The Man Who Was Thursday : Chesterton's Duel with the Fin de Siècle

Abstract

In former days heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of world and police and judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. armies with their cruel security, kings with their cold faces, decorous processes of State, reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was centre of universe; it was round him that stars swung. All tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, suppose I am very heretical, and looks round for applause. word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox. G.K. CHESTERTON, HERETICS History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES CHAPTER X OF Man Who Was Thursday: Nightmare (1907) is titled The Duel. It features hero, Gabriel Syme, in exhausting swordplay with impossibly unharmed Marquis de Saint Eustache--a literal duel that reflects many figurative ones that occur throughout novel. Chesterton had many quarrels with his time (only such a man could title one of his books What's Wrong with World) and enjoyed dueling over any issue that came to light in pages of Daily News or from pens of friendly adversaries such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. And while issues that Chesterton debated were numerous and filled pages of Illustrated London News for thirty years, of his work can be read as an argument for importance of what C.S. Lewis would, almost forty years after publication of Thursday, call the Tao: the sole source of all value judgments (1) that informs all major world religions--the doctrine of objective value, belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false. (2) Chesterton, with uncharacteristic brevity, used label (3) for this same idea, resisting, quite consciously, splitting apart of reason and emotion, mind and body, spirit and matter, which had occurred unconsciously in so many of his contemporaries. (4) To Chesterton, what proved truth of general theories was their very generality, a shared belief that what are commonly called Judeo-Christian ethics are the best root of energy and ethics, (5) and belief that not all questions of value are relative or solely functions of time and space. In Orthodoxy, published a year after Thursday, Chesterton characterizes his era--which he feared was moving toward increasingly relativistic values--with remark, A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about truth; this has been exactly reversed. (6) Chesterton's great and extended duel against what he viewed as (at best) a wooden-headed and (at worst) a pernicious moral entropy was fought in pages of his novels, short stories, verse, essays, and apologia; his greatest foes were not figures such as Shaw and Wells, whose values ran counter to Chesterton's own, but those who denied importance of such intellectual contests in first place. Chesterton spent much of his life reacting against certainties, and uncertainties, of his age. …