The Ball and the Cross (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By G. K. Chesterton and Sean P. Dailey

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

  When Evan MacIan, a fervent Catholic, becomes enraged by an atheist newspaper, he challenges the editor, James Turnbull, to a duel. Turnbull, just as passionate in his atheism as MacIan is in his Catholicism, eagerly accepts.  Their sword fight interrupted wherever they go, MacIan and Turnbull duel with words.  The more MacIan and Turnbull debate, the more they realize that they have more in common than they thought. They come to understand that their enemy is not each other, but a world that has grown too cold to tolerate men who not only believe in something, but believe in it enough to fight for it. MacIan and Turnbull gradually cease debating each other and begin to engage the people who interrupt their duel. Here we see G. K. Chesterton’s great genius in his fiction: his ability to bring philosophical and theological ideas to life through his characters and stories. In The Ball and the Cross  he accomplishes this with some of the wittiest and most engaging writing to be found in any of his novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467149

G. K. Chesterton

English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) better known as G. K. Chesterton is widely known for his creative writing style which contained many popular saying, proverbs, and allegories whenever possible to prove his points. Among writing, Chesterton was also a dramatist, orator, art critic, and philosopher. His most popular works include his stories about Father Brown, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Men.

Book preview

THE BALL AND THE CROSS

G. K. CHESTERTON

INTRODUCTION BY SEAN P. DAILEY

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2006 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6714-9

INTRODUCTION

THE BALL AND THE CROSS BY G. K. CHESTERTON IS A NOVEL FOR our time, as fresh and invigorating now as when it was first published nearly a century ago. Maybe even more so, for it is a novel about religious conflict or, more specifically, why some men—whether they are believers or nonbelievers—think religion is something worth fighting about. In The Ball and the Cross, Chesterton gives us Evan MacIan, a fervent Catholic who, enraged over what he considers to be blasphemies against the Virgin Mary in an atheist newspaper, throws a rock through the window of the newspaper’s office and challenges the editor, James Turnbull, to a duel. Turnbull, just as passionate in his atheism as MacIan is in his Catholicism, eagerly accepts. However, dueling is illegal, and thus begins a wild romp across England as the pair, one step ahead of the police, tries time and again to fight their duel only to be interrupted at each attempt. Now, this is where the real fun begins. Although prevented from dueling with swords time and again, MacIan and Turnbull are freed up to duel with words. In the England of the novel, to be either an atheist or a Catholic is to be guilty of bad taste. But MacIan and Turnbull have committed in the minds of their interlopers an even worse crime: that of having passionate convictions. The more MacIan and Turnbull debate, the more they realize that they have more in common than they thought, and with each interruption, they come to understand that their enemy is not each other, but a world that has grown too cold to tolerate men who not only believe in something, but believe in it enough to fight for it. MacIan and Turnbull gradually cease debating each other and begin to engage the people who interrupt them. And here we see Chesterton’s great genius in his fiction: his ability to bring great philosophical and theological ideas to life through his characters and stories. In The Ball and the Cross he accomplishes this with some of the wittiest and most engaging writing to be found in any of his novels.

Though many of Chesterton’s books remain in print, he has all but disappeared from the literary scene. When The Ball and the Cross was published in 1910 though, he was unquestionably a literary sensation. The Ball and the Cross was Chesterton’s third novel, following The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). But it was not his third book. By 1910, Chesterton had become well established as an original and insightful thinker in a variety of fields. With books on Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), and George Bernard Shaw (1909), he had shown himself to be a literary critic to be reckoned with (Shaw called Chesterton’s biography of him the best work of literary art I have yet provoked). With Heretics (1905) and especially Orthodoxy (1908), Chesterton had established himself as a Christian apologist of considerable wit and vigor. In addition, his weekly columns in various London newspapers revealed him to be an astute commentator on topics that ran the gamut from current events, politics, and religion to feminism, prohibition (he was firmly against it), and any subject under the sun.

Born on May 29, 1874, in the London neighborhood of Kensington, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s School. His teachers at St. Paul’s convinced Chesterton he was not college material, so he instead went to art school. In 1900, he was asked to contribute some articles on art criticism to a magazine, thus beginning one of the most productive careers in literary history. By the time of his death in 1936, Chesterton had written one hundred books, contributed to two hundred more, and composed hundreds of poems and short stories. He was just as comfortable writing sublime books on theology and Christian apologetics as he was writing detective fiction. With his popular priest-detective, Father Brown, Chesterton revolutionized the detective short story, while Orthodoxy is still recognized as one of the best defenses of Christianity written in the twentieth century.

Yet despite all this, Chesterton always considered himself to be primarily a journalist, and here his output was tremendous. He wrote more than four thousand essays for such newspapers as the Illustrated London News, the Daily News, and his own newspaper, G. K.’s Weekly. To put this in perspective, says American Chesterton Society President Dale Ahlquist, four thousand essays is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every day, for eleven years. For those who think that his newspaper columns might represent the inconsequential part of Chesterton’s writing, consider this: one of his columns in the Illustrated London News inspired a young, unknown London lawyer named Mahatmas Gandhi to return home to India and lead the movement for India’s independence from the British Empire.

Standing six and a half feet tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds, Chesterton cut a giant swath as he walked down Fleet Street, the epicenter of London’s publishing world. Wrapped in a great cloak, with a crumpled hat on the top of his head and a cigar clenched between his teeth, he carried a swordstick and in a cloak pocket, a small pistol that he had bought on his wedding day (he once wrote that he fancied the idea of having the privilege of defending his wife with it, should the occasion ever arise). The pistol gives a key to Chesterton’s character. His contemporary and friend Hilaire Belloc, himself a prolific writer and ardent defender of Christianity, is sometimes likened to a howitzer, smashing an opposing argument (and the person who made it) to smithereens with his muscular prose. Chesterton, by contrast, was more like a gallant knight on horseback, riding into an enemy camp and throwing down a gauntlet, all the while laughing uproariously.

But as a man who spent his life defending the rights and dignity of the common man, Chesterton also took delight in simple, earthy pleasures. He preferred the inside of an inn to the outside and could hardly get through any of his novels without at least stopping at one. So it comes as no surprise that when The Ball and the Cross’ MacIan and Turnbull reach an impasse, Turnbull declares, This is a case for beer, and the two men repair to an inn. Do not by any means let us drop our intentions of settling our differences with two steel swords, Turnbull says as they quench their thirst. But do you not think that with two pewter pots we might do what we have never thought of doing yet—discover what our difference is?

For Chesterton, two bitter opponents developing a friendship over a glass of beer was a hallmark of sound Christian living. He himself loved to argue, and he never backed down from a dispute. And he had a great time doing it. Maisie Ward, in her biography Gilbert Keith Chesterton, tells of how Chesterton and another man, Charles Masterman, once went canvassing door to door for the liberal party during an election year. Both started at the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly arguing at the first house.

A professional controversialist and satirist, Chesterton infused this joy at verbal combat into The Ball and the Cross. And it is a mark of the vast charity for which he was known, particularly by such philosophical opposites as Shaw and H. G. Wells, that the atheist Turnbull gets the better of MacIan as often as MacIan gets the better of him. Anyone familiar with Jesus’ admonition in the Gospels against swearing oaths will appreciate the joke of MacIan swearing to fight Turnbull by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honor of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God. To which Turnbull answers simply, And I give you my word. This exchange illustrates a central theme in The Ball and the Cross, one which recurs in all of Chesterton’s writing: the conflict between faith and reason, which Chesterton saw as a false conflict. To put one at odds with the other, or to try to have one without the other, diminishes each. Reason without faith devolves into mere rationalism, while faith without reason degenerates into Puritanism. MacIan and Turnbull in their own way represent this false separation and its detrimental effects on the human capacity for clear thinking. MacIan, brought up in some loneliness and seclusion as a strict Roman Catholic, had never realized that there were in the world any people who were not Roman Catholics. Turnbull, for his part, avoids the big issues in his ongoing denial of God’s existence in favor of cheap parlor tricks against organized religion: It was in vain that he cried with an accusing energy that the bishop of London was paid £12,000 a year for pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah.

The harm caused by divorcing faith from reason manifests itself in practically every aspect of modern thought and popular culture. For example, we see it in the ongoing debate between Darwinists and Creationists, and in the argument over whether Harry Potter is healthy literature or diabolical occultism. In the debate over Darwinism, neither side stops to consider one radical possibility: that evolution has nothing whatsoever to say regarding the validity of Christianity. Similarly, the possibility that Harry Potter may actually be rooted in Christian theology occurs to neither side.

Chesterton hints at this conflict even in the book’s title, which refers to the ball and cross atop London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Chesterton puts the reader there with an episode at the book’s opening that is nearly lost in subsequent events, in which a monk named Michael is kidnapped by a Professor Lucifer and spirited away in the professor’s flying machine. In their discussion, Professor Lucifer mocks Christianity as an unreasonable contradiction, as demonstrated by its own symbol, while Michael counters that the contradiction is Christianity’s greatest glory. What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball? the professor asks. The globe, he says, is reasonable, inevitable, at unity with itself. The cross, however, is unreasonable, arbitrary, and at enmity with itself. It is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction. To this the monk serenely replies, What you say is perfectly true. But we like contradictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms. He is the beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen.

When Professor Lucifer sees the cross perched on top of the ball, he says that the two symbols are in the wrong order; the ball, being superior, should be on top. But such an inversion, Michael replies, Would produce a most singular effect. The ball would fall down. Soon after, Michael is hauled off to a lunatic asylum where MacIan and Turnbull also are incarcerated, and he does not reappear until near the end of the novel. In the asylum, the question of which should rein supreme, the ball or the cross, is revisited. Or rather, each man is treated to a nightmarish vision of what the world might be like if either were abolished: I had a dream, Turnbull says, in which I saw the cross stuck crooked and the ball secure. MacIan in turn reveals, I had a dream in which I saw the cross erect and the ball invisible. They were both dreams from hell.

To discover just how hellish the dreams were, one must read the book. Chesterton’s novels tend to be both apocalyptic and prophetic. In The Ball and the Cross, Chesterton is eerily prophetic in saying that people with religious convictions would one day be not merely dismissed, but hauled away and locked up. True, imprisonment for religious belief was not novel to the twentieth century. What was novel was the scale by which it was done: the Spanish Inquisition and the Tudor persecution of Catholics were mere hiccups compared to the Jewish Holocaust and communism’s systematic persecution of all religion. But nothing can stop a religious debate, except perhaps one thing: If the debate is allowed it is possible that one side may actually win. But this does not mean the other side is defeated, but that the two opponents may finally be on the same side.

Sean P. Dailey is editor-in-chief of Gilbert Magazine, a literary journal devoted to the writings and thought of G. K. Chesterton.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR

CHAPTER TWO - THE RELIGION OF THE STIPENDIARY MAGISTRATE

CHAPTER THREE - SOME OLD CURIOSITIES

CHAPTER FOUR - A DISCUSSION AT DAWN

CHAPTER FIVE - THE PEACEMAKER

CHAPTER SIX - THE OTHER PHILOSOPHER

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY- I N - THE- HOLE

CHAPTER EIGHT - AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT

CHAPTER NINE - THE STRANGE LADY

CHAPTER TEN - THE SWORDS REJOINED

CHAPTER ELEVEN - A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE

CHAPTER TWELVE - THE DESERT ISLAND

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE GARDEN OF PEACE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - A MUSEUM OF SOULS

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE DREAM OF MACIAN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE DREAM OF TURNBULL

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE IDIOT

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - A RIDDLE OF FACES

CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE LAST PARLEY

CHAPTER TWENTY - DIES IRÆ

SUGGESTED READING

CHAPTER ONE

A DISCUSSION SOMEWHAT IN THE AIR

THE FLYING SHIP OF PROFESSOR LUCIFER SANG THROUGH THE SKIES like a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry or religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin, forgetful of their names. That thing which looked like an enormous key with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver. That object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews was really the key. The thing which might have been mistaken for a tricycle turned upside down was the inexpressibly important instrument to which the corkscrew was the key. All these things, as I say, the professor had invented; he had invented everything in the flying ship, with the exception, perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too late actually to inaugurate, but he believed, at least, that he had considerably improved it.

There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time. Him, also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations and exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself quite happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in the society of wild animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.

I have no intention, my good Michael, said Professor Lucifer, of endeavoring to convert you by argument. The imbecility of your traditions can be quite finally exhibited to anybody with mere ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge which teaches us not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy. Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders with men of all kinds——

You will forgive me, said the monk, meekly from under loads of white beard, but I fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub my shoulder against men of all kinds that you put me inside this thing?

An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the Middle Ages, replied the Professor, calmly, but even upon your own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now you are in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it how you like, you know that you know better. You know what are a man’s real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and the truth is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This mere space, this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the terrible plague. You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is the hopeless thing, more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath you, under the roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old. The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the underworld, to which you once condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars.

I hope you will excuse my interrupting you, said Michael, with a slight cough, but I have always noticed——

Go on, pray go on, said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, I really like to draw out your simple ideas.

Well, the fact is, said the other, that much as I admire your rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I have been enabled to make has led me to—er—rather singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign language.

Come, come, said the Professor, encouragingly, I’ll help you out. How did my view strike you?

Well, the truth is, I know I don’t express it properly, but somehow it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most eloquence, when—er—when——

Oh! Get on, cried Lucifer, boisterously.

Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run into something. I thought you wouldn’t mind my mentioning it, but it’s running into something now.

Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud. The Professor’s eyes were blazing like a maniac’s.

It is a new world, he cried, with a dreadful mirth. It is a new planet and it shall bear my name. This star and not that other vulgar one shall be ‘Lucifer, sun of the morning.’ Here we will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel—here the intellect——

There seems, said Michael, timidly, to be something sticking up in the middle of it.

So there is, said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement. What can it be? It might of course be merely a——

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung up his arms like a lost spirit. The monk took the helm in a tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A plain of sad-colored cloud lay along the level of the top of the Cathedral dome, so that the ball and cross looked like a buoy riding on a leaden sea. As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any gray desert. Hence it gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without resistance. There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there was no shock. It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so much butter. But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than those of sinking through the solid earth. For a moment their eyes and nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness warmed into a kind of brown fog. And far, far below them the brown fog fell until it warmed into fire. Through the dense London atmosphere they could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath them in squares and oblongs of fire. The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate vapor; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames; or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire. Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts. Or it was like some cyclopean sea-beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven. For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air. They had broken through a roof and come into a temple of twilight.

They were so near to the ball that