Chesterton, Help of Doctoral Students, Pray for My Reader’s Work!

A friend writes:

Utterly, utterly brilliant feigned interview. The funny thing is, this statement helps me fill in a portion of my doctoral work: that man needs to feed on fiction as well as fact. The main focus of my dissertation is the necessity of a fictive element in evil: falling in love with a construal of the moral universe about oneself as summit.

Here’s where Chesterton explains what he means (“Fiction as Food”, The Spice of Life and other essays):

Now this general need is connected with the deepest things in man; and the strangest thing about him, which is being a man. As a large mirror will make one room look like two rooms, so the mind of man is from the first a double mind; a thing of reflection and living in two worlds at once. The caveman who was not content that reindeers should be real – did something that no other animal ever has done or apparently ever will do. Of course, we cannot prove that the animal has not imagination in the inferior sense. For all we can prove, the rhinoceros may have an Invisible Playmate; and yet realize with his reason that “it is but a rhinoceros of air; that lingers in the garden there.”

Scientifically speaking, we cannot demonstrate that the rabbit has not an imaginary family of rabbits, on the lines of Brer Rabbit, as well as the somewhat large and increasing family which the rabbit produces in the ordinary way of business. But there is such a thing as common sense; and I think our common sense inclines us to suppose that any such artistic daydream, if it exists in beasts and birds, is much more rudimentary and stationary; and has certainly never advanced to the point of expression, even in fairy-tales or penny-dreadfuls. But for man some form of this fanciful experience is essential as a mere fact of experience. If he has not that daydream all his day, he is not man; and if he is not man, there is nobody to write about and nobody to write about him.

Theology has always taught about pride as the disordered love of oneself. *How *you confirm yourself as the center of the moral universe depends upon the construction. Brash self-assertion and the desire for straightforward dominion over others is so obvious a mode of this (in literature and world history) that causes people to reduce pride to this — but it is far from being the only way. Sinners construct a looking-glass world corresponding to the happiness they would construct for themselves, and the variableness of this false ideal is limited only by the fancy of
man.

Chesterton: Still helping out with the intellectual heavy lifting 70 years after his death. What a mensch!