Gilbert Keith Chesterton – Anthony G. Flood

The seeds of C. L. R. James’s critical awakening: from Chesterton’s “A Short History of England” to Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution”

(Continuing the series.)

C. L. R. James in Trafalgar Square, August 1935, protesting the League of Nations’ arms embargo on both the invader (Italy) and the invaded (Ethiopia) (Getty Images)

When did Cyril Lionel Robert James become CLR? From his middle-class youth in colonial Trinidad, he was an omnivorous reader, starting with his mother’s library, drinking in classics from Shakespeare to Thackeray[1], but also history, while developing an intense interest in cricket, which he played and, more successfully, covered in the papers.

In his engrossing C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain, a scholarly study of six years of his subject’s life (1932–1938) between Tunapuna, Trinidad, and New York City, Christian Høgsbjerg notes James’s absorption of the age’s empire-friendly historical narrative. But then he found books that upturned such Received Opinion. Høgsbjerg quotes James from an October 1967 interview wherein James recalls what awakened his capacity for and interest in critical history.

I read an enormous amount of history books . . . chiefly the history of England and later, histories of Europe and ancient civilization. I used to teach history, and reading the lot of them, I gained the habit of critical judgment and discrimination . . . . I remember three or four very important history books. These were a history of England by G. K. Chesterton and some histories of the seventeenth century by Hilaire Belloc. These books violently attacked the traditional English history on which I had been brought up, and they gave me a critical conception of historical writing.[2]

So, James, soon to become a revolutionary Marxist, cited Chesterton and Belloc, orthodox Roman Catholics of the post-Vatican I era, as the fons et origo of his critique of bourgeois historiography![3]

In the early 1930s, under the influence of Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, James began researching the Haitian revolution. (“At the end of reading the book, Spring 1934, I became a Trotskyist . . .” That is, after his expatriation to the UK, not while in Trinidad. See the October 1967 interview cited in note 2.) Yet as late as August 1933, caught up in the empire’s self-congratulatory celebration of the centennial of the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act,[4] James let these words be published under his name:

Our history begins with it [the Act]. It is the year One of our calendar. Before that we had no history.[5]

He would never make that kind of statement again.

He soon learned, on his own and through the scholarly labors of his former student (and, as future Prime Minister, jailer) Eric Williams (1911-1981), that the slave trade was not abolished because of its iniquity. It was abolished because the planter class had lost economic power. Human conscience just happened to awaken when slavery’s unprofitability became obvious to them.

To be continued.

Notes

[1] “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.” C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary. Duke University Press, 1993 (1963).

[2] Høgsbjerg, 161, citing Richard Small, “The Training of an Intellectual, the Making of a Marxist,” in C. L. R. James: His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle, London: Allison and Busby, 1986, 49-60. This edition’s pagination, which Høgsbjerg used, that of this PDF, wherein Small’s article is on pages 13-18. James was probably referring to Chesterton’s A Short History of England (1917). One cannot konw for sure which of Belloc’s books James had in mind, for among them are biographies of Charles I, Charles II, and James II, as well as a life of Cardinal Richelieu. He also wrote The French Revolution (1911), A History of England (1925), and Europe and the Faith (1920), which covers the 17th century’s broader context. Belloc was a splendid stylist.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) (1927)

[3] “George Bernard Shaw’s affectionate attack on G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, in an article entitled ‘The Chesterbelloc: A Lampoon,’ gave birth to a duomorph destined to find its place in literary legend. Chesterton and Belloc were seen so synonymously, said Shaw, that they formed ‘a very amusing pantomime elephant.’” Joseph Pearce, “The Chesterbelloc: Examining the Beauty of the Beast,” Faith and Reason: The Journal of Christendom College, Spring 2003. Take the link to download the PDF of this article.

[4] What was “abolished,” of course, was Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, on which “good will” the empire traded when they joined Europe’s “scramble for Africa” later in that century.

[5] C.L.R. James, “Slavery Today: Written by the Great-Grandson of a Freed Slave,” Tit-Bits [London], August 1933, 16. Cited in Høgsbjerg, 169. For zoomable, copyrighted image of that page, go here. Incidentally, “Høgsbjerg,” a Danish surname, is pronounced “Huh-s-BYUR” or “Huh-s-BYAHR.”

Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.

I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) as “processed” by David Ray Griffin (1939-2022).

I was then also navigating (internally) my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, wherein I was raised, educated, and married but which I had set aside, first in 1979 and again (and, I hope, finally) in 2017 for the dispensationalist eschatology and ecclesiology of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) buttressed by the Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987).

Natural law libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics, as filtered mainly through the person and writings of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), added another layer of tension to this journey, one that is reflected in part in Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.

I had not yet returned to the view of the Bible to which He had once led me and from which, for reasons inexplicable to me, He let me wander. Despite that detour, I articulated concerns about the roots of the secularizing forces that have polluted Western culture over the past three centuries.

This essay asks questions that, for all their verbose inelegance, merit being disinterred from my old site and displayed on this one. Light editing, restructured paragraphs, and linked reference notes have, I hope, lightened the prospective reader’s burden. At over 7,000 words, it’s hardly a quick read, but I hope its contents will repay the effort of the hardy few who undertake to read it.

[Here is the original prefatory paragraph]

Worth doing EVEN badly, I think he meant.

G. K. Chesterton once defended the amateur against the professional by aphorizing that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” (What’s Wrong with the World [1910]; last sentence of Part Four, Chapter XIV). And so in the spirit of this site’s “workshop” character, I am posting my notes toward an investigation I unfortunately do not see myself returning to in the near future. The following is not an essay fit for a journal.

The scholarship cited in this unfinished piece suggests an affirmative answer to the title’s question. By displaying this yet unripe fruit, however, I acknowledge that I may have overlooked important sources or misinterpreted those I have used. I invite interested readers to show, if they can, that either of these potential failings of mine is more than a theoretical possibility. I hope the order of some of the paragraphs and the occasional repetition of points does not put any reader off.

Anthony Flood, October 13, 2006

Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? Notes on David Ray Griffin’s Implicit Counterpoint to Stanley L. Jaki

Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.[1] By locating the roots of the West’s choicest fruits (science, law, education, charitable institutions, economics, etc.) in the soil of Western Christianity, Woods offers an eloquent, if indirect, apologetic for the Catholic faith. By indirect I mean that his observations do not so much argue for the truth of what Catholics believe as challenge those who are so sure that what Catholics believe is false. Presupposing that it is irrational to malign one’s benefactor, Woods’ challenge trades on his reader’s being a beneficiary of the civilization that the Catholic Church built. In one chapter, however, he has unintentionally documented how the Catholic Church, while building Western civilization, planted, seeded, and watered the garden of that civilization’s weeds, namely, materialistic mechanism, upon which it is now in danger of choking.[2]

Woods never comments on this dialectical reversal, whose irony cuts much more deeply than does his correction of popular ignorance of, say, what really happened in the Galileo episode. In recent decades scholars have been paying increasing attention to extra-scientific influences in the rise of modern science.

What does not even surface as a question in Woods’ narrative is the possibility that an enterprise that we would recognize generically as science—sustained, experimental study of nature—not only might have developed other than the way it did, but that such an alternative was already incipient in Western Europe.

In fact, Catholic divines nipped that alternative in the bud ostensibly because they deemed it incompatible with revealed truth and more pragmatically because any loss on their spiritual monopoly was bad for business. That is, science as “a self-perpetuating field of endeavor” was “enabled by a Catholic milieu” (76) because Catholic divines prevented another milieu, equally Western and arguably on the way to establishing that field of endeavor, from flourishing. Continue reading “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.”

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3] Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”