I.
Jessica Dooley: “Whimsy and Wisdom: Fairyland as a Window to
Reality in the Fiction of Chesterton and MacDonald”
Similarities
between the fairylands of these two authors.
- Fairyland shares the laws of the moral universe.
- The moral laws are fixed, but the characters are not static.
- In MacDonald, fairyland represents physical reality, moral peril, real consequences.
- Chesterton's is usually a practical environment. Often represents what the characters fear to be the nature of reality, rather than what it really is. Always dangerous.
- The character on the adventure needs a guide: Wisdom. Embodied as a person to assist the visitor in making the right choices. The Wise Woman; Father Brown.
- The source of sin is within the human heart. The pursuit of sin leads to madness and death. The pursuit of wisdom leads to a clear perception of reality and to self-knowledge.
- Chesterton brings his readers into the action. MacDonald shows us the characters outside of ourselves. The characters interact with fairies; the reader interacts with the fairytale.
- Chesterton presents his characters in moral process.
II. J.
Cameron Moore: “'Take away the supernatural, and what remains is
the unnatural:' The Secularizing Visions of G.K. Chesterton's
Villains”
A
theologically loaded statement. Does not subscribe to a Thomist idea
of pure nature. Instead, believes the supernatural under-girds
reality. The universe is bursting at the seams with the divine. His
heroes are often caught up in bursts of illumination.
His
villains, on the other hand, sink into denial, perversion, in their
search for power. Always ends in suppression of free will. Creates
cultural spaces inimical to human flourishing, leads to their own
degradation to a sub-human state. Rejection of the divine is an
embrace of the demonic.
Guardini,
kind of a European Wendell Berry, The End of the Modern World,
1950: power is at the root of radical redefinitions of man, natural,
and culture. Power is too strong for the goods towards which it was
supposedly directed. We do not have power over power. But power
justifies itself as a necessity. Culture has become non-cultural
under the grip of power, marked primarily by danger.
Society
presents a serious threat in Chesterton's fiction. Culture itself
proves dangerous. Fighting against “civilized” orders that are
themselves threats. Dystopic fiction?
Power
always entails a responsible agent, so who wields the power? There is
always a responsible party for the abuses of power in Chesterton's
fiction, as parents of the perverted order. Villains who are clearly
responsible for their perversions of power.
Non-human
definitions of man and non-natural definitions of nature are part of
that perverse use of power. Visions of “progress,” denial of
created limits—denial of the supernatural, because of a denial of
the create order. Leads to distortion and to unnatural suppression of
human freedom and dignity.
This
reading provides a vision that cuts through the rhetoric of power,
and reminds us that we must reclaim an understanding of the world as
a gift of grace, not as a limitless field for technological
advancement and distorted applications power. There is a love of
limitation and boundary. Chesterton is the poet of the industrial
city: it is enchanted and enchanting. We live in a wilderness of
power; Chesterton reads it as fantastic, investing it with the mythic
and the faerie. Grace lives in the very heart of nature.
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