G. K. Chesterton: Rallying the Really Human Things · G. K. Chesterton by Vigen Guroian THE I...

G. K. Chesterton by Vigen Guroian

26 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Fall 2002

G. K. Chesterton:Rallying the Really Human Things

Vigen Guroian

Vigen Guroian is Professor of Theology at LoyolaCollege in Maryland. He is the author of numerousbooks, including Ethics After Christendom and Tend-ing the Heart of Virtue.

“We need a rally of the really humanthings; will which is morals, memory whichis tradition, culture which is the mentalthrift of our fathers.”1 That was the judg-ment of G. K. Chesterton some seventyyears ago in an essay entitled “Is Humanisma Religion?” In order to rally the reallyhuman things, Chesterton proposed a newChristian humanism, while he simulta-neously warned of the dangers and decep-tions of a popular secular humanism that isbehaving as if it were a religion.

Chesterton distinguishes this modernsecularist humanism from a much oldertradition of Christian humanism withwhich he strongly identifies. The headwa-ters of this Christian humanism are thewritings of such ancient church fathers asBasil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom,Saint Augustine and Gregory the Great.The stream is replenished by such late me-dieval and early Renaissance figures asDante, Erasmus, and Thomas More.Chesterton extols the efforts of these hu-manists. “I doubt,” he writes, “if any think-ing person, of any belief or unbelief, doesnot wish in his heart that the end ofmediaevalism had meant the triumph ofthe Humanists like Erasmus and More.”2

In recent decades “secular humanism”has become a term of opprobrium amongconservative Christians who identify it withthe forces they believe are undermining the

religious foundations of Western civiliza-tion. Chesterton’s criticism is aimed morespecifically at the philosophical outlooks ofsignificant writers of his own time, includ-ing Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw,and H. G. Wells. He admires all of thesemen for their often insightful social criti-cism and their literary talent. But he ulti-mately rejects their brand of humanismbecause it is entirely anthropocentric.

True humanism, argues Chesterton, istheocentric and not anthropocentric.Christian humanism honors the fact that,though created of dust, the human being isthe sole creature that God has made in hisvery own image and likeness. Christianhumanism answers humankind’s need tobe redeemed from a fallen condition inwhich this image is tarnished, and in whichdeath works like a rust that destroys eventhe most beautiful bronze statue. Because itknows the difference between God and manand the effects of sin, Christian humanismrejects the spurious notions of humanprogress and perfection espoused by somesecular humanists. Christian humanismbuilds upon the human person’s “inner-directness” toward the transcendent. Itnurtures and disciplines this yearning (eros)

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for the divine life—for truth, goodness,and beauty—that God has planted in everyhuman being.

Christian humanism is grounded in thedoctrine of the Incarnation and gains itsspecial character from that doctrine. Godin Christ affirms our enfleshed and histori-cal existence and gives meaning to it in spiteof death. Within human culture andthrough the elements of this materialworld—bread and wine, oil and water,flesh and blood—the incarnate Son savesus body and soul from sin and death. Godhas given human beings compelling rea-sons to labor with him and within andthrough this physical world to redeem thewhole creation.

These Christian facts, Chesterton agues,are the inspiration of Christian humanism,which stands in contrast to man-centeredphilosophies of life that embrace matter tothe exclusion of spirit, or reject the materialworld in a flight to something deemed “spiri-tual.” Such secularist philosophies are notnecessarily atheistic, but they cannot sus-tain either faith in a personal God or thedignity, freedom, and eternal worth of thehuman person. The loss of this faith is theprincipal symptom, argues Chesterton, ofthe decline of the Christian paradoxicalimagination.

In the introduction to his edited volumeThe New Religious Humanists, GregoryWolfe argues that in the history of Westernculture “religious humanism has made onlyinfrequent appearances and has rarely oc-cupied center stage.” He explains that it “isa mode of thought that tends to arise whencultural cohesion is threatened by largesocial and intellectual upheavals.”3 He re-gards the time in which we live as one suchmoment. Wolfe adds that Christian hu-manism mediates the human and divineand the temporal and the eternal through

paradox and thus avoids the Gnostic pro-clivities of secular ideology.

On the face of it, the term religious humanismseems to suggest a tension between two opposedterms—heaven and earth, so to speak. But thisis a creative, rather than a deconstructive, ten-sion. Perhaps the best analogy for understand-ing religious humanism comes from the Chris-tian doctrine of the Incarnation, which holdsthat Jesus was both human and divine. In theparadoxical meeting of Christ’s two natures isthe pattern by which we can begin to under-stand the many dualities we experience in life:flesh and spirit, nature and grace, God andCaesar, faith and reason, justice and mercy.4

Chesterton is perhaps the most articu-late twentieth century practitioner of thisChristian paradoxical imagination. Hejudges that a serious breakdown of the fun-damental moral suppositions deposited bybiblical faith and the classical tradition isunderway and accelerating. He believes thatthis declension is due to a loss of convictionin our culture about the reality of the Incar-nation, that God truly became a humanbeing in Jesus Christ with all the importthat that has for human existence. ForChesterton, the doctrine of the Incarna-tion is the hinge that holds together what is,for the Christian, a vision of the world thatis essentially paradoxical. And he is aston-ishingly adept at employing this vision inhis cultural criticism and Christianapologetics. The Incarnation sheds lightwhere sin deceives and despair darkens thehuman horizon. Sin causes us to experiencespirit in opposition to matter, faith in con-flict with reason, life defeated by death. Butthe Incarnation reveals these apparent con-tradictions as paradoxes.

Contradiction may signal futility, butparadox is pregnant with the possibility ofresolution and harmony. Paradox is an allyof truth. The good news of the ChristianGospel is that God who is spirit becameflesh, infinite being became finite existence,and the immortal One became mortal man

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in order that death might be undone andhumanity might be drawn up into eternallife. God in his being and act unties theGordian knot of sin. The errors of paganreligion and the falsehoods of atheistic andantihuman secularismare exposed by the Incar-nation and replaced byits truth in paradox. Thisdivine and human truthopens a way for manother than the escape ofthe soul from matter andtime or the embrace ofmere flesh and finitude ina courtship with personalextinction.

Chesterton believesthat the collapse of thiswonderful vision of manin his relation to bothheaven and earth lies atthe heart of the moderncrisis of meaning. Indeed,what makes Chesterton instructive for ustoday is that he lived at a moment in historythat marked the end of modernity and wason the cusp of post-modernity. Modernitywas the result of a five hundred year processin which the dual Christian truth about thedignity and degradation of human exist-ence, illuminated by the Incarnation, heldtogether by the paradoxical imagination,was split apart. Secularist humanismemerged from this fractured truth and hasnot known how to put it back together,even when there is the desire to do so. Itseems doomed, rather, to fly from one poleof that truth to the other. On the one hand,it seeks to affirm, through some form ofidealism or other, the “divinity” of humanlife, but abandons the doctrine of the Incar-nation. On the other hand, it is drawntoward the opposite pole of naturalism andrelativism and forgets the crucial differencebetween finitude and sin—and the distinc-

tions between error and contravention ofhigher law. Chesterton sums up:

Where is the cement which made religion cor-porate and popular, which can prevent [human-ism] falling to pieces in a debris of individualistic

tastes and degrees? What isto prevent one Humanistwanting chastity withouthumility, and another hu-mility without chastity, andanother truth or beauty with-out either? The problem ofan enduring ethic and cul-ture consists in finding anarrangement of the piecesby which they remain re-lated, as do the stones in anarch. I know of only onescheme that has thus provedits solidity, bestriding landsand ages with its giganticarches, and carrying every-where the high river of bap-tism upon an aqueduct toRome.5

In its late Renaissanceand Enlightenment origins, secularist hu-manism is still a “mitigated” Christian hu-manism in which God is driven to the bor-ders of human life and enterprise. Grace isredefined as “the supernatural varnish ofthose acts whose perfect rectitude the rea-son of the upright man suffices to assure,”notes Jacques Maritain.6 Eventually, na-ture becomes the sole norm, as perfectionentails not a transcendent participation inthe life of God but is totally immanent. Themodern idea of progress emerges, justifiedby an unquestioning faith in reason andmodern science. In the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries, this secular humanism em-braces a complete human autonomy thatneeds neither God nor grace.

Chesterton’s life straddled the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. This gave him avantage point to see the line that was beingcrossed in his time. The old idealistic liberalhumanism born of the Renaissance and

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Enlightenment was giving way to a mili-tant, anti-theistic secularism, whose child isnihilism. He judges that all of the principalspheres of culture—the family, education,economic life, and politics—are being hol-lowed out and vacated of moral convictionby the solvent of rationalism and the blind-ness of positivism. I do not think that hewould have been surprised by the radicalhistoricism, skepticism, and relativism es-poused by contemporary post-modernistslike Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty,and embraced naively by many ordinarypeople today.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton quips:

At any street corner we meet a man who uttersthe frantic and blasphemous statement that hemay be wrong. Everyday one comes acrosssomebody who says that of course his view maynot be the right one, or it is not his view. We areon the road to producing a race of men toomentally modest to believe in the multiplica-tion table, leave aside making a sure distinctionbetween right and wrong.7

He concludes that secularist humanismis the “gathering place” of forces that under-mine the really human things and open thegates for anti-human ideologies dressed upin shepherd’s clothes. This new humanismis especially subversive and damaging toChristian faith and Western culture be-cause it is parasitic. It exploits and expendsthe religious and moral capital of biblicalfaith and is incapable of replenishing thatcapital. Chesterton observes that secularisthumanism “is using, and using up, the truthsthat remain to it out of the old treasury ofChristendom.”8 The deposit of moral truthsset adrift by a disintegrating Christendomis thus gradually degraded, reduced to ideo-logical half-truths and sappy clichés.

The modern world is not [wholly] evil. [Indeed],in some ways the modern world is far too good.It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When areligious scheme is shattered...it is not merelyvices that are set loose.... But the virtues are let

loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly[than the vices], and the virtues do more terribledamage. The modern world is full of the oldChristian virtues gone mad. The virtues havegone mad because they have been isolated fromeach other and are wandering alone.9

Consider the Christian virtue of charity,for example. Instead of the selfless seekingof another’s good, charity becomes sugarysentiment. It is invoked to deny that for-giveness entails judgment and repentance,or that sin even exists. In due course, secu-larist humanism may rob or empty all ofthe virtues of their true and vital meaning.The final outcome of such a process can beseen in what has been done to the religiousnotion of the dignity of human life. It hasbeen pulled up from its biblical ground andthe garden of the Church. Its deep humanmeaning, nurtured by the Christian doc-trine of the imago Dei, withers and fadesfrom memory. A desiccated concept ofhuman dignity is embraced instead. Andthat, ironically, nay tragically, is deployedto justify acts that contradict traditionalmoral teaching.

Chesterton says that the humanism ofthe secularist leads morality down a peril-ous road, a road that he tells us in Ortho-doxy is paved with pragmatism and relativ-ism. Man is told “to think what he must andnever mind the Absolute.” “But preciselyone of the things that he must think,” addsChesterton, “is the Absolute.” Otherwise,the whole of the rest of the world is anillusion. Both pragmatism and relativismembrace an outlook “just as inhuman as thedeterminism” to which they often vehe-mently object. “The determinist (who, todo him justice, does not pretend to be ahuman being) makes nonsense of the hu-man sense of actual choice.” But pragma-tism and relativism “make nonsense of thehuman sense of actual fact.”10 The road theypave leads to the devil’s version of the Em-erald City, where nothing is what it seems,

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words are no longer tools of truth butinstruments of raw power, and the moralcompass is given up because there are notrue poles of good and evil or right andwrong.

This suicide of thought, as Chestertoncalls it, leads inexorably toward the denialof the existence of the good—or of anythingthat is really, permanently human. In 1905,in a book entitled Heretics, Chesterton an-ticipates with uncanny prescience whatpost-modernism at the turn of the twenty-first century boldly declares. “Modernmorality,” he writes, seems only capable ofmaking a case for itself by pointing out “thehorrors that follow breaches of law.”11 Pre-marital sex may be inadvisable because onerisks pregnancy or AIDS. One probablyshouldn’t lie because lying undercuts thesocial trust that is the precondition forgetting what one really wants. All of these“prohibitions” are subject, of course, toalteration or negation if means may befound to avoid bad consequences. In otherwords, modern morality is consequen-tialist. More than that, it is morbidlyconsequentialist, having lost a sure visionof the goodness of goodness.

In the end, images of automobile acci-dents, pictures of people dying from AIDS,and photographs of aborted fetuses won’tnecessarily stop people from drinking anddriving, engaging in causal or “unprotected”sex, or escaping the inconvenience of hav-ing a child by having an abortion. At theCreation, God did not say: I will make theseas with clean water, not polluted water, andthe land arable and not desert because itwould be a disaster for the environment oth-erwise. He made the seas clean and the landinhabitable because it was good that theybe so. A vision of the good has far greaterpower to move men and women to do theright thing than all the horrible images wemay conjure up to terrify them into doingthe right thing.

In Heretics, Chesterton observes:

A young man may keep himself from vice bycontinually thinking of disease. He may keephimself from it also by continually thinking ofthe Virgin Mary. There may be a question aboutwhich method is the more reasonable, or evenabout which is the more efficient. But surelythere can be no question about which is themore wholesome.12

Modern people, he says, have grown somodest about the good that they no longerbelieve they can be certain of what it is.Erroneous notions of tolerance are fos-tered by secularist humanism in its finalstage as it gives itself over to nihilism. Evenordinary people voice the opinion that ourprincipal moral obligation is not to believetoo strongly in any moral conviction. “Agreat silent collapse, an enormous unspo-ken disappointment has in our time fallenon our...civilization,” writes Chesterton.“All previous ages have sweated and beencrucified in an attempt to realize what isreally the right life, what is really the goodman. [Yet] a definite part of the modernworld has come...to the conclusion thatthere is no answer to these questions.”13

Under the aegis of secularist humanism, anidea which is inherently absurd gains sup-port. It is that human flourishing may beachieved without defining what is humanor what is good for human beings.Chesterton continues:

Every one of the popular modern phrases andideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem ofwhat is good. We are fond of talking about“liberty;” that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoiddiscussing what is good. We are fond of talkingabout “progress;” that is a dodge to avoid discuss-ing what is good. We are fond about talkingabout “education;” that is a dodge to avoiddiscussing what is good. The modern man says,“Let us leave all these arbitrary standards andembrace liberty.” This is, logically rendered,“Let us not decide what is good, but let it beconsidered good not to decide it.” He says,“Away with your old moral formulae; I am forprogress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us

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not settle what is good; but let us settle whetherwe are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither inreligion nor in morality, my friend, lie the hopesof the race, but in education.” This, clearlyexpressed, means, “We cannot decide what isgood, but let us give it to our children.”14

Many would agree that Chesterton hasgot hold of something that is disturbingabout the modern temper. His diagnosis,prescient in his time, is confirmed in ourtime. What drew the venom of his contem-porary adversaries and continues to offendis his prescription. Secularism needs to bereplaced by faith, he says unabashedly, andrelativism by firm standards of right andwrong. In simplest terms, Chesterton pro-poses a return to dogma. This proposaldoes not fall easily on the ears of modernpeople who think that tolerance and undis-criminating diversity are the highest goodsof civilized life.

I want to explore what a return to dogmameans and its importance for Chesterton’sChristian humanism. But before doing so,it may be useful and instructive to examinethe views of one of Chesterton’s youngercontemporaries in counterpoint. In per-haps his best known book, entitled TheModern Temper and published in 1929, theAmerican literary and social critic JosephWood Krutch ruthlessly cut through theillusions of the liberal humanism of his dayto which he himself had earlier adhered. Inthat book, Krutch concluded that a col-lapse of Western civilization is inevitable,even if the course is long and winding. Krutchshared much in common with Chesterton’sanalyses of the modern crisis. But whereasChesterton saw through it to hope, Krutchcrouched in despair.

Krutch’s despair is especially poignantbecause he understands its source. His lib-eral and secular creed does not permit beliefin the truths and verities of traditionalreligion. Liberated reason must do without

dogma. Krutch also recognizes the terribleirony in this situation. For without faithand certitude, there is no stopping the newbarbarians who are knocking down thefortress walls of the civilization he loves.With melancholic honesty Krutch writes inthe Foreword:

I have neither celebrated the good old days norattempted to prove that mankind is about toenter a golden age. I am sure that those who holdconventional religious opinions will find mybook in many ways offensive and I fancy thatmany who are militantly rationalistic will bedisgusted by my failure to share their optimismconcerning the future of a rationalistic human-ity.... Certainly if any modern temper like thatherein described does actually exist it is verydifferent from that scientific optimism, which,though it is being widely popularized at thepresent moment, really belongs to nineteenthcentury thought and certainly one of its mostdistinguished features is just its inability toachieve either religious belief on the one handor exultant atheism on the other. Unlike theirgrandfathers, those who are its victims do notand never expect to believe in God; but unliketheir spiritual fathers, the philosophers andscientists of the nineteenth century, they havebegun to doubt that rationality and knowledgehave any promised land into which they may beled.15

There is something at once noble andpathetic about this declaration. For Krutchconcedes that he himself has contributed tothe subversion of the foundations of liberalsociety. This is because he and other secularliberals are unable to believe in or to com-mend to others the truths and moral prin-ciples that inspire a free society and givemen and women reasons to defend it. “Theworld may be rejuvenated in one way oranother, but we will not,” Krutch confesses.“Skepticism has entered too deeply into oursouls ever to be replaced by faith, and wecan never forget the things which the newbarbarians will never need to know.”16

Scientific enlightenment, says Krutch,makes it no longer possible to hold to the

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classical and biblical belief that the virtuesparticipate in a larger transcendent pur-pose. Human ignorance and fear imagineda meaningful universe masked in mysteryand headed toward salvation; we must nowconclude that the universe is faceless andindifferent to human purpose or suffering.“It is no longer [possible] to believe or telltales of noble men because we do not believethat noble men exist [nor the gods theywould obey]. The best we can do is achievepathos and the most that we can do is to feelsorry for ourselves.... [The] cosmos may befarcical or it may be pathetic but it has not[even] the dignity of tragedy.”17 The hu-man cause, says Krutch, “is a lost cause...[as]there is no place for us in the natural uni-verse.” But for the stoic Krutch, “we are not,for all that, sorry to be human. We shouldrather die as men than live as animals.”18

In the final analysis, Krutch’s human-ism collapses in upon itself in much themanner that post-modernist writers de-scribe the implosion of modern culturesince the Enlightenment. The humanist whovalues human freedom so highly ironicallysubverts freedom’s transcendent founda-tions with a deadly embrace of naturalismor radical historicism. Under either, free-dom is an illusion, much as God is a projec-tion of the human mind. We are left tobelieve and behave as if there is more thanthere really is—that our humanity is spe-cial and our freedom is real—because tobelieve and act in any other manner wouldbe unpleasant. “We have discovered thetrick which has been played upon us,”Krutch declares, “and...are [at least] nolonger dupes.”19

So far as I am aware, Chesterton did notreview The Modern Temper. But let mespeculate as to how he might have answeredKrutch. I suspect that Chesterton wouldhave begun by observing that Krutch re-jects religious revelation and truth too hast-

ily. Even as he claims that theism has beenirreversibly demythologized, Krutch him-self is caught in a myth of secularist liberal-ism. He is like a man blindfolded who thinksthat the object of his criticism has disap-peared; or he is like the child who thinksthat he is hidden from his playmates bycovering his eyes with his hands. In TheModern Temper, Krutch criticizes bothChesterton and T. S. Eliot for taking “ref-uge” in Roman and Anglican Catholicism,“whose dogmas, if accepted without argu-ment, provide the basis which pure reasoncannot discover.”20 However, if one readsChesterton carefully and fairly—and Eliotas well—one sees that his diagnosis of mo-dernity is neither romantic nor reaction-ary. Chesterton knows that Christendom isgone and that the church no longer standsat the center of culture. Indeed, he chidesthose who continue to think triumphantlythat England is still a Christian nation.21

Nowhere does he suggest that his aim is toput the old Christendom back togetheragain, in England or anywhere else.

Krutch’s honesty and despair, in fact,support Chesterton’s contention that secu-larist humanism at the ship’s helm has atgreat peril thrown overboard the spiritualballast of civilized life and broken religion’smoral compass. As the ship rocks and tipsto the deep, the humanists talk of therebeing “no precise moral ideals...[sounds]ludicrous.” For progress cannot be chartedwithout sure points of reference and a com-pass. Chesterton writes:

I do not...say that the word ‘progress’ is un-meaning; I say that it is unmeaning without theprevious definition of a moral doctrine, andthat it can only be applied to groups of personswho hold that doctrine in common. Progress isnot an illegitimate word, but it is logicallyevident that it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacredword, a word that could only rightly be used byrigid believers and in the ages of faith.22

Here surely is the nub of the matter.

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Chesterton’s turn to dogma is not what itsounds like to the ears of secularists, mod-ern and post-modern. He does not say thatwe must believe in dogmas or else the worst.He does not force dogma down our throats.He does not offer dogma as a bulwarkagainst regress or decline. Rather, dogma isbound to reemerge precisely because hu-man beings cannot live and prosper in aworld in which truth is thought not to exist.In Heretics Chesterton explains:

Man can be defined as an animal that makesdogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine andconclusion on conclusion in the formation ofsome tremendous scheme of philosophy andreligion, he is, in the only legitimatesense...becoming more and more human. Whenhe drops one doctrine after another in a refinedscepticism, when he says that he has outgrowndefinitions, when he says that he disbelieves infinality, when, in his own imagination, he sitsas God, holding to no form of creed andcontemplating all, then he is by that very processsinking slowly backwards into the vagueness ofthe vagrant animals and the unconsciousness ofgrass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singu-larly broad-minded.23

In a post-modern world, a Christianhumanism grounded in philosophical re-alism is what is needed. And Chestertonjudges that people are ready for it. For afraud has been perpetrated. The skepticscontradict themselves. They oppose dogmadogmatically and deny their own human-ity in doing it. They claim to be empiricalbut deny the testimony of lives lived in faith.The seeds of suspicion they sow can alsogrow, however, into fresh seedlings of be-lief.

When will we know that the rally for thereally human things really has begun? Withthe return of dogma, of course. AndChesterton is as sure of a return to dogmaas he is that birds need air to fly and that fishneed water to swim. At the close of Heretics,he sounds what Robert Royal has called“the battle charge for the kind of struggle”24

that must necessarily ensue if humanity is toavoid the abyss of post-modern nihilismand return to a God-centered vision ofhuman nature and destiny. This is whatChesterton says:

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that theyare disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubtdefines a religion. And the scepticism of ourtime does not really destroy the beliefs, rather itcreates them; gives them their limits and theirplain and defiant shape.... We who are Chris-tians never knew the great philosophic com-mon sense which inheres in that mystery untilthe anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us.The great march of mental destruction will goon. Everything will be denied. Everything willbecome a creed. It is a reasonable position todeny the stones in the street; it will be a religiousdogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis thatwe are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanityto say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindledto testify that two and two make four. Swordswill be drawn to prove that leaves are green insummer. We will be left defending, not only theincredible virtues and sanities of human life, butsomething more incredible still, this huge im-possible universe which stares us in the face. Weshall fight for visible prodigies as if they wereinvisible. We shall look on the impossible grassand the skies with a strange courage. We shall bethose who have seen and yet have believed.25

Chesterton challenges us with one finalparadox. Without dogma there is merelydescent into chaos and nothingness. Yetwith dogma we may rise only to becomedemons in bellicose combat over manytruths and many gods. For in a sinful worlddogma comes into combat with dogma.Nevertheless, dogma, the right dogma, mayalso enable us to rise to be godlike, creaturesmade in the image of the one God, in theunity of his truth revealed in the flesh of oneman who lived twenty centuries ago.

Contrary to so much of what claims to beChristian in our culture, we are called tobelieve not in order to gain peace but toknow the truth. Dogma is on the way totruth, but it is hardly the stuff of peace. Thefirst and last lesson of Christian humanism

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is this: We, by our own efforts alone, cannotsew together the cloth of peace from oursinful and tattered human nature. Realpeace, like real humanity, is a gift and atranscendent thing, that we will enjoy onlywhen we wholly accept and do faithfullyobey the God who has become really hu-man.

1. Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Thing (New York: Dodd,Mead & Company, 1943), 13. The chapter is entitled,“Is Humanism a Religion?” and is addressed specificallyto the last chapter of Norman Foerster’s AmericanCriticism, in which Foerster takes up the cause of theso-called New Humanism represented in the writingsof Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More.

2. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. LawrenceJ. Clipper, vol. 35, The Illustrated London News 1929-1931 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 84.

3. Gregory Wolfe, The New Religious Humanists (NewYork: The Free Press, 1997), xi.

4. Wolfe, New Religious Humanists, xv.

5. Chesterton, The Thing, 34.

6. Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 21.

7. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.:

Imago Books, 1959), 32.

8. Chesterton, The Thing, 13.

9. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 30.

10. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 36-37.

11. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John LaneCompany, 1905), 25.

12. Chesterton, Heretics, 26-27.

13. Chesterton, Heretics, 32.

14. Chesterton, Heretics, 33.

15. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper, (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), xv-xvi.

16. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 247.

17. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 137, 142.

18. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 249.

19. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 249.

20. Krutch, The Modern Temper, 229.

21. See, for example, Orthodoxy, 37.

22. Chesterton, Heretics, 37.

23. Chesterton, Heretics, 286.

24. Robert Royal, “Christian Humanism in aPostmodern Age,” in The New Religious Humanists,103.

25. Chesterton, Heretics, 304-5.