Catholic Thought discussion

Chapter 7 Summary: The Eternal Revolution.

Chesterton deals with progress, evolution, and revolution in the first part of the chapter and in the second part moves to how Christianity gave him the exact answer he required. The ideal of progress must be fixed but it must also be composed of things in proportion towards a “city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other.” (p. 171) He is describing a kind of Utopia as the goal of progress but a danger of falling from Utopia is like fall from Eden.

Left alone things get progressively worse, not better. Newspapers are not organs of public opinion but “hobbies of a few rich men”. (p. 173). “It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. (p. 174) The king works behind the constitution’s back. (p. 174) Men are naturally backsliders. Chesterton came to the conviction the “Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred.” (p. 175) He argues persuasively that neither the rich nor the poor--a socialist given clean clothes and air--nor the capitalist aristocrat are fit to govern and concludes “only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence of the rich. (p. 176)

Christ’s words about the camel and needle at the very least must mean, “that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy.” (p. 177) The rich man cannot be bribed because “he has been bribed already.” (p. 178) Christianity’s comment on governing must be that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule.” (p. 179) We should crown the man who “feels himself unfit to wear it.” (p. 179) Chesterton concludes with a sort of yearning for a world where laughter is preferred over solemnity, angelic levitation of the Medieval paintings over solid selfish seriousness, a New Jerusalem in place of Utopia, but right now in this world we have “the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure” to get to the world beyond. (p. 185)