Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Cheston wrote a lot. Why do I think this book, everlasting man, stand out? Because he was a journalist. He didn't actually write many books, but this is one of the few cases where he actually wrote a book as a book. It's kind of this overview of the history of man and the history of Christ and Christianity, and I just think it's a treasure chest of knowledge.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Welcome to the Catholic Theology show presented by Ave Maria University. This podcast is sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle, a community that supports the mission of Ave Maria University through their monthly donations of $10 or more. If you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Ave Maria University, I encourage you to visit avemaria.edu join for more information.
I'm your host, Michael Dolphinay, and today I am joined by Father Joseph Fecio, founder of Ignatius Press, I believe almost 45 years ago. 45 years ago, yeah, 1978. And happily, well, the founding provost of Ave Marie University and now a visiting professor of theology who was on campus for a little bit, teaching an intensive course on C. S. Lewis and Tolkien in the fall and a course on Chesterton in the spring. So welcome to the show, Father.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Thank you, Michael. Good seeing you again. Good being on the campus again after all these years.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yeah. We're glad to have you here. And I wanted to talk, actually, one fun thing today. This won't be released. It'll be released later, but we're recording it on January 10, which is your birthday. So happy 83rd birthday, Father.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Michael.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Yes, that's great. And we were talking before the show about the reading from the office of Readings and at Syrac 1120, which says, stand by your covenant and attend to it and grow old in your work.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yes, that was part of the readings for yesterday's office. And I take that to heart because my covenant is my vows, of course. And then I enjoy the work that I do that I've been called to do for the Lord. So I want to grow old in it. That's good. And then today at Mass, we had the call of Samuel, where Eli is there in the temple. Eli, of course in Hebrew means my God. And Samuel was called three times, and he thinks it's Eli, but Eli reasons, this is God calling. And then Samuel was told to respond the next time to say, here I am, lord, I come to do your will. And I thought, that's a great thing for my know, because my vocation was. It was delayed. I heard voices that were not the right know. But on the third or fourth time I got it straight. And that should be everybody's motto. Here I am, Lord. First of all, I am. We don't have to be.
We're here. It's a gift of God. What do we do to respond? We do his will. Here I am, Lord. I come to do your will.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah. That's really beautiful.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: It's my homily for today, my homily to myself on my birthday.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: That's great.
And read a beautiful way, too. That not only is a vocation, obviously, our foundational baptismal vow and vocation, or to religious life or the priesthood or to marriage, but that it not only needs to be discerned and made, but remembered. And I love that. Stand by your covenant, stand by your vow, stand by your baptism. Even growing old in your work and kind of increase, find a way that even if the youthful fervor and enthusiasm fades, that we can replace it with the enthusiasm of old age.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: One of the things we're looking at today is we wanted to talk about G. K. Chesterton's the everlasting man. And this is a book that was really kind of very famous, I think, when it came out in 1926.
And Chesterton at that time was also.
I mean, he had a level of notoriety and fame in Europe and in the United States. That's just unimaginable today. I don't remember it was around that time, but when he came to the United States and gave lectures at Notre Dame, it was covered in the.
It's just we don't have anything like that today of this deeply literary, scholarly, intellectual culture. I think when he went to visit, when he went on a tour of Europe giving talks, he was often welcomed by prime ministers or kings or different stuff.
And in part there, in Addition, obviously, one of the things I want to talk about today is, what is it about the everlasting man that C. S. Lewis would say? It baptized his intellect. But I also just want to take a moment to think a little bit about what is special in a way, about people like Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis, about what they were able to learn and discover in their time that, to a certain extent, becomes a treasure for us. So that, I don't know, that there was kind of a cultural and literary and religious and christian achievement that's really lasting.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yes. Well, I think Europe was more aristocratic than the United States, which is more democratic. Speak in general terms, and therefore not everyone is educated in those higher levels. Note that they begin as soon.
But here, for example, now the average iq of a college student is the same as those who don't go to college. It used to be that the college students would have a higher iq than the ones that don't go to college. Right, but that's not the case anymore.
We haven't leveled it up. We've leveled it down. Whereas in Europe they had this education which was very intense from the beginning. And of course, Chesson didn't even go to college. He went to art know, but he read widely. You could see that as a young man. But we talked about two groups of three. We talked about Tolkien, Chesson and Lewis, and also about theologically, about Delu, Bach, Hanzo, Schma, Balthazar and Joseph Ratzinger.
One thing I find interesting is that Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien are literary people, even though Lewis got his degree in philosophy, right, something like that. But they're very theological. But their theology is like Christ's parables. I mean, they're putting it into some kind of concrete terms. Whereas if you look at all three, Delubach, Balthasar and Ratchinger, they're not just theologians, they're deeply rooted in culture. Balthar would translate, Claudel and Delubach had conversations with these great Peggy, for example, and Ratchinger, of course, had a tremendous breadth of cultural education. So they were really fully human, fully christian, fully catholic, but they kind of focused on one area, but was rich, enriched by everything else they knew. But on this book, however, Chesterton wrote a lot. He started writing around 1900, basically, and he died in 1936, I think. But I was visiting Del Alquist, who's sort of the Mr. Chesterton of the United States. He runs the Chess and Review, the Chestern Society. And I was just at home last month, and he had a three volume bibliography of Chessidon in English, printed in Norway, 1200 pages. The bibliography of Chessidon was 1200 pages. Wow.
So there's a lot to read.
Why do I think this book, everlasting man, stand out? Why does it stand out? Because he was a journalist. He was writing quickly in a train station or whatever, and he wrote essays and articles. He didn't actually write many books. Sometimes he wrote these, like, monographs on literary criticism, on Dickens or Daiquiri or know. But this is one of the few cases where he actually wrote a book as a book. And it kind of gathers together, I think, all the major insight. Well, I can't say that because it's full of insights, but it's kind of this overview of the history of man and the history of Christ and Christianity. And I just think it's a wealth. It's a treasure chest of knowledge. And the thing about Cheston is that he will say something in one single sentence which encapsulates the whole philosophy.
And so it's a good guide, I think, for students to read something like this, they're not going to get it all at once. But the point is it gives them an idea. If they're going to study materialism or pragmatism or skepticism or pessimism or whatever, they can go to a book like this or orthodoxy, which is similar to this, and get kind of a core set of concepts will help understand it better. I mean, he was just a brilliant guy.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, you taught a course, I think, back at the St. Ignatius Institute.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: I did, almost 50 years ago beginning.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: And I think you taught that for several decades, revelation and Christology, where you did C. S. Lewis's miracles, which we've talked about in another podcast, and the everlasting man. Right. Those were the two books that were the kind of pillars of the course.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: So what are some things that over the years that you found in teaching the everlasting man that were, I don't know, kind of like particular things that you found either really helpful for students to learn or the things that you wanted the students to know by the end of the course?
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Well, overall, the idea of seeing Christ as the center of history, which is why it was for the christological part of the course, I think in the first half of the book where he divides religions not by geography but by monotheism, God, polytheism, the gods, the demons. And what's the fourth one? God, the gods, the demons and philosophy. Yeah, and philosophy. That's those four as the four kind of approaches to ultimate questions of man before Christ and how they really led to Christ and how Christ's fulfillment of monotheism and philosophy from the time he was born. So anyway, that kind of overview of history and overview of religion, because you think about all the different protestant groups, and then you've got Islam and they've got Shiites and Sunnis and so on, and you got Buddhists and different kinds of Buddhists. It seems like it's just this huge jungle, this morass of different views and opinions and ideas. But he shows, no, there's only four kind of attitudes you can have here, and they're incomplete. Polytheism is incomplete. Philosophies is incomplete, but together they come together in Christ.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's a great way of putting it as well.
I think the way also that he kind of somewhat distinguishes between, say, the myth makers or the poetry of ancient, say, philosophies or ancient religions where there is kind of an attempt to find truth, but in this kind of somewhat incomplete manner, but some kind of reverence for the world, reverence for different things that comes forward in the myths, the great ancient stories.
And then you also then have this attempt to kind of philosophically make sense of the world, which you can see without an Aristotle or Plato or Confucius or Buddha, different things like that. But then he has a third category, right, of like the demons, where. Wait a second, there's a lot of these ancient religions or ancient myths that are actually like, well, have a lot of child and human sacrifice.
We don't want to put all. So like, oh, all religions are basically nice people doing wonderful things in this kind of noble, savage, rousseauian, idyllic manner of. No, some of them were really dark. Like in Carthage, there was child and human sacrifice. And that was actually. So when Rome came in, Rome was actually an improvement because it did put an end to the human know. We see the human sacrifice in the Aztecs, you see it in Moloch. And the older, a lot of the religions that Israel encountered among the Canaanites.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: And so you see it in the United States, right? Yeah. There's abortion. We just do it in the womb.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So we need to be able to name that. There's something going on in human culture and society that's actually profoundly disturbed. And then the way he takes those three things, by the way, just as a know one of the kind of, you talk about how Chestern says things. So he have those three characters, the philosopher, the poet, the mythmaker, and then the demon worshiper. And then all of a sudden you take JeSus in the cave as he has this chapter beginning with ChrisT where he talks about God in the cave. Well, in the story of Christmas, what do you have? You have the shepherds who are mythmakers. You have the Magi or the wise men, the philosophers, but you also have Herod. Herod, the demon kIng. So could you talk a little bit about how the three of those Come Together?
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Well, I think you just explained it a bit. But he'll talk about mythmakers as those who draw paintings, picture make pictures, and the philosophers is those who do diagrams. And so the philosophy seeks truth, but it's abstract.
And mythmakers tell stories. But where's the truth in this story? Whereas in Christ, as we see in Tolkien and his beautiful essay on fairy tales, that myth and fact have married and we have a myth which is actually the truth. The story of Christ, which is mythological in its form, but it's actually a story which is a true story. So that's kind of the union that both Tolkien and Cheston saw and Lewis. And of course, they're influenced. I mean, Chestnut was an influence on both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. In fact, as I'm rereading, I reread this every know, and I see more and more that that's that kind of sparked off Lewis's idea of know or Tolkien's idea of.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Yeah, like in everlasting man, you basically get the Lord liar, lunatic.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Understanding of Christ that Lewis becomes famous for and articulates very easily in mere Christianity. But it's actually in the everlasting man. Right.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: There it is. Christ is either a liar or he's mad, a lunatic, or he's telling the truth. So which of the three? There's no other. And. Right, you're right. Lewis is famous for that. But you see it in everlasting man.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So maybe the everlasting man is organized in two major parts. Could you talk about those two?
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Well, sure. He begins with the man in the cave, the idea.
And the second part is God in the cave, and he shows that parallel there.
But at the beginning, he is showing that. And this is very important in his time, and it's important in our time, that man, human beings, are not just a slightly higher form of animals, but they set themselves apart by art and by civilization. Two of the chapters on those. So against the background of nature, he sees man as part of nature, but standing out and distinct from nature.
That's the first part. And in the second part, he sees human history as the background and Christ in history standing out in history as part of history, and yet unique in his own way. So it's a beautiful kind of a diptic there. Two panels of a painting.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: One of the things he does also that I think is really interesting is the way he talks about, like, he almost does a reduxio ad absurdum, which is not almost.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: He does.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Yeah, he does that. Right. And where he says, if you try to look at human beings as just more animals, and they're going to be the wildest sort of animal. And it's interesting, there's a primatologist named Robert Sapolsky, who's very famous at Stanford, and he basically does all his work watching primates.
And he kind of becomes famous by talking about how, well, primates are very much like human beings, and human beings are very much like primates. I think he wrote a book why zebras don't get stressed or something. And these sorts of different elements.
And obviously, there's a lot of elements in which. Well, we do have a lot of similarities. Right. I don't know. But the funny thing is that what he does is he says, well, but the OD thing is, as he does all this, he says, basically, human beings turn out to be, well, rather unique animals. They're not as unique as we thought they are, as is the way he puts it. And he's an atheist who's committed to an account that we are just the same as animals. But he ends up saying we end up being the unique because he just sees that we pull together in human beings. And he talks about art and theater.
We put on shakespearean plays, and we know what we're doing. Right. This is something that animals wouldn't. Animals might. I don't know how to put it. Might, like, try to deceive another animal, but they don't put on plays. I mean, the level of. So I feel like even when somebody tries to think of human beings as just another animal, they end up having to describe that as the unique.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Okay. And of course, Chessen is so colorful in his language, he'll give the example that, well, birds build nests. So that's a human type thing building, right? Yeah, but where are the statues of other birds? Where are the different styles of nests? A gothic style and a roman S style and so on. No, not at all. So, like you say, redux that absurdity. Well, what if birds were human? Well, what would they do? They'd have a history of birds. Right. Somewhere. And they'd have these nests which were of different architectural styles. No, he's a genius.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: And they'd have little schools about how to build nests, how to build them more efficiently. And one of the things he does there is he kind of goes back, because in some ways, I do think this. And he's writing this somewhat in response to HG Wells's outline of history, which is a kind of broad evolutionary schema which shows that man is just another animal and that christianity is not special in a mean. And of course, no religions are because of Wells's atheistic position. But what he does is he goes back to kind of the famous caveman in our images, right. But he uses that to totally turn upside down as he talks about man in the cave. What does man do in the cave? Right. He paints pictures.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: So talk a little bit about how that changes, in a way, our vision of human beings.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Well, it reminds us of the truth. And here's what Chessen does again and again.
He is helping us to see things which are true, we have taken for granted because they're so know. He shows that the ordinary is extraordinary, that the fact that we write poetry is amazing. Right. But the fact that we can write a sentence is also amazing.
Or.
I know he has this in orthodoxy, too.
What are some examples that he gives?
Doesn't come to mind right now, but he would.
Well, I can't think of it.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: I think like riding a horse. That man rides a horse. How. That's like.
We forget how just extraordinary that is. Yes, right.
We're very rare to find a horse riding a man. That just doesn't happen.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: And that's a kind of. He turns us upside down like that. Look how unusual that is.
Yeah.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: And that's where he talks also, I think art is the signature of man. So what does man do when he's in a cave? He paints.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: So you have the caveman, what we think of as brutal and primitive, but he turns out to actually be into watercolors.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: And he likes to paint in the afternoons and we don't know what exactly is going on, but clearly there's a mind at work. And that's where he says the mind is not an evolution but a revolution.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: So the human mind, human consciousness, human logos, is somehow creative.
It doesn't just follow instinct, but it represents in this secondary mode that is just unheard of.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: And I think this points to something else, which is a great characteristic of this book.
It's a history. All right, what is history?
It's not simply the recording of events one after the other, because the history of Michael Dauphine a this morning would be. His alarm went off, he got up, he shaved, he went, had breakfast or whatever.
He breathed so many times per minute, his pulse was this all those are facts, but they're not interesting facts. So history is always a selection of those facts which will give you the right proportion of things. I often give the example, like San Francisco. Nowadays, San Francisco has a bad reputation because we have the homeless and live in tent cities and so on. It's there. It's terrible. But if I had a half a day to giving someone a tour of San Francisco, I could go see the homeless places, the tents, the poop on the streets and so on, and they'd go away thinking, San Francisco is a dump. It's a terrible city. But I could take them to the Golden Gate bridge, out to the beak. Golden Gate park. Quite tower. They always think it's a paradise. So how do you describe San Francisco? You have to pick the different elements and give them the proper proportion and the proper emphasis to create the picture. Well, that's what he does here. I mean, he's not a historian, but he has all these facts at his disposal because he's such a widely read person. But he puts them in the right order, in the right proportion and then I think, teaches us that way how we ourselves should describe reality or how we should also try to understand reality. And we see it described in the newspapers, in the media and blogs, whatever.
We have to beware of anybody who is disproportionately emphasizing something.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and he talks about at the beginning as well that when we become so familiar with something we often have a kind of contempt for it. And in a way what he kind of says is that, well, on the one hand, we're so familiar with man that we have contempt for these human beings and the cultures and societies. We largely tear them down. They're unjust or something. Right. We don't have a kind of wonder and appreciation for the human. And the same thing with Christ. He says at the beginning, I love it, where he says that if you took the twelve apostles and you dressed them up like Chinamen and you had them in pagodas or different things like that, then all of a sudden you think, oh, wow, this is an interesting religion. Maybe we ought to take it seriously. And so somehow that we have to kind of step back and look afresh at the wonder that is man and also at the wonder that is Jesus.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Christ and the one that is ourselves. He has a statement, a little phrase in orthodoxy where he says in his childhood they often refer to someone who was a genius. But the great might have been because he never developed his talents. The great might have been a genius. So that's someone who stands out. But he said, really, we're all great, might not have beens, none of us.
We've all won the lottery. In fact, I was telling the students last night that I came across this book on my mother's little bookshelf years ago.
Od little book of poetry. And there was an inscription inside to her. Her name was Florence, dear Florence, blah, blah, blah, by this guy named Lenore. I said, well, who's that? She said, well, I was engaged to him. He was an officer in the navy in San Diego. But his ship, there was an explosion and he died. So I thought, well, here's a book signed by this fellow who was going to marry my mom. Well, I wouldn't be here if it happened for that explosion on the ship and everybody's that way. Your dad could have been on a trip instead of conceiving you. So, as you say, cheston is great at showing us how the ordinary things that we're here are extraordinary and therefore we should have wonder and if wonder, then gratitude. I mean, he's definitely the apostle of wonder and of know.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: That's a great place to. Let's take a little pause. We'll take a break and we'll come back in a minute.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: You're listening to the catholic theology show presented by Ave Maria University and sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle. Through their generous donations of $10 or more per month, Annunciation circle members directly support the mission of AMU to be a fountainhead of renewal for the church through our faculty, staff, students and alumni. To learn more, visit avemaria.edu join. Thank you for your continued support. And now let's get back to the show.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Welcome back to the catholic theology show. I'm Michael Dauffine, your host. And today we have Father Joseph Fesio with us, and we are talking about GK Chesterton's the everlasting man. So thanks again, father, for being on the show.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Sure, Michael.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: And so we talked about how Chesterton says that if we try to consider man as an animal, we see just what an extraordinary animal he is. He's actually unlike all the other animals because he alone is a creator made basically. He's kind of arguing for the image that human beings are made in, the image and likeness of God. But he does so in just, again, this kind of, just a brilliant way in which he looks at kind of cave paintings and this sense in which art is the signature of man. Here we have a creature that is a creator.
And then he starts looking at how do human beings create? Well, one of the ways they create is by telling stories about gods, the myths, and about trying to reason about the world, which is philosophy. But then there's a bent nature to that in terms of demon worship or these sorts of elements.
And we talked a little bit how then? So then he turns to, though, Christianity, because I think another thing that people really have this idea that Christianity isn't just another religion, that really sounds weird to people, that somehow Christianity could be not another religion. But I think Chesterton really makes a case that Christianity actually is unique among the religions. So are there any kind of particular things that stand out to you in terms of trying to teach this to students or people who have a sense that our culture talks about comparative religions or philosophy of religions. It just assumes that the category of religion is big enough to hold everything right.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: And of course, you teach C. S. Lewis miracles. So, you know, he's that chapter called Christianity and religion in quotes.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Where I think how much dependence there is of Lewis, I don't know. But the point is, it's a truth they both saw, let's put it that way for sure, that if you look again at the essence of what these attitudes are, religion is man's search for God, either by mythology, trying to find him through images and so on, or by philosophy. Whereas Christianity claims to be God's finding, man revealing himself to man. And so it distinguishes himself from all other religions except Islam. Well, in Judaism, of course, because Judaism is a precursor to Christianity, it's a religion in the same sense. Christianity is of God revealing himself, whereas Chesna will see Islam as a christian heresy, which I think is an adequate way of looking at know. So there's then, you know, we talked about uniqueness of man against the background of nature in the first part of the book. And the second part of the book is uniqueness of Christ against man's history. But it's also uniqueness of the church, because the second half of the book isn't just Christ, but it's Christ's extension in the church and how the church herself has this miraculous quality about her that makes her stand up from all other institutions. Interesting. There's the five deaths of the faith. When he talks about the second part there where church has been part of the culture, and when the culture declines, it looks like the church is gone, but it rises again with the next culture and imbues that culture. Well, I think, Michael, that we're living in a time right now where the church has influenced culture in a way, but become now influenced by culture. And I see in the West a dying culture now maybe it'll have a renewal, an awakening, something like that. It'll come back, but that's not evident to me right now. I think the hegemony of the United States and Europe, the unipolarity is disintegrating. We have multipolarity now, and we have this strange situation of know the brazil, Russia and India, China and so on, they're becoming more dominant. So I think we're in another cycle.
But will Christianity be a part if it turns out that the global south is going to become more important in world history? If God allows history to go on much longer, you wonder how much patience does God have with us? As my friend John Gauntlet used to say, if God doesn't do something in San Francisco, he owes an apology to Solomon. And so I'm not a prophet. Don't want to even try to be one. But I can kind of see even if it turns out that the influence of the west declines and the population declines, there is. Islam is always a threat. But you've got Russia, which has a christian roots. Russia is one of the few countries in the world whose origins are. Its original book is the know. It was a christian society from the beginning. In Rus and in China, you've got this official atheism. But there's more Catholics in China probably than there are in the United States. I mean, there's a huge underground church there. And unlike the Japanese, for some reason, the Chinese seem to have a kind of a natural receptivity to the faith. Now, part of that may be Confucianism, I don't know, but that's part of the second part of this book to show that the church is both human and beyond the human, just like man is both animal and beyond the animal, and like Christ is man and beyond man.
So I don't worry too much about the future, especially. We talked about that during the break. Our culture, our society is a difficult time to raise children and to be a child or to be a young person in the, you know, it's God's world, it's God's church. I do what I can, you do what you can. And we have to leave it in his think.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: There's a kind of reminds me a little bit of back in the fourth and fifth centuries, as Rome was declining, Rome became kind of Christian, so to speak. First their Christianity is tolerated with edict, the Milan, and then it even becomes the official religion of Rome for a, you know, Eusebius would even see this in his history of the church. He described this as kind of a pivotal moment, as though there was almost like something that was happening according to God's providence that we'd moved forward now. And Augustine in his great city of.
No, no, the city of God is always the church, and the city of man is always the city of man, the city of the society. The seculum, as he describes it, it's going to at times be more permeated by the city of God and at other times be more hostile to it. So he kind of, I think, very rightly saw that the conversion, quote unquote, of Rome was fine.
Yes, it falls under God's broad providence, but it wasn't specifically providential because, of course, Rome fell soon. But this beautiful thing that Christianity was able to kind of absorb Rome. And then when Rome fell, Christianity went on, and then it flourished among the kind of almost like the kind of quasi tribal characteristics of Europe for a.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: While, but while maintaining the great culture of both Greece and Rome in the monasteries.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that we have that. Exactly. So just that sense of the five deaths of the church. But it rises, and I think, again, so it's kind of a beautiful way of being aware of our contemporary societies and the difficulties that they're in. And in a way, having compassion for the next generation and recognizing, too, that God knows exactly where we're born and knows exactly when we're born. Right.
And that's all according to God's plan, but also having this sense of kind of that the church will somehow, in a way that we can't see, always rises from the ashes of the previous culture. It has and it will.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: And I'm thinking, as you're speaking there, that I began teaching this back in the years ago, and at that time it was 50 years old because you wrote in 1926, right?
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Well, now it's almost 100 years old, but I think it still stands out as a source of wisdom and understanding of current events, even though I thought it was kind of old then and now it's even older. But I think it'll stand out as one of those books that will be kind of a classic book that'll be forever, precisely because he gives you the outline of history and therefore what the real reality is of man, Christ and the church, and those are permanent know.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: So one of the things he says about Christ's uniqueness, and I remember reading a book, I'm trying to remember, it's called, really, it doesn't matter, but it's a book about a handful of professors, I think, at Yale, trying to teach some course on the meaning of life. And one of the things they describe is that if you want to have, people often think, oh, Buddha and Christ are kind of similar founders, but they just say, well, wait a second. Buddha is a man who's like a prince who sees the way the tao and decides to follow it. So he gives up all. He realizes, wait a second, all this power and wealth, and I need to surrender all this because that's actually attachment. So he discovers the way and he follows it. Well, that's not Christ. Who is that? That's Peter. So if you want to say who know Buddha's parallel is Peter. Peter, all of a sudden one day meets a man who says he's the way and he follows we. Even if you just pay attention to the story of what's actually being said with Christianity, you realize Christianity is weird. It doesn't fit into the categories. Christ says, not, I'm a philosopher seeking the truth, or I'm a religious man seeking the way.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:56] Speaker B: He says, I am the way, the truth and the life.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: Yes. And he does that with Muhammad, too. Tessadin does that with Muhammad that we list. These religious leaders have Confucius, as you say, in Buddha, and Christ and Muhammad, they're all religious founders. Well, no, wait a second. Muhammad didn't say, you know, and Buddha didn't say, you know, but Christ says, I'm God.
And what Chestenan does, because, Michael, we're blessed to go to mass frequently. At mass every day you go to mass pretty much every day. We hear God's word. But we don't get the shocking when Jesus says, but I'm the lord of the Sabbath. What?
Or as the Pharisees, I forgive your sin. Well, wait a minute. How can any man forgive a sin? I can forgive you if you harm me, but I can't forgive you if you harm someone else.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: So.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: But Chesson brings that out, that even if you look at Christ as a religious founder, he is absolutely unique. I guess you can't use your wife would be mad with me for having an adverb with unique, because unique is an adjective which takes no adverbs. But anyway. But he's unique.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the things there he talks about as well is he just says that Christ is one of his uniquenesses is that he was born to die. Yes, Socrates died. Plato wrote a beautiful, wrote the apology about it, and it's noble. Socrates has no fear of death.
He would rather die doing the good than do any injustice to stay alive longer. I mean, it is noble. He's the new achilles. He is not afraid to die, but he's the achilles for truth, for philosophy. And this is beautiful, but nobody would say that his death was the test of his fidelity to philosophy. But nobody would say that mission, that that was his mission to die, that he accomplished philosophy in dying. No, it was actually the end of his ability. And even at the end of the apologies is I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better is known only to the God. Right? So he has no idea what goes on after death, whereas Jesus comes to die. My hour has not yet come. The entire storyline of all the gospels and of all the things is that Christ came to die and to rise again. And this is just, again, more than his teachings, more than his parables, more than anything else, the early apostles spoke about the fact that this man whom you killed Rose again and through that ascended into heaven sent the Holy Spirit.
There's just no other religion where you say that the fundamental thing is that the death and resurrection is the pivotal moment of history.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: Yes. And Chesson does exactly there what he's done elsewhere we've talked about, namely he says, well, people consider Christ as a social worker or as a wandering preacher. No, he wasn't a wandering preacher. He set his face to Jerusalem. Luke, chapter nine. And he set his face towards Jerusalem. That's sacrifice, that's his.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Know. Again, it's one of those things that once you begin to see, like, again, Christ did not die by accident. He somehow does that. It's actually funny. He even says, if we're going to think about him, we'd think about Christ more similar to somehow like Odysseus than to, because Odysseus had to come home and then kill the suitors and who were trying to overtake. And Christ has to come home to his own and to overthrow an enemy. Again, I think Chesterton kind of reminds us that there's an enemy going on. And just as we saw the three characters in Christmas, he also looks at the three characters on the cross.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: Yeah, you've got the power of the world. Is there roman soldiers, you've got the philosophers there with the Sadducees, you've got the mythmakers with the common people are there at the cross and all of them have turned against.
Yeah, I want to say one thing. You mentioned that it wasn't an accident he died.
Louis Boie once told me this. He said there's no saint that died by accident. You think about that.
I can't think of a single know whose death came about by accident.
They died by their old age. They were, you know, but not in a car crash or anything like.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: And so, and one other thing that Chesterton speaks about, because I think one of the things that at least a lot of people find awkward, maybe it's like socially awkward to talk about how human beings are not animals or that Christianity is not another religion or it's unique among any other religions.
Again, there's this kind of narrowing. It's like, well, instead of all the wonderful species around the globe, man turns out to be the most important. And among all, there are lots of interesting, I don't know, but a lot of our lives would be richer if we followed a variety of kind of ancient religions or ancient philosophies. We'd all probably be wiser if we practiced Aristotelianism or Confucianism. Right?
[00:43:49] Speaker A: But you'd be happy if you married several wives, right?
[00:43:57] Speaker B: So that's a good one.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: Anyway.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: So you end up, though, with this idea, though, that what happens is that this narrowing into Christ, though, turns out to be the path out of something, right? And this seems to me, I think what Chesterton gets his hands on is that. Wait a second, do we really want to live like animals? We want to get out of that. Do we really want to live like, just our society's historical way? We kind of see it. No, I want to get out of. So, and then you see the creed, not only do you have to have, of course, Christ, you have to have the church and the know the apostles creed, the Nicene Creed. But what he does is he says the creed is like a key. It has a definite shape, it has an arbitrary shape. It couldn't have been deduced by reason alone. Right? It's part of God's plan, but that it happened under Pontius Pilate, that it happened in this part of the world, but that the key with a definite and arbitrary shape, just as the creed has a definite and arbitrary shape, opens the door. And he says it not only opens the door, it opens the door of a prison.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: That's right. And that again, he uses these images so beautifully and he's got a section on that about the keys which have not been emphasized that much as a symbol. How important that is. Like you say, and like he says again in orthodoxy, is that Christianity has a lot of oddities about it. Are we militaristic or are we pacifist? Well, we're both.
Are we gloomy or are we cheerful? We're both. Well, wait a second. It's not a simple philosophy like optimism or pessimism, but it's OD. But he says, the thing is, the world is odd and Christianity fits the world like a key fits a lock. And that's something that can't be by chance. You don't just by chance find a key that fits a lock, it's made to fit the lock. And so Christianity has been revealed to us. Why? To fit our experience in all of its variation.
[00:46:00] Speaker B: And I think in part that also, at least I don't know that. I mean, this isn't necessarily a proof of the christian faith, but it is the sort of thing, if the christian faith were true. This is the sort of phenomena we would experience. If the world is somewhat of a prison of our own sin and of the cultural injustices and confusions that get passed on from one generation to the next, and Christianity is the key out of it in Christ, then in a way, if the modern world has thrown away that key, what do we see? We see that, well, we're continuing to try to somehow turn a prison into a home, but we know it doesn't work, which is why we continue to become more frustrated. And if you look societally, anxiety, depression, suicidality, drug use, all these different things continue to increase.
And at the same time, we no longer even have utopian literature. But all literature now seems to be dystopian. Dystopian people largely think it's not worth the society is so corrupt, it's not worth it going on.
But that's exactly what you would expect if the world was a place that was actually wounded, wounded and darkened by sin, and the way out of it was really given in Christ, in faith in Christ. And when we reject that key, the prison doesn't go away. We just now are locked within it. So we either have these know, these kind of escapist ideologies, or we escape internally through these.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: And there's a common theme in Lewis, Chessidon, Tolkien. Tolkien makes it very explicit, this idea about escapist literature. Why is fantasy so important? Is it escapist? Well, yes. We are in a prison. We need to know outside the prison. And Chesterton will make it clear that if you are a naturalist, what Lewis would call a naturalist, a materialist, that it destroys thought and it destroys will. Because if there's nothing outside of nature, everything is simply material interaction, cause and effect. Well, then our conversation is just atoms in our brains that are acting a certain way. Well, that can't have any meaning.
If you see the world only as your physical nature, that is a prison because it destroys thought. It also destroys free will, because how can I do something creative? By saying, here, have a cup of coffee, and you say, thank you. Well, you had to do it. Why should I thank you?
It was part of deterministic world. So these philosophies, which seem so attractive and may seem so natural, actually end up imprisoning us in destroying thought.
Chestnut calls it the suicide of thought and also paralyzing the will. So what Chestnut says in orthodoxy, and he makes it clear all through everlasting men that the only solution to this world we're in has got to be mysticism. That is something beyond the world. Transcendence. Without transcendence, world is a prison. So you have your choice. You can say, well, there's no God. There's nothing outside the world. And then if you think it through, you end up not being able to justify thought or will.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: And also without some notion of transcendence and some way that we can get to that transcendence, we lose joy and hope. And it seems that in part, Chesterton is kind of like, is that apostle of joy? Apostle of hope? That apostle of.
So it seems that's in a way, what in many ways, we lack today as a society is joy and hope and gratitude.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Well, but I find it most among deeply catholic families. I find that there's joy there.
There's hope, there's beauty, education, it's become catholic families become a hearth, a locus of real education and education towards gratitude, which leads to joy and hope. No question about it.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: That's excellent. Well, father, as we're wrapping up the show, is there any final maybe.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: I think I just said it.
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Okay, but any final word you want to say about maybe suggesting someone who might want to pick up the everlasting man? I don't think it's an easy book to read on your own the first time. What might you offer?
Well, a listener who's intrigued by wanting to read more.
[00:50:38] Speaker A: Well, buy it. First of all, go to your local catholic bookstore and support them. They're important. If you can't find it there or don't have a bookstore in your area, go to ignatius.com. Avoid the behemoth. We give good prices and good delivery on these things, so you don't need to go outside of ignatius.com. But the best thing, Michael, is to have friends and read things together and discuss them together and listen to podcasts like this one, and it'll enrich you.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Father Fesio, for being on the show. For viewers or listeners who are interested, we do have an earlier podcast with Father Fesio on GK Chesterton and Orthodoxy, as well as C. S. Lewis's miracles. There's also an earlier episode with Joseph Pierce on GK Chesterton's Everlasting man. So thank you again for being with us today on the Catholic Theology show.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: Thanks, Michael.
[00:51:34] Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our Annunciation circle so we can continue to bring you more free content we'll see you next time on the catholic theology show.
