RIMINI MEETING/ G. K. Chesterton, Thomism and Certainty

It is easy to portray Chesterton as too positive and certain a writer, with an easy optimism and equally easy orthodox faith but the truth is far different. His initial Christian conversion came only after a period in a kind of sceptical hell and, as Borges has demonstrated, his writing always trembles on the brink of nightmare. Chesterton’s attraction to Aquinas, I would argue, is due to the fact that the structure of each of the questions in the Summa Theologiae similarly puts every certainty into question, with a scepticism in the objections to every positive assertion – such as "Does God exist?" – that puts everything in doubt until Thomas moves to re-establish certainty on a reasonable basis. Dionysius the Areopagite was a strong influence on Thomas and his mystical via negativa proceeds in a similar way, with positive assertions about the divine names negated, but in order to come to a deeper understanding of their meaning.

Chesterton wrote a brief but brilliant book, originally entitled, Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, in 1933. He locates the core of Thomas’s philosophy in what is often called "the intuition of being" whereby a child looking out of a window knows he sees something: that there is an Is. Existence exists and without this there can be no certainty about anything and no bridge between mind and reality. From this point Chesterton goes on to show how Thomas argues for a contingent and created world of variety and potentiality, and from there he reaches the need for God himself, as the complete reality to which our incompletion testifies.

It is because there is an Is outside our own mind, whether grass or God, that reality can challenge us in its otherness, and allow the mind to move beyond itself to experience communion with the object. There has to be something outside in order for there to be something with which to unite. Certainty comes therefore from this mystical encounter with a world beyond the self, so that it is a gift and not a possession. Life, Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, has the quality of something saved from a shipwreck.

It is often asserted that people read detective fiction to gain a sense of certainty: that all is right with the world and moral order – eventually – holds sway. Chesterton’s father Brown stories, however, put the reader through the same dark night of doubt as the articles in the Summa. We begin with a situation, a crime, which seems impossible, which forces a question. Then we are in doubt while various answers are attempted by the story’s characters. Finally, as Thomas with his "I say that…" we have Father Brown’s resolution of the problem, which answers all the objections.