The Father Brown detective stories

I greatly enjoyed reading a complete edition of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories., which were published from 1910 through 1936.  I’d read some of them of them before, but now I’ve read the whole canon, except for a couple published after his death.

Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, they have a real or apparent crime, clues to the solution buried in the details of the story and then the solution revealed.  But while Holmes is presented as an eccentric genius, Father Brown is as unassuming little round-faced man whom everybody underestimates.

And while Holmes is a master of arcane knowledge, such as being able to differentiate different types of cigar ash, Father Brown’s deductive powers are based on his knowledge of human nature, and whether a poet, an actress, an Oxford don, an Anglican vicar or some other human type are behaving in character or not.  In one story, the solution hinges on understanding the motivation of a dog.

Father Brown says he understands criminals because he has the ability to tap into the criminal in himself and imagine what the criminal in question would do.  As he explains, “You see, I had murdered them all myself…. I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”

It is a kind of spiritual exercise, he says.

Brown’s abilities are shaped by his experience as a priest and confessor.  When asked by Flambeau, a master criminal who has been masquerading as a priest, how he knew of all sorts of criminal “horrors,” Father Brown responds: “Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?”

He also states how he knew Flambeau was not really a priest. “You attacked reason. It’s bad theology.”

The stories contain rational solutions of the mysteries and explanations of how Brown worked them out.  He always emphasizes rationality.  Some stories poke fun at initially skeptical characters who become convinced of a supernatural explanation for some strange occurrence, but Father Brown easily sees the perfectly ordinary, natural explanation.

He says he is able to see through superstition and fake mysticism precisely because he is familiar with the actual supernatural and true mysticism.

Chesterton’s agenda is to advocate for Christianity and specifically for Catholicism.  He was formally converted to Catholicism in 1922,  He does this not by arguing for Catholicism, but by debunking alternatives to Christianity and by showing Father Brown’s intellectual and moral superiority.  The priest alone of all the characters is more interested in the criminals’ repentance than their punishment

G.K. Chesterton on the rise of nations

G.K. Chesterton

It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people.
First, it is a small power, and fights small powers.
Then it is a great power and fights great powers.
Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity.
                ==G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton on the fallacy of success

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton, journalist, essayist and author of the Father Brown detective stories, wrote the following in 1909 about books purporting to give the secrets of success.

These writers profess to tell the ordinary man … … how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon.  This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. 

Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare to publish an article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the earth.  Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.

It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding.  One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating.  Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. 

If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so.  If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards.  You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist.  But you cannot want a book about Success.

After pointing out some ridiculous examples of the genre, Chesterton concluded:

Let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride?

A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors.  This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth.  In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself.  Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues.

But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?

Click on The Fallacy of Success to read the whole essay and All Things Considered for a collection of Chesterton essays.

Hat tips to Mustapha Abiola and kottke.org

The American credo divides and unites us

The United States is exceptional in being founded not on loyalty to a monarch or charismatic leader, nor on identification with a racial or ethnic group, but on a set of ideas.   We Americans take this for granted, but foreign visitors do not.

Here’s how the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton saw us in the 1920s:

The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed.  America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed.  That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.  It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice and that their authority is for that reason just. …

Here’s how Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch saw us in the 1960s:

I crossed the border into the United States and found myself inside the myth of America … a country that despite its arbitrary frontiers, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called the True America, and could invest that patent fiction with all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol. … Here was the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the Midwest for abandoning the promise; here, the descendent of American slaves, Martin Luther King, denouncing injustice as a violation of the American way; here, an endless debate about national destiny … conservatives scavaging for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. … It was a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission.

Our American credo is based on two complementary documents, one radical and one conservative.  The radical document is the Declaration of Independence.  The Declaration proclaims that all human beings are endowed with inalienable rights, that governments are instituted to protect these rights, that there is a right of revolution in defense of those rights, and that 13 British colonies are free and independent states.  The conservative document is the Constitution.  It  joins 13 free and independent states into a nation to form a more perfect union, provide for the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Independence Day, our patriotic holiday, commemorates the signing of the Declaration.  The President of the United States, naturalized citizens, members of the armed forces and federal officers swear to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution.  To understand the United States, it is necessary to understand both the Declaration and the Constitution.

Like the Bible, these documents do not interpret themselves, nor do they make clear what parts are for a particular time and situation, and what parts are truths for all time.  You can pull out quotes from either document to justify many different things.

We Americans have been fighting over the meaning of these documents almost since the signing of the Declaration and the ratification of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were both patriots who contributed greatly to the founding of the United States.  But they hated each other, and each thought the other a traitor to the principles of the American republic as they conceived.

During the Civil War, the Union and Confederate soldiers and statesmen each thought they were fighting for the basic principles of American liberty.  They were not equally right, but they were equally sincere.

In our own time, it is no different.  The Tea Party and the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting to defend basic Constitutional rights as they conceive them.  They are not equally right, but they are equally sincere.

All through American history, different groups of people have tried to define themselves as the true Americans and their opponents as the un-Americans.  This can be, and has been, a very bad thing, but sometimes it is justified.  At least when we argue about the meaning of Americanism, our common loyalty to the Constitution and the Declaration gives us a common point of departure.  Arguing over what it means to be an American is part of our American exceptionalism.