Chesterton and Catholicism:

Excerpts from Aurel Kolnai's

Twentieth-Century Memoirs
Aurel Kolnai

A U R E L KOLNAI (1900-1973) was a Hungarian philosopher whose

life and thought was influenced decisively by Chesterton. Dr.
Kolnai is best known in the English-speaking world for his book,
The War Against the West, an analysis of the Nazi ideology
which was published by Victor Gollancz in 1938. Dr. Kolnai
read Philosophy and History at the University of Vienna, and
studied under Husserl at the University of Freiburg. He left
Austria shortly before the Anschluss and lived in exile succes-
sively in France, Canada, the United States and Britain. He
taught at both Laval University and at Bedford College, Uni-
versity of London. During the war, he wrote a book with the
title, Liberty and the Heart of Europe, an historical and cultural
survey of the countries in the Danube basin with suggestions
for their reconstruction after the War. He published scholarly
articles in many journals and in various languages. These
include articles in the Thomist, Gite Libre, La Revue Theolo-
gique et Philosophique and La Revue de L'Universite Laval. A
volume of his philosophical writings, Ethics, Value and Reality
was published posthumously in 1977 in London by the Athlone
Press.

What follows are excerpts from Dr. Kolnai's unpublished

memoirs. The manuscript of this extraordinary work was made
available to the Ghesterton Review by courtesy of Elisabeth
Kolnai, Dr. Kolnai's widow. Apart from the intrinsic interest of
the memoirs as a record of the life of a great Catholic thinker,
the memoirs are also of interest as a reminder of the kind of
influence Chesterton exercised on important continental thinkers.
Moreover, Dr. Kolnai's memoirs provide some of the most per-
ceptive and valuable criticism of Chesterton that has ever been
written.

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 The Chesterton Review

If we in the Danubian lands, or perhaps especially we in

Hungary, were to be undeceived more speedily and more sud-
denly than Western mankind, the pride that went before our
fall was also more bouncing, more naive and juvenile. A certain
background consciousness of unremedied inferiority and of a
developing political malaise notwithstanding, our more recently
won heaven of liberalism and prosperity yet had a fresh and
more unquestioned taste; we felt we were in the ascendant as
possibly not even the Germans themselves did. Hungary, not so
long before a wretched battleground between Turk and Habs
burg, was now reinstated in her ancient integrity and grandeur,
enjoying complete home rule and an all but sovereign status in
some way better than sovereignty, seeing that she was the politically
stronger and more arrogant partner in the Dual Monarchy;
Magyar hegemony extended over a population of "Nationali-
ties" as great in numbers as the Magyars, and marked for
"Magyarisation"; Jewish capital was busy building up a show
of prosperity; the liberal constitutional State boasted a solemn
frontage, with not a little reality behind it. Between the Catholic
majority and the very active, and more purely Magyar Calvin-
ists, there was less friction than between Protestants and Catholics
in Germany or in Switzerland, or Catholics and Freemasons in
France; and in contrast with the German Reichstag, not a single
Socialist sat in our Parliament. (Though the Socialists became
masters of the country in November, 1918 and the Communists
in March 1919 to July 1919, the first Parliament to have a
handful of Socialist members was elected in 1922.) It seemed,
all in all, a promising thing to be born a Hungarian in 1900,
particularly if you took care to pick upper-class or at least middle-

This original pencil sketch was sent to the Review by Mrs. Eliza-
beth Kolnai, the widow of the author and herself an artist. We were
deeply grieved to hear that Mrs. Kolnai died on January 31, 1982.
A letter written shortly before her death is published in the
"Letters" section of this special issue of the Review which is dedi-
cated to her husband's work. All quotations from Aurel Kolnai's
work are printed with her permission.

128
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from
 Trie Cnesterton tieview

class people for your parents; for despite the public euphoria
and proud sense of security, despite buoyant life and a mounting
standard of living, "Also, the poor in Babylon of hunger did
complain" (Lucy Lyttelton, Quod semper).

In the year 1900, Queen Victoria had yet another year to

reignwhile her mystical Danubian counterpart, our Francis
Joseph was still a vigorous man of seventy with sixteen more
years of rule ahead of him. Again Bernhard von Billow was
appointed Chancellor of the Reichto be dismissed nine years
later, which perhaps was one of the worst among his Imperial
master's many wicked blunders. In the autumn of that same
year. President Kruger, one of the Kaiser's dupes no doubt,
fled South Africa; in the great and beloved Chesterton's pre-
posterous and unforgivable doggerel,

When sword in hand upon Africa's passes,

Her last republic cried to God.

This is a melancholy thing to remember today, when the spirit

of Boer nationalism, with no sword in hand even, has recon-
quered its old habitat and subjugated Cape Province and Natal
as well.

We are liberal, very liberal Jews. Hardly ever shall I come

into contact with orthodox or emphatically religious Judaism,
and up to the twenties, I shall have little experience of Christ-
ians in any way explicitly religious. I am taught that God
existsdiscreetlyand a short evening prayer, and, of course,
that I ought to be good. God I shall denywith my parents'
disapprovalfrom about my twelfth year. My own vital tone as
a child is a compound of solid security and virtual estrangement
from my home milieu. I am in some way intellectually pre-
cocious, a self-taught reader and scribbler (graphomaniac, as my
mother will call me) from my fifth year on, writing also not a
little in the air.

I read heaps and heaps of more or less trashy Hungarian

stuff, as well as bowdlerised juvenile texts of some literary

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

classics, mostly foreign. Towering above all other literary

nourishments, the Hungarian juvenile versions of Gulliver's
Travels and of David Copperfield reach me, respectively, at the
age of seven and a half and of ten years. The English, anyhow,
must be the queerest sort of people. Their language is quite
impossible to pronounce: no letter is pronounced as it is spelt.
They are Protestant, progressive and practical, but at the same
time very conservative and spleeny; the most gravely ritualistic
but also the most informal and humorous. The Americans are
identical with the English but not quite; they have set up a
republic of their own under Washington whose statue we have
in the City Park; but they are even more practical than the
English. W i l l there next be another war between England and
France? No, I am informed by my tutor, early in 1911 (the
year of the Agadir crisis), more likely, there will be a war
between England and Germany.

Forebodings of the approaching catastrophe were indeed in

the air, but, particularly perhaps in Hungary, were laughed
away or neutralised by a frivolous certitude of invulnerabihty.
Even though dynastic and democratic Austriadespised under
both headsshould disintegrate into its national components,
we, a tightly knit National and Liberal State, protected by
Prussia's sword, could not be seriously affected by any turmoil.

That Russia's defeat was more to be dreaded than her

victory did not occur to anybodythough Maurius Jokai, the
Hungarian Dickens, in a manner of speaking, had foretold some
thirty years earlier in The Novel of the Next Century that
Russia under a Red dictatorship would develop a much more
formidable imperialism, and also that, in future warfare, air-
power would play the decisive part. I n 1911, there occurred a
murder more important and more disastrous in its effects perhaps
even than the murder of our Archduke Ferdinand three years
later, namely, the assassination by Red bandits, of the Prime
Minister Peter Stolypin. Stolypin was the continuator of the
noble work of Emperor Alexander I I (who was himself murdered

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 me unesienon neview

by the revolutionists) and the creator of a land-owning free

peasantry in Russia, which, had it been carried to the end and
taken firm root, would have cut the ground from under the feet
of Bolshevism and secured the social basis for a democratic
Monarchy of the future.

Being fully on the side of the West in its impending con-

flict with German imperialism to which we were unfortunately
and guiltily shackled, by 1913 I had guessed vaguely what in
later years became easier for all of us to understand. In a far
more perverse, aggressive and venomous sense than "Tsarist"
Russia, whose shortcomings were largely a matter of actual
''backwardness," did a Power fundamentally hostile to the moral
traditions of Christendom sit a-straddle of Europe in the shape
of Prussian Germany.

As I start on this stock-taking of my experience in life,

it seems to me as if the era of my departure had been not forty,
but four thousand years agothe last days "Before the towers
of Babylon along the ground were laid." But if the Austrian
Empire appears to us pre-historic, the Serbian Kingdomand the
Hungarianhave followed it, since, into the grave. The triumphs
of liberal democracy have proved illusory, or mere fleeting
moments still-born; the imperfection of Liberty has been super-
seded by the perfection of Tyranny; and the expected death of
forms outworn has been followed by a crop of unexpected new
shapes.

The germ of a deeper interest in things Englishand of

an unconditional, as it were, "religious"loyalty to the British
Crown, was already slumbering in my heart. If fair France, the
epitome of decent mankind, was more familiar and more
obviously loveable, far-away England, in her insular oddness,
with the recondite but glowing warmth in her noble and unfath-
omable soul of which I thus happened to catch a tenuous
ghmpse, was resplendent with magic dimming all other lights
and ranking above all other appeals.

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

That the Central Powers were essentially the aggressors

could not be called in doubt, though even at the time I found
that Allied propaganda simplified the matter a little; anyhow,
this was not what ranked foremost in my mind. What mattered
was not the accidental distribution of the aggressor's and de-
fender's part on the occasion of the outbreak of the war, but
the qualities of the belligerents; their conception of international
life; the forms of civilisation they typified and their respective
locus in the unity of European civilisation. Though Germany
manifestly stood for a principle of evil arbitrary power, force
contemptuous of moral restraint, wilful barbarism, the expansion
of an alien growth over and above the traditional order of
Europe, though the Entente was evidently fighting on behalf of
the good, for ordinary civilised mankind, this might not be
manifest or evident (and was not) to every sane man. There
was something incomplete about that "Good versus Evil" situa-
tion of which I was so strongly convinced but whose connotation
of ambiguity did not, perhaps, wholly escape me even at that
time. This is what we have inevitably lacked when confronted
with Hitler and with Stalin: in these situations, the Enemy has
been too unequivocally and openly identical with rank Evil to
admit a "choice" in the proper sense of the term; whereas in
the situation that ushered in the new Iron Age and was not
yet wholly part of it, some hesitation might still be possible and
one's choice had the more life of its own. Whoever took an
attitude like mine might feel, with Joshua of Chesterton's Ballad
of the Battle of Gibeon, that in this quarrel "more than we
know is rising and making"introducing the theme, unfamiliar
and quasi-virtual, yet of totalitarian demonism.

During 1910-1912, the first three years of my Gymnasium,

I had a private tutor. He was a fanatical atheist of "advanced
views" and tremendously impressed by Germany. Unhappily, he
succeeded in perverting me into atheism and disposing me favour-
ably to leftism; but in the matter of chemistry and, happily,
of Prussianism, his efforts only lashed me into fierce opposition.
This had at any rate the good effect, in the sequel, of keeping

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up in my mind, despite the increasing "leftist" connotation of

my pro-Ally war ideology, a certain awareness of the atheistic
and progressive aspects of Prussianism; so that, when some five
years after the war I got hold of Cecil Chesterton's rather in-
accurate and ill-balanced but penetrating and delightfully writ-
ten pamphlet on Frederick the Great's atheism and the fruits
it had borne. The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart, it fell on
a receptive soil.

The school I attended from September, 1910 to June, 1918

was one of the three or four best reputed in the country: the
"Obergymnasium""Evangelical of Augustan Confession" which
is kept up and managed, under State supervision, by the Lutheran
Community. The Lutherans, perhaps one-tenth of the country's
population, often were of either Eastern Slovak or German
extraction. The "Roman" Catholicstogether with the Eastern
Greek-uniate and Armenian-uniate Catholics, and the "Greek
Oriental," that is, "Orthodox"formed about two-thirds of
the nation; many of them had a Western Slovak, Croat, or
German (so-called "Swabian") ethnical background. The Calvin-
ists, amounting to one-fifth or rather less of the total population,
formed the racial core of Magyardom and the backbone of
radical nationalism; they aspired, in many ways successfully, to
spiritual and political leadership. Count Stephan Tisza^ as well
as Andrew Ady,^ the great Frenchified decadent and radical
poet of the same epoch, united by a mutual hatred and rising
far above all other Hungarian figures of their time, were both
Calvinists; and so was Admiral Horthy,^ the Regent of the
rightist regime between the wars. Our Calvinists were less puri-
tanical in spirit than their Dutch or Scottish brethren; but they
seemed to me manlier, drier, more soldier-like than their Luth-
eran fellows. Of Hungarian Catholics, I have known personally
a very few only. Our Gymnasium masters were exclusively
Lutherans and Calvinistsexcept for the Catholic priest, the
Unitarian clergyman, and the Jewish rabbi who gave religious
instruction, two hours a week, to the boys of their respective
faiths.
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

The general spirit of the school was liberal-conservative,

strongly patriotic but rather verbally and conventionally so,
and only slightly and discreetly anti-dynastic, not devoid of a
sober ''ethos of work"; there was barely a trace of confessional
discrimination; and, outside religious classes, there was little
emphasis on religion, eschewing all questioning of it and all
reference to ticklish subjects like evolution or "higher criticism."
God was mentioned seldom and perfunctorily only; Providence
or the destiny of the soul, not at all; Christianity or its Founder,
not unless the historical context made it necessary. The relations
of Protestantism with national selfhood and independence as also
with liberalism (shorn of its democratic and social implications)
were stressed, but by no means aggressively. No incentive, how-
ever in direct, was offered to a Jewish pupil who might have some
disposition to embrace Christianity; I may note here that
"conversions" of Jews were frequent in the liberal epoch but
ever indirect, was offered to a Jewish pupil who might have some
persuasion; most of such Jews got baptised for reasons of
"career"many of them into the Cathohc faith which was that
of the aristocracy and which was associated with the fine arts.
But many, too, turned to Calvinism.

Many, doubtless, had known the issue of conflict a good

deal earlier; I knew it, definitively, on that sultry August day,
the 11th, 1918. The war was won; Armageddon had ended. What
I did not know until some time latershall I say, seven months
later when Hungary went Bolshevist or more essentially, about
ten years later?was that something else, too, had ended: the
world of "High Civilisation" into which I had been born. It
had been a world in which, notwithstanding its spots of tyranny
and barbarity or again, the presence in it of faint traces of a
conscious dislike or veiled opposition to its basic tenets, an
express creed of barbarism in control of entire societies would
have been thought of as a thing impossible beyond the limits
of imagination.

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 The Chesterton Review

The Hungarian Soviet Repubhc lasted from March 21 to

July 31, 1919. Soon after the nightmarish May 1stthe whole
surface of Budapest disfigured with red rags and huge card-
board idols of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Kun^the Rouman-
ians had crossed the Theiss at Szolnok, and hope for immediate
deliverance flew high. During the month of May, however, the
picture changed. First, I had dissuaded my family from their
projects of escape; now I urged them feverishly. It was in these
days that the emigre mentahty became fixed in me, that in some
essential sense, I ceased to be a Hungarian and started to accustom
myself to the idea that wherever I might live I should live in
exile. My axiomatic loyalty to the "bourgeois democratic"
West was, indeed, stronger than ever; yet the enemy was no
longer Germanism. After the "White" upheaval in Hungary,
my inner breach with my native country and my friendly ap-
preciation of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were to
grow even more definitive. These civilised countries, I thought,
had overcome the evil "anti-democratic" traditions of Central
Europe and solidly embraced the "Western" creed, whereas
Hungary persisted in her rebellion against the West, first by
yielding to the Red seduction and then to the not much less
barbarous form of a defiant reactionary nationahsm.

As a matter of fact, the more I thought about the "final

goal" of Communism, the less I liked it; before long, I decided
that the "love-community" of Communist society proper, which
by supposition would be past all dictatorship and indeed all
State compulsion, was even more execrable than the **transi-
tional" present reality of the Communist Terror State itself.
Far from the end "justifying" the means, the immorality of
the end was what really accounted for, and surpassed, the
immorality of the means. For the specific and gigantic evilness of
Communism lay, not in the unrestrained use of violence as such,
but in the negation of man's individual personalitytaken in
its juridical, economic and intellectual distinctness from all
"community." The so-called "collectivist" principleremunera-

1 oc
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

tion of everybody according to his merits and his industry

was really an expansion, a consistent and rational expression,
of liberalism, or individualism, and quite acceptable; the "Com-
munist" principle propereverybody producing according to his
capacities, and consuming according to his needsdebased man
into a mere particle of the community, deprived of autonomy,
self-sovereignty, "reservations" and "frontiers"; and this was the
very epitome of absolute evil. A few years later, when the Utopian
aspect of "liberal socialism" and the arbitrariness of its economic
presuppositions had dawned upon me, I transferred my interest
to the more or less dogmatic and Utopian, more moderate and
conservative, yet still in some ways rather problematic conception
of "Distributism" (the Belloc-Chesterton school), allied to the
Papal suggestions pointing to the aim of "deproletarianisation."
Although I no longer believed that a civilised society and a
vigorous State could be made up of small units of ownership
or of petty bourgeois of equal statusalone, I did not see how
big industry could be run by workers' co-operatives. Nor did I
indulge in the illusion that a well-paid factory hand endowed
with various "rights" and even with shares is equivalent to an
artisan. T still hold that a wholesome fabric of society requires the
predominance of the peasant and, in general, the small-owner
type among its citizens. Even more integrally have I retained
the view that the evilness of Communism resides essentially in
its "ideal" itselfthe aim, that is, of overcoming the divided
estate of man, inherent in the order of naturenot primarily
in the terroristic "means" to which its adherents have, by a
"deplorable accident," chosen to resort; and still less, in their
alleged "insincerity" which I immediately knew to be an un-
worthy imagination of petty cavillers, whose dwarfish and
cowardly minds would shrink from the necessity of defying any
pretentious "ideal" as such and of recognising intrinsic evil in
its stark reality.

The three autumn months of 1919 which I spent in Vienna

were to decide about my future habitat and allegiance up to
the age of middle manhood. Meanwhile, at home under Horthy's

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regency, the "White Terror" was raging unabated. This terror

was aggravated by reaction, shorn of its former Hberal parapher-
naha, and had much of a lawless military dictatorship about it.
The "White" regime prefigured, as a vague and foreshortened
initial sketch, one might say, the emergent historic types of
Fascism and National-Socialism. Austria was smoothly settling
down into an orderly republican democracy. The Socialists were
still holding most of the actual power in the State, but after
the failure of Communism in the neighbour country, Austria
seemed more than ever immune to dictatorial temptations. Such
a political situation was calculated to make me succumb alto-
gether to the incomparable charm of Vienna as a city. In the
autumn of 1920, I definitively took up my abode in Vienna,
which I was not to leave again (except for visits) until a year
before the German conquest of Austria.

Between 1921 and 1923, the daily paper Vienna Hungarian

News occasionally carried articles, literary or political, from my
pen; seeing that my parents insisted that I should return to
Budapest, at least on visits, I signed the articles, "Stephan Lenz"
instead of using my real name. Strangely enough, the first article
in the autumn of 1921was on Chesterton, and bore the
paradoxical title The Catholic Revolutionary. For a year, I had
been devouring whatever texts of Chesterton's T could lay hands
on. One spring day in 1921, Eric Hiller and I , dining together,
discovered to our amazement, that we were both Chestertonians
(though neither of us was Catholic at the time, or believed in
God), and Hiller acquainted me with The New Witness to
which he was a subscriber. Almost everything in that weekly
the chief exception being Joseph Clayton's articles, which smacked
of Communismsounded as if I had written it myself, had I
only been able to think so vigorously and to write so well.
From that moment on, it also became apparent to me that
nothing could be either thought so soundly or said so validly in
another language as in English. Chesterton's magnificent phrases
in The New Witness, " I prefer Bolshevik disorder to Bolshevik
order" and " I object to Lenin, not because he is violent, but
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

because he is a tyrant," or again, his passionate and logical re-

fusal to join the Pacifists and Germanophiles, already getting
the upper hand, took possession of my mind.

It happened that Eugen Dhring died just in the autumn

of 1921; this great paranoiaca fantastic mixture of exceptional
sanity and glaring insanity. A little later, on the publication of
Engels's nti-Dhring in Hungarian, I succeeded in placing an
article which extolled Dhring to heaven and viciously tore
Engels to pieces. Though Dhring had throughout his life been
a stubborn atheist, with a foaming hatred for Christianity and
all religion (his hatred of the Jews, too, being more fanatical
and unbalanced than Hitler's), I was peculiarly impressed with
the points of resemblance between his social system of petty-
bourgeois "personalism" and the "distributism" of Belloc and
Chesterton. How explain this riddle? It would seem that a
man's explicit religion is far from determining his essential
position unequivocally. Were I asked to "define" Dhring in a
sentence, I should say that hea Prussian of partly Swedish
descentwas a genius of the intellect, a giant of common sense
and an incarnation of probity, within the limits in which it is
possible for a man to develop his genius, to bring out his com-
mon sense, and to preserve his probity without possessing a trace
of either humaneness or sense of humour. May the Lord count
his war upon Marxism and the fallacies of "idealism" to his
credit, and have mercy on his great envenomed soul!

By the autumn of 1923, then, my short-lived career as sub-

Editor of a Hungarian literary weekly (The Fire, published in
Pressburg and Vienna) being also ended, I knew at least that
T knew scandalously httle. In November, I registered for the
four-year course of philosophy in the University of Vienna; this
I gladly did, taking modern history as the obligatory "minor''
subject.

The Editor of The Fire [a Viennese weekly journal], a

crude and illiterate but ambitious literary manager, once sub-
mitted a silly questionnaire about the future of European civilisa-

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tion and similar trifles to many dozens of celebrities all over

the world, from Lenin to Clemenceau and from Chesterton to
several Croats and Slovaks, writers of the time. Neither Lenin
nor Clemenceau troubled to answer; nor, I think did Shaw and
Wells; but the Croats and Slovaks did so at great length, while
Chesterton's secretary wrote very briefly to say that in Mr.
Chesterton's opinion, all our questions were answered by Mr.
Belloc's statement, "Europe will return to the Faith, or her
civilisation will fail." Though I had felt steadily confronted with
Catholicism ever since I first read Chesterton in 1920, and though
I had already devoured, not without objections to its thesis, The
Servile State, this succinct formula hit me with tremendous
force, and would not stop boring into my mind. No doubt, it
was at best a brilliant oversimplification of truth; but if there
lay any truth at its coreand that struck me as almost self-
evidentit was of supreme importance. That Europe could only
be herself, or even her best self, in her mediaeval shape seemed
no more than an arbitrary paradox; but that her life was some-
how bound up with the survival of her religious matrix, that
her life-sap was ultimately Catholic and that her crisis had to
do with her having departed too far from that religious basis
seemed fairly reasonable suggestions. I thus came, not indeed to
think of accepting the Faith as yet, but to envisage the claims
of the Church at a more favourable slant on "worldly"though
implicitly spiritual rather than selfishgrounds, in strong con-
tinuity with my former preoccupations and barely conscious of
the shift that was taking place in my mental attitude.

Chesterton's message also happened to remove me one step

further from the liberal philosophy in a more incidental fashion.
I showed the lapidary text, printed in The Fire, to Jaszi^ (my
fallen idol, former leader of the Radical Party, now in exile),
who, being "pro-religious" and rightly apprehensive of the
spiritual decay in modern society, read it with warm approval
but added in a reassuring tone that, of course, the two eminent
English authors must have meant the word Faith "metaphori-
cally"as a sense of transcendent values, of some Divine purpose

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

behind the material universe, of the individual's "dignity" over

and above his mere interests, and so forth. For, he implied,
the liberal who is worshipped of "culture" is fond of the pres-
tige of great names and would not renounce men of genius
wedded to deplorable un-liberal ideologies; he is anxious to save
their reputation and to clear them (Dostoyevsky, for instance)
from the charge of being "reactionary"; thus Chesterton and
Belloc must also be supposed to use the word "Faith" as an
ornamental archaism, because they too were liberal orators. But
I knew that they meant "Faith" in a quite literal hard-and-fast
Roman Catholic sense. Chesterton had only just been received
into the Church, but as a thinker and writer he could hardly
thereby become more Catholic than he had already been for a
long timeand I found that, at any rate, I felt more intellectual
respect for these two Popish eccentrics than for Jaszi: they
would never have said, for instance, analogously, that when
Nietzsche attacked Christianity he was really only criticising the
stuffiness of country parsons, or when Lenin proclaimed the
"dictatorship" of the proletariat he was not really thinking of
"dictatorship" but of an active and vigilant liberal government.
A genuine, determinate religious creed, with the earnest and
far-reaching demands it made on man, would thus appeal to me,
the rationalist and realist, all the more on the strength of its
contrast to woolly "religiousness."

Something of the old "freethinker" who "will not be

fooled" has always survived in me; I welcomed the Dogma, pre-
cisely in view of the sharp contours it gave to supernatural beliefs
and the limits it set to their range. This I took to be the proper
antithesis of an indefinite, open attitude of "credulity" which,
I thought, was liable to the most various kinds of insidious
abuse. The vaguely mystical and symbolistic moods I have also
cherished ever since my childhood have hardly influenced my
actual single convictions, though they may have made it easier
for me to accept supernatural faith in the general sense of in-
clining me towards recognising the limitation of human reason
and the incompleteness, or, better, the intrinsic imperfection, of

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our "scientific" world-knowledge. The Catholic elaboration of

supernatural themes and the concept-embroideries of some theo-
logians on the mysteries of the Faith rather wither than stimu-
late such mystical moods as I may indulge in. I often think that
Theology has definitely sought to make out or to clarify too
much; had I followed my mystical rather than my rational
bent, I should probably have become a Protestant instead of
a Catholic, or no definite kind of Christian at all. As it was,
I traversed no pre-Catholic period of broad "Christianity,"
hardly even of loose "religion." The mental aura of my conver-
sion, which to some extent has permanently tinged my faith,
reminds me more or less of Mark the Roman in the Ballad of
the White Horse: "And belief that stood on unbelief/Stood up
iron and alone." Few things, indeed, have done so much to
convince me of the authenticity of .Tesus's miracles and the
claims of the Church as the episode of Thomas, the Apostle,
who would doubt and test the improbable thing ere he sur-
rendered to belief, and some of whose sober rationalism recurs
in that other great Thomas in the Church's history, Aquinas.
Long after my conversion, I discovered a phrase of St. Paul's
which impressed me with a similar note of dry authenticity:
Scio enim cui credidi. Unbelief and aridity, disillusionment and
frustration, growing misgivings about the spiritual decay of
industrial society and the drift of contemporary Europe contri-
buted to my mental unease. Of the problem of industrialism,
I had a very inchoate awareness only; I was not utterly shaken
by it in Vienna as I was later in Berlin, and much later again,
more decisively, in America. I merely knew now, also enlightened
on this point by Spengler, that decay was as normal as progress,
that European civilisation was in greater danger, and that actual
preservation of the good was more important than fanciful
schemes for its improvement. Further, there was something
resembling despair but it was embedded in an intangible,
objectless hope.

Towards the end of August, 1923, I made a ten-day trip,

alone, to Salzburg, Innsbruck, and Bregenz, without any thought

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

but to enjoy the sights of these places; this I did indeed, but
I came back to Vienna an "implicit" convert determined to
inquire henceforth into the Catholic faith, slowly but persever-
ingly, with a view to accepting it in the end unless I persuaded
myself of its being unacceptable for some cogent final reason.
"The end" was to coincide with the end of my University
course, three years later in the summer of 1926, when I was
baptised into the Roman Catholic Church and given Holy Com-
munion by Father Georg Bichlmair, s . j . , who later, for some
years, was Austrian Provincial of the Jesuits, and who had
instructed me in the elements of the Faith and cleared up some
of my doubts during the previous four or five months.

I did have a most vivid experience of the alternative:

either no religion or an embodied religionwith its symbols,
traditions, historic figures (beyond more abstract concepts or
allegoric personifications) and with its arbitrary accents and its
corporate authority. Having chosen religion in place of irreligion,
which meant entrusting myself to God and not inventing a
concept of Divinity that might best suit my fancy, I chose, una
ictu, submission to the Church.

Like so many other converts of my time, I was won for

Catholicism largely, if not chiefly, by the wisdom and wit of
Gilbert Keith Chesterton. One of my prevailing moods in those
years could be phrased thus, "Not to share Chesterton's faith is,
after afl, a thing of rank absurdity." Of the many intellectual
influences I have undergone, none by far has been so powerful
and formative as his. Nor am I sorry for this (though he in
heaven may be) even today, viewing his work from a greater
distance, with less enraptured and more critical eyes than I did
thirty or even twenty years ago.

By 1918, The Man Who Was Thursday, just published in

translation, had become famous in Hungary as a funny book,

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 The Chesterton Review

but I did not happen to read it. Towards the end of 1919, in
Vienna, I heard some Hungarian Radical praise Chesterton as
a witty sensible writeralthough a Catholic, and one should
say a conservative, "but not, properly speaking, a reactionary."
Back in Budapest, I saw one day two Chesterton volumes, pub-
lished recently, in the window of a bookshop: one was Ortho-
doxy, its title defaced out of recognition into Igazsagot! ("Truth,"
in the accusative case and with exclamation-mark); the other,
I forget under what title, a compound of texts from Heretics,
Orthodoxy, and What's Wrong with the World. I bought these,
cautiously tried to digest a few pages, found that I could not
stop, devoured the two books in a trance and then plunged into
them over and over again, undeterred by the many allusions
beyond my grasp and the obvious incompetence of the translators.
I differowing, perhaps, simply to my different national per-
spectivefrom Belloc's view that the translator needs in the
first place a perfect command of the language into which he is
translating; I hold that he fails mostly, and most crudely,
through his ignorance of the language in which the original is
written. Somewhere in Heretics or Orthodoxy, Chesterton is
punning on "Russian influenza" and "German measles"; I was
old enough to recall that influenza was Russian, though we now
blamed it on Spain, but for all the wickedness of Germany,
whatever was there specially German about measles? I did
not know, but the translator ought to have known about that
insular perversity called "German measles" or "rubella" which
to us Continentals was familiar by the name of "rubeola" or
Rteln. I was soon to find that most German translations of
Chesterton were scarcely preferable to the Hungarian ones, and
that in order to read my favourite author properly I had better
learn English.

Though I had appreciated Hilaire Belloc from the start, it

was only when much further advanced in years, after 1940,
that I came to admire him duly and to discern his superiorities

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

over Chesterton along with his comparative drawbacks. This

may appear odd at first sight, for, whereas Chesterton was a
pure, insular Englishmanindeed, as he proudly acknowledged,
a Cockneyhis boisterous declarations of love for the Irish, the
French, the Poles and other foreign Catholics sprang from
candidly ideological and schematic motives, and imphed no
real knowledge of foreign souls. Belloc, however massively Eng-
lish, was at the same time French, or, better, Roman; on thai
score, he might be supposed to carry a stronger appeal and to
be easier of access to continentals of a more-or-less Latin cast
of mind. That, however, of these two great friends, Belloc was
the greater man, that he was the greater poet and infinitely
greater artist of the two, that, in an historical and national
sight, his was the far more universal mindsuch tests of com-
parison must needs lie beyond the reach of the immature and
unpolished foreign reader. Nor did Chesterton's almost invari-
able, bileless, and sometimes slightly roseate good humour make
me long, at that time, for the majestic and austere bitterness
of Bellocembedded, to be sure, in tints of mellow serenity.
That Chesterton's English was an exclusively English and late
Victorian or Edwardian English did not matter so long as it
was not English commanding attention as such; whereas the
exquisite style of Belloc, despite its ingredient of Latin glitter
and pungency, was lost on me as yet. But the important point
is that, considered as a thinker, Chesterton rises vastly superior
to Belloc, even though he taught Belloc little and learnt a
great deal from him.

Notwithstanding the historical and geographical width of

his perspective and equipment, from a doctrinal or philosophical
point of view Belloc is a fairly narrow, inflexible and opin-
ionated thinker; his analytical acumen and his appetite for
problems are definitely not in proportion to the strength of his
convictions. He not only inoculates you with elemental truths;
you may also glean from him deep and subtle thoughts; but
you will rarely observe him thinking. As you read him, you
will seldom feel as if you were actually discussing with him:

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he is a monologist rather than an interlocutor. Not so, Chester-

ton. This Fleet Street Aquinas, this public-house phenomenolo-
gist, addresses you as argumentatively as a mediaeval disputant,
as personally as any controversialist in a debating society. For
all his biases and preconceptions, for all his faith and ardour,
you feel him to be open to counter-argument, curious of your
opinion, eager for more points of view. His huge gluttonous
intellect, supported not by an equally powerful personality but
by the purity of an infant saint, is indefatigably at work. The
famous "toy theatre" of his exuberant fancywhich creates
nothing of flesh and blood, except perhaps for the figure of
Father Brown, but is really an amiable idiom of discursive
thoughtthe "toy theatre" whose image he chose to be the
symbol of his untarnishable eternal childhood, is indeed unreal
as a theatre but it is concept-scenery of human reality at its
thickest: the flimsy cardboard personages flutter about, numbly
carrying the weight of responsible formal arguments; the spark-
ling lights are but a conventional badge of the light of elucidation;
the tinsel which nobody is supposed to mistake for gold is
merely a discreet cover for spiritual metal more precious than
gold; the "wooden swords" hit painlessly but more aimfuUy
and effectively than if they were of steel.

There is, it must be admitted, a great deal of material and

formal carelessness, of flighty and repetitive verbosity, in
Chesterton's work, a deficiency partly due to his journalistic
commitments but largely arising from his temperament and his
very virtues. He is too much fascinated by things, too much
engrossed in the object, too much given to the divine indulgence
in intellectual play and too disdainful of self-conscious solemnity
to check and confront his utterances with any punctilious care
or to be solicitous about hjs own quality. The defect attaching
to a virtue is none the less a defect; indeed while the object
should rank paramount in my mind and the mind be accorded,
normally, no more than a dim marginal consciousness of its

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

own existence, the fact that I see something and say something
about it belongs itself to the objective situation, and the very
fashion in which I speak is part of what I have to say. This
dawned upon me in time; again, almost from the start, I dis-
cerned certain vulnerable spots in Chesterton's and Belloc's social
outlook; an excessive resentment at the English post-reforma-
tion and nineteenth-century "plutocracy" and "the wealthy" in
general; an over-simplifying dialectical preference for the peas-
antry, for things Latin as against Teutonic, for sudden and noisy
"mob" eruptions as against slow and silent evolutionary trends,
for the popular as against the constitutional aspect of democracy;
a tendency, involved by their efforts to dislocate the superstitions
of Progress and lay bare their inner contradictions, towards a
forced emphasis of the points of consonance between Christian
and "popular" attitudes, as also between conservatism and the
"plain man's" point of view. Chesterton's intellectual responses
used to be less rigid and dogmatic, more nuance and more adapted
to the soul of the object than Belloc'sthus, he was much less
taken in by Italian Fascismbut just because his was a mediaeval
not a baroque mind, imbued with a primeval unmodern objec-
tivism rather than with a preconceived anti-modern doctrine,
he was much less of an historian and, therefore, more naiVely
impaled within the perspective of the early twentieth century.

Gradually and reluctantly, I grew aware, then, that in

Chesterton's extensive production, the wheat was by no means
wholly unmixed with chaff; curiously enough, perhaps the earli-
est of such discoveries related to a certain tinkling cheapness
about Lepantothough it had at first inebriated me like few
other poemsof which no trace could ever be descried in Belloc.
No sooner did I read Tennyson's Revenge than I knew it to
be far superior to Lepanto in its own kind; and for these twenty
years or more I have held that, in spite of the vulgar and narrow
traits in Kipling's creed and attitude, the sombre force and
hidden tenderness in his rhetorical verse place him above
Chesterton as a poet. Chesterton himself took, I think, a view
as one-sided and inadequate of Kipling as he did of Hardy.

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 The Chesterton Review

More important, however, is the reflectionit occurred to me,

as no doubt to most Chestertonians, very earlythat, because
Chesterton puts his truths or "truisms," his insights and his
arguments, in a form so witty, delightful and cordial, and
because he is too careless about himself to be ashamed to
blunder on occasion rather obviously, many readers (among
those not wholly enthusiastic) wifl inevitably incline to mistake
much if not most of his "wheat" for "chaff." Being a true
humourist rather than a mere wit or satirist, he is fondto say
it roughly in his own wordsof joking even about the things
he holds dear; and that is why his humourless or silly critics,
and in general the groundlings among his readers, have sus-
pected him of not taking his subjects or his own affirmations
seriously and of sacrificing the truth of a matter to his lust for
puns and paradoxes. But I cannot help thinking that even for
his enthusiasts it is easy to underrate his consistency. Never
was there, perhaps, a man so contemptuous of the decorums
of "system" yet holding so fervently and preaching so urgently
a concordant set of convictionsa philosophy, indeed, not only
in the loose sense of an outlook on life or of a "doctrine" about
one specified subject, but in the sense also of a network of
presuppositions properly philosophical and expressible in schol-
astic or professional language.

With a powerful impetus of logical dissection, rhetorical

imagery and, above all, intuitive experience ready to flow into
discursive argument, Chesterton brought home to me the
truththe all-round superiority, intellectual and moralof a
realist, pluralist and theist conception of the world; the per-
fection, rectitude, wealth, equipoise and historic creativeness of
the authentic Christian Faith; the objective meaning of tradi-
tions, their compatibility with analytic thought, the value even
of their "irrational," arbitrary and contingent aspects, and how
their impatient, short-winded "rationalist" critique was bound
to miss the point; the philosopher's task, as wefl as the debater's,
the moralist's, or intellectual craftsman's in general, of making
the rational content of common sense explicit as opposed to

148
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

disregarding or overriding it. He was a master of distinctions,

a tireless exposer of reductionist conjuring tricks, and a standard-
bearer of human nature and its constitutive yearnings. It is not,
of course, against the Christian religion, but against the monist
and reductionist caricature of religion, against the post-Christian
prig's machinations to destroy nature and Christianity, that he
wrote the famous lines: "There is one thing needfulevery-
thing/The rest is vanities." As an ingenuously irreverent
anatomist of fads, fashions and fallacies, he excelled perhaps
most, and shaped me most profoundly and enduringly. He also
convinced me for a lifetime that it was possible and fruitful to
think in a "mediaeval" and "scholastic," rather than in a
"modern"subjectivistic or mechanisticway, yet in the context
of real life, on the plane of spontaneous reflection stirred by its
problems, rather than in the grooves of school-room routine.
He made me understand that things were not arguable in pro-
portion as they were calculable, and recognise that greater
wisdom has thriven in the cloisters than in the laboratories. As I
just said, he brought all these truths home to me; I might as
well say that he brought me home into the realm spiritual
which is their dwelling-place.

I seldom had the feeling of being "convinced" by Chester-

ton: rather, I was overwhelmed with wonderment to find again
and again that he uttered in plain English my own inchoate
and shapeless but innermost thoughts which I was vaguely and
all the more painfully longing to utter, without being able to
do so in any articulate form. Here was a great brain that could
think what I merely would, an intellectual courage that coined
into glittering hard mint the starved secret fancies I scarcely
dared to toy with, a fighting spirit that gathered my lame vel-
leities of revolt into a volcanic eruption, a booming voice that
seemed uncannily to surge from my own puny chest. It was that
most complete of conquests, when one feels that one has so
far been a mere lay figure which the conqueror is now cafling

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 The Chesterton Review

to life; or again, a barren genius whose hoarded thoughts and

words that other has brazenly stolen and published. To create
this illusion marks, of course, the supreme triumph of the real
genius, of the "conqueror" that is to say: the resonance he
evokes is so strong as to implant his stuff and substanceas
God's grace is implantedinto the humdrum recipient; thus might
a belated tyro feel amazed at discovering that Shakespeare was
already familiar with the expression "the insolence of office"
and that he made use of the locution "Age cannot wither her,
nor custom stale . . . ." To such treatment, Chesterton, of all
men, could least object, he who wrote that he had spent his life
trying to convince people that the truisms were really true.

Still, this general consideration may not fully account for

my trance-like experience in the early twenties, of having my
own mental self not so much enlightened as brought out, not so
much educated as it were, by that stout talkative Englishman,
who directed me towards truth as if showing me the way
towards "my" truth. There was not present in me the slightest
feeling of being swept off my feet by any potent suasion, sug-
gestive appeal or irresistible brilliance, or of succumbing to any
alien seizure or even yielding to any alien influence, however
suffused with reason: what I felt was, not that I was "accepting"
anything proposed from outside, but that a stream of thought
was entering me which was immediately more at home within
me, more in tune with my soul, more my own, than any explicit
thought of my own had been so far. Briefly, it was an awakening,
not to a sweeter, richer, purer or happier life in the flrst place,
but to freedom.

I cannot help thinking that such a total selective response

to one author, be he even an author so widely read and so
effectual as Chesterton, argues a specific affinity between the
author's and the reader's mind. Probably the dynamism of
Chesterton's effect upon my mind could not have been so
startling, had he not himself been a convert, his conversion
a winding progress of cerebral and emotive acts manifoldly
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

intertwinedstill going on, in a sense, during the period in which

he brought forth his most important works. Probably, again,
there was some analogy as regards social "locus": to be more
precise, the position and outlook of the intellectual by nature
who, descending from the late Victorian (or Francisco-Josephine)
commercial middle class, has come to distangle himself from its
axioms and prejudicesincluding a narrow concept of "broad-
mindedness" and a shallow, colour-blind, comfort-seeking attitude
of "moderation"radically enough in his thought and tastes,
but not so violently or completely as to fail to preserve in his
mental make-up a certain undergrowth of stable security and
invulnerable serenity, no matter how excitably he responds to
fresh stimuli and how boldly he opens himself to spiritual ad-
venture. In his very detachment from the bourgeois setting out
of which he has emerged, he keeps up a not wholly unbourgeois
habit of detachment as such, which underlies, nay, supports, his
intense contact with a diversity of objects and values; which
endures however actively he may take sides in vital controver-
sies; it seems to me as if this analysis applied, in some measure,
to Chesterton andif I may say so, and accounting for the
time-lag between 1874 and the 1900 generation by the less
advanced condition of Hungaryalso to myself. It defines a
sharp contrast of mentality with earlier or more typical Victorian
intellectuals who remained in essential communion with their
middle-class environment, with intellectuals of, say, noble, peas-
ant, or proletarian origins, or again, with the "existentialists"
and other children of "Crisis" and "Totality."

In my pre-Chestertonian youth, I cannot remember having

met at all with Christian (or at any rate, spiritualist or non-
positivist) and Conservative (or at any rate, non-progressive)
thought presented on a high level, but for a very few exceptions:
Boswell's Johnson, too remote in style and perspective, too
incoherent in form and too wilfully Tory in spirit to lure me from
my prejudices; Thomas Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpoliti-
schen (1918), which I found very readable and stimulating

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 Tne cnesterton tieview

but whose Prussianist bias, let alone the impression it conveyed

of the author's personalitya culture-monger and attitudinising
aesthetewas not calculated to win my sympathy; a few of
Henry Bergson's books, which did provide me with matter for
thought and contributed to relaxing the spasm of my ideological
science-worship; but owing to a certain tinge of anaemic flimsi-
ness and some traces of a mystagogic pose, they failed to
impress me with anything like an elemental effect. Chesterton
showed me, as if by a stroke of magic, that a Christian thinker
could be not only as "intelligent" and "educated" as one who
swears by science in place of Religion, but as subtle, as sensitive,
as "nervous," as much aware of the spiritual situation of con-
temporary man, as free from petty and palsying biasesand a
great deal more. Untinged by the fashionable cult of the
irrational and contempt of the conscious, he introduced me to
the atmosphere of Wisdom as distinct from sheer naked Intel-
lecta precious faculty so far as it goes, and a vital prerequisite
of wisdom. Again, Chesterton showed me that one might well
be Catholic without being necessarily conservative, a knowledge
I considerably overrated during the next fifteen or twenty years,
but most salutary at the time; he showed me, moreover, that
on the other hand one might well be conservative in a quite
different manner to the narrow zealotic clericalism, the even
narrower right-wing liberalism and the obsessive nationalism
which acted and continued acting upon me as first-rate irritants.
Another amazing thing he showed me was the possibility of
being English, English to all intents and purposesvalodi angol
(genuine English), to quote a ritual Hungarian phrasewithout
sharing at all the distinctive beliefs and traditions of, say. Mill
or Spencer, Wells or Shaw: here was an English genius who
actually countenanced Popery, at which even Johnson seemed
to have drawn the line. This would shake and fascinate me
more than I can say, not merely by reason of my innate and
incurable Anglomania but because it confronted me with the
complex and curious problem of the intrinsic relations between
the English and the Catholic cast of mind.

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

Obviously, there was a certain tension, not to say incom-

patibility, between the two: the empirical, pragmatic, elusive
and inexplicit character of the English mind, its habit of
ascertaining the nature of things piecemeal, groping alongside
their contours immersed in a fog, contrasted evidently with the
feature of dogmatic strictness in Catholicism, not unrelated to
the so-called "Latin lucidity and logic." And yet, is there not
also a striking point of specific kinship between the English and
the Catholic mind? I meanand I meant even then, though
I could not then put it in quite the same wordsa somehow
similar affinity of the two with common sense (conscious, as
such, of its own limits), tradition and manifoldly tempered wis-
dom, a certain carelessness about the appearance of inconsistency,
the proper genius of every object, thing or tradition being
regarded as more important than the show of systematic coherence,
a certain taste of oddness and asymmetry, a patient appreciation of
the concrete, the casual, the contingent. It may be described then
as something that is set in contrast alike with the French Cartesian
clarte or esprit de geometric and with the pantheist or "cosmic"
type of piety, as also the solemn indulgence in concept-archi-
tecture and concept-transformations, proper to the German spirit.
Perhaps, I thought, even though it were true that England went
Protestant from motives of nationalism and Crown absolutism,
her choice was facilitated by a feeling (illusory in the final
analysis, but not without a foundation in reality) that she
needed the Church less than did other European nations because
she carried a substitute for it in her own structure and temper.
Had Providence decided against the emergence of an Empire
of Christendom under an English sign because it would have
been a thing too good for this earth; too perfect a consummation
of Catholicism, a premature growth as it were, and therefore
not fitted to its designs? Prescinding from such speculations,
certainly my acquaintance with Chesterton, and secondly, with
Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, convinced mewho knew nothing as
yet about Newman or Lord Acton, and not much about Shakes-
peare, for the matter of thatthat in order to be Catholic one did
not have to be anti-English or out of touch with things English.

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 The Chesterton tieview

But, so far as I am able to see, no other idea of Chesterton

has informed my mind so strongly and enduringly as has his
conservative conception of Reform, set out mainly, but by no
means exclusively, in What's Wrong with the World. Doubtless,
I had been predisposed to receive his doctrine by the experience
of Bolshevism, which had caused me to understand that there
was no point in pruning society of its various injustices and
incongruities, real or alleged, if it meant the destruction of
''this society as suchto which "ourselves" with our yearnings
for justice and reasonable settlements, belonged altogetherand
the substitution for it of "another" society not "ours," were it
not even conceived on a plan expressly opposed to civilisation.
Yet it was Chesterton who replaced, in my mind, this vague and
hesitant intuition with a fully thought-out argument. That
change cannot be evaluated, nor, consequently, valued, except
in the framework of permanent standards; that progress, in the
sense connoting improvement, not only demands a setting of
conservation historically but presupposes it logically; that an
active work of reform, as distinct from aimless destruction and
likewise (a danger Chesterton overemphasised) from a mere
passive mood of anarchy, depends less on intellectual innovation
than on intellectual constancy; that discontent sustained enough
to be operative requires patience, which is to say, content at a
deeper level; that without a background of love, just anger itself
is pointless; that insistence upon what ought to be is meaning-
less and self-contradictory unless it is based on a primal affirma-
tion of what is; that there can be no pith in our criticism of
realities unless we are "optimists" about Reahty; that we can
only aim at a more perfect order if we first accept Order
here is the most important body of truths I owe to Chesterton's
teaching. However feebly, they are reflected in my articles on
"Right and Left in Politics" and "Critique of Social Progress"
{Deutscher Volkswirt, Berlin, 1927), and in my doctorate thesis
Ethical Value and Reality (Freiburg, i.B. 1927), especiafly its

154
Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

chapters on "The Hmitation of ethical claims" and "The ethics

of Reform."

Against the ewiger Wandel ("eternal mutation of shape")

principle of fashionable German neo-paganism, against the
Asiatic and modernistic ideaabove all hateful to Chesterton
of indefinite transformation, dissolution of boundaries, loss of
identity and change of nature, against the modern hubris (most
strikingly expressed in Renan's old-age fancies) of man aiming
at "creating God," against the Marxian insanity of an unfore-
seeable but necessary and superior future, against all "clean
slate" and "new deal" attitudes of Utopia, a world to be
"created" by man, that isagainst these deleterious heresies of
Pantheism and Atheism, of self-worship and suicide, of Sub-
version and Totality, a pupil of Chesterton would stick to the
conviction that fragmentary achievements alone are wthin our
reach, and that our business is to patch up the edifice of Crea-
tion in a selection of places. The barbarian will lazily let good
things crumble, or in his rage, tear them to pieces so as to
"create" anew in the void; it is the civilised man's job watch-
fully to mend the holes and the tattered roof. Our Lord and
Redeemer Himself has pointed the way; for mankind redeemed
is not a spotless new race out of continuity with the one marked
by the Fall, but rather a fallen mankind in a patched-up state.
In one of his most brilliant books. Eugenics and Other Evils,
Chesterton has a devastating passage on the popular fallacy
(with which I had indeed taken issue before even reading that
text) that "Prevention is better than cure." No, it may well be not
only not better than the cure but even worse than the disease
just, I would add, as the Utopian negation of sin is not only not
better than penitence and redress but actually worse than sin
itself, as the Utopian temptation held out by Lucifer is worse
than the blighting fury of Satan. Though, unless my memory
fails me, he has not referred to it in so many words, few men have
understood better than Chestertonthat great lover of freedom
and finiteness of the creaturethe meaning of the fact that God
chose, not to "prevent" but to "cure" the evil of mankind.

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 ine unesierwn neview
Earlier in this article, I mentioned my friendship, during
the early twenties in Vienna, with the Enghsh Chestertonian Eric
Hiller, through whom I became acquainted with Belloc's The
Servile State and with The New Witness. Chesterton, whose
writings I continued to devour, henceforth meant to me no
longer an individual genius only, but also a milieu, a camp of
kindred minds and of followers gathered round him. To be a
"Chestertonian" would not, then, reduce one to mere person-
worship; it has something of a "recognised" position about it.
It admitted of divergences of opinion within the sphere of a
common attitude; it enclosed a field of discussion. This en-
couraged me to make valid more definitely and formally, my
adherence to what Chesterton stood for. I realised, through a
closer knowledge of German Catholic literature, that Catholicism
comported with a great variety of opinions and with divided
schools of thought. But I was particularly impressed by another
English book Hiller happened to lend me or, rather, a book
written in English, during the Great War, by a Spaniard who
at that time was living in England. This was Ramiro de Maeztu's
Liberty, Authority and Function in the Light of War, a great
philippic against subjectivist philosophy and its social expressions
on the Left and the Rightliberal humanism, the ethical sover-
eignty of the State or the People, and the Prussian cult of Force
under the cloak of "authority"a somewhat uneven but
original, and by no means superficial, compound of Husserl's
neo-objectivism with Duguit's theory of "institutions" and the
"Guildist" conceptions of Penty and Orage. Unlike many other
Spanish Catholics and traditionalists, de Maeztu had embraced
the cause of the Allies with great fervour, and his book did
perhaps even more than the Chesterton influx towards persuading
me that the spiritual theme of the War might be put in some
such formula as "Catholic Christendom versus Luther's creed of
Moral Anarchy." I was unacquainted yet with Max Scheler's
war pamphlets, which suggested that on the Central Power's side,
Catholicism and Lutheranism were aligned against Western
Calvinism. As a matter of fact, "Calvin versus Luther" would
perhaps be nearest the truth; and certainly, if I had to choose

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between the two, I should never have hesitated to choose Calvin.

Be that as it may, my progress towards the Faith derived greater
impetus from the fact that it was thus connected with my pro-
Western bias, which was the strongest effect of my irreligious
past, and with the second strongest of my political preferences,
the distributist and co-operative conception of society.

I do not know whether Dostoyevsky's Possessed, that in-

superable picture of the inferno of subversion, had any part
in making a Christian of me. It was in the crucial years, 1922
or 1923, that I first read it; but, though I recognised it for a
magnificent novel, high above the rest of the author's works
in especial, above the Idiot, which is but a messed-up preliminary
attempt at a similar taskI hardly yet guessed its import as
a masterpiece of political thought. As for Dostoyevsky's Christian-
ityhowever different from the Tolstoyan blend of Asiatic
pantheism and a jaded man-about-town's yearning for the
"simple life"with its one-sided "pneumatic" tinge of love-
ecstasy, much farther remote than Catholicism from "juridical"
conceptions and from Old Testament morality, it would impress
me occasionally but not in any way decisively.

Max Scheler's Wesen und Formen der Sympathie^^probably

his best book, written some three years before his apostasy
his monumental, if rough-hewn and incomplete. Critique of
Kant's ethical formalism, and not Jast, his little known Dozent's
thesis on the "relations between logical and ethical principles,"
all of which I read in the spring of 1924, did most to convince
me of the superiority of Christian over current modern thought,
and cleared up definitively some of my former misconceptions.
In particular, theynext to Chestertonmade me see that
Christianity not only did not deny the distinctness and the moral
consciousness of the person but had a truer, safer and more
deeply grounded conception of these central principles of mine than
Liberalism; that, in fact. Liberalism was less absolutely opposed
to Pantheism and to the abject cult of the Unconscious than I
had believed; that "Christian love" meant, not an equivalent

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but the extreme anti-thesis of a vital "merging" into an indis-

tinct "community-soul" or a "loss of identity" and riddance
from responsibility. Only two years earlier, indeed, I had been
greatly put out by a recent booklet of old Franz Oppenheim-
er'sthe inventor of "Liberal Socialism"in which he had
sketched his anarchist utopia of a stateless society of "spon-
taneous harmony" (after the elimination of large rural estates and
of "food scarcity") in a fashion apt to give me a warning that
his vision was really that of a tensionless, confluent "community"
of minds, a vegetative paradise on earth which could dispense
not only with coercive power but also with juridical norms and
with the rules of Right and Wrong. I felt bitterly disappointed,
and inclined to revise very thoroughly my notion of being an
adherent of this school.

Though in a broader sense of the term, I was to be a

"Christian democrat" for a long time following my conversion,
I would never for a moment imagine that modern democracy
was the fulfilment of the "real meaning" of Christianity; and,
though I did think of Christianity in terms of close references
to the order and climate of society, I never thought of it as
a social theory, and much less as a recipe for economic
organisation. Neither was anything of that kind involved in the
Gospeloratorial phrases about politics to be "founded on the
Sermon on the Mount" I would dismiss with equal peremptori-
ness when a free-thinker as when a Catholic. The Christianity
of the Gospel was not at variance with the .teaching and essential
spirit of the Catholic Church. What I thought I understood,
then, at the time of preparing for Baptism was, briefly, this
that the profound, vaguely discernible, but beyond a doubt
tremendous and righteous meaning of the Gospel did furnish
the ultimate spiritual key to the immense and irresistibly attrac-
tive fact of the Church; and that, if man stood in need of
"embodied religion" anyhow, with the Gospel the living and
present Church was not less but all the more necessary. God
has willed us to believe Him through His "mystical" presence in

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from . . .

the Church as well as through His revealed Word. Of the unique

impression I had of the Church as "that other different Society"
and trustee of objective Authority, I formed the idea of the
intrinsic meaning of the Christian attitudeinseparable from
the Church in its concrete determination and purport, but capable
of being considered separately in itself, and requiring such con-
sideration alsoor in other words, of the "ethic of the Gospel."
This, if any, was a crucial point.

There is in the Gospel, in its concentration of Divine

hoHness as the governing focus of human destiny and aspiration,
a trait of absolute, irrefragable and uncompromising straight-
forwardness, which may in traditional idiom be described as
"simplicity"I prefer the term "plainness"and which is
reproduced in the theocentric scheme of Catholicism and the
paramount status it claims for "Faith and Morals." To see
things as uhimately set in a kind of "order" and directed towards
a centre of moral meaning, to experience life primarily as a
multiplicity of "weights" and differences of weight, to take for
granted certain fixed elements of truth and valueaspects of
reality and of "importance"^loyalty to which must be axio-
matic and not seriously subject to argument, I would find
myself compelled to owe reverence to what struck me as "the
ethical radicalism of Christ."

But on the other hand, simplicity in the sense of a simple

and lucid "pattern," simplification at variance with the com-
plexity of the world and especially of moral demands, accents,
and dangers is eminently alien to the Gospel, as it is alien to
the rich structure of Catholicism and peculiarly repugnant to
my personal taste. The thinkers of the Church, in elaborating
moral theology, have done no more than justice to the com-
plications and tensions among points of view involved in the
precepts, warnings, hints, and parables of the New Testament.
A higher morality than the merely conventional and outward
one is demanded, yet the higher a morality the graver the threat
of its being confounded as a blind-alley of subtle pride if encased

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 me unesterion tieview

in an attitude of autonomy, self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

That fearless freedom of eccentricity which pervades the air of
the New Testament, inseparably mingled with a terse and almost
homely savour of common sense, could not but enthrall me
by the aspect of the Christian tonality once I had discovered it.

Sound reason aware of its limitations but trustful of its

application to objects outside the mind, reverence for the mani-
foldness of reality, open-minded acceptance of the order of the
universe and the realm of values as ''given" in our world-
experienceto maintain or safeguard any of these, it was by
no means necessary to embrace Catholicism; but the historical
linkage between these principles and the Catholic intellectual
tradition, the dominant general propensity of mankind to turn
against the former in proportion as it deserted the latter, seemed
to bear witness, if not to the truth of Catholicism, at least to
a deep enduring concordance of Catholicism with the spirit of
Truth. Sanity, morality, and the full experience of a world
undeprived of its wealth of meaning, dimension, colour, savour
and weight were undoubtedly possible without the Faith; but
they were all of greater intrinsic perfection and endowed with
greater security under the Faith. Above all, the Faith alone would
guarantee their status and effective presence on the vast scale
of our common civilisation. Entering the Church not only
placed me in the supernatural presence of God and offered
me access to the Communion of Saints; it also made me feel
as if I were firmly lodged in the one valid, universal and
imperishable medium of communication with mv fellow man.

1 Count Istvan de Borosjen Tisza was the son of Coloman Tisza; both
were outstanding Liberal statesmen of the Francis Joseph era. Tisza was
Prime Minister from 1903-1905 and 1913-1917, and Speaker of the House in
1912-1913. He was murdered in the Marolyi revolution as a Symbol of the
old regime. Some of his ancestors Were Dutch and Scottish of whom one
was the Duke of Schmberg, Field-Marshall of William I I I of England. He
was the great right-wing Liberal leader of the pre-war and earlier war years.
2 Andrew Ady was a great Hungarian lyrical poet of Calvinist par-
entage; he was a revolutionary poet of gloom and, for some, of hope. The

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Chesterton and Catholicism: Excerpts from

tragic hero of his poetry was "the Magyar," a role he assumed for himself
in an age of decay.
^ Admiral Miclos Horthy, soldier and statesman, was Naval officer,
aide-de-camp to Francis Joseph, last Admiral of the navy of the Monarchy
in the First World War, and Commander of the White Army in 1919. Regent
of Hungary from 1920-1944, he succumbed to Nazi influence and joined their
war in 1941. The Germans arrested him in October, 1944. After the War
he lived in Portugal.
* B61a Kun was an important figure of the international Communist
movement in Hungary. He became a prisoner of war in Russia and then
fought on the Bolshevist side. He was the founder of the Hungarian Com-
munist Party in 1918, and became the actual leader of the Hungarian Soviet
Republic in 1919. He was driven out by the Roumanian Army of Libera-
tion and lived from 1920 in Russia as a leading member of the Communist-
International. He was killed under the Stalinist purges.
5 Oszkr Jszi was a sociologist, politician and political writer, the
founder and editor of the review Huszadik Szazad. He was also leader of
the Democratic movement in Hungary, advocate of the national minorities,
and Chairman of the Radical Party. Minister of the Nationalities in the
Karolyi Government in 1918, he emigrated to Vienna in 1920, and from 1925
onwards was Professor of Political Science at Oberlin College, Ohio.

161