The Bulletin’s Day Book

Gilbert K. Chesterton, the well-known essayist and journalist with whom we have frequently found it easy to disagree, has finally written something on the score of religion that even his most captious critic would have trouble tearing apart. It’s a foreword to a pamphlet called “Germany’s National Religion,” published by an English organization known as the “Friends of Europe.”

The pamphlet came to this office from London with the inscription “for J. D. B.’s Book of the Day.” It came at a time when the “Book of the Day” columnist couldn’t think of another nasty thing to say about the Nazis or anybody else and was on the verge of turning in a column damning the weather for being in league with Hitler.

So, without further comment, since comment on a Chesterton foreword would be like so much gilt on the lily, the column is turned over completely to the stout journalist from across the pond. And may he never fall into Hitler’s hands! Forewords G. K.:

“Anyone old enough to remember, even faintly, the last days of Queen Victoria, and the gradual change in international information which had appeared even before the Great War, will be astounded at two things about the tribal triumph now parading among the Germans. The first staggering fact is that a fresh generation can boil up again, in so frothy a fuss, over anything so utterly stale. The second staggering fact is that a whole huge people should base its whole historical tradition on something that is not so much a legend as a lie. A legend is something that grows slowly and naturally and generally symbolizes some sort of relative truth about history. The legend of Arthur is legendary in this sense; but it does symbolize the enormous and once neglected truth; that if Britain had not once had a Roman basis it would never have had any basis at all. But the myth of the modern Germans, especially in its relation to the ancient Germans, was made quite recently and quite artificially; it was invented by professors and imposed by schoolmasters, and it has not even the remotest connection with any historical truth whatever.

“The first fact, the strange staleness which makes the racial religion stink in our nostrils with the odors of decay and as of something dug up when it was dead and buried, need not principally concern us. A man who has revelled in Carlyle as a boy, reacted against him as a man, re-reacted, with saner appreciation, as an older man, and ended, he will hope, by seeing Carlyle more or less where he really stands, can only be amazed at this sudden reappearance of all that is bad and barbarous and stupid and ignorant in Carlyle, without a touch of what was really quaint and humorous in him. The historical theory which Froude and Freeman and others shared with Carlyle, the theory of a Teutonic root of all the real greatness of Europe, has been criticized by saner historians, with a broader outlook which the Victorians never imagined, and often with a number of new facts which the Victorians could not be expected to know. Today no well informed person has any right to be ignorant of the part really played, not by the Germanic chaos, but by the Roman order and the Catholic faith, in the making of everything civilized or half-civilized, including Germany.

“In the light of this elementary degree of education, examine some of the statements . . . from two of the most popular and enthusiastic Nazi writers. Passing over, for the moment, the cases of flat contradiction where the Nordic notion contradicts not only every Christian virtue, but every common human generosity, as in saying that “the conception of Christian charity causes national degeneration inasmuch as it involves caring for the physically weak and infirm,” let us take first the virtues on which the Christian and the Nordic man may agree; though the Nordic man has the cheek to claim them as his alone. Take the ridiculous statement, repeated again and again in the passages quoted from both books: the notion that there is something specially German about the “idea of honor.” There is not the faintest historical truth, or even historical meaning in this claim. Imagine the Prussian professor slowly and carefully reading Horace’s version of the story of Regulus and duly noting down the fact that no Latins or men of the Mediterranean have had any idea of honor. One would suppose that anybody could see the absurdity of that; that everybody can, in a general way, trace the conception of keeping faith, refusing cowardly comfort or safety, feeling surrender as a stain, through all the great story of antiquity, through the Pagan philosophers defying tyrants, through the Christian martyrs accepting torments, through the Christian knights and paladins careful to keep the vow, or fulfill the conditions of the quest. To call it a German idea is about as sensible as to call it a Finnish idea or an Icelandic idea. Since all men, even the rudest, have some rude form of conscience, it did doubtless exist more or less in various Teutons, as in various Celts and Slavs and Semitic Arabs. But the most powerful examples of it, the clearest traces of it, the longest tradition of it, descend to us all down that long Roman road which connects ancient with modern civilization.

“In these few lines, by way of introduction, I have confined myself to the preliminary point that the Nazi literature, with which this pamphlet deals, is on the face of it opposed to common sense and common historical information. I will leave to the pamphlet itself the special task of explaining where it has of late conflicted with the Catholic conscience and the principal religious authority of Europe. It is worth while to note how much the two elements of normal instincts and of supernatural doctrine are at this moment in agreement. Rome stands just now not only for reason, but rather especially for common sense, and, as in this case, for common justice to the common people. It is this influence which the Nazi writers describe as so subtle a social poison; the southern influence which, creeping north into the virgin forests, corrupted the simple Germans with the habit of building houses, of making roads, of riding horses, of talking in an intelligible, or more or less intelligent, manner. For those great gods, the early Germans of the forests, to whom all “creative” energy is due, did not, of themselves, set up one building that has remained, or carve one statue of even prehistoric value, or express in any shrine or symbol the confused mythology which some would substitute for the radiant lucidity of the Faith. The great German civilization was created by the great Christian civilization; and its heathen forerunners left it nothing whatever, except an intermittent weakness for boasting.”

H. W.