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Chesterton on Ritual
David W. Fagerberg
Worship, Volume 71, Number 3, May 1997, 194-205.

There is a great deal of analysis being conducted on ritual in the academic study of liturgy these days, all to the good, I believe. If, as my teacher used to say, liturgy is a species in the genus “ritual,” then these general studies can only be of help. Nevertheless, this article intends to add one more voice to the discussion, the voice of a person from outside the academy. It seems important to add this voice because sometimes academics treat ritual as if it had one purpose, namely, the same as theirs, which is to make meaning. No disrespect intended to my own guild, but we can be a serious and furrow-browed band, looking, as we do, for meaning and sense everywhere, and so we may be tempted to see ritual primarily as a system for producing and communicating meaning in a social unit. I have no doubt that ritual does produce and express meaning. But it does also seem true that ritual is full of meaning in other ways, and for other people, and that these people would not necessarily look to production and expression for the ultimate justification of ritual (including the ritual of liturgy). So an additional voice might benefit our discussion: not a contrary voice, but a less specialized, happier, and more common voice; the voice of a journalist from Fleet Street in London who enjoyed defending the common person; a voice which defended Christian ritual in the face of disparaging criticisms of it in his own day, that of Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

Despite his fame as an author of detective stories (The Father Brown Mysteries), a literary critic (on Dickens, Stevenson, Chaucer), a political commentator (and proponent of distributionism), a polemicist on the lecture circuit, a biographer (St. Thomas, St. Francis) and a Catholic apologist, Chesterton consistently described himself simply as a journalist. He made his living from articles and essays and book reviews and books. The secret as to exactly how he managed to fit all this in he gives in his autobiography, completed just a month before his death in 1936 at the age of sixty-two: “The profound problem of how I ever managed to fall on my feet in Fleet Street is a mystery; at least it is still a mystery to me ... On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper .... I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafes and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labor organ like the old Clarion and defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.”

In keeping with his contentious and anomalous literary habits, he also defended ritualistic religion in the atmosphere of elite anti-ritualism. Some of his defenses came from days before he himself finally converted. (One might say that Chesterton became Catholic a number of years before he got around to informing Rome about it, having informed the world about it first in his literature.) His own background seems not to have been antagonistic to religion in theory, but he does not describe himself as having possessed a resolute ecclesiastical identity. “I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan and Dionysius and not from Luther or Laud; that the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan ...” At any rate, his conversion was not something he orchestrated. He recalls that upon first meeting Fr. John O’Connor, if anyone “had told me that ten years afterwards I should be a Mormon Missionary in the Cannibal Islands, I should not have been more surprised than at the suggestion that, fully fifteen years afterwards, I should be making to him my General Confession and being received into the Church that he served.” If it was not personal nostalgia which incited his defense of ritual, what, then?

In his most famous book, Orthodoxy, written in 1908 at the age of thirty-four, Chesterton describes himself as someone who set sail to discover a new island in the south seas, only to land unwittingly on the shores of England. He had set out to discover a cure to pessimistic nihilism and arrived at what he called a theory of conditional joy. “[W]ith little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own. It was substantially this; that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting .... I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks.” He followed that one thin thread, unaware of what it was fastened to at the other end, in order to defend the proposition that the ordinary person is fitted with a capacity for joy, but that such joy is possible only in an ordered, ordinary life. "I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion.” This confirmed a suspicion deeply ingrained in his personality: if religion is to be a normal tradition it must be practicable, and if it is practicable it must be common and universal so that all people can practice it. His defense of a ritualistic Church derives from his commitment to defend ordinary persons from the meddling expert - in politics, social revision, and religion - who offers to improve the ordinary person according to the latest theory. “The expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better ...”

Rituals should be universal and ancestral things, possessing a capacity to do many things and made to supply many different needs - which is how Chesterton defines universal and ancestral things. To make his point, he recommends casting an eye about the room and noticing some common, ancestral things. “About each of these you will notice one specialty; that not one of them is special .... and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.” Take a knife, for example. “The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats ....” Or a stick. “The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg.” Most vividly of all, fire. “A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people.” But its most obvious use is not its only use. “It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.”

Such ancient and universal things share one characteristic, Chesterton says: not one of them is special. The ancient things are timely, and the universal things are capacious, because they are not specialized, and in not being specialized, they have more uses than our modern substitutes for them. “If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat’s cradle, or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a traveling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveler who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a telephone; you cannot do anything else with it ....” You can communicate meaning with a meaning-making ritual, as if across telephone wires; you cannot do anything else with it.

Ancient and universal things, like rituals, make us think of all the things that can be done ritually, and some of them might even be useful. If one is in a designating frame of mind, then one might search to name the single thing which a ritual does; but if one is in a different frame of mind, say, an observant one, then one might notice the many things which people do by ritual. That is why, when specialists in pedagogy and experts in communication gaze upon the religious ritual, they risk seeing only a specifically adapted purpose. In that event, “some all-round balance is needed to equalize the extravagance of experts. Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells.”

Chesterton would be willing to call rituals “complex” if the term meant multipurposeful, but the word really does have two meanings, and one must be careful not to jump to confusions. The anti-ritual mood which Chesterton contradicted understood complex to mean “many coloured, and elaborate, and needlessly formal,” and was generally desirous to be free of the same. But it is Chesterton’s observation that there are two kinds of ritualism: one conscious, which is comparatively simple, and the other unconscious, which is really heavy and complicated, and the people who are most upset with religious mummery are, he observes, even worse ensnared in rituals which have not the complexity of “plain things like wine and fire, but of really peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things - things like door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti” Chesterton does not advocate this kind of complexity as the defining mark of religious ritual. In fact, if that is the kind of ritual one means, then he affirms that “modern man scarcely ever gets back to very old and simple things except when he is performing some religious mummery. The modern man can hardly get away from ritual except by entering a ritualistic church.”

Therefore, the complexity of religious ritual does not mean that it is so arcane that it needs expert interpreters. It means that complex rites are available and generous and able to be practiced by ordinary men and women. The practicability of his fiancée Frances’ religion was an alien experience to Chesterton when he first met her. “She had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbors, new and incomprehensible.”

Religious ritual is complex, but not in the sense of fussy and perplexing and pointless. And religious ritual is practicable, but not in the sense of being practical (read: utilitarian, always useful). The failure to understand this accounts for the most amusing explanations of ritual ceremonies. For example, it is sometimes patiently explained that primitive people put food in a grave because they were primitive, and being primitive, they were ignorant and backward and believed that the dead can eat. But this would be like saying the English in the twentieth century believed that the dead retain their olfactory senses, attested to “by the fact that they always covered [the] grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers.” We misunderstand because we misunderstand the real nature of ceremonial. “The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be supposed, the reason is generally a very absurd one - absurd because it originates not in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of the professor .... I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence, it is essentially irrational.”

These rational explanations of natural, albeit irrational emotions, are amusing in some cases, but they are pure snobbery in other cases. Chesterton impugns the snobbery of experts for at least three reasons, it seems. First, he abhors the experts who look down their noses upon the green-grocer and the sausage-seller. There was evidently an epidemic of this attitude in the cast of characters with whom Chesterton sparred in his younger days, and at the end of his life he recalls having disliked these theosophists for this attitude, even before he understood their asseverations. “I did not dislike them because they had erroneous doctrines, when I myself had no doctrines .... I disliked them because they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood. It is a curious fact, that they never seemed to hope that they might evolve and reach the plane where their honest green-grocer already stood.”

This superiority manifested itself in the assumption that ritual religion is an instinct of nature which could be cured by civilization. This natural instinct, which the primitive shares with beasts of the wild, would decrease as civilization increased. The less sophisticated one is, the more one is supposed to be superstitiously ruled by base instincts shared with the animals and, hence, the more susceptible to religion. Chesterton contradicts. Religion, and the ceremonial it spawns, is a product of our higher capacities, not our lower ones. “There is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical associations at all .... [T]here is no reason to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestor-worship .... It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolic dance, in honour of the cow that jumped over the moon .... The materials for religion had lain there for countless ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of religion was in the mind.”

Second, Chesterton senses another version of this snobbery in those who belittle Christian liturgical rites on the charge that they are rooted in paganism. There was a class of critics who thought that Christian ritual was the result of a paganising corruption, and their objective was to purify the Church of it. So Chesterton calls them puritans. But the very elements which they would liquidate, Chesterton celebrates. When the puritans complain that ritual religion uses certain feasts, processions or dances which are really of pagan origin, he replies that “[t]hey might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet .... Where such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin.” Chesterton celebrates this connection because it is a connection to our common and ancestral humanity. Puritans worry about those facets of ritual which seem to connect us to an ancient and pagan people, but Chesterton sees it as a connection to the broad avenue of common human experience. “This is really what is meant by the Puritans who say that the Church is Pagan; that it does open a very long avenue, which is the only avenue left connecting us with Pagan antiquity. That is largely what is meant by insisting that the Church covers all sorts of dubious or disreputable people; all the motley mobs of tramps and pedlars and beggars, who do make up the life of an open market-place.”

Finally, Chesterton assails the experts who consider themselves above ordinary ritual behavior. He senses a “gradual increase of the specialist over the popular function” and objects to it, weighing in on the side of popular practice. There is a place for experts, he agrees: they do specific things expertly. But we have already seen that he thinks religion is universal and ancient, therefore it is not something that must be done expertly, therefore it belongs to the people and not to the specialists. “Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest .... [Once] a person could dance without being a dancer; a person could dance without being a specialist; a person could dance without being pink” Singing, laughing, dancing - these are some things of which religious rituals are made. In Chesterton’s rosy view of the Middle Ages as a commonwealth dominated by a religion, these skills belonged to everybody and were not confined to a professional class, and in proportion as religious civilization decays, he thinks a world will be created where there will be no life for dancing to have a place in. The fact that a certain Mr. McCabe (who is serving as Chesterton’s foil in this case) can think of “dancing as a thing belonging to some hired women at the Alhambra [a music hall and ballet company] is an illustration of the same principle by which he is able to think of religion as a thing belonging to some hired men in white neckties. Both these things are things which should not be done for us, but by us. If Mr. McCabe were really religious he would be happy. If he were really happy he would dance.”

Religious ritual is ordinary because it is natural. It is natural to be allured by the supernatural. There is no innate contradictoriness between our earthly, material, natural lives and our heavenly, spiritual, supernatural destiny. In fact, only the irruption of the latter has the power to inspire the festival. Only the supernatural can create celebration. Only holy days can create holidays. “It is hard to see at first sight why so human a thing as leisure and larkiness should always have a religious origin. Rationally there appears no reason why we should not sing and give each other presents in honor of anything - the birth of Michael Angelo or the opening of Euston Station. But it does not work. As a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously material about something spiritualistic. Take away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and you do some strange wrong to the sellers of sausages. Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.” The experts want to rationalize ritual, while the popular longing has been to ritualize mystery. But the experts are the worse off for their program, because while they have their reason, the people have their sanity. “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.”

These experts, unlike the future Frances Chesterton, seem to prefer analyzing and arguing about religious philosophy to the practice of religious ritual. And even if it comes to pass that from their advanced and precocious aerie they manage to abstractly appreciate popular rituals like the maypole or the Olympian games, “there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they don't keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight. It is even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls crackers. If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions? Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar. If this be so, let them be very certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar. Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behavior, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there was faith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers.” From his viewpoint on Fleet Street, Chesterton was happy to say that ritual, including religious ritual (or perhaps especially religious ritual), was vulgar because it pertained to and constituted ordinary people.

All this makes me suggest, simply, that the people about whom Chesterton is writing do not attend liturgical rituals to learn something, they do liturgies because of who they are. Yes, rituals communicate meaning, but “Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak ...” The ritual precedes the thought; the celebration is the basis for the meaning; lex orandi establishes lex credendi.

Perhaps it would be good to reserve the appellative “liturgist” for the person who does liturgical ritual instead of the person who studies it; it might help us remain conscious about where the center of gravity lies. A residue is left by the ritual scrimmage between God and the liturgist, and this residue is what a student of liturgy analyzes. Liturgical theology materializes upon the liturgist’s encounter with the Holy One, not the analyst’s inspection. Only after the liturgy has been transacted can it be dusted for God's fingerprints.

I do not mean to pit the expert against the practitioner (except when pebbly-eyed experts wait for liturgists to ascend to their understanding), but Chesterton reminds us that the popular reason for enjoying ritual may be different than the professional reason for enjoying ritual. Imagine finding a great machine, pieces of its discarded packing crate still lying about on the grass, which has an array of dials, knobs, levers, gears, wheels, buttons, pedals, chains, pulleys, gizmos and controls of all kind. On the lid of the packing crate are stenciled the words "Liturgical Ritual." The professional might buckle on a tool belt crammed with the utensils of the trade (linguistics, history, comparative methods, textual analysis, anthropology studies, hermeneutics) and approach the machine saying, "Now, let's see how this thing works." Chesterton’s friends might be drawn to it for a different reason, asking "Now, let's see how to work this thing." In other words, they might have different reasons for working with ritual than to tune up the meaning coefficient or adjust the symbol-productivity quotient. Thank God that liturgy is complex, but not just so that we experts have a job. Thank God that liturgy is complex because ancient and universal things supply many different needs. The liturgist might be motivated by such vulgar desires as dancing, singing and laughing; playing with God; sounding the mystical note of ecstasy or the grave tone of morality; decorating the landscape with colored light streaming from stained-glass windows; teaching justice to those who need to see the world aright and hope to those who need to see the world to come.

I am firmly convinced that those who have left the table of the Lord did not ever completely understand what happens on the altar. There is no sermon so spellbinding, no music so uplifting, and no fellowship so endearing that could ever replace receiving the body and blood of Jesus Christ! There is no substitute for it and those who fully understand it could not live without it.