More Auden Snippets

On G.K. Chesterton in Forewords and Afterwords:

Chesterton challenged the Whig version of English history and the humanists' version of cultural history...Our school textbooks taught us that...civilization had ended with the fall of the Roman Empire and was re-born in the sixteenth century, between which dates lay twelve centuries of barbarism, superstition and fanaticism...Whatever the Renaissance and the Reformation might signify, it was not a revolt of reason against fanaticism - on the contrary it might be more fairly described as a revolt against the over-cultivation of logic by the late Middle Ages.

Oddly enough, since he so detested them, Chesterton inherited from the aesthetes of the eighties and nineties the conviction that a writer should be continuously "bright" and epigrammatic. When he is really enthralled by a subject he is brilliant, without any doubt one of the finest aphorists in English literature, but, when his imagination is not fully held he can write an exasperating parody of himself.

In "The Ethics of Elfland" Chesterton tells us how his own pattern was derived from fairy-stories. If I can always enjoy reading him, even at his silliest, I am sure the reason is that many elements in my own pattern are derived from the same source. There are, I know, because I have met them, persons to whom Grimm and Andersen mean little or nothing: Chesterton will not be for them.

Not always via media, this via Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch:

Of all the Christian Churches, not excluding the Roman Catholic, the Anglican Church has laid the most stress upon the institutional aspect of religion. Uniformity of rite has always seemed to her more important than uniformity of doctrine.

To build modern church buildings like an air-port...flooded with cheerful light, [is] a complete falsification of what we really feel: our hearts are not cheerful, and our heads not clear.

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians would do well to be extremely reticent on this subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

The Christian theologian is in the embarrassing position of having to use human language which by its nature is anthropomorphic to deny anthropomorphic conceptions of God.