The English Catholic author G. K. Chesterton was one of the great pro-life advocates of the twentieth century in more ways than one. Although he may appear something of an antique figure in 2020, his values and pro-life message, which he lived every day, have much to say to us now.
If we take a look at this tremendous man, a heroic defender of Christianity and common sense, who instinctively, recognised the sheer miracle of existence, as a gift in its own right standing atop “an invisible pyramid of virtues”.
And it is clear, too, that Chesterton possessed a well-thought-out philosophy, and even a theology, of life that underpinned his ethics and actions, which is worth looking at more closely, especially regarding his views on women which he referred to as those “splendid sparks”.
When he was studying at the Slade School of Art, in the early 1890s, Chesterton had his now-infamous encounter with a fellow student and advocate of free love, the “Diabolist”, who later “committed suicide… with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain”, we are told.
Chesterton, who, to his “own extreme and lasting astonishment”, was discovering at this time that he was not an atheist, found himself defending morality by directing the student’s attention to a nearby fire.
“Aren’t those sparks splendid?” he remarked. “Give me those few red sparks and I will deduce Christian morality.”
He continued: “Once I thought like you, that one’s pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that could come and go with that spark. Once I thought that the delight was as free as the fire. Once I thought that the red star we see was alone in space. But now I know that the red star is only on the apex of an invisible pyramid of virtues.”
Chesterton was essentially making the point, here, that the universe is splendid exactly because “that flame flowered out of virtues, and it will fade with virtues”. And then we have the key line:
“Seduce a woman, and that spark will be less red.”
And the misuse of women, for pleasure, failing to view them as a pleasure and glory in their own right, Chesterton knew, would considerably darken the universe that he took so much pleasure in as a believing Christian – and Chesterton would later convert to Catholicism in 1922. Moreover, sexual misuse would destroy both the souls of the man and the woman.
The chilling response by the Diabolist, who “looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit”, Chesterton recalled, was that “for every woman I ruin”, he would feel an “expanding pleasure of ruin”.
Unfortunately, the unchivalrous Diabolist represents where we are today.
Chesterton was, in a way, one of the mystics, and it is worth unpacking this dire encounter a little further, I think, since it was the event that he considered “by far the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life”, as he had the terrible “sense of being tempted in a wilderness”.
Historically, the “chivalric” treatment of women, as the word suggests, pre-dates feminism. Indeed, it is quite the opposite; and as Chesterton once wrote: “Chivalry is not the romantic, but the realistic, view of the sexes. It is so realistic that the real reasons for it cannot always be given in print.”
However, I shall dare to give some candid, if not explicit, account, nonetheless.
Chivalry, considered broadly, is the attempt to apply Christian ideals to practical living. The earliest Christian knights were essentially barbarian warriors coated with a thin veneer of Catholic precepts, which, as it turned out, were wholly realistic, especially in the realm of the relations between the sexes. Chesterton recognised this, and was suffused, I suggest, in a realism that took great responsibility in its attitude towards sex in particular.
Firstly, we might say that to “ruin” a woman, in Chesterton’s day, meant engaging in sex resulting in pregnancy outside of marriage, for which she would receive severe and life-defining moral censure from society.
Secondly, however, and perhaps more vitally, Chesterton was hinting at something more than moral censure – rather, moral demoralisation. His concern, I think, was for “every one of those red sparks [that] will go out”. In other words, we ought not to forget the emotional devastation, especially for women, that casual sex and its attendants entail.
Sociology is finally catching up with Catholicism on the correlation between successful marriages and previous sexual experience, as recent data has shown that women in the United States, for example, who have had one or less previous sex partners before marriage are the least likely to divorce – only 6 percent of such marriages broke up within five years compared with 20 percent for the rest.
Professor Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the Institute for Family Studies in the United States, has noted “the surprisingly large number of Americans” who, “reporting one lifetime sex partner”, have “the happiest marriages”. Of course, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but the data is at the very least suggestive. Professor W. Bradford Wilcox, another sociologist, also stated that, “contrary to conventional wisdom, when it comes to sex, less experience is better, at least for the marriage”.
I’m sure that Chesterton, reading either of the above statements, would question whether such a conclusion was at all surprising. Wolfinger and Wilcox would do well to note the true “conventional wisdom” – tried, tested and upheld by the Catholic Church for the last two thousand years – that giving oneself wholly to one partner, one’s spouse, is a positive benefit and the ultimate ideal.
We shouldn’t neglect human experience either, as Chesterton certainly didn’t. Anecdotally, there are plenty of stories that underline what science is now backing up, that multiple sexual partners and especially casual sex damage a person’s ability to pair-bond with future partners. This may also apply to men as well. The actor Rupert Everett, for instance, has admitted having spent much of his life “thinking almost exclusively about sex, and getting it, or recovering from it”.
In other words, chivalry once had a very practical purpose – to protect the human soul from losing its fundamental spark.
To consider the deeply chivalrous nature of Chesterton is to consider what it means to be pro-life more broadly, which is the point of this article. Chesterton’s marriage to Frances Blogg, in 1901, was itself a pro-life statement. But it is important to remember, here, that their marriage was by no means unusual. Indeed, Ian Ker, in his biography of Chesterton, has given an account of the honeymoon that was, for the most part, entirely usual to its age.
“What may well have happened on that first night was that the young couple, both virgins and brought up in all the proprieties of the Victorian age, found their first sexual contact very difficult: the young husband, who was as inexperienced as his wife, was no doubt clumsy, and Frances may well have shrunk away in embarrassment and panic. Such an experience would have been common to many newly married middle-class couples at that time.”
It is also the case that their marriage was entirely happy and burnt brightly until the day Chesterton died, on 14 June 1936.
However, there was a great tragedy in their marriage, which was Frances’ inability to have children. Chesterton, by all accounts, loved children, and longed to have a child of his own. Despite Frances seeking medical advice and even having an operation, they were never to be blessed with children.
There is, then, a retrospective poignancy to Chesterton’s pro-life statements, including one of his earliest poems called “By the Babe Unborn”, in which an unborn baby – “In dark I lie” – begs to be born and live, even for an hour, whatever the outcome: “Let storm clouds come: better an hour, / And leave to weep and fight, / Than all the ages I have ruled / The empires of the night.”
Chesterton, in this case, spoke for the unborn child who, having so far been denied existence, wishes so much to be given “leave / Within the world to stand”, in what Chesterton often referred to as “fairyland”. This poem that, as Chesterton described in his Autobiography, “imagined the uncreated creature crying out for existence and promising every virtue if he might only have the experience of life”, was a condemnation of “the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism” of his day, which failed to realise that “anything was magnificent as compared with nothing”.
It is, therefore, understandable, given Chesterton and his wife’s inability to have children, that he exhibited an uncommon, though entirely justified, “contempt” towards those who denied life to others and themselves. As Chesterton’s poem concludes:
“They should not hear a word from me / Of selfishness or scorn / If only I could find the door, / If only I were born.”
Chesterton, as a man, Catholic and husband who never had a child of his own, understood the true value of life. But as we have seen, his pro-life message goes beyond the child itself to the nature of life, of living, of women, and of the efforts of man to live as chivalrously as he can within what is now truly the Age of the Diabolist.
References
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/d.htm
https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marital-happiness
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/sexual-partners-and-marital-happiness/573493/
https://www.medinstitute.org/articles/pair-bonding-and-the-brain/ “When an individual chooses to engage in casual sex, breaking bond after bond with each new sexual partner, the brain forms a new synaptic map of one-night-stands. This pattern becomes the “new normal” for the individual. When and if the individual later desires to find a more permanent partner, the brain mapping will have to be overcome, making a permanent bond more difficult to achieve.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/apr/21/rupert-everett-sex-is-over
Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (2011; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 80.