Chesterton on love
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Chesterton at work, 1905
GK Chesterton died 85 years ago today, aged 62. Chesterton has long been one of my favorite writers, a witty and topsy-turvy guide to literally everything. To commemorate the anniversary of his passing I was looking through my books and notes and even quotations I had shared as Facebook statuses going back as far as 2009. It was in these statuses that I noticed a recurring theme—love. And I decided that there was no better tribute I could pay him than simply to share his thoughts on six different facets of love.
I use the metaphor of facets deliberately, because, like a finely cut gemstone, while each of these quotations comes at the topic from a different angle they are all of a piece, part of a carefully shaped whole, and it’s that whole vision of Christian love that I believe animated everything Chesterton did and that we can stand to learn from. I know I can.
On love of one’s work:
From Chesterton’s 1903 biography Robert Browning:
The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. . . . A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.
One of these days I’ll finally write about my years-long struggle to understand and live out one of Chesterton’s most famous dicta, that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” But the above quotation gets at why even failing at something is worth it.
On love of home:
“I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.”
“I dare say,” I said. “What reason?”
“Because otherwise,” he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, “we might worship that.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Eternity,” he said in his harsh voice, “the largest of the idols—the mightiest of the rivals of God.”
“You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,” I suggested.
“I mean,” he said with increasing vehemence, “that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.”
The above is from his underappreciated novel Manalive, which I read at a very important time in my life and you can read here.
On love of country:
A celebrated passage from “A Defence of Patriotism” in his very first essay collection, The Defendant:
On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word “love” means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word “love” is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. . . . “My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
On love of neighbor:
One of Chesterton’s most famous one-liners comes from a 1910 column for the Illustrated London News:
The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
You can read more from the same column here.
On love of others:
From Orthodoxy, chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy.” Compare this insistence on the particularity of love with the passage from Manalive above.
A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. . . . Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces.
On unconditional love:
From a meditation on soldiers, the use of force, and defeat in his 1915 essay collection All Things Considered:
To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune.
Conclusion
Devoted attachment to real, particular things and people, unswerving but not uncritical, and always wanting and hoping the best—this is a model of love I hope to live up to, and one we could all certainly use more of. And a good place to look for it not only described but acted out is in the work of Chesterton. Thankful for his memory today, 85 years on, and all that his work has meant to me and many thousands of others.
GK Chesterton, RIP.
