commend him to your readership. So here we go. Okay, maybe by way of further introduction, I started reading GK Chesterton a little bit at the end of high school and then in the beginning of college and then a lot more in the novitiate.

So my sister Rebecca had also gone to Steubenville and she read GK Chesterton. It had been assigned to her while she was there and then she caught into it and picked him up in the years since. And so she would quote and send along things that she had found in Chesterton and I was always interested

and sometimes excited at the prospect of diving deeper but I only read like a little bit in high school and then maybe a little bit in college and then we had a group of guys who got together to talk about things of faith and then to go on adventures called the GK and there was more GK Chesterton to be had in that blessed company and it was just like against this backdrop that when I went to the novitiate and I was encouraged like not so much to start our formal study of St. Thomas Aquinas because it was communicated to us like, listen, these things are going to be set before you in pedagogical

fashion. You need time to think them through. You also need time to develop a philosophical and theological habit of mind. So maybe take some time here to read more spirituality, maybe even read some literature and kind of like work your way into the studies that you'll experience at the Dominican House. And so I was like, that sounds great, and I read a ton of Chesterton during the novitiate, and then my first year of studies, I was like, okay, I'm going to read some sweet philosophy and supplement with some sweet history and theology, but I'm also going gonna read some sweet Chesterton. And I did, and I profited from it, and I'm super grateful. And so, like, when I think about the ways in which Chesterton has influenced my own life, I tried to kind of cook it down to five points, five reasons for which I love GK Chesterton

and you might love GK Chesterton too. I realize though in saying this, like, I don't recommend too terribly many things except, precepts of the church and the gospel of John, because people are different, they have different temperaments, and for some people reading Chesterton is alienating. You're like, what is this man saying? Or even frustrating. It's like, did he just spend three pages setting up a pun? But I think that a lot of Catholics and a lot of Christians find Chesterton to be delightful, and I know of people who have been converted from unbelief to belief by Chesterton, or by reading Chesterton and the grace of God at work in those pages. So, yeah, it might be for you, it might not be for you, but I found it to be delightful.

I found him to be delightful, and you might as well. Okay, so five points, five reasons for which I love G.K. Chesterton. The first is his worldview. Worldview is kind of a sterile and silly word,erton. The first is his worldview. Worldview is kind of a sterile and silly word, but what I mean is his contemplative gaze on God and reality. Because I think a lot of us we have a kind of mundane or workaday gaze on God and reality. We're like, all right, there's rules to be followed, there's tasks to be done, let's get to it. But Chesterton, he gazes on God

and reality with a sense of profound wonder, with a sense that all that he has he might not have had, like a sense of its contingency. It could not have been, it could have been otherwise. And as a result of which, the fact that it's a gift is very much present to him throughout the whole course of his life. So he has this beautiful little meditation on a dandelion, what like the optimist might say about it, what the pessimist might say about it, and then what he is drawn to say about it is like, wow, it's perfect, it's ideal because it could not have been or it could have been otherwise. And so he proposes this kind of posture, not so much of optimism or pessimism before reality, but of like what he calls patriotism. The fact that you love it because it's yours, because it's been given to you, because it's been entrusted to you, and he thinks that that kind of

basic foundational love is what really transforms life. You know, it's what makes life wonderful. Our relationships wonderful, our places wonderful, our engagements wonderful. And so, yeah, he has a sense for the fact that the world is created, that it's given to us by a creator. When he refers to for the fact that the world is created, that it's given to us by a creator. When he refers to St. Thomas Aquinas in his book about him, he'll say that if he were to have taken one of these kind of more elaborate religious names, as you'll find in some congregations or some religious orders, he said he would have been St. Thomas of the Creator, because St. Thomas, you know, in part communicates the same vision of an appreciation for creation of its status

as a gift of our dependence upon God and of the contingency of all it all that is but yeah as a result of which the way in which we can refer all that is back to God. Okay so that's first worldview. Second thing is his insight and this kind of follows from the first because I think the Chesterton is really good at identifying what's essential and what's accidental. So he's like, a lot of us encounter him through his essays, which essays are sometimes critical of the thoughts of his contemporaries. And so like he has this cool essay about progress, for instance, and he makes similar observations as other Catholic

contemporaries like Christopher Dawson, but he's critical of people like Wells who say, you know, by technological means we're going to advance in a kind of unstinting incline. And he's like, listen, this whole progress ideology, it just doesn't hold up against our human experience because, like, we're not just going to evolve automatically, or we're not just going to evolve mechanistically. Like if we can be sure of something, it's not so much that we'll evolve, it's that we will devolve if left to our own devices because the only thing that's going to work itself out automatically or mechanistically is original sin. So he's got this kind of keen insight, he's got this incisive gaze

into reality at its heart, at its core, whereby he identifies what's essential and what's, you know, accidental. And I think he's, as a result, he's less... he's not taken in or he's less easily taken in by, you know, ideology or passing fancy. He has a sense for, like, the perennial life or for the perennial teaching. And you'll see him use this even in fiction, in literature. Like the thing that's cool about his Father Brown stories, his detective fiction, is that what gives Father Brown insight into reality is the fact that he's a priest, so he has care of souls, so he knows what's in the heart

of man like our Lord Jesus Christ, whom the priest images or whom the priest imitates. And so for him, like, solving mysteries isn't a matter of being, like, a really advanced intellect with an opium addiction, as it was for Sir Arthur Cornandoyle. For him, it's a matter of having a sympathy with humanity for knowing what's in the heart of man, and the priest is the character who's best suited to kind of tell that forth because he's entered most intimately into reality by his association with God, which I find, yeah, beautiful. And so Chesterton comes before his experience with this kind of curiosity and with this kind of honesty, and he's able to mediate

that to you, to the reader, with a kind of burst of insight. So there's so many things that I've read in Chesterton which remain with me even at present like I was just talking with a friend the other day about the youthfulness of God this idea that you know Chester will talk about how the child is content to play the same game over and over and That it exhausts the adult when the child says again again again But we see a kind of youthfulness in the divine behavior and the divine comportment Even in the movement of the heavens He'll say like the fact that the Sun rises each morning is testimony to the fact that God does not grow weary of saying again again again so there's

stuff like that that I just yeah I love I find especially beautiful another thing that I love about Chesterton is his energy and you see this in his literary output so I think Ignatius Press has collected his works in something like 37 volumes, but some of those volumes are in several parts or three parts, something like that. So he wrote a lot. And I don't know how that compares to St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, but it seems like he wrote a lot. And I've really profited from reading almost everything that he's ever written.

And I think in part, it's like, you know, that was his Metier, so he was an essayist. The last, I don't know, nine, ten volumes of his collected works are the weekly essays that he's submitted to the Illustrated London Times or the London Illustrated Times. I've forgotten the exact name of things, so correct me in the comments. But it's like he was just, he worked under deadlines and he just continued to generate content. And I think for anybody who writes or anybody who generates content of whatever sort, one recognizes how exhausting that can be or kind of how depleting the grind often proves. But Chesterton was a warrior, you know, like he was a battler and he knew that in the combat

for truth against the forces of falsity that you have to occupy the field of battle. Like you're not going to strike down all of your enemies, but you can scare them. You can intimidate them. And the way to do so for Chesterton was to occupy the field of battle with words. And so you see come forth from his pen a kind of tide of words, a beautiful tide of words, not egomaniacal words, not self-centered words, but humble words, words of service. There's a story told about Chesterton that at the end of his life he was visited by a Dominican friar with whom he had been close friends, Father Vincent McNabb, and that Father Vincent McNabb

extended to him a kind of Dominican privilege of singing the Salve Regina over Chesterton's expiring body. And then before he left the room, McNabb is said to have picked up Chesterton's pen and to have kissed it. And in the introduction to one of the versions of Chesterton's autobiography, the author who writes the story, I think it's Randall Payne, says, for that pen, speaking of Chesterton's's pen told best the story of its possessor by pointing awesomely and adamantly to someone else And he likens it to the to the long bony finger of st John the Baptist and so we can say about Chester, you know He must increase and I must decrease like God must increase and Chesterton must decrease

There's the sense that like Chesterton's a humble man. He's a self-forgetful man Chesterton must decrease. There's the sense that like Chesterton's a humble man, he's a self-forgetful man, he writes with a kind of prolix prose that often enough tells you more about himself than it does about his subject matter, but there's like a whimsy to it, right? There's just like a wonder to it, which shows forth this awesome energy that like the long bony finger of St. John the Baptist, the pen of Chesterton tells best the story of its possessor, it tells best of its possessor by pointing awesomely and adamantly to someone else. He must increase, I must decrease.

So I just love that energy, that kind of humble, simple, wonderful energy that you experience in Chesterton's writing. The next thing is there's like a humanity to Chesterton, which I love. You know, so like he's critical of things and whenever someone is critical of things there's a risk that you lose a hold on that man or that woman's humanity because it just becomes a matter of, you know, like trenchant critique and yeah that's just tough. That's a tough genre in which to operate for a long time without dehumanizing or being dehumanized. But with Chesterton

you have this sense that he always retains a hold on his humanity or that he always embodies his humanity. Also, with reference to his autobiography, some people notice that there's no real mention of his wife, Frances Blog, Frances Chesterton, and apparently it's because she told him not to include her in his autobiography, because she knew that if he did, it would be all about her. And so she wanted him to tell his story even if it meant the exclusion of her in more balanced fashion. And it's clear that Chesterton loved his wife. There's a kind of dedicatory line in one of his first collections of essays, or maybe it was either Greybeards at Play or The Ballad of the White Horse, where he says, therefore I bring these

lines to you who brought the cross to me, because it was his wife who really introduced him to Christianity or to the Lord, and he had this like real tender and like sweet appreciation for her, not just for that, but for her. And it was a sadness for them that they couldn't have children, but I think they had extended family and chastened love to kind of muck around with the kids and impress them with his heroic feats, one of which apparently was his just incredible consumption of food would cause like great delight amongst the children. I'm going to close my window here for a second because they're doing work outside. Stay with me. That might be the first time that I've interrupted a video in the middle to close a window, but when you're 13 minutes in, you just got to send it.

So Chesterton's humanity, like he would, yeah, impress even his little niece's nephew's or his extended family by featsats of strength like the consumption of large amounts of food, which to you might sound like gluttony or at the very least like something other than abstinence and sobriety. But you can appreciate that this man is like he's a man of of a certain silliness, of a certain whimsy, of a certain caprice, but like a thoroughly human man, a man of friendships, a man of attachments, a man of engagement. Yeah, I love him. So then the last thing maybe is just to take a further point from that, like his hilarity, his whimsy. There's a famous line at the end of Orthodoxy

that he sets up for a couple of pages where he's talking about like the hidden life of our Lord Jesus Christ. The things that don't necessarily come through in the pages of the Gospels but which we can infer or we can reason are present in our Lord. And what he reasons is present therein is his mirth, right? Like our Lord's own hilarity. And maybe we do get glimpses of that. Like when you read the Gospel and he talks about having a beam in your eye that you ought remove first before you look to the splinter in the eye of your neighbor.

So maybe our Lord is funny. I don't know. That's a question to be entertained at greater length in another setting. But Chesterton had this insight into the kind of cosmic hilarity of all of creation. And you see this in the way that he describes, for instance, our status as creatures or the arrangement of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, the fact that they had to obey, you know, that they couldn't take from the fruit of the knowledge of truth, like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he says like, it might sound arbitrary to you, but like all of us have to observe a kind of, what, law of conditional joy. And like the ideas that he spins out on the basis of that are so funny, but like you get it, like he sees

the kind of hilarity as it were, or whimsy at the heart of reality, and he's able to rejoice in that. He's able to revel in that. And to some of us that might seem foreign to our experience if we find life kind of characterized more by negative emotions than positive emotions, but I get the impression that Chesterton struggled with the things with which we struggle, but that he believed, that he hoped, that he loved in a kind of aspirational way towards a richer reality than is often the one we choose to see or we choose to remark upon. And so I think that Chesterton as an author can help us with our own aspirations to be better believers and hopers and lovers. And he helps us certainly, you know, to, I don't know,

with gaining eyes to see and with gaining a mind to think and gaining a heart to love. That's somewhat incoherent statement, but I hope that it is of profit to you. So I want to commend Chesterton to your readership. I hope that he will help you along the way. You might start with those Father Brown stories. They're like some of the most approachable things. His literature, like I don't know that it stands up as literature. I'm sure that literary theorists have many criticisms to make because of excesses or defects, but a lot of people... I like The Man Who Was Thursday,, man alive, the flying in, and yeah, those

would be the ones with which I might begin if I were to read some of his novels. And then when it comes to his essays and his books, a lot of folks still profit from, you know, orthodoxies, kind of the classic text. His lives of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas are super beautiful. I think his life of Saint Francis of Assisi was the first thing of his that I read, which I just love. Like the fact that Saint Francis sees the world best by standing on his head as the juggler of God or the troubadour of the Blessed Virgin Mary by, you know, like doing somersaults. He has a better appreciation for what is most lasting in this world

and what is least lasting. And then you might also profit from like kind of some of the cultural criticism like what's wrong with the world is a really good example of that. And you know, if you survey his collected works you'll find something that suits your fancy because he comments on practically everything under the sun. So maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn't.

At the very least it's probably worth a try. So this is Pints of the Aquinas. If you haven't yet please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell and get sweet email updates when other things come out and then let's see I contribute to a podcast called God Splending we often do episodes about literature so it's like literature and this person or that person to the other person and we did one about Chesterton way back when which you might enjoy and we've done other ones about other literary figures in the time since. So that's what I got. Know of my prayers

for you, please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.