Well, since the Reformation ripped the beating heart out of English culture and replced it with "the lore of Bloody Mary and Guy Fawkes and sinister Jesuits", to say that this runs very deep in the culture is something of an understatement, and also explains why Chesterton may have had a point in his historical views.

I'm looking forward to reading this after Lent: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674045637/

No, I don't know anything about it, other than that it's nasty. And really, that sort of thing is just too much to overlook. It's not just minor faults and occasional lapses, it's a real...well, the first word that comes to mind is disease.

Hmm, I managed to write that whole thing without including the link to the Hitchens article itself, although Craig has it. It's here.

Oh yeah, but there was all manner of anti-semitism in the Church, too. Hitlerism (to use Chesterton's term) happened in Germany, but nothing like it ever got very far in thoroughly Reformed England, so clearly there were other things at work.

Well, the paragraph Hitchens quotes is somewhat vague--"of the Reformation" is a little vague--but taken as a whole it seems to be saying that Hitlerism wouldn't have happened if the Reformation hadn't happened. That's what seems pretty shaky to me (aside from being only conjectural). That's different from saying you can see elements of Reformation ideas and their influence in it. There were more Catholic-compatible variations of fascism (Spain and Italy), which you could argue were, for that very reason, less lethal than the German variety. Or you could argue that the difference was partly a matter of national temperament. Agreed about the "elect nation" idea, but that didn't produce anything like Nazism in the Anglo-American world.

In general Chesterton and Belloc seem to me a little fanciful in their view of what a Catholic, an un-Reformed, northern Europe would have been like. What's that Belloc verse?..."Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine /There is always laughter and good red wine." I mean, come on...the northeastern USA is full of the descendants of Italians who were desperate to get away from the poverty they suffered under the Catholic sun.

GKC/HB sometimes seem to be the inverse of those in the north who blame the Church for the poverty of the south.

"...one must at least consider the notion that Reformation thought bears a certain amount of responsibility for secularism."

Oh yeah, I don't have any doubt about that whatsoever. Both secularists and Catholics agree about it, really. It's clearly implied in the Hitchens piece, and also in his review a while back of a novel set in Reformation England. That's not what I'm disputing. And again, it's not that I think GKC is just wrong, but that I think he sometimes romanticizes and exaggerates.

It's true that the "elect nation" mentality didn't feed antisemitism (or not to any great and deadly extent), but it did feed other forms of racial pride and racial hatred.

I do think Hitchens touches on something important here:

But [Chesterton] and his fellow Distributists and other stray reactionaries did get themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism. And they did so, furthermore, because of self-imposed blinders in their own view of matters ethnic and ideological and confessional. For instance, in search of a good taunt, Chesterton decided that the Protestant Reformation was originally Jewish!

That getting “themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism” is, I think, so huge that it will forever haunt Chesterton’s reputation.

At least Hitchens absolves Chesterton of not being "exterminationist or eliminationist" in his anti-Semitism. It's a little annoying that Hitchens doesn't give sources for anything. He says "Chesterton decided that the Protestant Reformation was originally Jewish!". Did he really? Is that a fair summary of what he said? Can't tell from the article.

Unfortunately, one still runs across anti-Semitism along with admiration for Chesterbelloc in some Catholic traditionalist circles. I've seen web sites that featured their work alongside books that had eyebrow-raising titles about exposing Jewish influence and that sort of thing.

"get themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism"?

Since Chesterton always crticized Nazism and all it stood for (Eugenics and Othe Evils might be one place to start), and in the mid-1930s predicted that Hitler's rise would lead to another war of German aggression that would have to be prepared for and waged vigorously, what exactly is the *right* side?

I wasn't sure I could, either, because it has a really powerful hold on me. But it's been easier than I thought. I have a love-hate relationship with it--love to drink it, hate some of its side effects, to which I seem to be hyper-sensitive. So I keep reminding myself that I feel better overall.

I've also given up meat, mostly, although just as a matter of convenience I haven't been totally strict about that, e.g. one night I ate some leftover pizza that had meat on it. But to give up meat *and* dairy--I have trouble fathoming that, because I think I would start feeling sick. Unless of course I were having seafood every other day or so. And what would I take to work for lunch, if meat, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, milk were off the menu?!?

If I gave up coffee, it would be hard for me, but I'm afraid it might be harder for everyone around me; so I won't.

AMDG

"Since Chesterton always criticized Nazism and all it stood for..."

That's what I thought, although I couldn't really point to anything specific. I think Hitchens is conflating Nazism and anti-semitism. Nazism would have been just about as monstrous without a-s, and a-s is certainly not the province only of Nazis.

I have an idea that GKC did say some complimentary or hopeful things about Italian fascism in its early days. But the significance of that is not that he was a monster but that Italian fascism did not at the time appear monstrous.

If what A. N. Wilson says in a review of Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton is true, then I’d say he was not thinking clearly about Mussolini. Here’s Wilson (from http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/6880848/the-man-mountain-of-fleet-street.thtml):

When he [Chesterton] went to see Mussolini, the Duce amazingly and amusingly wanted to quiz Chesterton about the revision of the Prayer Book in the Church of England. By now, alas, we feel that something rather sinister has happened to the Edwardian lefty GK we all loved. When that kindly minded distributist Maurice Ricketts resigned from the editorial board of GK’s Weekly because it did not sufficiently condemn the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, Ker thinks it is sufficient to remind readers that the staff and readers of the magazine were ‘even more divided over the Abyssinian crisis than over distributism itself’. Damn it, the Italians were bombing Ethiopian villages with poison gas! GK himself thought Fascism ‘no worse than a corrupt parliamentary system’. By then, surely, he has left all decent people behind.

As for Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, I think it was much more than the garden variety of his day. I’ve just read a bit of his New Jerusalem (it’s available online here http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13468/pg13468.html) and, well, wow. A sample:

It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jews are only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothers or the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple fact as the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that such an English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that the Seventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather, scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth. Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers, or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or in Petrograd as in Plymouth.

The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all. It is normal for the nation to contain the family. With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations. This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations, those who really think there ought not to be any nations. But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotism thinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it. It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint, that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be bound to a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more private and personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is not any sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason. Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially, the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot.

There’s much more here, like his suggestion that English Jews who don’t want to migrate to Palestine but to stay in England should wear distinctive clothing to set them apart as the aliens they were.

The book was written in 1920. Wonder if Hitler read it in the German translation?

Actually, there is a lot to eat; you just have to think differently: I eat a lot of hummus, sprouts, soups, beans, tortillas, falafel, peanut butter, vegetables, fruits, etc...

More about Chesterton later, but on the subject of food: yeah, those are all good, and in fact I have tasty hummus in my lunchbox today, along with bread and an orange. But it's supplemented with a half-pint or so of milk, not for the taste but for the protein, of which I seem to need a lot. I don't know, I suppose I would adjust...I should try it some time.

Marianne, I'm not saying that Chesterton was blameless in any of his weird views, I'm saying he was not pro-Nazi. That's my complaint about Hitchens's treatment of the question. Hitchens uses that "wrong side" attack twice, both in a slippery way: "he confines his chosen people [the English] inside the enclave that had been fashioned for them by some rather strict Catholic intellectuals: intellectuals who were later to get themselves on the wrong side of Europe’s most important quarrel by being shady on the question of Fascism". This is pretty much just guilt by association.

And "But he and his fellow Distributists and other stray reactionaries did get themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism." That appears to be just plain false as applied to GKC, who is not responsible for "other stray reactionaries," and at most only partly so for "his fellow Distributists."

I think his anti-Semitism actually is not too far from garden-variety, though it's elaborated with an intellectual's foolishness. It's basically the standard complaint that the first loyalty of Jews is other than to the nation. Which is pretty funny coming from a Catholic, since that's also the standard complaint about us, or used to be.

"The book was written in 1920. Wonder if Hitler read it in the German translation?"

See, that's what I mean about the different way such things look post-Holocaust. If Nazism and the Holocaust had never happened, we would read things like the special clothing (!) and think "what nasty rot." But because those things did happen, we see it as phase 1 of the Holocaust, and with good reason. But we know that Chesterton did not stay on that path, and that he did see and protest the evil when it became manifest.

I agree that all this is a black mark against Chesterton. What I dispute is that it should define him, and pretty much ruin his reputation, and justify writing him off completely, in the way that Hitchens seems to think it should. It's similar to the case of left-wing intellectuals who fell for communism. That's considered youthful naivete or something now, although many of them never repudiated it, and for the most part results in no stigma. I doubt Chesterton was as sympathetic to Mussolini as they were to Stalin, and he doesn't seem to have been sympathetic to Hitler at all.

Well, since the Reformation ripped the beating heart out of English culture and replced it with "the lore of Bloody Mary and Guy Fawkes and sinister Jesuits", to say that this runs very deep in the culture is something of an understatement, and also explains why Chesterton may have had a point in his historical views.

I am loving this, Paul!

"Neuhaus was intelligent enough that he should have been able to see through the sentimentality to the core of truth"

Yeah, that's my beef with a lot of the critics of agrarianism and distributism. Louis Rubin went to great pains on numerous occasions to encourage folks to do exactly that w/r/t to the Southern Agrarians -- to get beyond the apparent "idyllic" surface of the thing and see the solidity of the critique underneath.

I'd like - philosophically speaking - to live on a farm and try out the "self-sufficient" lifestyle, b/c I can see the importance of such a life. But I am pretty unromantic about it. I'm not much into physical labour etc. No doubt some people are more romantic about it, but I think that's completely irrelevant when considering what an economy ought to be like. I can't see why the opponents of agrarianism/distributism should constantly carp on about this as though it's some kind of argument.

Unfortunately, one still runs across anti-Semitism along with admiration for Chesterbelloc in some Catholic traditionalist circles.

Very sad. They're the ones who go on and on about the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!

Just to be clear, Louise (and welcome back, btw--thought maybe you had sworn off the net for Lent)--I do consider myself a Chesterton fan, just not as enthusiastic as many. I don't know that I've read any more of him than you have. I think he's great at his best, and even the tossed-off journalism pieces sometimes have brilliant moments.

I was surprised that Hitchens likes his poetry. Also that he seemed to like The Man Who Was Thursday. I've read it twice, and it never made that much of an impression on me. I'll try it again sometime--the first reading was 30 years ago, the second probably 10.

I don't think nationalism and patriotism have precise enough definitions for the Church to formally condemn or approve them, but certainly in a general way what you say is true.

You can only go so far in comparing Jewish loyalty to the Jewish people at large to Catholic loyalty to the universal church, because the latter has a formal structure that the former doesn't. At any rate, my impression is that in this country at any rate the relationship of most Jews to the nation is somewhat like what Catholics are supposed to hold in principle--loyal to the nation but not regarding it as the ultimate object of loyalty.