Reading the Right Books
G.K. Chesterton’s book Everlasting Man lit for me the first spark of a true love for literature. Up to that point, I didn’t know what I was missing out on. A great book by its own right, it also stands among those that make a fierce defense of knowledge and study of the Great Books. It was in these pages that I first realized the difference between learning for intellectual achievement or societal or personal progress and learning for piety and posterity. I gained here a strong sense that a lack of knowledge, and that of a particular type of knowledge, truly leaves one vulnerable to the thinking of progressives today - thinking that effectively cuts one off at the roots.
There exists a popular line of thinking today that, by many twists and turns of logic, causes us to disregard or discredit the voices of the past as outdated, irrelevant, or simply as uninteresting. This line of thinking might even cause us to doubt the value or legitimacy of our culture’s roots because of perceived prejudice or past moral failure (often over-exaggerated or completely false) resulting, again, in the disregarding or discrediting of the voices of our fathers. This line of thinking, hotly debated as novel and dangerous when proposed in the 1800s and early 1900s, is fully swallowed as true today and it is fascinating to consider the concerns that were expressed in that debate in light of today’s current ignorance and nihilism.
Upon entering any anthropological museum, one would expect to see ancient man depicted as “primitive” using words like “prehistoric” or “caveman”. One would see charts depicting ages of man separated into lifestyles of economy – for instance “hunting and gathering” preceding the invention of agriculture. One would see primitive man described in ways that one might see National Geographic describe modern primitive tribes of Indonesia or Africa. Creative descriptions of the development of religion would be given prominent display, effectively trivializing the importance of divine intervention in the creation of mankind, as the link between apes and humans is, again quite creatively, made to appear reasonable.
I did not realize how recently accepted this anthropological timeline is, nor how much of it is owed to H.G. Well’s Outline of the History of the World, which he published in 1920. As a Christian, I have always viewed this timeline with great skepticism, but to read Chesterton’s comfortable and eloquent rejection of these propositions left me inspired and hungry for knowledge. With a thoroughly Christian approach, Chesterton applies his understanding of history and a deep knowledge of the Great Books, to an adept exposé of the insidiousness of Well’s Outline, rejecting it as manipulative propaganda against the importance of mankind as a species and against the Christian church as God’s Kingdom at work in His creation, and especially against the Lord Jesus Christ and His pivotal place in history. (Wells makes his own case for this argument, basically agreeing with Chesterton, in his book The Open Conspiracy).
Chesterton begins by making clear his awareness of the way in which facts and information are being used to make a case for something that we cannot possibly know, for instance cave drawings being allocated to a time period before ancient civilizations. He challenges such assertions by emphasizing that we have primitive tribes today living right alongside massive civilizations, just as we have hunter-gatherer cultures living alongside agricultural cultures all through-out history. “It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely falsified history.”
He toys with the word “prehistoric”, drawing attention to the real history that we can best corroborate in the writings of civilizations that left us a record, focusing primarily on Egypt and Babylon. “But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress…our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised.”
As we discover more about them, these civilizations present themselves as fully human, fully civilized, and already old. Evidence of “prehistoric” man may very well have been produced at the same time or long after these massive civilizations left their mark, but to presume that this evidence speaks of a more primitive period in human history is to apply an intended philosophical end and call it science. And then to assert that these are evidences of anything less human than that which we see in the massive civilizations of Egypt or Babylon, which are among our most ancient, or less human than the primitive tribes in existence today, is again to apply to science a philosophy about mankind – that we are progressing.
As he lays waste any confidence in the “scientific” nature of this modern timeline, he poetically draws attention to an epicenter of history that truly deserves our attention - the Mediterranean and the civilizations that interacted around it, and the struggle by which Europe emerged as a people, beginning with the epic fall of Troy. “It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and Europe from the night of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of the Turkish ships at Lepanto.”
Chesterton’s defense of Western Civilization and her roots begins, ironically, in a defense of the paganism that, through her mythology and worship, was eventually satisfied in Christ’s establishment of his Church. He contrasts this paganism that eventually became Rome with an evil in history which was continually at war and continually defeated – using Carthage as an epic example of a society in which family and individual was completely subjugated before the all-important state, such that the gods of Carthage were state gods to which its children were regularly sacrificed. Telling a story of Western Civilization that is not often told today he attributes to the hand of God the good fortune that the victor of the Punic wars was instead a society in which the gods were family gods and the state was constantly subject to the mob.
Rome began in the piety and heroism of fallen Troy. Its language and writings are still studied today, and indeed were the language and writings of academia and the Church for most of their existence, right alongside the language and writings of those who laid waste to Troy, the Greeks. Chesterton eventually rests his rejection of Well’s Outline not just in his manipulative use of information, but in his use (misuse) of the word “outline”. Wells clearly has not itemized the important events and the result is indeed a falsified and almost forgotten history.
There are, however, glimmers of hope. In a few remote corners, a flicker of light, of midnight oil, can be seen in libraries as students spend their time remembering. History has not changed as a result of a bad outline. Time still tells its tale and the stories that built Western Civilization are not unclear. Humanity is important. Families are important. The Faith of our fathers is important. And knowledge, the right kind of knowledge, is important. Piety is necessary here.
