How good a writer was he? The early novels have a fantastic charm but lack profundity. The Father Brown stories are entertaining and clever and an impressive forerunner to what, between the wars, would become the golden age of detective fiction. 

While dropping the Telegraph to go and read almost anything else is always good advice, I’m not sure this will quite persuade anyone to abandon it. He goes on to say that his criticism of Dickens is rather good (it is some of the best you will read) but that he also left us some “dense theological works” (they aren’t my favorite either, but finding them dense says rather more about S.J Heffer than G.K Chesterton). ​​The summit of Chesterton’s achievements will be a footnote to Agatha Christie.  

While her virtues might be indisputable for a certain class and age group of Englishmen, I must dissent. The English detective story refined the Father Brown stories, even before its supposed Golden Age. By making his leading man a priest, G.K. Chesterton could write crime fiction that investigated crime in its totality. An intelligent detective might “get to the center of things” by penetrating the psychology of his criminal, but the intelligent priest goes one step further; Father Brown’s singular talent is his ability to investigate the metaphysics of a crime. 

​​​While his metaphysical criminology doesn’t entirely ignore psychology, it does suggest that one’s psychology is not the fundamental thing about oneself.  For Chesterton, the core of any act is the final attitude toward the universe it represents. Normally, Father Brown summarises this attitude after he solves the mystery; its great advantage is that this gong-note of sublimity introduces the necessary revelatory scene that usually ends a detective story. When these endings come from writers unequipped with a similar gong, I am too often unsatisfied, revealing the criminal’s method is too much like un-weaving the rainbow. Admittedly, when reading a mystery, there is a kind of satisfaction in finally knowing how this was stolen, how he was murdered, etc. Still, compared to the wonder excited by the mystery itself, even the most ingenuous act of detection falls short. In short, detective stories tend to end flaccidly.  

The Father Brown stories obviate this by increasing our wonder rather than diminishing it. While he performs the same curtain-rending reveal as fiction’s other bloodhounds, the same methodical breakdown of the magic trick in the better stories, this is accompanied by an observation that points to the revealed action’s greater significance. Thus, Chesterton spares himself that weak final note.  

He even manages this with plots that amount to pedestrianly natural explanations for events that seem supernatural. In ‘The Honour of Israel Gow,’ the circumstances surrounding the death of a Scottish Earl and the postmortem treatment of his estate look like black magic but turn out to be the consequence of the innocent (if twisted) actions of the Earl’s servant. We understand the servant’s twisted innocence as a product of his Calvinism. At first, the murder in ‘The Wrong Shape’ looks like it has something to do with the mystical influence of the Hindu Fakir the victim had staying at his home. It transpires to have been committed by the victim’s doctor, whose written confession to Father Brown points to the significance of his action. 

​​​Dr Harris kills the dissipated poet Quinton because he is in love with Mrs Quinton; we can call this the psychological content of the crime. The metaphysical element is suggested in the written confession Father Brown persuades the atheist physician to write. As far as Dr Harris is concerned, “According to my own creed, I was quite free to kill Quinton.” This creed is encapsulated in Harris’s wish to be a “good animal.” In this confession, he refers to himself as an “animal” twice more. This creed appears to amount to the belief that man should model himself on the lion; self-interest is made the sole criterion of behavior, and the value of other lives is put at the level of a gazelle in the eye of the same lion. The very concept of humanity is denied, and with it, the notion that our species enjoys special rights. We recognize that ontology plays its part in the killing just as much as cold steel. 

Our understanding of the crime can remain at the psychological level, and the facts of the story stay the same: Quinton’s death is a murder of passion. But without that which we learn from Dr Harris’s confession, this psychological explanation of the crime would feel too much like a crash to earth. Instead, Chesterton takes our attention away from the supernatural to demonstrate the murder’s profundity and how far its origin stretches into the depth of the murderer’s soul. 

​​​The word “soul” chimes us back to the fact that these are stories by a Roman Catholic about a Roman Catholic priest. And saving souls, not solving crimes, is Father Brown’s real profession. ​​Obviously, there is a moralizing element to this act; Brown isn’t coercive. Simon Heffer rightly points out that the advantage of making your detective a priest is his understanding of human nature; the other advantage is it frees the detective from playing a part in his society’s judicial machinery. The effect this has in the stories is of relegating in importance the ensuing arrest and imprisonment behind that of the deep dive into the crime’s meaning.  

When he asks for Dr Harris’s confession, Father Brown reminds him that confidentiality is a must in his trade as much as a doctor’s. The story ends with the gloomy image of the “wet waterproofs of several policemen” gleaming in the streetlights, but we know that the written statement in Father Brown’s hand won’t end up tucked into one of their pockets. His duty in solving and understanding the murder isn’t towards the law; his intentions are more spiritual. Likewise, Chesterton’s stories do not constitute fantasies of nefarious Protestants and atheists being cuffed and hauled to the police station. His illustrations of error are more contemplative than this. If his interest in crime is more fundamental than the psychologist’s, then it is certainly more so than that of the mere moralist.  

Inevitably, there are duds here. ‘The Eye of Apollo’ is abysmal to the point of reading like an apprentice’s work. But at his most felicitous and pace, Heffer, I think Chesterton manages a kind of philosophic storytelling that matches Dante’s. If this seems like a claim too far, it is easily proved or refuted by consulting Chesterton’s own Dantesque infernal peregrination, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword.’ The story’s plot unfolds as Father Brown walks with his friend, the criminal-turned-detective Flambeau, through an English selva oscura. They talk about hellish things until finally reaching the paradise of a well-furnished pub. Chesterton names Dante twice in this story. 

​​​It is necessary to know its plot for the story’s power to be made clear. It begins with Father Brown taking Flambeau to see the tomb of General St Clare, a fictional English general who died on a campaign in Brazil. St Clare has become a national hero, and the circumstances of his death are a mystery. Father Brown already knows its secret; it is slowly revealed to Flambeau. The mystery is this: Olivier, St Clare’s Brazilian adversary, is famous for his chivalrous conduct, but St Clare was hanged after his final battle with his broken sword hanging, in turn, from his corpse. Further to this, St Clare was a tactical genius, so why does his last military command appear to have been a futile suicide charge that cost hundreds of British lives? What happened? 

Flambeau offers three attempts at an explanation; all are wrong. His companion tells him that the real story is even more horrid than he can imagine. “There are worse things,” he says as they tramp past the dark trees. Father Brown, as he always does, has learned the secret thanks to the privileges of his role as priest. Through his acquaintance and knowledge of three persons present at the time of the battle, one a Brazilian, and the other two an Irish colonel and an Ulster Protestant Major serving in the British Army, he learns that St Clare was not only in debt but the victim of blackmail. To make money, he had been betraying his country by selling secrets to a Brazilian spy. Major Murray, the Ulsterman, discovers this and demands he resign or be court-martialled. St Clare kills Murray with his sword (which breaks) to prevent the necessity of either option, but he now confronts a problem: what to do with the body of the dead Ulsterman? 

As a means of avoiding an accusation of murder, St Clare has his men form ranks and marches most of them to their deaths. Murray’s body is now one among many, and all assume he died in the battle. Olivier is astounded at the foe’s foolhardiness, but recognizing their bravery, he spares St Clare and the surviving men. He departs, but as he does, the surviving British soldiers recognize what St Clare has done, and they lynch their general. The officer who puts the rope on his neck is his son-in-law-to-be, Captain Keith. St Clare’s calculating intelligence remained undiminished unto the last, and Olivier’s conduct is in fact unblemished.  

As well as learning the facts surrounding his death, Father Brown also makes the discovery that the reality of St Clare’s life is even further from the truth of his heroic legacy. He tells Flambeau that “In each of the hot and secret countries to which that man went, he kept a harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold…” and there were “tales of monstrous and prehistoric things in Park Lane.” Read one way: the evil represented by this figure makes him a caricature of a certain kind of Englishness and greed—even a satire on militarism. But, as ever, it’s the reference that Father Brown makes to religion that expands our sense of his evil, indicating that this story might be about things deeper than satire usually allows. St Clare was an “Anglo-Indian” who read his Bible. But Father Brown has this to say about that: 

When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads him and finds we have no arms and legs…Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted- lust, tyranny, treason. 

With his reference to General St Clare’s reading of the Old Testament, Chesterton brings to mind the whole bloody narrative of divine wrath and peoples put to the sword. For an honest Christian, all the killing in the story of Exodus and the Deuteronomistic history might well merit the epithet “evil” according to human conventions, but evil according to God’s laws certainly is not; killing in these instances was no sin. There is evil, and there is Evil. There is violence consubstantial with Hell and violence flowing from the will of God. 

‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ is, in part, about this theology of violence. Read this way: General St Clare becomes a swaggering Canaanite, sunk in sin, and Captain Keith, a conquering Joshua, cuts down the Lord’s enemies. The story’s climax, the scene of the English survivors turning their faces on their general in silence, and the hand of the general’s son-in-law-to-be placing the rope on his neck, is a horror show. But we aren’t totally displeased with the event. It is the climax not only because the story’s horrors crest at this point but because the reader finds himself willing to commit the mutinous murder like no other act in the story. Chesterton thus evokes an intuition of Old Testament divine justice through carefully ratcheting up a moment of poetic justice. He has us rejoice at the justice manifested in this revenge in the same way as the author of Leviticus wants us to recognize the good in massacring the Amorite women and children. Like a Canto of the Inferno, with its depiction of unquestionable divine judgment alongside Dante’s empathy for the sinner, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ is a tale of the prismatic nature of both evil and God’s will. 

It is no wonder that the paradoxical moral logic of the Old Testament appealed to Chesterton. Even less surprising is that the concise invocation of its paradoxes in ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ should appeal to that other metaphysical romancer, Jorge Luis Borges. That Borges was an admirer of Chesterton is well known. Less well known is the influence that this story, in particular, seems to have had on the Argentine. By my reckoning, no fewer than three stories in Borges’s Labyrinths appear to have their origin in musing on its theme. 

‘The Shape of the Sword’ shows some superficial signs of influence in its title and its Englishman (who turns out to be Irish) in Brazil, but the important link is its concern, not only with treachery but with the synonymity of treachery and heroism. Suppose General St Clare is both a traitor and a hero because of a conflict between appearance and reality. In that case, Borges builds on the idea of that contradiction by making his John Vincent Moon two characters at once: one a hero of the fight for Irish independence, the other an informer in Britain’s pay. Then, as if he chose to write a story as a commentary on the story that precedes it (even keeping Ireland as the setting for the examples of his heroism and treachery), Borges follows with the ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’. Like Father Brown, Ryan learns that a historical figure played both the best and the worst characters in the drama in which he found himself; again, like Father Brown, Ryan chooses to stay silent about his discovery. It is suggested that the treachery was necessary for the Irish rebels to succeed, therefore making the traitor the hero because of his treachery.  

Finally, Borges then takes his master’s theme into an area of scriptural debate he is unlikely to have condoned. With ‘Three Versions of Judas,’ we have the suggestion that either the meaning of Judas’ treachery was self-abnegation to match the sacrifice of the Word becoming flesh and suffering death, with his eternal punishment in Hell, therefore, being understood as the perfection of the ascetic means of glorying God; or, the terrible significance of Judas is that he is himself the Word become flesh and that the abasement inherent in his treachery is a more committed form of status-lowering than merely getting yourself executed.  

These elaborations on the theme of ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ are a Mount Nebo affording a fuller look into Chesterton’s original treatment. Each one suggests the possibility of the paradox of an act of treachery, the worst of things, being simultaneously the greatest of things. Although ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ doesn’t quite make these metaphysical sallies, what it offers the reader of Chesterton is the opportunity for a playful re-reading. After Borges, we might understand General St Clare as not only a caricature of evil incarnate but a caricature of the average human being, as the universality of his own protagonists suggests; the paradox of good and evil existing in the same soul is one we all experience. With his near-saintly legacy and bestial life story, he is a nightmare image of the concept of man as half-divine, half-animal.  

More interesting, perhaps, is the way this reading points to a paradox in the nature of sin itself. In this story, as he also does in ‘The Flying Stars’, Father Brown points out that the tendency of crime and sin is to make the perpetrator meaner; the more we rebel against the laws of the universe, the smaller we become. This is a paradox. While the significance of our evil acts grows, expanding to a heroic stature as they mount a challenge to the divine order, our natures become less than human. The immensity of divine wrath that a traitor triggers is in inverse relationship to the attention he merits from God. 

We needn’t worry about being accused of Hefferism by saying that to have made Borges Borges is enormous to Chesterton’s credit. He did not have to write for us to recognize Chesterton’s value. And yet, it remains true that without the metaphysical puzzling of his diminutive priest, it is unlikely we would have that disturbing reinterpretation of Judas Iscariot. I suspect that crediting him with the inspiration of this story would displease him, so I am sorry to have done so on his birthday. Nonetheless, he could not have been so without being one of the greatest artists in the last 150 years.  

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The structural analysis of myths leads along the paths of psychology, logic, and philosophy. Starting from the ethnological experiences, we are still to create a mental index of barriers, to trace back apparently arbitrary facts to order, to reach a level where a necessity is revealed, which is inherent in the illusions of of freedom, to surrender to creative spontaneity of myth. But even in that case, it seems to be arbitrary to recognize laws of presupposition that operate on a deeper level, so the conclusion would become unavoidable that the mind, at the mercy of self-confrontation and deprived of the duty to operate with the objects, sees itself in some way confined to imitating itself as an object, and that, since the laws of these operations are not then fundamentally different from those which it makes known in the other function, it thus reveals its thing-nature among things. Without carrying the conclusion so far to push it, it is enough for us to have gained the conviction that the human mind if it appears to be determined down to its myths, must a fortiori be so everywhere (“if there is a law, there must everywhere”).

By being guided by the study of mental constraints, our problematic approach is that of Kantianism, although we follow other paths that do not lead to the same conclusions. The ethnologist does not feel compelled, as the philosopher does, to make the conditions of activity of his own thinking to the principle of reflection, in order to be able to extend his local statements to a knowledge whose universality can only be hypothetical and virtual. The hypothesis of universal cognition prefers the empirical observation of collective cognitions whose features, consolidated as it were, are revealed to him by innumerable concrete systems of conception. This aspect of our attempt is recognized in Paul Ricceur when he speaks about “Kantianism without transcendental subject”. Since we have set out to find the conditions in which the truth systems can become mutually reversible and consequently leadingly acceptable to several subjects at the same time, the totality of these conditions acquires the object character, endowed with its own reality and independent of any subject.

To illustrate this objective thinking and to show its reality empirically, nothing is so well as mythology. It is the same with myths as with language: the subject, who would consciously apply the phonological and grammatical laws during its speech, would almost immediately lose the thread of its thoughts. Likewise, the fact and the use of mythical thought, that its properties remain hidden. The analysis of myths does not and cannot have the aim of showing how people think. And if by means of the myths we can identify certain archaic or figurative expressions of our own folk language, the same observation is made statement, since we, for our part, are retroactively becoming aware from the outside and under the constraint of a foreign mythology. So, one does not claim to be able to show how people think in myths, but how myths, in people think without their knowledge. Thus the Ojibwa Indians hold the myths for “beings that have consciousness, can think and act”. And perhaps one would have to go further, abstracting from any subject, to recognize that the myths think of each other in a certain way. The point here is not so much, what is in the myths, but rather to uncover the system of axioms and postulates that define the the best possible code, which is suitable to give a common meaning to unconscious creations, creations which meaning to unconscious creations, creations that are events of the mind, of a society and of a culture, selected among those that are the most distant from each other. As the myths themselves are based on codes of the second order (the codes of the first order being those in which the language is the language), there would also be the design of a third-order code, which is destined to ensure the mutual translatability of several myths. But just as little as the other codes this third one is invented or demanded from the outside.

It is immanent in the mythology itself, in which we only in which we only discover it. Every narrator, or almost everyone, tells the stories in his own way. Even in important details, there is an extraordinarily wide margin of variation. So, the myths will be told by several authors and will appear in different lighting. And yet these variations refer to one and the same country, to the same epoch, to the same events, whose reality is dispersed on all levels of a flaking structure. The criterion of validity therefore does not hang on the historical elements. Pursued in isolation, each would turn out to be intangible. But at least some of them take shape, due to the fact that they can be integrated into a series. The mythical schemes show to a high degree the character of absolute objects, which, if they were not subject to external influences, would neither lose nor acquire parts. It follows that, if the scheme undergoes a change, this also affects all its aspects.

Thus, if one aspect of a particular myth appears incomprehensible, it is a legitimate method of making it in a hypothetical and provisional way as a change in the homologous aspect of another myth assigned to the same group for the sake of the matter, which is more amenable to interpretation, which is more accessible. The method merely implies that each myth, taken by itself, exists as the limited application of a schema, which is the reciprocal intelligibility relations that are to be recognized between several myths, gradually helping to uncover them.

Importantly, the human mind, without prejudice to the identity of its occasional messengers, in this structure becomes more and more comprehensible as the doubly reflected course of the two mutually interacting ways of thinking, one of which can be the spark of convergence here, the other there. spark of rapprochement from which their common enlightenment will flare up. And when this then reveals a treasure, there will be no need for an arbiter to distribute it since one has begun to realize that the inheritance must remain inalienable and undivided.

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There are two episodes involving the healing of blind men in the same book (8:22-26; 10:46-52). These act as bookends for a section of the story in which Jesus and his followers are heading to Jerusalem, where Jesus will be executed. In this section, Jesus predicts his own death three times (8:31; 9:31; 10:32-34). And, following each prediction, his disciples fail to grasp his meaning. Their blindness remains.

This looks like a plot.

The miracle involving failing to restore sight then succeeding to restore sight is a message with so many meanings. But considering St. Mark’s strange literary intention, I want to look at just one interpretation. I want to focus on the shift from the unmiraculous to the miraculous as it relates to how we interpret the world.

Meaning, in general, is a process in which resonance is found and created. It has a setup-payoff structure. A perfect image of this is Chekhov’s so-called gun. Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that insists that everything in a story should be necessary. The writer Anton Chekhov, after whom the idea is named, says the following:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Elsewhere he echoes this idea as follows:

“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”

The setup-payoff structure of meaning follows the intentional structure of consciousness. There is an expectation and the fulfillment of that expectation, or at least an answer to the questions raised by that expectation. A thing feels meaningless or nonsensical when there is only a setup but no payoff, or when something happens randomly without being preempted in some way. This structure depends on our natural receptivity, our natural openness to the meaning-world.

We are made for what is not us. We are built without any hope of being self-sufficient, where every dimension of our meaning-finding and meaning-making requires going beyond what we inherently possess. In fact, everything in this world is dripping with contingency; everything calls out beyond itself for an answer that it cannot provide on its own.

We feel hungry and go look for food. We yearn for companionship, so we seek others out. We feel that we’re made for a particular kind of work or role, so we aim to do that rather than some other thing we have no aptitude for. We desire transcendence, so we look for ways to fulfill or suppress that desire. We’re made for so much and we are naturally dependent on what is not us to fulfill how we’re made.

We are meant for meaning. There is simply no way to escape this.

But what this story of a failed healing and the subsequent poor understanding of the disciples shows us is that it is more than possible for us to work according to particular expectations and anticipatory structures that turn out to be wrong. Think of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. The shepherd boy plays a trick on everyone around him, screaming at the top of his lungs that danger is near. But there is no danger and the joke is on them. He does this again, but again he is lying. Then, when a real wolf approaches, the boy calls for help, but this time no one believes him.

Their expectations have become set in stone. They now expect only one answer, such that when a different answer presents itself they cannot see it.

The thing that fascinates me about St. Mark’s telling of the story of the failed healing is that he is throwing light on the way that a particular setup or expectation is held. It becomes a kind of mental prison. He is, following Jesus here, questioning the way we anticipate things. Mark’s Jesus speaks to his disciples as if they are a bunch of morons—because they are (8:17-21):

“[P]erceive ye not yet, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember? … How is it that ye do not understand?”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot around what happens in the realm of the digital, where the simulacrum frequently replaces the real or proves that there is no reality behind pixellated virtuality. In the Markan story and the one of the boy who cried wolf, the people there had access to realities that could call their expectations into question. But in the hypermediated digisphere, access to the real is often blocked. We have, for all we know, ideas without realities, representations without reference.

This makes us all particularly vulnerable to a kind of anti-phenomenology: a mindset that is set up to constantly deny what we experience by reconfiguring our expectations along false lines. In daily life, people are (mostly) calm and earnest and even (mostly) kind. They live ordinary lives with a fair sense of responsibility, a desire for truth, and neighborliness. But in the mediasphere, goodies and baddies are everywhere. There’s a lot of ussing and themming. There’s a lot of side-picking.

Trouble is, this simulacrum sets up a particular set of expectations, and if we’re not careful, expectations ossify and, like the man in Mark’s story, our blindness remains. Then the things we don’t expect can’t happen.

They can’t happen. They can’t happen. Right?

Anticipation can function as intoxication. It’s no wonder that ours is an age in which ideology runs rampant. When embodied realities are granted less legitimacy than (hyper)mediated ones, there can be no miracles. Expectations can’t be thwarted when your side has been picked ahead of time.

Ideology functions along the lines of deciding beforehand how the world works. Ready-made opinions are dished out, vilifying some, glorifying others, and splitting the world up into teams. But at least one of the lessons of that story in the book of Mark is that if you play stupid games, you will win stupid prizes. Your blindness will remain. Thankfully, though, a further lesson is that reality acts as autocorrect for those who play stupid games. We can fight the real only for so long.

At some point, we’ll see the wolves.

At some point, hopefully, we’ll have to notice the miracles too.

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