Word: chesterton
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...style was equally unorthodox. Like his friendly enemy in a lifelong battle of wits, Bernard Shaw, Chesterton delighted in weaving his strictures against the unorthodox in a web of paradoxical wit. To freethinkers he said: "You are armed to the teeth and buttoned up to the chin with the great agnostic Orthodoxy, perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the orthodoxies of men. . . . I approach you with the reverence and the courage due to a bench of bishops...
Massive Disdain. His own orthodoxy he revealed in an equal disdain for 20th-century socialism and 20th-century imperialism. In a world of massive empires and massive trusts, Chesterton wanted a revival of opportunity for the small shopkeeper and farmer. He called Britain's colonies deplorable, distracting "suburbs." One of his objections to the Boer War was Britain's destruction of a small nation of small farmers. Where Shaw wanted state socialism (which Chesterton and his friends denounced as "the Servile State"*), Chesterton wanted Distributism (the division of land into small holdings, and of chain stores into thousands...
...Chesterton's resistance to the common confusion of greatness with bigness and worldly importance was shared by his brilliant older friend, Historian Hilaire Belloc. Bernard Shaw transformed the two men into a single mythical creature called "The Chesterbelloc"-intellectual Siamese twins who waged furious war against those who preferred a recklessly expanding future to a return to a smaller, intenser way of life. The Chesterbelloc opposed votes for women. "Twenty million young women," wrote Chesterton. "rose to their feet with the cry We will not be dictated to: and proceeded to become stenographers...
Democracy and Dogma. In Christian theology Chesterton found "the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy," and the dogmatic justification of many of his social and political views. In the medieval church he saw the protector of the small landowner and the life of individual intensity. "There is no basis for democracy," he concluded, "except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." Chesterton's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 (his priest, Father O'Connor, was the model for Detective Father Brown) was a sensation in England...
Bernard Shaw wrote to Chesterton: "Faith is a curious thing. . . . You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle-the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fire-worshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours-all incredible, monstrous, comic...