"Every saint is a sort of man before he is a saint; and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man; and most of us will choose between these different types according to our different tastes....The Saint is a medicine because he as an antidote. Indeed, that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need."
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The recent (and relatively rapid) beatification of our late great pope has raised a few concerns. There are the unjust
concerns, rarely voiced aloud, that this process has been too swift, and that Blessed John Paul II really wasn't that holy. Rubbish! There are also more fair-minded concerns, voiced by people who knew the late pontiff. His biographer, Dr George Weigel, has such
concerns of this more just variety, though his concern
is not that the canonization process is proceeding too quickly:
Strange as it may seem, I’ve been vaguely worried about the beatification on May 1 of a man with whom I was in close conversation for over a decade and to the writing of whose biography I dedicated 15 years of my own life.
My worries don’t have to do with allegations of a “rushed” beatification process; the process has been a thorough one, and the official judgment is the same as the judgment of the people of the Church. I’m also unconcerned about the fretting of ultra-traditionalists for whom John Paul II was a failure because he didn’t restore the French monarchy, impose the Tridentine Mass on the entire Church, and issue thundering anathemas against theologians and wayward politicians. No, my worries have to do with our losing touch with the qualities of the man. When the Church puts the title “Blessed” or “Saint” on someone, the person so honored often drifts away into a realm of the unapproachably good. We lose the sense that the saints are people just like us, who, by the grace of God, lived lives of heroic virtue: a truth of the faith of which John Paul II never ceased to remind us.
The lesson of both Chesterton Blessed John Paul II is that saints are ordinary men and women who have responded in an extraordinary way to God's grace. True to Chesterton's remark, both men were also "antidotes" of sorts, antidotes against the climate of thought of their respective times.
Blessed John Paul the Great lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and then through the equally disastrous communist occupation. He would go on to be a member of the "Holy Alliance" which included Reagan and Thatcher and which at long last saw the fall of communist Russia, much to the joy of the various "eastern bloc" countries which were held under that regime's power. He moreover reigned during the time of the sexual revolution, a crisis which spread throughout Christendom (and indeed beyond). He responded with the Theology of the Body, which is truly an intellectual treasure of the Church.
Chesterton, meanwhile, lived in a time and place in which not only God and the Church were being questioned, but also what wisdom was possessed by the human race--wisdom preserved in tradition, custom, passed on by prescription, but also that which is known on a deeper level by man, as if by instinct. He responded by becoming what Mr Dale Alquist called "The Apostle of Common Sense." The theories of Marx, Nietzche, or Darwin (and more importantly of Huxley) had taken root in the minds of the intelligentsia both in England and on the continent, not to mention in the Americas. The consequences of these teaching would not really be known during Chesterton's life--Lenin's revolution (Marxism) had succeeded in plunging Russia into Communism, but Stalin had not yet extended this over Europe, and while Hitler (Nietzche's Overman) had come to power in Germany, he had not yet rebuilt the war machines nor death camps which would make his Reich so infamous. The death camps and genocides of the twentieth century had not yet come to pass, nor had the outright attempted culling of the undesirable populations (Darwin/Huxley), though Sanger was agitating for that in America whilst Hitler did the same in Germany, and there were plenty of people in Britain willing to aide the process. These were dark times for the Church, which was being persecuted by Communist and Nazi alike; and, as so often is the case, the dark times for the Church were similarly dark times for mankind.
Chesterton was a seer, a prophet. He foresaw the disasters which awaited men if they would embrace these theories. The anthropology which turns a man into an advanced sort of monkey would also very quickly suggest that he was really no more than a monkey, a mere animal. As such, he ought to be treated as a animal, that is, to be treated as if he had no inherent dignity, no rights. The common man had nothing to teach his "betters" in the intellectual circles, and they could, of course, try to mold him and shape him according to their whims, be it through propaganda or through more direct methods such as birth control, sterilization, selective breeding programs, or (eventually) through the murder and torture of abortion, the concentration camps and gulags, the gas chambers, the genocides which have plagued the last 75 years or so of human history.
Against this false view of humanity we had the two views of humanity given by Chesteron and John Paul. The former would note that even the common man had a great deal of common sense, and that because he had common sense he would retain his sanity. The intellectuals of his time often lost theirs, if not in the overt sense of the madhouse, then in the more diabolical sense which would ultimately lead up to the monsters of the last century, from Hitler and Himmler to Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Of the intellectuals who enabled these monsters, Chesterton would write that they were madmen not because they had lost their reasoning, but rather because they had lost everything else. This began with a rejection of revelation, and it continued with a rejection of common sense; that is, first they denied the doctrine that God exists, and then they denied the doctrine that Man exists.
As for our late pope, he recognized that the common man had a bit of common dignity, which trait is lacking in the animals. He noted that man was created "in the image and likeness of God," and so he worked tirelessly to promote the dignity of man, most especially through his teachings concerning the Theology of the Body. Recalling that in the beginning, after God had completed His creation, "He saw that it was good," the pope would go on to teach that a part of this creation was man, and not merely man's spirit but indeed his body. This was no mere adornment or ornament "worn" by man, but indeed was an integral part of him. To paraphrase Christopher West, one of the great popularizers of the pope's teaching, we are our bodies.
As such, our bodies are also deserving of some dignity, in particular as regards the act in which two persons come together and "become one" in the flesh. While Hugh Heffner and his colleagues (or rivals) were promoting the degradation of sex and sexuality in revolution against the prudery of the Victorians--which still had a hold on much of society, albeit a weakening one--John Paul led a different kind of sexual revolution. The prudes rejected the body, saying that is was a filthy thing, and therefore treated sex as an unholy act of lust which was made less sinful when committed inside of a marriage. Heffner changed this by saying, in essence, that since the body is a filthy thing, therefore committing filthy acts would not stain it further, so there was no point to restricting these acts to marriage. John Paul similarly rejected the prudish understanding of the body and sexual morality, but he did so at the very source by challenging their very rejection of the body. "He saw that it was good": the body is not inherently filthy, but rather is good, and so sex is not a dirty little act which can be sanctified only through marriage; rather, it is a sacred and holy thing, for which we must prepare ourselves and our fallen natures through the sacrament of marriage.
Both of these men-Chesterton and John Paul--were visionaries of sorts, and yet both began as ordinary men. But they then recognized something, namely that ordinary men are themselves not mundane but rather miracles. Both ultimately went on to defend the dignity of their fellow "ordinary men," the former in the mind and the latter in the body. Both could be said to have spent theirs lives "exaggerating what the world needs," and thus both were antidotes to some of the ideologies of the world in which they lived.
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Ironically enough, G.K. Chesterton--prophet that he was--is still not "saint", "blessed," or even just "venerable." That there is no cause underway for his canonization
is a true travesty.
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If you enjoyed this post, here are some related ones:
Vocations and Graces
Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Reflection (
Nicene Guys)
A Sort-of Review of Chesterton's Heretics (Book Review)
Chesterton on Christianity and Asceticism
Chesterton on Birth Control
Vocations and Sanctity (Thirty Minute Musings)
Love and Responsibility (book review)
The Idiocy of Modern Man
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