by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Catching with James Parker Catching Up with Chesterton
News
it is to me that there are people proposing (as if his coarse remarks
about Jews are no big deal) that G.K. Chesterton should be declared a
saint – an actual, canonized, statue-inspiring devotion-eliciting
saint.
I’ll never be a Chestertonian, or even close, but James Parker – whose own approach is akin to G.K.’s in its blend of epigrammatic reason and outflowing passion – makes as good as case as can be made for him. (It was in the Atlantic, weeks ago now; somehow I missed it.) Here’s the best bit:
His prose, if you don’t like it, is an unnerving zigzag between flippancy and bombast—and somewhere behind that, even more unnerving, is the intimation that these might be two sides of the same thing. If you do like it, it’s supremely entertaining, the stately outlines of an older, heavier rhetoric punctually convulsed by what he once called (in reference to the Book of Job) “earthquake irony.” He fulminates wittily; he cracks jokes like thunder. His message, a steady illumination beaming and clanging through every lens and facet of his creativity, was really very straightforward: get on your knees, modern man, and praise God.
The problem with Chestertonians is that they are Chestertonian: they make the case for their man in their man’s own terms – and then (with G.K.-style overstatement) suggest that the terms are actually those of Jesus himself. Parker does that – but does it better than most:
The Chestertonian paradox, in fact, was a kind of ideogram of the foundational paradox of the Incarnation, of God being born as Man, when “the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle,” as he wrote in another book of Christian apologetics, The Everlasting Man. And has anyone gone further than Chesterton into the agonizing paradox of the Crucifixion—Jesus’s cry of abandonment from the cross, when “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist”?
Chestertonians glory in the fact that their man was old-fashioned; but Parker’s concluding point there makes clear that in crucial ways he was ahead of his time.