Sometimes Chesterton was Wrong

I don't mean wrong about ultimate essentials. You cannot be "sometimes" wrong about those. I mean details.

Here I spotted a historical blooper, and if he's in heaven, as I hope he is (getting him out of purgatory for gluttony could otherwise be a daunting task, but I believe in his innocence), ora pro nobis, he'll forgive me for correcting that one.

Now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the loss of this; the loss of what we may call the natural and heathen mysticism. When modern critics say that Julius Caesar did not believe in Jupiter, or that Pope Leo did not believe in Catholicism, they overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours. Perhaps Julius did not believe in Jupiter; but he did not disbelieve in Jupiter. There was nothing in his philosophy, or the philosophy of that age, that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit personal and predominant in the world. But the modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe. Hence, while the heathen might avail himself of accidental omens, queer coincidences or casual dreams, without knowing for certain whether they were really hints from heaven or premonitory movements in his own brain, the modern Christian turned heathen must not entertain such notions at all, but must reject the oracle as the altar. The modern sceptic was drugged against all that was natural in the supernatural. And this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom, as a tyrant literally pagan might possibly not have done.

Caesar pretty certainly disbelieved in Jupiter quite as much as Gretta Vosper disbelieves in Christ.

There was no such thing as a "philosophy of the age" in his day, since there were no modern school systems. In the nineteenth century, you did have one, and those who were outside it, yes, that existed, usually did not bother readers of their works or readers about their life work with references to their divergent philosophy. When they did, that was marked out as something quaint. Something to be patronised. A biography or interview with a village sage could happen, but the foreword made sure he was not to be confused with the sages of the universities, whom people had come to be told were what they should look to guidance for.

All that was different for old Romans. The nearest they came to having a "philosophy of the age" was having some different competing "fashionable philosophies" which in his day were Stoics and Epicureans, both of which disbelieved in Jupiter. Or rather, they could "believe in Jupiter" in certain moments, just for the mood, in make-believe, but their philosophy very certainly told both of these that the Jupiter Homer and Virgil wrote of did not exist.

I am not sure which of these Caesar was more fond of, I think that in a Japanese fashion, he was fond of both, and for both of their reasons, was not fond of a literal belief in Jupiter. He was an augur, and as such one of the augurs of whom Cicero said (I think it was Cicero) that two augurs cannot meet without a grin. At each other's and their own antics.

Anyway, this affords this university educated man, I really took Latin and yesterday, I understood the first half of Exulta Lusitania Felix, until it tired me, I don't have the same fluency as in English or in French, the opportunity to do homage to Chesterton who was an Art School educated man, and to the men he did homage to as victims of Capitalist evils (the ones that had built the 19th C.)

It also affords me the occasion to most formally protest againt the idea that the hagiographers of the Bible were like [Caesar's attitude on] Jupiter. It was only in later times that Sadduceism became fashionable, and even then the writer of II Maccabees takes issue with it.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Chair of St. Peter
18.I.2024

Cathedra sancti Petri Apostoli, qua primum Romae sedit. Ibidem passio sanctae Priscae, Virginis et Martyris; quae sub Claudio Imperatore, post multa tormenta, martyrio coronata est.

PS, I'm off to check whether St. Volusian lived between St. Martin and the time of Clovis.

PPS, indeed, he was the third successor of St. Brice, just before Tours was finally salvaged from Arianism by Clovis./HGL

PPPS, before I forget it, here is the link to Eugenics and Other Evils, from which I quoted part II, chapter IV:

Eugenics and Other Evils
by G.K. Chesterton, 1922
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Eugenics.html

PPPPS, I did a few corrections after signing, like two misspellings and an added phrase in square brackets. I'm still a bit tired this morning.